AerynOS (formerly Serpent OS)[^3][^4] is an [[MPLv2]] licensed in-development independent [[Linux Distro]] started in 2020 by [[Ikey Doherty]] with tooling written primarily in [[Rust]]. - [Website](https://aerynos.com/) - [Website](https://serpentos.com/) (old SerpentOS site, redirects to above for now) - [Source](https://github.com/AerynOS) - [Documentation](https://aerynos.dev/) - [Package Build Infrastructure](https://dash.aerynos.dev) (alpha test) - [Chat](https://aerynos.zulipchat.com/join/fuqokhsomj5mzqj6akqaiqlr/) ([[Zulip]]) # Notability It has some really good ideas and it could turn into something great.[^12] # Philosophy ## Display Server No [[X11]] support. It is [[Wayland]]-only. ## Anti-Slop > We do not accept contributions authored using genAI/LLM chatbots/agents \- official readme for tooling repo (2026-06)[^8] The project added a muddled [[Anti-Slop Policy]] in January 2026.[^9] It specifically calls out ethical and ecological concerns, but then explicitly allows it for translations and nebulous "accessibility-related uses", despite translation and assistive technologies pre-dating LLMs by decades. Promotes [[Zed Dev]][^10] and even uses it as the default editor for the Gnome desktop[^1] - a [[Generative AI|Slop]]-first subscription-based program. It's hard to imagine why they feature it so prominently. > Over time, the team has become increasingly dissatisfied with GitHub for various reasons, including the increased push towards AI \- Ermo, co-founder in an official blog post (2026-01)[^7] They still use Github, but seem displeased with it due to its slopification. ## Tooling Language Tooling was originally developed in [[D]] but the team began to encounter issues[^6] with this stack and ported these tools to [[Rust]] instead.[^5] There are also [[Go]] applications in their stack, thanks partially to its close development with [[Solus]]. # History ## 2020 In 2020 [[Ikey Doherty]] introduced Serpent OS. ```cardlink url: https://frontpagelinux.com/news/serpent-os-a-truly-modern-linux-distribution/ title: "Serpent OS: A Truly Modern Linux Distribution - Front Page Linux" description: "Not everyone in the Linux community has heard of Ikey Doherty. Ikey is an extremely talented programmer from the Republic of Ireland that has done some great work on Linux distributions in the past. Ikey began the Evolve OS project in 2013 as well as his new desktop environment that…" host: frontpagelinux.com favicon: https://frontpagelinux.com/wp-content/uploads/cropped-fpl-logomark-favicon-2-32x32.png image: https://frontpagelinux.com/wp-content/uploads/serpent-os-announced.jpg ``` ## 2022-2023 Between December 2022 and March 2023 there was radio silence from official Serpent channels. In April 2023[^13] it was proposed to change [[Solus]] to be based off of Serpent. Serpent was not stable or complete enough to support Solus at the time of announcement. This change did not occur at that time, thankfully. ## 2024 In December the official blog announced that they've entered the "alpha" stage of development. There is a proper GUI ISO now. Bizarrely, the ISO uses [[Gnome Desktop]], despite much of the team working on [[Budgie Desktop]] - including most of them also doing work on [[Solus]] which ships [[Budgie Desktop]] by default. ## 2025 On February 6th [[Ikey Doherty]] announced that he lost his job and project funding was a major concern moving forward. Despite this there was progress and an announcement that a new tool was (going to be) using [[KDL]] for configuration (it still uses [[YAML]] nearly a year later). He also announced the idea of "versioned repositories", likely inspired by a recent snafu while updating [[Solus]] that lead to having to maintain multiple repos. On Valentine's Day 2025, their blog announced that they were changing the name from "Serpent OS" to "AerynOS" because people complained. Note that Valentine's Day is associated with the legend of St. Valentine driving the "snakes" out of Ireland. [[Solus]] thankfully has not been ported to AerynOS as of [[2026-07-14]]. > Ikey has left us with no way to contact him \- official AerynOS blog post[^2] Ikey vanished again in April 2025, but this time was able to turn over the keys to the community, who continues to develop it under the original goals. ## 2026 - Review This section is a review of the current state as of [[2026-08-21]]. The installer is very rudimentary, if stylish, for a command-like program. It requires that all partitions are pre-setup. There are only a few basic options, including locale and desktop environment. It requires UEFI to boot and recommends [[XFS]] and [[KDE Plasma]]. It is odd that the live environment is [[Gnome Desktop]], conflicting with its recommended desktop selection. The documentation also lists [[KDE Plasma]] as "currently considered beta status".[^11] So several things are out of sync here. I haven't tested it out on hardware, but I did get it running in [[Virtual Machine Manager]]. # References [^1]: https://aerynos.dev/users/desktops/gnome/ [^2]: https://aerynos.com/blog/2026/01/02/2025-in-retrospect/#the-project-founder-steps-away [^3]: https://linuxiac.com/serpent-os-rebrands-as-aerynos/ [^4]: https://www.phoronix.com/news/Serpent-OS-To-AerynOS [^5]: https://aerynos.com/blog/2025/06/30/mid-year-update/ [^6]: https://aerynos.com/blog/2023/09/06/oxidised-moss/ [^7]: https://aerynos.com/blog/2026/01/31/january-2026-project-update/#github-vs-codeberg [^8]: https://github.com/aerynOS/os-tools#we-do-not-accept-contributions-authored-using-genaillm-chatbotsagents [^9]: https://github.com/aerynOS/.github/commit/ac5beb250ff39f182d83c3f4efe76a4e3c3a12fb [^10]: https://aerynos.com/about/#features [^11]: https://aerynos.dev/users/desktops/plasma/ [^12]: https://aerynos.com/tooling/moss/ [^13]: https://aerynos.com/blog/2023/04/21/snakes-on-a-boat/