AerynOS (formerly Serpent OS) is an 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, redirects to above for now)
- [Source](https://github.com/AerynOS)
- [Documentation](https://aerynos.dev/)
- [Package Build Infrastructure](https://dash.aerynos.dev) (alpha test)
# Notability
It has some really good ideas and it could turn into something great.
```cardlink
url: https://serpentos.com/moss
title: "System Management Tool For Serpent OS | Serpent OS"
host: www.serpentos.com
```
# Philosophy
## Display Server
No [[X11]] support. It is [[Wayland]]-only.
## Slop
Promotes [[Zed Dev]] as the default editor[^1] - a [[Generative AI|Slop]]-first subscription-based program. This strongly implies that AerynOS incorporates [[Generative AI|Slop]] into its code. It's hard to imagine why else they would feature it so prominently.
# 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 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.
```cardlink
url: https://www.serpentos.com/blog/2023/04/21/snakes-on-a-boat/
title: "Snakes On A Boat | Serpent OS"
host: www.serpentos.com
```
## 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 [[2025-02-15]].
# References
- https://linuxiac.com/serpent-os-rebrands-as-aerynos/
- https://www.phoronix.com/news/Serpent-OS-To-AerynOS
[^1]: https://aerynos.dev/users/desktops/gnome/