The long-awaited Linux distro Serpent OS is finally here

Unlike most current Linux distributions, Serpent OS does not use existing distributions like Ubuntu or Debian. Ikey Doherty and his team have been writing Serpent OS from scratch for the past four years. This fact allows Serpent OS to boast features not found on other Linux distros, ultimately making it a more efficient system that requires less time to develop and maintain and is also harder to “break” by installing updates.

The Serpent OS pre-alpha ships with GNOME 45.3, which is not the latest environment, but this may change in the final release. The minimal desktop includes a pre-installed app selection following suit. Notable apps include Mozilla Firefox and Zed code editor, the latter only recently available to users of Mac OS. Much like Serpent OS, Zed editor provides a clean and fast user experience while leveraging the performance enhancements of the Rust programming language.

MOSS, the package manager, is also written in Rust and is unique to the distribution. For every package management operation, MOSS creates a new self-contained transaction. MOSS allows the system to offer rollbacks to an earlier state if the package or package update is unsafe to apply. This feature alone could prevent systems from crashing from an update. Rust also ensures that the processes are quick and memory-safe.

However, this is a pre-alpha build of the OS and has limitations. Currently, there is no graphical installer. Users are required to partition their drives for installation. There is also no support for other desktop environments besides GNOME. Thankfully, there are plans to support System76’s upcoming COSMIC environment and other popular Linux desktops. To learn more or try the distro yourself, please be so kind as to check the links below.