by 
A lot of heavy work is happening these days on the upcoming Serpent OS distribution developed by ex-Solus leader Ikey Doherty, with which I had a talk recently on the major new features coming to his new distro.
It’s been two months since I first announced that Ikey Doherty is working on Serpent Linux as its newest distribution since he left the Solus project, and it looks like things are progressing in the right way.
And we can finally talk about some of the major new features coming to Serpent OS. I believe there are many of you out there that want to know what will make them install and use Serpent OS as their daily driver.
Well, one of the coolest things about Serpent OS is that it will be supporting both 64-bit (x86_64) and ARM64 (AArch64) architectures from day one, according to lead developer Ikey Doherty.
While 64-bit support focuses on Intel (Haswell and later) and AMD (Zen and later) computers, ARM64 support will focus on the Rockchip RK3399 SoC that powers PINE64’s Pinebook Pro, as well as on the Raspberry Pi 4 boards.
Pinebook Pro is very popular these days, so I bet Serpent OS will become a popular choice for the cheap and very performant Linux computer from PINE64, the makers of the popular PinePhone Linux phone. Also, another distro for the very cheap Raspberry Pi computer is a good thing in my opinion, especially that Serpent OS aims to be different.
Another cool thing to get you excited about Serpent OS is that it will ship with a full-featured KDE Plasma desktop environment. However, the initial pre-release builds will be shipping with Sway, a tiling window manager and Wayland compositor, since Serpent OS will be a Wayland-only distro.
What else is there? Well, Serpent Linux will have its own, brand-new package manager written in the D programming language, which will let users add source repos and binary repos. “Think of it as the PPA version of AUR,” said Ikey Doherty for 9to5Linux.
Lastly, Ikey Doherty tells me that a bootable barebones image should be out by the end of September 2020, which will be followed by multiple prototype ISOs, but we’ll have to wait a little longer until we can download a live ISO with usable desktop environments and apps.
Last updated 4 years ago
