Running SerenityOS, a Love Letter to '90s User Interfaces

I have always loved messing around with operating systems and desktop environments. I believe my first graphical operating system was AmigaOS. In the decades since I have worked through various Windows versions, every version of macOS since 7.0, different Linux flavors and combinations, and many other small niche OSs I have forgotten about in a sea of windows and menus.

I first heard about SerenityOS via a news item on the Changelog. They mentioned that a handful of open-source programmers were working on an alternative browser and browser engine, Ladybird. This is an exciting prospect to me as I am concerned by the Chromium-based browser hegemony, and there are few other options that aren’t tightly controlled (WebKit) or slowly vanishing (Firefox). Ladybird doesn’t pretend to be fully featured or ready yet but is developing quickly.

In this post, I look at building and running Ladybird and SerenityOS on my M1 MacBookPro. Using Apple Silicon posed some complexities, but not too many, and the project’s community is helpful and communicative when you experience problems.