Serpent OS is a traditional Linux distribution powered by package management and packed with the latest technologies.
Ikey doherty, known mainly for being the creator of the Solus distribution and also for having collaborated on Linux Mint, made it known a few days ago information about some changes that will have the development path of your new Linux distribution you are working on «Serpent OS».
In the recent note that I published share some of the latest trends in the development of its Serpent OS distribution, of which, as already mentioned in an article that we share here (you can consult it at this link) will have technologies on which the launch of Solus 5 will be based.
The distribution SerpentOS is not a fork of other projects and is based on the moss package manager, which borrows many of the modern features developed in package managers such as eopkg rpm, guix, among others, while maintaining the traditional view of manipulating packages and using stateless compilation. by default.
The package manager uses an atomic system update model, in which the state of rootfs is fixed, and after the update, the state changes to the new one.
Our priorities have changed somewhat since the announcement of our joint venture with Solus, and we must make architectural decisions based on the needs of all stakeholders involved, including the existing group of contributors. Additionally, we must be careful to be somewhat populist in our choice of stacks to provide contributors with relevant industry experience to add to their resume (CV).
In his publication, Ikey Doherty mentions that currently the project Serpent OS was in a state of relative "stagnation" due to technical problems associated with the implementation of additional memory safety features in the D programming language and limited resources for creating and maintaining packages in the D language, which was previously used to develop Serpent OS.
Ikey Doherty loves the D programming language and appreciates his expressiveness and creative freedom, will continue to use D in his personal projects and is optimistic about his future. After collaborating with Solus, project priorities changed and architectural decisions are now made taking into account the needs of all stakeholders, including the existing maintenance team.
Typically, Solus has been a Golang-oriented project and has several experienced developers. With the addition of Serpent developers, the full cross-development team has a skill set that includes Rust and Go, as well as various web stack technologies.
In reconsidering the entire project architecture, including our automated builds, the following decisions have been made that incorporate the requirements of being widely adopted/supported, robust ecosystems, and established tooling.
When developing the project, It is planned to use the Rust, ReactJS/TypeScript and Go languages, In addition, Rust will be used instead of D for low-level tools, ReactJS/TypeScript for the front-end and Go for web systems and building infrastructure.
Another change that will be implemented in the development of the distribution is that the new infrastructure will be scalable and will be implemented using Kubernetes, in addition to the fact that it is planned to actively use caching when rebuilding the entire distribution after changing any part of the graph of dependency.
It is worth mentioning that Currently, the project focuses on implementing the package manager moss in Rust and use the MPL-2.0 license for the new tool kit. The decision to use this license was through internal discussion, as the MPL offered the highest level of defense against patent trolls while ensuring that the code was widely free for everyone to respectfully use and adapt. .
In addition, it is also worth mentioning that the project assigns copyright to the Serpent OS development team to avoid future license changes.
Finally if you are interested in knowing more about it about the news, you can consult Ikey Doherty's publication in the following link