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A new, yet familiar kind of Linux

Serpent OS is a heavily engineering-led effort to redefine the distribution aspects of a Linux® distro. Fed up with an all-or-nothing approach, i.e. classical package management or entirely image based, we set out to create a hybrid approach that blends the best of both worlds.

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What is Serpent OS?

Serpent OS is an independent Linux-based operating system built upon a variety of open source technologies. Most importantly, it is an attempt to provide a sane installation that cannot be "broken" by updates. It does this through a variety of recovery mechanisms, including on-disk offline rollbacks and system deduplication.

We acknowledge that updates can go wrong, despite striving to avoid breakage with our advanced tooling and processes. This is why we designed with recovery in mind - reboot to the last transaction, be confident with package triggers that run in isolated containers.

Who is Serpent OS for?

Anyone. Whether you're a downstream, building containers or just enjoying Serpent OS itself for the simplicity of maintenence, there's something for everyone.

As a project, we care deeply about how things work - so our primary goal is to improve the automation and tooling used by our developers and contributors to streamline delivery of features and updates to our users.

Serpent OS is in active, heavy development

We welcome all contributions at this stage of our development, as we transition from prototypes to deliverables, especially with our transition to Rust. With the integration of system triggers nearing, we'll begin to publish frequent desktop ISOs and OCI images for dog-fooding purposes.

Meet the tools

We said we care deeply - and this is made a reality through our tooling. Whether its package builds, orchestration of updates, the package manager itself, each component is crafted with care and extensive experience, and fully open source.

🚀 moss - blazing fast package management

Whether you're using Linux for home or work, we've got you covered. Don't wait around for old package managers or bundles: turbocharge your installations and containers with moss and Serpent OS.

âš› Atomic transactions

Every package management operation creates an entirely self contained transaction, offering rollbacks to earlier points in time as well as ensuring new updates are safe to apply. Unlike other "A/B" transaction systems, moss can make the new system root available immediately.

âš¡ Ridiculously fast

We leverage the fastest technologies and techniques to provide ridiculously fast package management.

  • xxHash for content addressable hashes. Zip!
  • Zstandard for package compression, kernel modules, firmware, etc.
  • Upcoming: BLAKE3 for verification!

🔒 Safer

  • 🦀 Core tooling is written in Rust, with support tooling in the process of being ported. Memory safe, and extremely fast execution.
  • âš  Self-contained builds of essential system tools - moss can recover your system if you accidentally remove glibc!

🔨 boulder: A better way to package

We've been building tools to build systems for a long time, and came to an obvious conclusion: Packaging is by and large, a set of policies applied to the final build artefacts of compliant source packages.

🦸 Superpowered packaging

Our simple yet powerful stone.yml format makes it a breeze to create packages for Serpent OS. Whip them through boulder, our container-based build-tool, and have binary packages in no time.

No steep learning curve, just some YAML and an extremely intelligent package build system capable of automatically splitting packages into the correct subpackages and recording their dependencies. Heck, we can even generate a recipe from an upstream release! 😲