Serpent OS prealpha0 released

Serpent OS, a new Linux distribution with a completely custom package management system written in Rust, has released its very very rough pre-alpha release. They’ve been working on this for four years, and they’re making some interesting choices regarding packaging that I really like, at least on paper.

This will of course appear to be a very rough (crap) prealpha ISO. Underneath the surface it is using the moss package manager, our very own package management solution written in Rust. Quite simply, every single transaction in moss generates a new filesystem tree (/usr) in a staging area as a full, stateless, OS transaction.

When the package installs succeed, any transaction triggers are run in a private namespace (container) before finally activating the new /usr tree. Through our enforced stateless design, usr-merge, etc, we can atomically update the running OS with a single renameat2 call.

As a neat aside, all OS content is deduplicated, meaning your last system transaction is still available on disk allowing offline rollbacks.

↫ Ikey Doherty

Since this is only a very rough pre-alpha release, I don’t have much more to say at this point, but I do think it’s interesting enough to let y’all know about it. Even if you’re not the kind of person to dive into pre-alphas, I think you should keep an eye on Serpent OS, because I have a feeling they’re on to something valuable here.