Comment by qalmakka
9 months ago
I guess SerenityOS is somewhat doomed now? I never saw this kind of move ending well, honestly. Even when not involved, having the original around is always a great boon to the popularity of a project.
I for one would love to see the SerenityOS GUI ported to Wayland on Windows. It's precisely what I ask for from an OS honestly.
I don't know, there's quite a few open source projects where the original author stepped down and it's thriving. Take Arch Linux for example. Before that Gentoo - and there I think the main "problem" with popularity is that self-compiling fell out of fashion.
There's also tons of software projects where this happened, just more quietly. Usually when there is no drama, nobody reports about it. So I'd assume it's usually more a problem, if there is drama, but even here I can think about projects surviving despite it. See OwnCloud/NextCloud.
Honestly, I can't think of projects where this did not end well. Given that SerentyOS is still a thing, despite Kling pulling out a while ago (in the sense of only working on the browser) it really doesn't sound like the project is on its last breath now.
Given the history of getting people into OS development - even more so than Haiku, which also did a pretty good job at that I think Kling leaves with a multitude of people stepping in.
Define ‘doomed’. As far as I can tell, SerenityOS did everything (and much more) than Andreas ever hoped it would.
It was never meant to be a ‘mass-market’ general purpose OS, but could still turn into one (or be the basis that one is built from) if the right maintainers steer it that way. But even if it doesn’t I’m glad that it existed, and that it spawned Ladybird is pretty crazy and awesome.
If it is something people hack on for fun why would it be doomed because of one guy leaving or their web browser getting forked?
Yeah it's hard to see this not as the beginning of the end for SerenityOS