Bringing SerenityOS to real hardware, one driver at a time

I love the serenityos concept (and ladybird browser) so I'm glad to see this progress!

Me as well.

Sadly, they have parted ways at this point. Not only has Ladybird broken off into an independent project but it does not consider SerenityOS a target platform anymore.

Ladybird is slowly shedding a lot of the “home grown” Serenity layers and replacing them with more mainstream alternatives.

As I am primarily a Linux user, I am excited to see Ladybird become a real alternative on Linux. However, as a fan of SerenityOS as well, I am sad to see all the energy and innovation that was going into Ladybird get stripped out of SerenityOS.

Ladybird has a very large political aim: to become the only browser that isn't funded by Google or based on Google's browser engine. The reason it left behind SerenityOS is because it has moved from a hobbyist aim to a very serious political aim.

Ladybird aims to build a true new browser engine bit it's using big Google libraries like ANGLE and Skia to do it I don't know it's really fair to frame it as escaping Google completely like that.

i'm not sure why you are being downvoted -- i can see angle as just a platform compatibility layer (in the same category as qt, which ladybird also uses), but skia (vector graphics) is definitely an important part of a rendering engine, which, coupled with the insane complexity of skia's implementation, does appear to jeopardize the whole 'web rendering engine from scratch' aim.

Well, the "engine" is pretty much from scratch but the project no longer believes in "being responsible for everything ourselves".

The goal with Ladybird is to be "independent" in the sense that nobody influences their decisions. However, they have no desire to be independent from a technology stand-point (other than being Open Source). In fact, they are talking about moving to Swift as their core language.