That is a collection of some of the stupidest ideas I've ever seen.

From his website:

As far as I can tell OS design for the past 40 years has been centered around drivers. This is what the micro-kernel/monolithic debate is all about. I do not believe in drivers. In the Serene future there will be no drivers. With this insight we can move on to real innovation in OS design.

What does that even mean? This has serious "quack" vibes.

Edit: I just watched his q&a video. He's reinvented DOS. He expects every program to just write their own hardware interface code. 🙄

I don't understand this guy's argument at all. First of all, he isn't using any shell that I know about, he seems to have invented his own, and the command line arguments he uses are specific to his own shell. He doesn't explain how these command line arguments work in terms of POSIX system calls, so I can't follow along with what he is actually doing. As far as I can tell, these are security issues with his own software, not with Unix or Linux.

If you are worried about file mutability, you can use ZFS or BTrFS or BCacheFS. All of these filesystems have a snapshot function, so if any changes (e.g. file encryption by ransomware attackers) are made you can reboot and roll back the changes, unless the attackers figure out a way to get root access and delete your snapshots. But if an attacker has gained root access to your computer, that is a much more serious issue and not really in the scope of filesystem security or file mutability.

The snapshot and rollback feature also exists in NixOS and GuixOS, where your operating system kernel and all software installed is part of a snapshot that can be rolled back, if the system becomes unbootable, you can rollback from within the GRUB boot loader. Again, all software installation is managed by a service that runs for you at root level so you never need sudo to install software, and the software you install never effects any other user or the operating system. So the only way to hack this is to gain root access and alter the content of the Guix or Nix "store" database with malicious code, but again, root access is a much bigger issue than what we are talking about.

So yeah, the argument stated in this video makes no sense to me.

OS X (now macOS) and iOS have had app-level sandboxing for the last 14 years, at least since 10.7 Lion/iOS 5.

Nowadays, Apple has even gone to some outrageous efforts to make the OS itself nearly inaccessible to edit without jumping through a bunch of hoops (which, for power users, are simply inconvenient), however there are a few security upshots to this, including keeping novice users from hosing their system by accident.

Edit: this would, of course, apply to any macOS derivative such as iOS, iPadOS, etc.

Better sandboxing would be great. Wasn't there a story earlier in the week that a missing environment variable in a desktop theme erased someone's entire user directory? That shouldn't really be possible.

Gives me madaidan vibes.

Here is an alternative Piped link(s):

https://piped.video/watch?v=M-HZk9fRnKA

Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.

I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.

File Mutability and Why Unix-based systems are insecure

Implying that Linux is Unix...

Terrible 🙃

Impressive, but terrible.

Reminds me a little of the old Jonathan Shapiro research OSes (Coyotos, EROS, CapROS), though toned down a little bit. The EROS family was about eliminating the filesystem entirely at the OS level since you can simulate files with capabilities anyway. Serenum seems to be toning that down a little and effectively having file- or directory-level capabilities, which I think is sensible if you're going to have a capability-based OS, since they end up being a bit more user-visible as an OS.

He's got the same problem every research OS has: zero software. He's probably smart to ditch the idea of hardware entirely and just fix on one hardware platform.

I wish him luck selling his computer systems, but I doubt he's going to do very well. What would a customer do with one of these? Edit files? And then...edit them again? I guess you can show off how inconvenient it is to edit things due to its security.

I just mean it's a bit optimistic to try and fund this by selling it. I understand he doesn't have a research grant, but it's clearly just a research OS.