Sculpt OS release 20.02

Version 20.02 of the Sculpt operating system revisits the administrative user interface for a more intuitive and logical user experience.

With the release of Sculpt version 20.02, we follow our roadmap's mission to make Sculpt OS easier to approach. In particular, we identified the reliance on a command-line interface as a potential barrier of entry. As Sculpt OS is not a Unix-like system, it should not require any Unix know-how from the user. To relieve users from this burden, Sculpt 20.02 introduces a custom graphical file browser and editor that can be used for interactively inspecting and tweaking the state of the system. The traditional command-line interface is still present as a fallback for advanced tasks though. The updated manual goes into detail about the use of the new system.

Thanks to the work of seasoned Genode developers, many software packages are already available for the new version. These include virtual machine monitors like VirtualBox, performance-monitoring tools, GUI components, Genode's custom Unix runtime, and several applications and games. In particular, the software depots offered by alex-ab, cnuke, skalk are worth exploring. The ready-to-use system image for version 20.02 can be obtained from the Sculpt download page and is accompanied by matching documentation.