Last updated on February 19, 2025
Any article about Serpent OS or Solus OS (or now, AerynOS), is first and foremost an article about Ikey Doherty.
Serpent OS, a Linux distro that just recently reached alpha, announced on Friday that it’s changing its name to AerynOS. In most cases, that would be the story — a distro in the birthing stage is changing its name — but in this case the story is the guy behind the distro, which is Ikey Doherty.
There’s been a long queue forming for more than three years for the first stable release of Serpent OS, mainly because it’s the brainchild of Doherty. It’s supposed to be the next-gen, better-than-Solus-OS-distro coming out of what I’ve seen called, “the Ikey Brand.”
Ikey, it seems, has a reputation as being the creator of great Linux distros. He also has a reputation of suddenly abandoning his creations due to… well, mainly money issues.
Meet Ikey Doherty
Take Solus OS for example.
Doherty has started two separate distros using the name Solus. The first was started in 2013, which quickly became popular and which Ken Starks wrote about in his first ever FOSS Force article. But about the same time that Doherty started it — or at least not very long afterwards — he abandoned it, which became the subject of Starks’ second FOSS Force article, published 10 days later.
Four months after that Doherty was back with another distro, Evolve, which quickly went through a name change, to Solus OS, as a way of solving a trademark dispute. That distro also became quite popular, and even gave birth to Budgie, which remains a popular desktop environment.
It’s also been something of a roller coaster ride for everyone involved, with Doherty abandoning it, leaving his team stranded, and then returning years later when another project lead abandoned the project, which I chronicled about a year-and-a-half ago.
Somewhere along the line, Doherty began developing another distro, Serpent OS
The plan, as I understand it, has been for Serpent OS to be something of a advanced version of Solus OS — with Serpent being more of a distro for developers, and with Solus becoming based on it, but being more of a distro for everyday Linux users, sort of like Arch and Manjaro.
Things seemed to be moving along nicely — albeit slowly for Serpent OS — when Doherty out of the blue posted a dire warning to LinkedIn a few weeks ago that he was running out of money and that due to funding issues he was “having to slow development down.”
Since then there’s been a wave of articles in open-source media supporting Doherty and the project, but there’s been no indication one way or the other on whether that’s resulted in funds coming in.
Then on Friday came another unexpected announcement. This time it was about the most recent name change of a Doherty project.
Shakespeare’s Linux Rose
The last time I wrote about Doherty and his ongoing troubles I used Yogi Berra’s famous phrase, “déjà vu all over again,” for one of the subtitles. That same phrase would be especially fitting for this article, considering that Doherty announced the name change in a post called “Evolve This OS,” a reference to the original name of the distro that’s now known as Solus OS but which isn’t to be confused with another Doherty founded distro called Solus which is now dead.
In other words, lightening has struck twice. Its déjà vu all over again… all over again.
In his post, Doherty attempts to make the case that the name change was necessary because, “‘serpents’ are often associated with negative connotations.”
“It’s fair to say we’ve spent a long time in prototype and alpha phases,” he wrote. “In order to move forward, our identity needs to be more befitting of the project we’re building. A move into the real world. This isn’t a hobby project, it’s a full blown Linux distribution with serious technical underpinnings, achievements and goals.”
Okie dokie then. So that’s going to get Serpent OS, now AerynOS (pronounced “erin”) on the road to recovery and stability?
I think I’m going to side with Linuxiac’s Bobby Borisov, who pretty much said in an article on Saturday, “Uh, I don’t think so.”
Basically it boils down to this: Doherty has made it clear that he’s got all of his ducks in a row, even if he’s missing the duck that pays the rent.
“Having already secured AerynOS.com, AerynOS.dev, plus the associated social media accounts, we’re now in the process of rebranding the project. For sheer irony, we’ll make the final transition day the 17th of March, 2025. Yes, St. Patrick’s Day.”
St. Patrick, you might remember, drove the snakes out of Ireland.
Editor’s note: An earlier version of this article reported that in a recent LinkedIn post that Ikey Doherty had said that without funding the Serpent OS project was in danger of ending, when what he had actually written was that without increased funding he’s “having to slow development down.” The article has been edited to reflect that.
Christine Hall has been a journalist since 1971. In 2001, she began writing a weekly consumer computer column and started covering Linux and FOSS in 2002 after making the switch to GNU/Linux. Follow her on Twitter: @BrideOfLinux
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