Sculpt OS version 24.04 May 29, 2024

The Genode-base Sculpt operating system now supports 4K displays and I2C touchpads out of the box, brings experimental support for suspend/resume, allows the fine-grained assignment of USB devices to applications and VMs, and introduces new audio-mixing capabilities.

On our road map, we touted 2024 as the year of Sculpt OS usability. This aspiration unleashed an unseen dedication on user-visible features, which culminated in the release of version 24.04 by the end of April.

The new version now supports 4K displays and I2C touchpads out of the box, brings experimental support for suspend/resume, allows for the fine-grained assignment of USB devices to applications and virtual machines, introduces new audio-mixing capabilities. Under the hood, each of those topics represented deeply technical challenges for us developers. But on the user-visible surface, Sculpt's administrative interface exposes them to the user in an streamlined and almost playful manner. Please find the highlights summarized in What's new in Sculpt OS 24.04.

Sculpt OS is still primarily targeted at highly technical users and developers. For the latter, the new version introduces two exciting new features, namely the support for on-target debugging via GDB, and the ability to use Sculpt OS as a remote test target of Genode's Goa SDK. The dedicated article and accompanied screencast On-target debugging with GDB on Sculpt OS 24.04 shows the new debugging facilities in action.

Thanks to our routine with running Sculpt OS on modern laptops day to day, version 24.04 bumps the range of supported hardware. Displays up to 4K are supported out of the box now, and touchpads of laptops like the Gen13 Framework have become operational.

Sculpt OS 24.04 is available as ready-to-use system image at the Sculpt download page accompanied with updated documentation.