Engineering journal
Progress you can check.
What has actually been demonstrated, when, and what went wrong along the way. Demonstrations ran on our test systems, mostly virtual machines, with some on real PCs. No installations exist outside the lab yet.
Milestones
Updates that roll themselves back
OS updates now boot on trial and fall back automatically if the new version fails. A tampered build is refused at boot, and power cuts at each step of an update leave a working machine. All eight acceptance checks passed on four test machines.
Loom becomes readable
The live map of the system gained a clear left-to-right layout, groups, drag-to-place and undo.
Mouse support everywhere
Every panel now supports the mouse automatically.
Terminal and remote command gateway
The terminal and SSH command gateway passed acceptance.
The GPU joins the fabric
The graphics card became a display node in the fabric, verified across cold power cycles.
A server nobody touched
A headless server was installed and administered entirely from a desktop. Nobody typed at the server.
Lesson: 144 Hz that was really 26 Hz
Our first high-resolution GPU output was quietly running at 26 Hz instead of 144 Hz. Earlier checks had confirmed the display was in sync, not that it was refreshing at the right rate. We fixed it by programming the pixel clock explicitly.
Measure the thing you claim, not something next to it.
A wiped machine, restored
A wiped machine was restored from a recovery code plus a copy held by a trusted peer that couldn't read it.
Two people, one machine
Two seats on one machine, each with its own login and encrypted home.
Third-party software, on our terms
An app built and signed outside the project was refused until its publisher was trusted, then installed and run in its sandbox.
Lesson: green tests are not enough
A live store test found three defects that a fully passing test suite of nearly 8,000 tests had missed.
That is why every milestone on this page was accepted on running machines, not on test results alone.
Across the machine boundary
A panel on one machine drove a service running on another.
Our own secure web client
StrandsOS's own TLS 1.3 client fetched real HTTPS websites.
The first app from the store
An app was downloaded from the store, checked against its pinned publisher and launched. The same week, Loom showed the live graph of a connected peer.
Custody survives a partition
After a network split, a returning machine refused stale data, then reconciled with its peers.
Candid limitations
Mostly proven on virtual machines
Most demonstrations ran on virtual machines. Hardware support on real PCs is narrow, and nothing has been measured on bare metal under load.
One network, not the internet
Machines join as one fabric on a local network. Fabrics spanning sites have been tested only on a simulated network.
Loom shows, but doesn't yet rewire
You can see and inspect the system in Loom. Composing and rewiring it from the map is planned.
Second monitors still have defects
A separate monitor per seat on real hardware is in progress and still has known defects.
Not independently audited
The security design has not been externally audited or certified, and native apps don't yet have hardware-enforced isolation from each other.
Not compatible with existing software
StrandsOS isn't Linux or Windows. It runs software written for Strands, not existing desktop applications.