The developers of Redox OS, an open source operating system written completely in Rust, announced progress on several fronts. These are some of the highlights from the June 2026 update.

What's new

• Initial gamepad support: USB-connected gamepads can now be used to play games on Redox OS. However, the game or emulator being played must be using the SDL2 library, so not everything is covered here.
• Gaming on Flycast: The Sega Dreamcast emulator Flycast was ported to Redox OS, meaning you can play Dreamcast games (and also Naomi, Naomi 2, and Atomiswave games) going forward.
  • The blog post included screenshots of Resident Evil games being played on Redox OS.
• GTK 3 windows: Redox OS' windowing system (called "Orbital") can now render windows created with GTK 3 libraries thanks to a porting of the GDK backend.
  • This comes a month after Redox OS gained initial support for the Xfce desktop environment, which is built on GTK 3.
• Tcl support: You can now run Tcl programs on Redox OS.
  • Tcl is a command-oriented language often used for testing and prototyping in software development.

What's getting better

• Security and efficiency: One contributor moved the process of allocating file descriptors from the kernel to the userspace. This had the effect of reducing attack surface of kernel exploits and increasing the speed at which Redox OS runs.

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• Fractional scaling: The windowing system can now perform fractional scaling across multiple windows at once. However, the only library running on Redox OS that supports fractional scaling is GTK 3, meaning only apps written in GTK 3 will take advantage of fractional scaling.

What's getting funded

Aside from the new features and enhancements, the Redox OS team also announced a €50,000.00 grant being awarded to the project from the NGI Zero Commons fund and the NLnet Foundation. The funds will be used to make Redox OS usable for running web services and microservices as a tiny QEMU virtual machine.

As part of the project, expected outcomes include:

• virtiofs support
• Networking enhancements
• Improvements to Redox OS' ZFS-inspired file system, RedoxFS
• Better POSIX compliance

Zooming out

Why this update matters: While Redox OS is still nowhere near ready for showtime, an entirely Rust-based operating systems means a lot for security and for diversity in the open source OS ecosystem.

My take: I'm speculating the virtual web server implementation will speed Redox OS' overall development, assuming adoption is significant.

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Diving in

The fineprint: You can read the Redox blog post yourself to get more details and see those screenshots.

Get it now: If you want to try Redox OS, you can follow the Redox OS quickstart guide.