Iris OS Onyx

Description
Iris OS Onyx is an operating system made by iriSoft in 2019. It is based on the Linux kernel. It includes a tremendous amount of new features, such as a new interface - Aurora Shell which iriSoft claims it's a mix of Google's Material Design and iriSoft's design languages. Onyx got mostly positive reviews, with some saying about the new and exciting Aurora Shell including widgets.

Apps
Iris OS Onyx adds in new apps and features. A secondary browser made by iriSoft, SafeBrowser, was added into the OS but does not replace Firefox entirely. A new updated Notes app was introduced with a new icon, templates including a to-do list, and the area to type on is a close-up of an actual notepad with animations of flipping through pages when a user clicks on the page up or down buttons; rendering the app pretty GPU-intensive. Hence, the animations were more exciting than in Iris OS '18. The file manager also now has tabs. Iris Chat and iriSoft Error Scanner are pre-installed. The irisMart App Marketplace also debuted in Iris OS Onyx, since iriSoft announced during the release of Iris OS Onyx "No more hunting on the web for applications, now you can get your favorites on the irisMart."

Core features
Alt+Tab (on Windows keyboards) now shows up Firefox or SafeBrowser tabs. iriSoft added this feature because they thought they'd make Onyx more convenient to use.

User interface
iriSoft made a new UI for the OS - Aurora Shell, which includes a wallpaper-matching color for the dock and transparency in the UI elements, similar to Windows Aero used in Windows Vista and 7. It also includes some new, exciting animations that made the OS "more intuitive".

Start screen
Iris OS adds in a radically new start screen. It is full-screen and has 2 columns - the top column is used for notifications and news, while the bottom column shows a list of apps and Web shortcuts, showing their corresponding icon. The normal list of apps is Firefox, Google, the unremovable Desktop icon which is a shortcut to the desktop, and Notes. There are 2 tabs in the bottom column - the Apps tab, and the Widgets tab. Users can add widgets using the plus "+" button on the bottom right, and drag-and-drop them to the desktop on the bottom left, where it says "Drag and drop widgets to desktop here" on a light blue square. It was a breakthrough but stole the idea from Windows 8. Thus, the OS was more touch-friendly. On login, the user is sometimes presented with a message saying there would be poor performance due to the Aurora UI animations on some PCs. Then the user is presented with a 3-note jingle on login, and the list of apps floats up one by one, the top column zooms in, and the "Start" text slides from the left, similar to Windows 8.

Development
Onyx began development in 2018, with the codename "Vertigo", and based on Iris OS '18. The same year, a milestone 1 developer preview was released in July of that year. In the developer preview, the UI was called "NDE", an alpha version of Aurora UI. The version number calls itself "ecSoft Codename Vertigo Dev Preview". In August 2018, a milestone 2 pre-beta version was compiled, with the UI now calling itself just "Aurora" instead of Aurora UI. It was announced in August 2018 as "Onyx". Milestone 2 includes a beta version of the new Notes app, widgets, and a redesigned display properties panel.