Blog

Whilst August is a holiday month around Europe, it’s safe to say it’s been a very busy month around the project, with a lot of progress made across various core tooling repositories.

Following on from our Versioned Repositories phase 2 work that we landed last month, we are developing moss on multiple fronts. tarkah has supplemented our current hardlink driver approach with a reflink strategy for filesystems that support it, along with working on an in-progress development sprint to eventually deliver an EROFS metadata-image based approach that will be fully filesystem agnostic. Fabio is working on moss’ command tree, reorganising the commands we already have but also looking forward to the command functionality we will eventually want to have available. Lastly, Jonathan is also working towards improved search and shell completion functionality that will make moss easier to interact with for both users and packagers alike.

Joey has delivered a number of performance-related improvements to boulder, making packaging quicker and also offering additional optimisation techniques such as BOLT for key packages.

On the distribution side, Reilly has led our expanding packaging team through a repository-wide rebuild to ensure ABI sanity and protect against potential bit rot. Ultimately, this means less risk of broken packages or systems for our early adopters.

In a separate work stream, staff member Bryan is working on a new TUI-based lichen installer that is substantially improved from the current lichen installer that we offer. We are developing it openly with updated versions being shared in our Zulip server. Bryan is taking on board feedback and iterating on the design and functionality with the aim of it being included in a future ISO. Key improvements include automatic disk formatting, system-model-driven installs, btrfs as a root partition option and generally a much more refined TUI navigation experience.

Staff members Alice and NomadicCore have worked on a new Discourse forum that will replace our GitHub Discussions forum. We are thankful to Discourse for sponsoring the project with this server, and to our community members who have been giving us feedback on the layout. It is now ready for wider use by our community.

Finally, we’re continuing to refine the project’s branding with a slight tweak to the project name from AerynOS to aerynOS along with tweaks to logo colours and fonts.

Solid foundations are leading to expanding horizons

Aug 2, 2026 - 16 min read - 3074 words

It’s been several months since our last update in May, and a lot has happened around the AerynOS project in the meantime!

First and foremost, we have tested, landed and productised our Versioned Repositories phase 2 feature, which will serve to firm up AerynOS’ foundations and help us further develop our vision of how to build a Linux distribution.

On the distribution side, Reilly has landed experimental OpenZFS support for data drives alongside significant systemd packaging efforts bringing it from 257.13 to 261.2.

Community member Christian Bendiksen is continuing his work around his Gnist and Malm cli tools for conveniently declaring, applying, and sharing Wayland Window Manager themes, and community member lumi has worked on their aerbox tool, which natively makes use of moss’ system-model concept to quickly create containers gated by access control to network, sound, drives and other hardware.

On the kernel front, we have moved to 7.1.5 for our stable and gaming branches and 6.18.40 for LTS, following a period of elevated vulnerability disclosures in the Linux kernel that required rapid response from the team.

We have also landed NVIDIA driver 610.43.03 in our repositories and have been running a testing programme with community members over the last month that is already yielding positive results.

In our wider project activities, we continue to explore Codeberg as an alternative to GitHub, with our new website built with Hugo using the Hextra theme under active development over there. We are also releasing a new ISO, AerynOS 2026.08.

In terms of our code bases, we have contributors experimenting with improving the moss package search UX, and refactoring some of our shared low-level git and sqlite3 db functionality.

From a development story arc perspective, AerynOS has been deliberately kept under a very tight leash over the last year, as we have focused on strengthening our core tooling and infrastructure code bases. Whilst we are nowhere near “done” with our vision for our tooling, now that our ability to seamlessly deliver updates to our on-disk repository and file formats has been secured, you will see AerynOS deliberately transitioning into a more open and collaborative space for those of you who want to get involved with the project and work on areas that you find fun, interesting and engaging.

This shift in approach has already been evident over the last couple of months, as engagement around the project continues to grow through all of our social media platforms and particularly in our Zulip server.

A post we never want to have to make!

May 3, 2026 - 8 min read - 1577 words

This is the post we never want to make, where we made errors with our previous ISO release and are having to take steps to fix the issue, including releasing an updated ISO.

Over the course of April, the team worked on systemd-presets as a workstream we didn’t actually talk about in our April blog post. We thought that all the work had been completed in such a fashion that users wouldn’t see any discernible difference whilst allowing us to move closer to “best-practice” approaches.

Unfortunately, due to the way systemd functions, it doesn’t natively support a global preset-all approach on first boot, one of the preset approaches we had recently adopted. In combination, our lichen installer was creating an /etc/machine-id file in new installs, which is what systemd uses to detect whether a machine is in its first boot or not.

As such, users on existing systems did not have an issue, but new installs could be broken and we did not detect this as part of our ISO testing process.

Thanks to user feedback, we were able to narrow down, identify and resolve the issue within 24 hours of the ISO release, and we had an updated ISO up for testing within our server by the end of the first day of the original release. The fix came via two commits:

Lichen: Fix first boot
Systemd: Preset-all user services on first-boot

Following additional testing with a wider audience on our Zulip server, we have updated the links on our download page to our new ISO so any users downloading the latest ISO won’t see these issues.

Rebranding, Upgrading, and Wallpapering: AerynOS’ April glow-up!

Apr 30, 2026 - 11 min read - 2048 words

No, this isn’t a suspicious phishing attempt! AerynOS has officially gone through a rebrand 🎉

Over the course of April, we rolled out a new logo and refreshed colour palette across the entire project. It took a bit of time to thread this through every corner of the OS and our web presence, but we’re happy to say it’s now fully in place.

Alongside the new branding, we’ve also been collaborating with community member ziegenmelker5, licensing a selection of his photography for use as wallpapers (and the title image above). A handful of these have already landed in our artwork repository and will show up on user systems after the next sync. On top of that, the team has created an abstract wallpaper inspired by the new logo, so there’s a bit of something for everyone.

On the software development side, a big chunk of April was spent improving our core tooling, especially moss and boulder:

Boulder:

Added boulder cache size to show cache size of both boulder and moss.
Added boulder cache clean to free up space on system by deleting the cache.
Updated boulder recipe update to use ent to check for recipe updates and appropriately update the stone.yaml accordingly.

Moss:

moss state prune is now faster and shows a progress bar when removing states.

In addition, we’ve continued our reuse compliance work, extending it from our recipes repository into our os-tools repository. This brings us closer to full compliance across the board.

Lastly, we have expanded our kernel configurations and now offer an LTS, stable and gaming kernel, though switching away from the stable kernel isn’t yet a simple process.

March 2026 project update

Mar 31, 2026 - 12 min read - 2275 words