September 2025 project update
As we reach the end of September, it’s time for another monthly update. For this month, we are deferring our technical blog post into October but wanted to provide wider project updates.
Kernels
Section titled “Kernels”AerynOS is currently running on 6.16.8. While we are aware that Linux 6.17 was released on 28th September 2025, the AerynOS team takes the view that for larger software stacks, the wise thing to do is to hold back for a few point releases after a major version update to ensure there are no unexpected issues.
Even though AerynOS is a rolling release distribution, we don’t aim to be on the bleeding edge just for the sake of being on the bleeding edge.
Gnome 49
Section titled “Gnome 49”The team updated to Gnome 49 within a couple of weeks following its release meaning it’s now available in our repository. Given the way Gnome updates and how extensions then follow suit, we are aware that many extensions have not yet been updated for compatibility with Gnome 49.
As such, we are holding back our next live installer ISO release until a larger number of extensions have had time to go through their own update cycles.
Infra stabilization
Section titled “Infra stabilization”2025 has seen a massive lift in our infra code with the rewrite to Rust taking place in Q2, and its stabilization being pursued from the end of Q2 and up until now.
In this period, the team has been incrementally refining the code, and resolved bugs as they have arisen. This is work that average users will not have seen or been aware of as it only affects workflows behind the scenes. However, this has been extremely important work that has increasingly allowed us to become more confident in our new infra foundations.
We are now at the point where we are confident in calling our new infrastructure “stable”, with no bugs having presented themselves in several weeks and hundreds of packages built.
It cannot be overstated how much better the state of our infra is compared to the start of the year. In turn, this now allows us to focus our efforts in other areas of our technology stack to similarly work through bugs, implement features and generally refine our code base.
Cosmic maintainership
Section titled “Cosmic maintainership”A couple of months ago we had a new contributor, Bryan Hyland, join us and begin working on the Cosmic stack. Bryan’s contributions have been invaluable to the team and we thank him for his engagement.
Unfortunately, due to personal reasons, he is having to take a temporary step back from the project. He has shared his methodology for providing updates to the Cosmic packages and we already have willing contributors from our community picking up the in-flight tasks.
We know he will be back once his circumstances improve, but in the meantime, if you are curious about supporting Cosmic on AerynOS, please do get in touch in our Matrix packaging channel as it’s always good to have several people capable of maintaining each of our DE stacks.
Web development
Section titled “Web development”One area in which we often receive feedback is our website. Given we are in an alpha state, it has not been our highest priority to improve it. We do have a couple of interested contributors wanting to work on our website to help improve the overall look and feel of the project, though.
Hence, if you are interested in website design and want to lend a hand, please feel free to join our Matrix webdev channel as we will likely begin work on this area in parallel to our core development work.
Documentation
Section titled “Documentation”Similarly to our web development work, we are seeing increasing numbers of contributors willing and able to help with our documentation. Outside of our core tooling development, this is arguably our second most important workstream and another area in which we often receive feedback.
If you are interested in supporting our documentation drive, feel free to join us in our Matrix documentation channel.
Holidays
Section titled “Holidays”NomadicCore has been leading our social media presence for the last few months. Someone (unwisely) gave him permission to go on holiday for the next three weeks, which means that our social media presence is likely to be less active than usual in the interim.
Please do not take this as any indication of the project slowing down. If anything, we have an increasing number of developers working on different areas of our tooling stack and are seeing our development and packaging activity picking up.
October plans
Section titled “October plans”We hope to release out next ISO in October, once:
- We have landed the Cosmic Beta packages and have had a few weeks to shake out any bugs
- Gnome extensions have had more time to update for compatibility with Gnome 49
- We are a few point releases into the Linux 6.17.x kernel cycle and there are no confirmed bugs we need to address
We are also aware of the planned release of KDE Plasma 6.5 on the 21st of October 2025. Similarly to Linux 6.17.x, we are not planning / trying to be first out of the gate with a large stack update. This will likely land at a later point after a few weeks / a point release or two.
That’s it for this monthly roundup. Thanks for reading, and we hope to see you around in our community.