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We are firmly in the final quarter of 2025 and what a year it’s been so far. In our last blog post at the end of September, we mentioned that we were delaying the release of our next ISO into October to give our Gnome 49 stack (and the wider extensions ecosystem) more time to mature.

Coming into the final week of October, the team made the decision to transition from clang’s libc++ to GNU libstdc++ and work through the associated rebuild requirements across our repository.

We also mentioned in our September blog post that we had reached the point of having stable build infrastructure. However, over the course of October, we had an old problem re-appear, which proved somewhat vexing to solve initially.

After the issue was debugged, and a fixed version of boulder was deployed to the build infrastructure, we used the transition back to libstdc++, which included hundreds and hundreds of rebuilds, and the landing of the KDE Plasma 6.5 stack to verify that that we have put this particular issue behind us.

In addition to the build infrastructure related boulder fixes, the team has also found the time to hash out a design for, and prepare an early prototype PR of, the moss declarative system-model feature, as well as landing a few small user experience improvements and correctness fixes to both moss and boulder.

With that all said and done, we are ready with our 2025.10 GNOME Live ISO refresh for you to enjoy along with this blog post.

September 2025 project update

Oct 1, 2025 - 5 min read - 899 words

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

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

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

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.

August 2025 project update

Aug 31, 2025 - 12 min read - 2376 words

Closing out August 2025, we are proud to announce our third release of the year. This release follows an intense development period where the team has reevaluated its priorities / timelines and refocused efforts on “delivering core Linux distribution tooling that will simplify our ability to scale out over time”.

We have documented some of our progress in our last two blog posts and spent the last two months further progressing towards these goals. We have implemented a basic version of virtual packages (Package Sets), continued our hardware (and VM) enablement efforts and have selectively been growing our repository where we feel it’s beneficial to our users.

What’s new Distro-wise

Whilst not an exhaustive list, some of the top line repository updates include:

GNOME 48.4
Plasma 6.4.4
Sway 1.11
Cosmic Alpha 7
Linux 6.15.11
Mesa 25.2.1
LLVM 20.1.8
uutils-coreutils 0.1.0
sudo-rs 0.2.8
ffmpeg 7.1.1
fastfetch 2.51.1 (adds AerynOS logo)
Waydroid: Add at 1.5.4
openvpn: Add at 2.6.14
protontricks: Add at 1.13.0
winetricks: Add at 20250102

In addition, we fixed a subtle issue with our PATH configuration that mostly affected our console logins. With this fix, we have made our login experience fully stateless. We have also enabled sulogin for a single-user root shell to diagnose and repair boot failures.

Development update: os-tools

Jul 11, 2025 - 13 min read - 2601 words

In our recent mid-year blog post, we mentioned that it would be the first in a short series of posts providing updates on the various work streams we have been actively progressing during the last few months. Whilst that post focused primarily on our infrastructure, in this one, we will shift our focus towards the work we have been doing around our os-tools.

Short overview

To recap, our os-tools consist of moss and boulder. Whilst also originally written in DLang, initial ports of these were built in Rust during the latter half of 2023. Though we made the odd improvement here and there during 2024, through Q2 2025 we set out to review the code, develop an improvement plan and then put that into action.

The TL;DR is:

Moss: Existing PRs reviewed, refined and merged (including a PR enabling faster package installation via parallel blitting). The code received various bug fixes and refactors for correctness and maintainability.
Boulder: Similarly, existing PRs reviewed, refined and merged including a few smaller features and packaging macros being added. Since Boulder uses the moss crate, it now builds packages slightly quicker due to faster buildroot creation. The odd bugfix was also made.
User Experience: Improved error reporting features were added to both Moss and Boulder to improve the troubleshooting experience for users and packagers. More to be done on this front.

We will be continuing our os-tools work over the coming months with a specific focus on tidying up the code, improving documentation, and ensuring better error handling and status reporting throughout the codebase. This will come in particularly handy when we do the feature work to make us able to produce JSON output as the final part of the alpha2 os-tools milestone.

Overall, this work will help users when they come across unexpected errors and also be beneficial when onboarding new developers.

The JSON output feature, in contrast, is largely targeted at convenient machine parsing of structured output for automation and integration purposes, which we are banking on will come in handy for future development work currently in the planning stages.

Mid Year Update

Jun 30, 2025 - 11 min read - 2172 words