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🏗️ AerynOS: The OS As Infrastructure

Mar 30, 2025 - 11 min read - 2271 words

Taking a break from our usual release-oriented updates, I thought it was high time to dive into what AerynOS actually is and what sets it apart from other distros. Fair warning, this is a meaty, in depth post, and still only scratches the surface. If you’re interested in the future of Linux distributions, read on. It may also help to visit our work-in-progress documentation site for more information.

🧱 The OS As Infrastructure

Firstly, AerynOS isn’t Yet Another Linux Distribution. It’s a platform, a foundation, and a set of tools engineered in accordance with a vision and design that just so happens to produce a Linux distribution. Were we to go back in time and build a design brief for AerynOS, the initial question might be:

What if the operating system itself behaved like modern infrastructure?

AerynOS is the answer to that question. What if, instead of doing things the way they’ve always been done, we started from the ground up and produced a well designed system, rather than the traditional model of in-place mutation internal to a distribution?

🏗️ The AerynOS Foundation

Leveraging years of experience across the industry, including some notable pioneering projects such as Solus, Clear Linux, and others, we set out to build things the hard way, in order to make them easy.. eventually.

🔧 Toolchain

At the very core, is the decision to not be another GNU/Linux distribution. We default to the LLVM toolchain, using libc++ and compiler-rt by default. This isn’t just a case of “we like LLVM”, but rather a strategic decision to leverage the superior diagnostics, and ensure correctness / portability of packages. Whilst in our very early stages a few years ago we did trial musl, we do default to glibc for compatibility reasons and its superior performance characteristics. The performance advantage of glibc over musl is well-documented, particularly for compute-intensive workloads and applications requiring optimal threading performance. We’re here to build a working, usable system, for a multitude of use cases and verticals, and glibc provides the best balance of compatibility and performance.

Note, we do still package gcc and it’s trivial to enforce its use in a package recipe by setting the toolchain field in stone.yaml to gnu.

Lastly, it’s worth noting we build all packages for x86_64-v2 as our minimum baseline, and perform targeted optimisation in our package recipes using the extensive tuning options configurable in boulder.

🚀 Hello AerynOS

Mar 25, 2025 - 6 min read - 1162 words

Ikey

Founder: Retired

Hello from AerynOS! ✨ As you recall from February, we set about rebranding Serpent OS into what you now see, AerynOS. It’s not been without challenges, and where possible we’ve ensured continuity. Additionally we silently dropped a few ISOs, and can now take our first formal steps under our new identity. TLDR: the transition has been entirely fluid and you only need to keep updating, no manual intervention is necessary! 🎉

Progress has been steady but quiet lately, as due to unfortunate circumstances I’ve been working in bursts from my wifes hospital bedside.

💿 But first, an ISO drop!

OK, lets get right to it. We’ve released AerynOS 2025.03, with the following shinies:

🖥️ GNOME 48.0
🐧 Linux 6.13.8
🦊 Firefox 136.0.2
🎮 Mesa 25.0.2
🚀 Vulkan SDK 1.4.309.0
🛠️ LLVM 19.1.7

We’ve also decoupled the internal tooling version from the ISO versions to make them a little bit more.. well.. readable, for humans.

Grab it now from the download page.

Evolve This OS

Feb 14, 2025 - 3 min read - 520 words

Ikey

Founder: Retired

A long overdue, and highly requested update today. We’re finally rebranding the project!

🤔 Why the change?

The “Serpent OS” name was a quickly chosen name that stuck. Unfortunately “serpents” are often associated with negative connotations, and we’ve had a lot of feedback over the years that the name was off-putting. Let’s be completely honest, it’s not the most inviting name for a project. Who wants to trust a serpent? Generally speaking they’re considered dangerous at best.

It’s fair to say we’ve spent a long time in prototype and alpha phases. In order to move forward, our identity needs to be more befitting of the project we’re building. A move into the real world. This isn’t a hobby project, it’s a full blown Linux distribution with serious technical underpinnings, achievements and goals. Getting the tone right from day dot is critical.

Do note, there is no change to the internal core team, so we’re aiming for full continuity and a seamless transition. Had enough of these snakes on this plane? We have too.

✨ What’s the new name?

Hah, it’s not “Evolve OS”, despite the clickbait title. Our new name is… drum roll please…

Hello 2025

Feb 6, 2025 - 15 min read - 2930 words

Ikey

Founder: Retired

TL;DR: Serpent OS is facing funding challenges but development continues. Alpha2 is coming soon with an improved installer. We’re seeking community support through donations and volunteers for key roles. Our technical roadmap includes versioned repositories, immutable OS features, and improved package management workflows.

We had a flurry of activity around the Christmas period, including our first alpha release as well as enabling offline rollbacks early in January. We’re actively working on alpha2, but we also need to talk about the elephant in the room.

🐘 The elephant in the room

Recently I posted a tweet that has been covered by a few news outlets. The long and short is quite simple: distinct lack of funds. A very long story short: a change in my contract led to a loss of income protection, combined with a herniated disc (C6-C7), culminated in having to resign. Naturally I’ve been working exclusively on Serpent OS since then, but I’ve also got to keep the lights on at home.

Broke

This doesn’t mean the project is closing or anything like that, but it does mean that I actively need to keep costs down whilst using daytime hours for financing. This is what’s led to the significant slowdown in the last few weeks, and I’m just trying to be as transparent as possible and manage expectations.

Offline Rollbacks Enabled

Jan 4, 2025 - 4 min read - 675 words

Ikey

Founder: Retired

If a picture tells a thousand words… well then this video .. Yknow what, sod it. Here’s a video of the offline rollback support in action, as tested in a newly installed VM using xfs for the root filesystem. We jokingly refer to this as the “LTT” test due to LinusTechTips’ “interesting encounters” with package management systems in the past.

This has already landed in our volatile repository, so simply sudo moss sync -u and grab the latest updates. Any subsequent transactions will automatically generate the boot entries for you, no intervention required. Or mounting. Or anything. Just update and go. Srsly.

We actually saw this as a golden standard for the feature, as it’s a real-world scenario where you’d want to roll back to a known good state. The video shows the system booting and recovering in multiple ways, from complete system nuke (via glibc) and simpler scenarios like removal of the GNOME desktop environment.

The intent is to ensure a user can quickly revert to the last transaction that worked in the instance an update goes awry, without needing to boot into a rescue environment or live CD.