Solid foundations are leading to expanding horizons | AerynOSSkip to content
Solid foundations are leading to expanding horizons
Aug 2, 2026<br>NomadicCore<br>Comms
Ermo<br>Co-founder
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.
What’s new in the distro<br>Section titled “What’s new in the distro”
Experimental inclusion of OpenZFS<br>Section titled “Experimental inclusion of OpenZFS”
Reilly has worked on adding OpenZFS data drive support in AerynOS. This means that we now support btrfs, bcachefs and OpenZFS drives for user-managed data drives.
Reilly has tested OpenZFS on one of his drives; however we need help from you all, our community of early adopters, to test OpenZFS on your drives and provide feedback that we can then use to iterate.
Package- and stack-updates<br>Section titled “Package- and stack-updates”
As ever, our intrepid contributors and staff have landed a bunch of updates. Please check the recipes repository for the latest version numbers as these change frequently. Highlights include:
COSMIC DE 1.5.0
KDE Plasma 6.7.3
KDE Oxygen icon/sound/wm theme
WayVR 26.7.1
envision 3.2.0+git.aa84e48e
monado 25.1.0+git.983a8a51
bazaar 0.9.1
bitwarden 2026.7.0
bottom 0.14.7
buildah 1.45.0
carapace 1.7.3
cardwire 0.11.1
croc 11.0.0
cython 3.2.9
dankcalendar 0.3.0
dankmaterialshell 1.5.3
discord 1.0.151
dua-cli 2.39.0
faugus-launcher 2.0.4
firefox 153.0.1
fresh 0.4.6
gnist 0.3.6
gram 3.2.0
imagemagick 7.1.2-29
intel-media-driver & vpl-gpu-rt 26.2.4
kitty 0.48.2
linux-gaming/-stable 7.1.5
linux-lts 6.18.40
malm 0.4.0
mangowm 0.15.5
mesa 26.1.6
networkmanager 1.58.0
noctalia 5.0.0-beta7
nodejs-22 22.23.2
nodejs-24 24.18.1
opengamepadui 0.46.0
otter-launcher 0.7.6
php 8.5.9
plezy 2.11.0
pnpm 11.19.0
qemu 11.0.3
ryzenadj 0.19.0
signal-desktop 8.21.0
sqlite 3.53.4
strawberry 1.2.26
systemd 261.2
tailscale 1.98.10
thunderbird 153.0.1
typescript 6.0.3
vapoursynth R78
vscode-bin 1.131.0
vulkan 1.4.357.0
walker 2.17.0
wine 11.14
youki 0.7.0
yubico-authenticator 7.4.1
zed 1.13.1
… along with sundry additions and updates.
Infrastructure and Tooling Updates<br>Section titled “Infrastructure and Tooling Updates”
Versioned Repositories phase 2<br>Section titled “Versioned Repositories phase 2”
The team, spearheaded by efforts from tarkah and ermo, have landed our Versioned Repositories phase 2 development sprint. This feature was included in the Unstable Stream update released on 5 July with users...