Formerly known as Serpent OS, the Ikey Doherty-led Linux distribution project has gone through an extensive rebranding process, where they ditched the serpentine branding for a more elegant AerynOS name that symbolizes the project's Irish roots.
Personally speaking, I really liked the earlier branding, with its minimal blacked-out look, but I understand why they moved away from it. Not everyone is comfortable with a danger noodle. 🐍
To mark this change, the AerynOS developers have introduced the very first release with the updated branding.
🚧
This is an under-development operating system that's not meant for production or general use.
The most obvious change is the new moniker and the purple hue that distinguishes this independent Linux distro from its predecessor. Even though the developers have been busy these past few weeks with the rebranding effort, this hasn't stopped them from working on the distro and the surrounding infrastructure.
With the 2025.03 release, they have introduced os-info which generates system metadata in a structured format (JSON), greatly improving OS identification by including a description of AerynOS, the details of all the technologies involved, and their capabilities.
For you as the end-user, this results in better integration with software that relies on such data. Not to mention, this improves the transparency factor of AerynOS as well.
Similarly, work on revamping lichen-installer has begun, introducing new features like better partitioning support (via disks-rs) and improved error handling. These updates aim to make the installation process for AerynOS smoother and more reliable.
The infrastructure for AerynOS also sees some changes. Now, the old Serpent OS URLs are redirected to the new website, the package repositories have been moved to packages.aerynos.dev for the unstable presync repos and packages.aerynos.com for the user-facing repos, and the documentation is now being hosted over at aerynos.dev.
AerynOS 2025.03 also features updated software and tooling that include:
The project is under heavy development and should not be used on your main system.
The official website hosts the latest AerynOS ISO, where there is only a GNOME Edition download available. Though, when I tried installing this, I also had the option to install COSMIC. I'm fairly certain that more flavors with different desktop environments will be added in the future.
Existing Serpent OS users can migrate to AerynOS by running the following command:
sudo moss sync -u
If you face any issues, then you can ask for help on AerynOS's Matrix space. On the other hand, if you are interested in contributing, then you should visit the GitHub project page.
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Sreenath
