AerynOS is gradually morphing from an early experimental phase into a flexible Linux distribution focused on scalability, reproducibility, and advanced tooling. It's been a few months since the project shed its skin to evolve into what it is now.
The developers have put out a new update, which introduces several key improvements to equip the system with updated desktops, better virtual machine support, and enhanced package management tools.
AerynOS August 2025 Update
NomadicCore and Ermo from the AerynOS team share that AerynOS is aimed at power users and developers. The lichen installer still requires pre-formatting the disk, creating a temporary barrier for beginners.
Following this approach helps the team avoid getting overwhelmed with support requests, though they plan to streamline this in future releases to make AerynOS more approachable.
As for the changes with AerynOS 2025.08,there's the revised lineup of desktop environments, adding a KDE Plasma 6.4.4 option alongside GNOME 48.4 and COSMIC Alpha 7. There’s also a console-only option for users who want a barebones config and an updated Sway 1.11 installation.
Moving on, this release adds improvements for virtual machine usage. The update supports more host and guest configurations, and the hardware enablement (HWE) work ensures better compatibility for recent devices and virtualization platforms.
Package sets are introduced in this release. They allow users to install predefined groups of packages for minimal, standard, or full setups depending on the chosen desktop environment.
Similarly, the lichen installer has been updated to support the new package sets. It now downloads the latest packages directly from the repository during installation and handles network interruptions better, providing helpful outputs to make troubleshooting easier.
We wrap this up with info on the other notable package updates:
Mesa 25.2.1
Linux 6.15.11
LLVM 20.1.8
FFmpeg 7.1.1
Fastfetch 2.51.1
Uutils-Coreutils 0.1.0
These highlights only scratch the surface of what the AerynOS team has been working on. Check out the update blog linked above for all the details.
Get AerynOS
🚧
This Linux distribution is in the Alpha stage of development. I don't recommend using it on production or general-use machines.
The most up-to-date ISO of AerynOS can be found on the official website. Even though it lists only the GNOME edition, the installer should show additional desktop environment options.
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Sreenath
