The release of AerynOS 2025.08 has been announced, which is the second update since the project's renaming from Serpent OS. The distribution uses its own package manager and an atomic system update model. Development is led by the old team of developers from the Solus distribution, including Ikey Doherty — the creator of Solus, and Joshua Strobl — the key developer of the Budgie desktop environment. A bootable ISO image (2 GB) has been created for the x86_64-v2 architecture and comes with the GNOME desktop.
The distribution uses the moss package manager with its own Stone package format and system state management tools. To save disk space when storing multiple package versions, deduplication is applied based on hard links. Updates are performed in atomic mode, replacing the contents of the /usr partition. In the event of a failure during the update installation, the system rolls back to the previous working state.
Most packages, including the Linux kernel, are compiled using the Clang compiler. With the exception of the kernel and some system components, changes are applied on the fly without the need for rebooting. The project is also developing the Lichen installer, the boulder build system, control panel summit, the blsforme boot manager, and the moss-container system. At this stage of development, the distribution is in alpha status.
Changes in the new build include:
- Updated graphical stack and versions of desktop environments GNOME 48.4, KDE Plasma 6.4.4, Sway 1.11, Cosmic Alpha 7, Mesa 25.2.1.
- Waydroid 1.5.4 is used to run Android applications.
- Updated system components, such as Linux kernel 6.15.11, LLVM/Clang 20.1.8, uutils-coreutils 0.1.0, sudo-rs 0.2.8.
- Protontricks 1.13.0 and winetricks 20250102 are utilized to facilitate the launching of Windows applications and games.
- The concept of package sets is applied for the consolidation of base system packages and desktop environments, grouping related packages or those used for a single purpose into collections. Support is provided for both minimal and full sets.
- Support for installing desktops using package sets has been added to the Lichen installer.
- Work has been completed to adapt AerynOS for use as a host environment and guest system in virtualization systems. For this purpose, the virt-manager package has been added to the repository, and necessary drivers and HyperV support have been included in the kernel.
- The scx-scheds package has been added, setting scx_flash as the default task scheduler. The scx_flash scheduler uses the 'sched_ext' (SCX) mechanism based on eBPF and ensures fair and predictable resource allocation, which, for example, maintains interface responsiveness during resource-intensive tasks such as background package builds.
- The package manager has been updated with the 'moss state diff' and 'moss search-file' commands to evaluate differences between two system states and search for files.
Source: opennet.ru
