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Announcing Gurnard — Ubuntu 24.04 LTS with the Pantheon desktop

· 2 min read
James Reilly
James Reilly
Maintainer

The TunaOS variant catalog keeps growing — and this time it pairs the most familiar LTS base in Linux with one of its most elegant desktops. Meet Gurnard (🐟): Ubuntu 24.04 LTS (Noble Numbat) with the Pantheon desktop, rebuilt as an atomic bootc image.

Why Gurnard exists​

Until now, if you wanted the Pantheon desktop — the calm, minimal environment from elementary OS — you mostly had to run elementary OS itself. Gurnard is the first widely-buildable way to get that desktop with a standard Ubuntu 24.04 LTS base underneath, wrapped in a container-native, immutable core.

The result is a familiar Ubuntu with an atomic heart:

  • Ubuntu 24.04 LTS base — the LTS with the longest support runway in the catalog, on both x86_64 and arm64
  • Pantheon desktop — elementary's elegant, minimal desktop, pre-configured out of the box
  • bootc core — atomic updates and rollback, the same container-native foundation as the rest of the TunaOS line
  • Flathub and Homebrew pre-enabled — apps and tools ready to install the moment you boot

Gurnard currently ships as Experimental (ghcr.io/tuna-os/gurnard:base and ghcr.io/tuna-os/gurnard:pantheon) — the right time to try it is now, before the surface settles, because Pantheon on a non-elementary base is a new packaging surface and we want your bug reports while they're cheap to fix.

How to try it​

# Pull and run with a container runtime, or boot directly via bootc
bootc container copy ghcr.io/tuna-os/gurnard:pantheon

Or browse the Gurnard variant page for install instructions and image tags.

Part of a growing line​

Gurnard joins the catalog alongside Hummingbird (🐦, Fedora Hummingbird rebased with the CKI ARK kernel and hardened for secure boot) — both new variants in the last week, and both reminders that TunaOS is not one desktop's project. Every major base and desktop pairing we can ship atomically, we will.

Questions, feedback, or a first contribution? We're on Matrix and issues are open in github.com/tuna-os/tunaOS — good-first-issue labels are coming to the backlog soon.