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Modern Enterprise Linux Desktops with TunaOS

· 3 min read
James Reilly
James Reilly
Maintainer

Enterprise Linux has a problem with the desktop. RHEL, AlmaLinux and CentOS Stream are made for servers. They are strong, they have a long life, and they are stable to the point of tedium. For a fleet of production hosts, this is correct. But it is not correct for the machine that a developer or an administrator uses each day.

Thus most EL sites use Fedora or Ubuntu on the desktop, and something fully different in the datacenter. The result is two package ecosystems and two update rates. It is also two sets of tickets that ask why the same operation is different on the two systems.

TunaOS closes this gap. It gives you true desktop environments as bootc images. They are built directly on the Enterprise Linux base that your servers use now.

The same base, with a true desktop​

Albacore is the primary variant. Its base is AlmaLinux 10, which follows RHEL 10 rebuild for rebuild.

On that base you have a true choice of desktop: GNOME, KDE Plasma, COSMIC or Niri. Each desktop is its own bootc image: ghcr.io/tuna-os/albacore:gnome, :kde, :cosmic and :niri. There are also -hwe and -nvidia images for more recent hardware.

Other variants follow the remainder of the EL family. Yellowfin uses AlmaLinux Kitten 10, the preview of the next major AlmaLinux. Skipjack uses CentOS Stream 10. Redfin uses RHEL 10 itself, and its license lets you build it only locally.

This is not a fork, and it is not a compatibility layer. It is the true AlmaLinux and RHEL package set, with the same lifecycle. A desktop goes on top of it. The pipeline that makes the image is the usual bootc pipeline.

What bootc gives you​

The image is the update. bootc status shows the exact container reference that you booted. bootc upgrade gets the next image, prepares it, and reboots into it. If there is a fault, it returns to the previous deployment.

rpm-ostree on Fedora Silverblue did the same. But here the artifact is an ordinary OCI image. You build it, scan it, and push it with the same registry and the same CI tools as each other product of your team.

For an EL site, this is the important part. Your desktop images can use the same pipeline rules as your server images. Hold a known-good digest for a training laboratory. Push a new tag to send a security fix to all machines. Compare two deployments to see the exact changes.

For none of this do you need a second toolchain. It is the toolchain that you already use in production.

Try it​

Downloads are live at tunaos.org/download, or pull a variant directly:

podman pull ghcr.io/tuna-os/albacore:gnome

The variant table gives the full set of bases, desktops and hardware tags. The bootc usage guide shows the daily bootc commands.

Tell us if something does not operate, or if you have trouble with the download page. Write to us in Discussions. That is what it is for.