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.
Apple Silicon Macs are, by some measures, the most common ARM Linux machines in the world — and until recently they were mostly out of reach for TunaOS. That changes with the work landing in bootc-installer-asahi: a macOS-driven installer path that turns a TunaOS bootc image into a bootable Asahi Linux setup on M1/M2 Macs.
Snapdragon X Elite is the most interesting Windows-on-ARM silicon in years — and a growing number of Linux users are discovering that these laptops make excellent Linux machines. TunaOS ships two images built for the canonical X Elite device, the Lenovo ThinkPad X13s (Qualcomm SC8280XP): one based on Bonito (Fedora Atomic GNOME) and one based on Project Bluefin Dakota.
The "immutable desktop" space is crowded and the terminology is muddy. Fedora Silverblue, Bluefin, Aurora, Vanilla OS, NixOS, openSUSE MicroOS, Endless OS, and a growing list of bootc-based images all claim the same high ground: atomic updates, rollback, and a system that doesn't rot.
So where does TunaOS fit? This post maps the landscape honestly — what each family does well, and the specific gap TunaOS was built to fill.
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.
Users of each image-based distribution ask the same question. How do you install one package? This is my answer. Its name is remora. It adds local layers in the container-native way. It operates in the same manner on each variant that we release, and the base can use dnf, zypper, pacman, apt, emerge, or apk.
sudo remora install htop
That is the full interface.