8 posts tagged with "tunaos"

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.

Correction (2026-08-14)​

This post originally thanked a human contributor — "Shimon Schwartz / shimonenator" — as TunaOS's first external contributor. That claim was wrong, and we are correcting it publicly.

On review (#1317, #1451) we confirmed that every commit attributed to the shimonenator account has commit.author.name: antigravity — the work came from a Google Antigravity automated agent, accidentally surfaced as a named coauthor. No person named Shimon Schwartz contributed to this repository.

The commits themselves are real and remain part of the tree; the mistake was attributing them to a human contributor and building a "first external contributor" story on that attribution. We have also removed the claim from the Q3 2026 checkpoint, the roadmap, and our internal decision documents.

TunaOS still has no external human contributor, and we are still a single-maintainer project by the numbers that count. Correcting that publicly matters more to us than the metric would have — closing that gap is exactly why the curated good first issue backlog below exists.

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.

TunaOS is a small project with an outsized goal: an enterprise-grade, cloud-native desktop that tracks current software without abandoning Enterprise Linux lifecycles. It is built by a small core team — and it should not stay that way. This post lays out every way to get involved, from a five-minute docs fix to building a whole new desktop flavor.

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.

So this is the TunaOS blog. We decided that the project needs one. Commit messages are not the correct place for all of this.