Evaluating TunaOS in a VM

The lowest-friction way to try TunaOS is a virtual machine. Nothing touches your existing disk, you can snapshot before every experiment, and undoing the whole thing is deleting one file.

This guide takes about 15–20 minutes end to end, most of it waiting on the ISO download.

Why a VM first

TunaOS is a bootc system: the OS ships as a container image and updates are atomic. That makes it easier to try than a traditional distro, but installing to real hardware still means repartitioning a disk. A VM avoids that entirely:

• No repartitioning. The virtual disk is a file in your home directory.
• Snapshots. Take one after first boot, then experiment with layering, updates and rollback knowing you can return to a known-good state in seconds.
• Parallel evaluation. Run Albacore and Bonito side by side and compare.
• Disposable. Deleting the VM removes every trace.

If you decide to install on real hardware afterwards, see Installation.

1. Pick and download an ISO

TunaOS publishes GNOME and GNOME-HWE ISOs every two weeks to download.tunaos.org:

Variant	GNOME	GNOME (HWE)
Albacore (AlmaLinux 10)	albacore-gnome-latest.iso	albacore-gnome-hwe-latest.iso
Yellowfin (AlmaLinux Kitten 10)	yellowfin-gnome-latest.iso	yellowfin-gnome-hwe-latest.iso

If you are unsure which variant to evaluate, start with Albacore — see Choosing Your TunaOS Variant.

Pick the plain GNOME image for a VM. HWE exists for newer physical hardware; inside a hypervisor the virtual devices are the same either way, so it buys you nothing here.

Other flavors (KDE, COSMIC, Niri, XFCE, NVIDIA) ship as container images rather than ISOs. To evaluate one of those in a VM, install a published ISO first and then rebase to the flavor you want with bootc switch — see bootc usage.

2. VM specifications

From System Requirements:

	Memory	Disk
Minimum	4 GB	25 GB
Recommended	8 GB	50 GB

Two things worth setting above the minimum:

• Disk. A base installation is ~15–20 GB and roughly 25–30 GB once you add applications, so a 25 GB disk is genuinely minimal. Use 50 GB if you can — qcow2 images are sparse, so an unused 50 GB disk does not occupy 50 GB on your host.
• CPU. Give it 2+ cores. The installer and the first bootc upgrade are both noticeably faster.

Enable EFI/UEFI firmware. TunaOS images are built for UEFI boot; a VM left on the legacy BIOS default will not boot the installer.

3. QEMU/KVM with virt-manager

virt-manager is the graphical route and the one to use if you have not done this before.

1. Install it. On a Fedora-family host:

   sudo dnf install virt-manager

   On a Debian-family host:

   sudo apt install virt-manager

2. Launch Virtual Machine Manager and choose File → New Virtual Machine.

3. Select Local install media (ISO image or CDROM) and point it at the ISO you downloaded.

4. Set memory and CPUs (8192 MB, 2 cores).

5. Set the disk size (50 GB).

6. On the final screen, tick Customize configuration before install, then in Overview set Firmware to UEFI. Apply, then Begin Installation.

4. QEMU from the command line

If you would rather not install virt-manager, qemu-system-x86_64 is enough.

Create the disk once:

qemu-img create -f qcow2 tunaos.qcow2 50G

Boot the installer:

qemu-system-x86_64 \
  -enable-kvm \
  -m 8192 \
  -smp 2 \
  -bios /usr/share/OVMF/OVMF_CODE.fd \
  -drive file=tunaos.qcow2,format=qcow2,if=virtio \
  -cdrom albacore-gnome-latest.iso \
  -boot d \
  -device virtio-vga-gl -display gtk,gl=on \
  -netdev user,id=net0 -device virtio-net-pci,netdev=net0

Notes on the flags that matter:

• -enable-kvm is what makes this usable rather than glacial. It needs /dev/kvm; add yourself to the kvm group if you get a permissions error.
• -bios points at OVMF, the UEFI firmware. The path differs by host distro — /usr/share/OVMF/OVMF_CODE.fd on Debian/Ubuntu, /usr/share/edk2/ovmf/OVMF_CODE.fd on Fedora. Install the ovmf (or edk2-ovmf) package if the file is missing.
• virtio for disk and network is markedly faster than the emulated defaults.
• -device virtio-vga-gl -display gtk,gl=on gives accelerated graphics, which a GNOME desktop appreciates. Drop both if your host lacks the support.

After the install finishes, drop -cdrom and -boot d to boot from the disk.

5. First boot

Run through the installer, reboot, and complete GNOME's initial setup.

Once you are at a desktop, take a snapshot before doing anything else — this is the state you will want to come back to:

# virt-manager: Manage snapshots → +
# CLI, with the VM shut down:
qemu-img snapshot -c clean-install tunaos.qcow2

Then confirm the system is what you expect:

bootc status

That prints the container image the system is booted from, which is the thing that makes this a bootc system rather than a package-managed one.

6. What to try next

With a snapshot in hand, the interesting parts are cheap to explore:

• Layer a package and reboot into it.
• Update with bootc upgrade, then roll back with bootc rollback and watch the previous image come back intact.
• Rebase to a different desktop flavor, or a different variant entirely, with bootc switch.

All three are covered in bootc usage.

If TunaOS suits you, Installation covers real hardware, and System Requirements has the full compatibility detail.

Other hypervisors

VMware, VirtualBox and Parallels are all supported — see System Requirements. The specifications above apply to any of them; the one setting to check in each is that the VM is set to UEFI rather than legacy BIOS firmware.