What's going to be in it

I'm getting people asking me questions about what's in it. Some people would eat a hot dog not knowing what's in it. There are even people who eat hot dogs knowing what's in it, too.

And what not

The "what's not going to be in it" is probably a better way to answer the big question than answering the "what's in it" question, because it's just the start of the long journey down the content river. The content flow will never stop. There will always be new cool programs coming down the pipe. So let's start with the omissions.

No atomic-update OS (yet)

This is still high on my list. But before I can make such a thing, I need a normal package based OS. Because it logically comes before the atomic update version. As said before, the distro build system is composition agnostic - all compositions should be possible. I can't make a build system that outputs an atomic /usr slice and then transform it into traditional packages. It goes the other way around. So there won't yet be an atomic /usr image and update system. It's planned though.

No unicorns

There's no native Steam build, yet, for one. This requires multilib 32-bit builds, and I'm not committing my time into that just yet. You can use the flatpak/flathub version for the time being. I know that's likely not ideal for several reasons, but this is a time commitment thing, and it's not ready for that yet.

Only x86_64

No time to integrate cross compiler toolchains just yet. The build system will be able to do this, but it's lacking the packages to start driving this. I will pick up Aarch64 as the first non-x86_64 architecture when the time is right for that. For me to be able to test it, someone needs to send me actual usable hardware.

No proprietary or out-of-kernel drivers

This means no ZFS, bcachefs, but also no proprietary NVIDIA drivers. The kernel system used by The Ur Project takes these into account, though, so there will be a way to do this, it just isn't going to be in a repository (yet, or, maybe never, I don't know just yet how we'll handle this - perhaps out-of-tree builder/downloads tooling will take care of this).

Tiptoeing around patents for now

I'm mostly avoiding the whole patents thing a bit. The ffmpeg package has encumbered software codecs disabled, meaning you'll have to use hardware decoders and you might lack encoders. This might change, or not. Relying on hardware for decoding is a positive thing for users, though, we shouldn't fall back on software if possible.

No super stable LTS stuff

Nope. We're rolling release for the time being. Always "latest stable" and never development/experimental. Updates are flowing naturally already and I'm seeing 5-10 automatic package updates come in through the update watcher component. Most of them are automatically applied ones. Occasionally they need some tweak or change. The updates are not what is eating my time right now, and the plan is that it never does.

The kernel sits at 7.2.8. GCC is 16.2.0, glibc is 2.44. LLVM is at 21.1.8 and Rust sits at 1.98.1. The rest similarly sits at latest stable or close to that.

No quirky stuff

There's no COSMIC desktop, I don't know even how to start to package it from just git snapshots. Maybe I'll defer that for a while. No Cinnamon, Budgie, Mate. But there is Xfce4 (+lightdm on xorg) and KDE/Plasma and GNOME (both on wayland). All of them should work out of the box, but my daily driver tests right now are for the time being only focused on GNOME. We will add Plasma testing based on images at some point. All desktop environments can be tested with the image based testing system that is in place, it's just a time investment for later. Anyone who wants to help build out DE packaging later can come and help.

A browser

There's a de-branded firefox, but wait, that's not all. There's more! It also has a bunch of UX fluff disabled, such as all the nonsensical bookmark stuff and UI elements that just take up space. On top of that I've disabled all firefox built in AI elements by default. Is that all? No Mike, there's more. I've also included a few very, very useful extensions and bundled them by default, so you can start browsing safely knowing that uBlock Origin is there for you. Prefer dark mode reader? Also there. And yes, Privacy Badger is there too, if you prefer the lighter touch of it. Surely that's everything, Mike? No, the default search engine also was changed to DuckDuckGo! Enjoy.

There's a mostly complete GNOME circle of apps

The GNOME desktop and KDE desktops are looking pretty okay right now. They're not super complete just yet, but all the basics are there so anyone wanting to give it a quick spin gets most of the basics from GNOME and KDE out of the box.

Plenty of console basics

There's a bunch of sets like +console, +network and more that have all the basics. There's all the basic debugging and tracing tools like strace, trace-cmd, gdb (which can auto-install /debug subpackages!) and things like this (think tcpdump and friends, route/ping tools, htop etc.).

But no emacs (*)

Sorry! I initially spent some time on emacs only to find out the hard way that emacs doesn't build reproducibly. I have tossed it aside and for now it won't be in the build unless that gets fixed, since reproducible builds are a hard gate for acceptance. No reproducible build -> not included.

(*) Editorial update, 2026-10-12: emacs builds reproducibly now, and it is in the repositories. It stayed out until it did.

There's a plan for all the rest

I'm making lists right now for the next wave of new packages. So if there's anything you want to add to the list, hit me up on IRC or discord and let me know what's your fancy. If you're interested in working on adding any packages yourself, that also would be good to know. There will be plenty of packaging and testing work to be done, soon enough.

--sofar (aka Auke)