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Review: AerynOS 2026.01
Quoting: DistroWatch.com: Put the fun back into computing. Use Linux, BSD. —
Whenever I am testing software which is clearly labelled as being in development I try to bear in mind that the operating system will have some issues and limitations. AerynOS is in its alpha development phase and, by definition, we should expect to run into software which is either incomplete or buggy (or both). With AerynOS this is further complicated by the fact the project appears to be aiming for a "modern" approach, meaning some missing functionality may very well be intentional. For instance, I mentioned earlier AerynOS will not boot on Legacy BIOS systems, but I don't think it is meant to, preferring to focus exclusively on UEFI-enabled computers. Likewise, I don't think AerynOS supports running any X11 desktops or window managers, preferring Wayland-only options (COSMIC, Plasma, and GNOME) and this also seems to be an intentional design rather than an oversight.
In other words, when running an unfinished operating system, it can be difficult to decide what is missing or broken by accident (or oversight) and what is not working by intentional design. I'm fairly certain the relatively small number of supported desktops is intentional (to help streamline the project and focus on Wayland) and I think the relatively small collection of traditional packages in the moss repositories is also intentional so that users will run Flatpak bundles instead. On the other hand, I think having manual pages installed without a manual page viewer is probably an oversight and I am fairly certain Discover not "seeing" installed packages until the software centre has been restarted is a bug. In my opinion these are problems which are, for an alpha release, entirely understandable.
There are a few areas where I think the problems or limits are a bit more concerning. Having the installer ask me to create FAT32 partitions while the partitioning tool warns there is no FAT32 support available did not instill confidence in the operating system. This was not a show stopping bug, but definitely something that made me double check my setup before continuing.
Despite the "alpha" label on AerynOS and despite a few rough edges and despite a few limitations, the distribution has made a good deal of progress. A year ago I couldn't get AerynOS to even successfully install and, at this point, the distribution not only runs, but it also performs fairly well as a desktop distribution. It is responsive, it supports multiple desktop environments, it has a decent collection of applications (largely thanks to Flathub). The project is a little heavy, but not all that different from some mainstream distributions such as Fedora or Ubuntu running the same desktop environments. The hardware support delivered and, once we get beyond the text installer, AerynOS provides a slick, attractive user interface that covers basic desktop computing needs.
I wouldn't say yet that I'd recommend AerynOS, but the project is doing some interesting work with the moss package manager which looks like it could pay off, making updates reliable without the extra weight of an advanced filesystem. I think it is worth a look, especially for people interested in exploring outside the usual mainstream projects in the Debian, Fedora, and Arch families.