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Ikey Doherty Missing from AerynOS for Six Months
Quoting: Ikey Doherty Missing from AerynOS for Six Months —
During my brief exchange yesterday with the AerynOS team about the coverage of their updated 2025.10 ISO release, they mentioned something about the project’s founder, Ikey Doherty, that I wasn’t entirely sure how to take at first — specifically the part that stated, “he stepped back six months ago.”
So, I thought there must’ve been some misunderstanding — that it couldn’t really be what was written. But after a quick search for more details, I came across a message on the project’s GitHub account, posted just a day earlier. In it, Rune Morling (ermo), the co-founder of the AerynOS project, responds to the question, “Where is Ikey?” with the following...
FOSS Force:
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Ikey Doherty's Gone Missing Again - FOSS Force
Ikey Doherty has evidently ghosted yet another project he started. I had hoped that maybe this time he would see it through — or at least let his team know if he had to take a break or something. Instead, it appears that he’s done his usual and just quit answering the metaphorical phone.
This time the news comes from Bobby Borisov at Linuxaic, who indicates that the problem might be money — or a lack of it — which seems to be what’s usually behind Doherty’s disappearances.
Before his latest return to incognito mode, Doherty was the lead developer for AerynOS — originally called Serpent OS — a distro he created in 2020 which has yet to have a stable 1.0 release (it’s currently in alpha). The distro is said to be something of a next-gen improvement on Solus, a popular distribution that Doherty also started and eventually ghosted. While at Solus, he also launched the Gnome-based Budgie desktop environment in 2014.
New release:
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October 2025 project update
We are firmly in the final quarter of 2025 and what a year it’s been so far. In our last blog post at the end of September, we mentioned that we were delaying the release of our next ISO into October to give our Gnome 49 stack (and the wider extensions ecosystem) more time to mature.
Coming into the final week of October, the team made the decision to transition from clang’s libc++ to GNU libstdc++ and work through the associated rebuild requirements across our repository.
We also mentioned in our September blog post that we had reached the point of having stable build infrastructure. However, over the course of October, we had an old problem re-appear, which proved somewhat vexing to solve initially.