There is a particular stage in any project where you are not quite building the thing yet, but you are definitely doing things. The pieces are scattered across the table, some of them work, some of them are held together with duct tape and optimism, and you are fairly certain that last commit was a mistake but it is 2 a.m. and you are not undoing it now. That is where AliveOS is at the moment, and honestly, it is a rather good place to be.

Here is what has been happening.

Dory File Manager: Still Getting Sharper

Dory

Dory, the file manager, continues to mature. It was one of the first pieces built specifically for this project, and it remains the one I reach for most often. The core is solid, the companion extensions are filling in nicely, and the occasional bug fix lands when something behaves in a way that is technically correct but practically annoying.

The philosophy behind Dory has not changed: do the file management things well, skip the things nobody actually uses, and do not ship a 400-megabyte dependency tree to open a folder. If it sounds simple, that is because it is. Getting it right, however, is a different conversation entirely.

Valuate: Because Numbers Need a Home Too

Valuate

Meet Valuate — the new calculator app for AliveOS. It started as a “wouldn’t it be nice” and ended up as a “why does this not exist yet.”

Most Linux calculator apps fall into one of two categories: the one that comes with your desktop environment and does barely enough, or the one that tries to be a full-blown computer algebra system and weighs about as much. Valuate sits squarely in the middle: a clean, fast, GTK3-native calculator that does the math you actually need without making you feel like you need a PhD to use it.

It is early days, but it works, and it does not pull in half of GNOME to do it. More on this one soon.

A Custom Cinnamon Session

Cinnamon

The desktop is getting its own session. Not a full fork of Cinnamon — let us not be dramatic — but a custom session that wraps the pieces AliveOS cares about into a coherent, predictable experience.

This means a tailored default configuration, sensible keybindings that do not require a cheat sheet, and a panel layout that stays out of your way while remaining exactly where you expect it. Think of it as Cinnamon with the rough edges sanded off and the bits you never use quietly removed. The kind of desktop that disappears while you work, which is the highest compliment a desktop can receive.

The Website

Developer

You are reading this, so clearly the website works. aliveos.org is live, served over HTTPS, with a landing page that lays out the manifesto and a news section where these updates go. It is built with Jekyll, deployed via GitHub Pages, and costs exactly nothing to run. Which is how a website should be.

The RSS feed is there for the three people who still use RSS feeds (you have excellent taste, by the way). The contact address for sponsorship and business inquiries is in the footer. The whole thing is clean, fast, and does not phone home to seventeen analytics trackers. Because it is a website, not a surveillance apparatus.

Bug Fixes and Testing: The Glamorous Part

Let us be honest about something: most of the work that happens at this stage is not the kind that makes for exciting blog posts. It is the kind where you spend three hours tracking down why a particular font renders strangely on one specific monitor, or why the file picker opens two pixels to the left of where it should, or why a certain package conflicts with another package in a way that only manifests on Tuesdays.

This is the unglamorous grind that separates a distribution that works from a distribution that feels right. AliveOS is firmly in the “feels right” camp, and that means a lot of small, invisible fixes that nobody will ever notice because they will just work. Which is the point.

XConnect: Your Phone, Actually Connected

XConnect

This is the big one. XConnect is AliveOS’s answer to Android desktop connectivity — a full-featured suite that covers almost everything KDE Connect does, but built on XApp/GTK3 to fit naturally into the AliveOS desktop.

What does it do? The usual useful things:

  • Notification syncing — your phone’s notifications, on your desktop, where you can actually read them without picking up the device.
  • File transfer — drag, drop, done. No cloud services, no email yourself the file like it is 2009.
  • Clipboard sharing — copy on the phone, paste on the desktop. Or the other way around. The future is bidirectional.
  • Media control — pause, play, skip from your desktop while your phone streams music. Because reaching for your phone to skip a track is a civilisation-level inconvenience.
  • SMS messaging — read and reply to texts from the desktop. Yes, it still works, and no, it does not require sending your messages through a third-party server.
  • Remote input — use your phone as a touchpad or keyboard. Handy for presentations, couch computing, or when the cat is sitting on your keyboard and you cannot be bothered to move her.

The key difference from KDE Connect is the toolkit dependency. XConnect depends on XApp and GTK3, which means it integrates cleanly with the Cinnamon desktop and the broader XApp ecosystem without dragging in Qt libraries or additional framework dependencies. It is native, it is light, and it belongs here.

This one is still under active development, but it is far enough along to talk about. Expect a dedicated post when the feature set stabilises.

The Custom Repository

Repos

None of this matters if you cannot actually install it. The aliveos-repo custom pacman repository is the plumbing that ties everything together. It compiles and hosts stable builds of AUR and local packages, and it does so automatically — a GitHub Actions pipeline pulls, normalises, compiles, assembles, and deploys on a weekly schedule.

The repository already covers Dory and its extensions, the Cinnamon repackaging, the XLibre display server stack, AliveOS core packages, themes, and a growing collection of utilities. If you are running Arch, you can point pacman at it right now. If you are running AliveOS, it is already there.

Where Things Stand

The pieces are gathering. Some are polished, some are rough, some are still being hammered into shape on a Friday evening with questionable coffee. The target for v0.1 remains Q3 2026, and the path to get there is clearer every week.

The important thing is that every piece here exists for a reason. Not because it was popular, not because someone else shipped it, but because it solves a specific problem in a way that fits the rest of the system. That is what a curated distribution looks like. Not a bigger pile of packages — a coherent one.

More updates as pieces land.

Zero Bloat Policy reminder: every component mentioned above earned its place. Nothing is included because “someone might want it.” It is included because it works, it fits, and it is needed. If that changes, it goes.