A couple of days on from our welcome post, and things are moving. Here is a quick look at what has come together since launch and what is currently in flight.

Online and reachable

The project now has a proper home at aliveos.org, served over HTTPS with a valid certificate on a custom domain. The landing page lays out the manifesto and defaults; this news section is where we will publish ongoing progress.

A couple of infrastructure bits worth noting:

  • An RSS feed is available at /feed.xml for anyone who wants updates delivered to their reader.
  • A contact address for sponsorship and business inquiries is now live (you will find it in the footer of every page).

Foundations taking shape

Behind the scenes, the project’s repositories and build infrastructure are coming together. The package repository, the icon theme, the Cinnamon customizations, and the taskbar applet are all under active development. These are the unglamorous pieces that make a distribution feel coherent on first boot, and they are where most of the current effort is going.

Native utilities are progressing in parallel:

  • Dory File Manager — the core and a set of companion integrations are in active development.
  • Respite Media Player — streamlined playback, free of heavy bloat.
  • Custom Cinnamon DE — a refined, responsive desktop workflow.

The aliveos-repo package repository

One piece worth calling out specifically: aliveos-repo, our custom pacman repository. It compiles and hosts stable builds of AUR and local packages for AliveOS, and it does so automatically — a GitHub Actions pipeline runs on a weekly schedule inside a privileged Arch Linux container, pulls packages from the AUR, normalizes them with a small clean_pkgbuild.py helper, compiles them with makepkg, assembles the database with repo-add, and deploys the resulting *.pkg.tar.zst files to a gh-pages branch so they are instantly downloadable.

The repository already covers a fair amount of ground:

  • Dory — the file manager itself, plus a full set of extensions (dory-audio-tab, dory-compare, dory-dropbox, dory-emblems, dory-fileroller, dory-image-converter, dory-media-columns, dory-pastebin, dory-preview, dory-python, dory-repairer, dory-seahorse, dory-share, dory-terminal).
  • cinnamon-no-nemo — Cinnamon repackaged without the Nemo dependency, leaning on Dory for file handling instead.
  • XLibre stack — xlibre-xserver-legacyabi, a drop-in replacement for the X11 display server, alongside patched legacy NVIDIA drivers (nvidia-390xx-utils, nvidia-340xx-utils) tuned for modern kernels and XLibre.
  • AliveOS core — aliveos-assets and aliveos-settings.
  • Themes & utilities — graphite-gtk-theme-git (including the black compact variant), tela-icon-theme, markpad (a lightweight GTK markdown editor/viewer), nerd-dictation (voice typing via Vosk), xdg-desktop-portal-xapp-filepicker, grub-silent-ldfix, and the legacy Clutter stack that backs dory-preview.

If you are running Arch (or an early AliveOS build), you can point pacman at the repository right now by adding this to /etc/pacman.conf:

[aliveos-repo]
SigLevel = Optional TrustAll
Server = https://Twilight0.github.io/aliveos-repo/x86_64

Then sudo pacman -Syu to sync.

What is next

The target for the initial v0.1 release remains Q3 2026. Between now and then, expect sporadic updates here as individual components reach a usable state, the package set stabilizes, and the installer image starts coming together.

Zero Bloat Policy: strictly essential utilities, no office suites, no pre-installed bloatware. Clean by default.

Thanks for following along — the next update will be more concrete as pieces start landing.