The aerynOS team shared its August 2026 development update, with the main highlight being the new TUI-based version of Lichen, the installer used by aerynOS.
The rewrite progressed considerably over the past month and now includes installation and summary screens, networking, user account configuration, storage and filesystem selection, and the plumbing needed to complete an installation from start to finish.
Among the notable additions is support for installing aerynOS with Btrfs as the root filesystem. The installer is also gaining automatic disk formatting and system-model-driven installations, along with a more polished terminal interface.
For now, the new Lichen remains development software. The current aerynOS ISO and its existing installer are still the officially supported installation method. The rewritten version is planned for inclusion in a future ISO once testing is complete.
Another major undertaking in August was a complete rebuild of the distro’s package repository. More than 1,700 recipes were rebuilt, each potentially generating one or more packages. According to devs, the rebuild also served as a large-scale stress test of the packaging infrastructure, which handled the workload successfully.
As usual for a rolling-release distro, the software stack has also moved forward considerably. August’s package updates include KDE Plasma 6.7.4, KDE Frameworks 6.29, KDE Gear 26.08, COSMIC Desktop 1.7, GCC 16.2, glibc 2.43, Mesa 26.2.1, Qt 6.11.2, Rust 1.98, QEMU 11.1.1, Wine 11.16, and ZFS 2.4.4.
On the kernel side, aerynOS currently provides Linux 7.1.12 as its stable kernel, Linux 6.18.47 LTS, and Linux 7.2.1 for its gaming-focused kernel package. Firefox 154 and Thunderbird 154 are also among the recent application updates.
Apart from that, development continues on moss, the distro’s custom package manager. A new filesystem-tree abstraction has been introduced along with reflink support for filesystems that provide it.
Since XFS, the project’s recommended root filesystem, supports reflinks, moss can use them to create deduplicated copies while preserving independent ownership and permissions.
Additionally, the moss command-line interface is being reorganized, and its search functionality simplified to provide a more coherent way to find packages, providers, and files.
At the same time, aerynOS’s boulder package build tool received performance improvements. It can now produce multiple packages concurrently when a recipe generates several outputs, making better use of modern multi-core processors.
Finally, users may notice a subtle branding change. The project is transitioning its name from “AerynOS” to “aerynOS.” The lowercase spelling has already been adopted in many of the most visible areas, including the website, while repositories are gradually being updated for consistency.
The existing triquetra logo will remain, but its colors, typography, and kerning are being refined, with accessibility considerations such as different forms of color blindness also being taken into account.
More details about the August development work are available in the project’s official announcement.
