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:
“Ikey has not been in contact with the project for six months. In his absence, I have taken up the Project Steward role, including planning and directing the various development workstreams, while @NomadicCore is handling external communications.”
Yes, in open-source circles, Ikey’s pattern of starting projects and then stepping away from them has been a lingering concern ever since his early days as founder and leader of the Solus project. But honestly, it’s hard to believe that history is repeating itself with AerynOS.
I mean, Ikey poured his heart into this project. Back in February, he even rebranded it from Serpent OS to AerynOS and, as its founder, made major contributions to the codebase and the distro itself, shaping it to his own vision. So, when you’ve invested that much time, energy, and passion, you don’t just vanish without a word, without feedback, without closure. It just doesn’t make any sense.
It’s worth noting that back in early February, Ikey shared an unusually candid message saying he was facing serious financial troubles. However, it’s unclear whether that has anything to do with his current absence from the project.
A look at his GitHub profile paints a concerning picture. After an impressive streak of more than 2,400 code contributions for the last year, his activity suddenly stopped around mid-April—matching what the rest of the AerynOS team said about his absence from the project over the past six months.
The statement, particularly the line “Ikey has not been in contact with the project for six months,” suggests that even the AerynOS developers are unsure of what happened. Communication seems to have ended abruptly without explanation. The good news is, there’s no doubt about AerynOS’s future.
In Ikey’s absence, Rune Morling has taken up the role of Project Steward, overseeing planning and coordination across the project’s various development streams, so AerynOS development has not slowed down. The team reports steady progress on key goals, including the successful rollout of Rust-based infrastructure and the addition of KDE Plasma as an alternative desktop environment.
Morling emphasized that new contributors have joined the project in multiple areas, helping sustain and expand development efforts. “We wish Ikey the best,” he noted, “but rest assured, the project is in great shape and consistently hitting on our internal project goals.”
And that’s great news, because AerynOS is shaping up to be something truly special — it brings a fresh, innovative concept to the Linux ecosystem that you don’t see in other distributions.
With its atomic updates, I see it as the perfect middle ground between fully immutable systems and those using traditional package managers — combining the best of both worlds.
Additionally, it’s not just yet another name based on an existing distribution. Instead, AerynOS is being built entirely from scratch, putting it in a small, elite group of genuinely original Linux distros in an otherwise crowded landscape of hundreds of look-alikes.
As for Ikey, we really hope he’s doing okay. It would be wonderful to hear from him directly about what’s been going on. We wish him all the best, and if he’s facing any challenges right now, we hope they pass soon so he can get back to doing what he loves most—contributing to open source.
