FAQ

Because rewriting the kernel buys no differentiation. Android and ChromeOS use the Linux kernel; their product difference is entirely in userspace. A hobby kernel that cannot run real software only earns the sentence “the kernel is mine” — the effort here went above the kernel, which is why the result installs and runs real software with a complete desktop.

Nothing above the kernel is off-the-shelf: PID 1, window compositor, terminal (own PTY + VT parser), Chinese IME, AI hub and the IPC protocol.

The Linux kernel and Buildroot's toolchain/rootfs infrastructure are not. Everything else is, across 7 Rust crates and 23,694 lines of code (43 source files): aether-init (PID 1), aether-compositor, aether-shell, aetherd + aether-ipc, aether-install, aether-ops, plus the terminal, IME, trash and package format.

It is an early v0.1.0 release: good for experimenting, development and tinkering — not recommended for important data or as your only machine yet.

wget -O- <package-url> | sh

Static binaries and common dynamic dependencies work; the image ships ncurses + terminfo, zlib, openssl, libffi and expat. Verified with htop 3.3.0 from the official Ubuntu 24.04 archive.

The architecture is client → your own gateway → model providers. No upstream API keys are stored on the system, and every tool call passes a permission gate: L2+ actions raise a confirmation dialog and are written to an audit log.

A distribution assembles existing components — existing init, existing desktop, existing terminal. This project writes them from PID 1 upward while keeping the “installs real software” property. Few projects do both.

Because there is no giant desktop environment inside: the compositor, terminal and IME are written here and their size is under our control. Fonts are subset at build time (GB2312 + Latin, ~5.7 MB).

Open an issue. For reproducible bugs include the hypervisor and version, the AetherOS version, and the serial log (see the download page). Pull requests are welcome.