It's FOSS

Not Every Open Source OS Needs to Be Based on Linux, and These Six Aren’t

Sourav Rudra — Sat, 17 Oct 2026 18:31:44 +0530

Anyone who wants a break from Linux is usually told to try another distro. That advice, while good, leaves out those who want a break from Linux itself.

Every system listed below is open source and not powered by Linux. Each has an ISO or installer you can boot today, and many of the picks can even run Linux applications.

Think of it as a list of operating systems that are friends with Tux🐧 but not friendly enough to call him inside for a cup of tea.

📋

This list is not ranked. The order moves from the BSDs to the desktop-first systems and ends with the two newest kernels.

1. Vinix

If you own an Apple Silicon MacBook and want a system that is neither macOS nor a Linux distribution, Vinix is aimed at you. Only the original M1 is supported today, and Alexander Medvednikov, the author of V, maintains the project.

The kernel is monolithic and written mostly in V, while part of it is C and assembly. Because memory is managed by hand, no garbage collector can interrupt a system call, and the security model borrows certain concepts from OpenBSD.

On ARM64, it runs Alpine Linux binaries natively, and pkg installs packages from Alpine's aarch64 repositories. ISOs for both x86-64 and ARM64 are available for virtual machine use.

Vinix

⭐

A good pick if you enjoy poking at experimental kernels.

2. Asterina NixOS

Trying Asterinas NixOS means setting up a NixOS system and finding a Rust kernel where Linux should be. Asterinas is that kernel, and because it implements Linux's system call interface, apps for the Linux platform run on it.

The distribution is configured through Nix like regular NixOS, and unsafe Rust is allowed only inside a small framework called OSTD, while the rest of the kernel, along with its drivers, is safe Rust.

x86_64 is the fully supported platform, and ARM64 and RISC-V sit one tier below it. The project says the distro is not ready for production use and aims the installer ISO on GitHub at early adopters and enthusiasts.

Asterina NixOS

⭐

A good pick if you follow the implementation of Rust in operating systems.

3. FreeBSD

Source: Distrowatch

FreeBSD is a complete operating system derived from BSD, the Unix version developed at the University of California, Berkeley. A large community maintains it, and its license lets companies keep their own changes private.

ZFS, jails, and a hypervisor sit at the center of what it offers. OpenZFS is built into the base system, and boot environments let you roll back a bad update by snapshotting the system first.

Its recent release, FreeBSD 15.1, came out earlier this year, and the OS runs on hardware platforms like AMD64, AArch64, Armv7, PowerPC, and RISC-V.

FreeBSD

⭐

A good pick if you run servers, storage, or networking gear.

4. GhostBSD

GhostBSD is FreeBSD with the desktop work already done. The project pairs a FreeBSD base with the MATE desktop and offers a set of applications that make users feel familiar with using it.

The name started as shorthand for GNOME hosted by FreeBSD. MATE, the desktop it ships today, is a continuation of GNOME 2, and the old name still fits.

Updates arrive on a slow-rolling schedule, and the project says it values a stable cycle over chasing the newest software the way some Linux distros do. The current release, 26.1-R15.0p2, came out in April on a FreeBSD 15.0 base.

Also good to know is that Linux binary compatibility comes preconfigured, and an installer built on OpenZFS keeps setup approachable for newcomers.

GhostBSD

⭐

A good pick if you want FreeBSD as an everyday desktop.

5. Haiku

Haiku is an open source operating system inspired by BeOS that is aimed at personal computing. The same team writes the kernel and the desktop applications, with the project crediting that approach for the system's consistent interface.

Under that interface sits a kernel built for responsiveness, a system that is multithreaded throughout, and a BFS file system whose indexed metadata lets Tracker, the file manager, run database-style queries across a drive.

Software installs are handled via packages that mount into the system, and earlier states are kept for rolling back botched updates.

Haiku

⭐

A good pick if you are looking for a uniform desktop experience.

6. ReactOS

ReactOS comes with a warning label attached because the OS is still considered alpha-level software, and the download page promises nothing about stability, the safety of your files, or whether it would work on your hardware.

Behind the warning is a full operating system with a Windows-style desktop that the project says was written from scratch, while most of its user-mode code is based on Wine, the ubiquitous compatibility layer.

By default, it installs only onto a FAT16 or FAT32 partition, and Btrfs support is experimental.

ReactOS

⭐

A good pick if you want to see how far an open source Windows reimplementation can go.

A suggestion

Try these operating systems in a virtual machine before switching. I say that because it’s a good habit to test out such non-standard pieces of kit before committing to them on your hardware.

First see what works for you. Then see if your workflow and usage habits align with what the OS offers. Once you settle on one, keep it updated so you never miss critical patches.

Air-gapped setups are better protected from such risks, of course.

If this helped you, consider supporting It's FOSS

It's FOSS has been helping people use Linux for the past 14 years. Help us stay independent from big tech. Become a Plus member, enjoy ad-free reading and get 5 eBooks.

Plus yearly

Ad-free, FREE ebooks

Join yearly Best value

Plus lifetime

Pay once, Enjoy forever

Go lifetime

Buy us a coffee

Any amount, no commitment

Support on Ko-fi

Skip the AI slop and SEO spam in your Google results

Tell Google you prefer It's FOSS, and it will show our Linux news and tutorials, created by experienced Linux users, more often when you search. It takes just a click.

Set as preferred source 🐧 Play today's Tuxdle — the daily Linux word puzzle →

Get FOSS Weekly in your inbox

A wholesome Linux newsletter with the latest releases, relevant news, tips and tutorials, trivia and memes, quizzes and deals for desktop Linux users. Free, every week.

Valve’s Steam Client for Linux Goes 64-bit in Beta and Moves Into a Container

Sourav Rudra — Fri, 16 Oct 2026 16:51:18 +0530

Valve's October 15 Steam Client Beta changes how the Linux client is built and run. It moves the client to a 64-bit build and runs it inside a Steam Runtime container. Alongside that, a fix for the updater window failing to show up is included, as is the new Achievement Sets feature.

According to Valve, the client has run in an older setup that layers Steam Runtime libraries over the ones on the host system. The runtime documentation adds that this only works while the host is newer than the runtime.

Games on Steam can already run in containers, which give an application its own set of libraries rather than blending them with the host's. The tool behind those containers, pressure-vessel, still takes graphics drivers from the host system.

Valve says running the client in a container should make it behave more consistently across distros. Its games already run on the same technology.

The release notes for the beta client do not name the container, but its runtime release notes tie the 64-bit client to one called steamrt3c. The README describes it as a variant of the sniper runtime made for use inside the Steam client.

The groundwork for this can be traced back to March, when Valve put the container and the early 64-bit client out as the Linux SteamRT3 Beta.

And don't assume that opting for a 64-bit client removes the need for 32-bit libraries.

The requirements for the beta client still call for both 32-bit and 64-bit versions of the required libraries and graphics drivers on x86_64 systems.

They also list 64-bit-only setups as unsupported. The steamrt3c README from earlier notes that its containers ship i386 libraries for compatibility with older software.

Test it now

I switched to the beta on Ubuntu 26.04 LTS, and it only took me four steps. If Steam is not already on your system, you need to get the official DEB package for the client and install it.

Next, follow these steps. 👇

Open Steam, click Steam at the top left, and choose Settings.
Go into the Interface tab and find Client Beta Participation.
Open the dropdown and select Steam Beta Update.
Click Restart Now when Steam asks you to restart.

That is all it takes, and Steam is now on the beta channel. Valve welcomes bug reports from testers, so if you run into an issue, use the "Report a bug" button in the Interface page.

Suggested Read 📖: Epic Games is looking to entice Linux gamers with its anti-cheat move.

Enjoyed this update? Support independent Linux news coverage

It's FOSS has been helping people use Linux for the past 14 years. Help us stay independent from big tech. Become a Plus member, enjoy ad-free reading and get 5 eBooks.

Plus yearly

Ad-free, FREE ebooks

Join yearly Best value

Plus lifetime

Pay once, Enjoy forever

Go lifetime

Buy us a coffee

Any amount, no commitment

Support on Ko-fi

Skip the AI slop and SEO spam in your Google results

Tell Google you prefer It's FOSS, and it will show our Linux news and tutorials, created by experienced Linux users, more often when you search. It takes just a click.

Set as preferred source 🐧 Play today's Tuxdle — the daily Linux word puzzle →

Get FOSS Weekly in your inbox

A wholesome Linux newsletter with the latest releases, relevant news, tips and tutorials, trivia and memes, quizzes and deals for desktop Linux users. Free, every week.

Ubuntu 26.10 Has Come Out as a Rust-Packed Interim Release

Sourav Rudra — Thu, 15 Oct 2026 20:04:37 +0530

The title says that because, until now, the core utilities in Ubuntu were not fully Rust. cp, mv, and⁣ rm had stayed on the GNU versions over compatibility issues. They have since moved to the Rust-based uutils implementation, taking the distro even further in its oxidation process.

Ubuntu 26.10, codenamed "Stonking Stingray", is an interim release, which means it brings newer software than the earlier LTS while only getting nine months of support, ending in July 2027.

Although our features roundup covered a lot of ground, there were some changes that it missed. 😅

⭐ Ubuntu 26.10: What's New?

Well, we start with the kernel powering this interim release, Linux 7.3, which offers support for recent Snapdragon X2 Elite laptops along with several older Snapdragon X Elite and X Plus machines from Lenovo, HP, and Acer.

Gamers will be glad to know that the first chunk of Valve engineer Natalie Vock’s VRAM overcommit work has also landed in this kernel. Games on graphics cards with too little video memory should run better, as some of the data can now be offloaded to regular system RAM.

You already know that this Linux release is shaping up to be one of the most performance-focused releases in years.

Ubuntu is also moving to the NVIDIA 615 driver series, which replaces 595 and 610 and ships open kernel modules only, supporting Turing and newer GPUs.

The rustification we talked about earlier also extends to OpenPGP, where Sequoia PGP, a Rust-based implementation built by former GnuPG developers, has landed in the main archive. Its sq and sqv tools now sit alongside GnuPG's gpg and gpgv.

For the desktop environment, Ubuntu 26.10 has GNOME 51, with its range of upgrades such as a fingerprint manager in the Users panel, DNS search domains in the Network settings, and a count badge in Files when you drag multiple items.

There's also the Ubuntu Tiling Assistant that shows a Windows-11-like interface for the built-in snappable window layouts.

If you were hoping for a redesigned installer and first-boot onboarding flow, those are planned to come for the next long-term support release, Ubuntu 28.04 LTS.

🛠️ Other Changes & Improvements

These are some of the other notable changes in this release:

OpenSSL 4 brings Encrypted Client Hello (ECH) and better QUIC support.
TPM-backed full-disk encryption now works without a hardware root of trust if a PIN or passphrase is set.
The RISC-V platform gets official RVA23 support for the SpacemiT K3 boards and SiFive's BigSky platform.
Twelve new wallpapers that were picked across the Mascot, Photography, and Digital/Abstract categories.
The toolchain upgrades consist of GCC 15.2.0, LLVM 22.1.8, Python 3.14.7, Rust 1.97.1, Go 1.27, and OpenJDK 25.0.4.

📥 Download Ubuntu 26.10

ISOs for this interim release are available for AMD64, ARM64, RISC-V, and others from the official website; go for the "Desktop" ISOs if you are a regular user. Specific flavors like Server, Netboot, and WSL can be fetched from the releases portal.

Ubuntu 26.10

Enjoyed this update? Support independent Linux news coverage

It's FOSS has been helping people use Linux for the past 14 years. Help us stay independent from big tech. Become a Plus member, enjoy ad-free reading and get 5 eBooks.

Plus yearly

Ad-free, FREE ebooks

Join yearly Best value

Plus lifetime

Pay once, Enjoy forever

Go lifetime

Buy us a coffee

Any amount, no commitment

Support on Ko-fi

Skip the AI slop and SEO spam in your Google results

Tell Google you prefer It's FOSS, and it will show our Linux news and tutorials, created by experienced Linux users, more often when you search. It takes just a click.

Set as preferred source 🐧 Play today's Tuxdle — the daily Linux word puzzle →

Get FOSS Weekly in your inbox

A wholesome Linux newsletter with the latest releases, relevant news, tips and tutorials, trivia and memes, quizzes and deals for desktop Linux users. Free, every week.

Big Tech Funded a €115 Billion Warning Against Europe’s Digital Independence

Sourav Rudra — Thu, 15 Oct 2026 20:02:16 +0530

The European Commission's proposed Cloud and AI Development Act, or CADA, looks to lay out four tiers of requirements for cloud services where public bodies would pick a tier for each service they buy, based on the risk involved.

The upper tiers demand tighter control over who owns a provider and who controls its software. ECIPE, a Brussels-based think tank, put a 10-year cost estimate on those rules via a research report this week.

It argues the Commission's impact assessment misses an important part of the costs, mainly one-off software rewriting.

CCIA, or the Computer & Communications Industry Association, funded the study. The association is a tech trade group with members like Amazon, Google, Intel, Cloudflare, Apple, and Meta.

Three scenarios, one estimate

ECIPE modeled three scenarios for the period between 2027 and 2036. The narrow one comes to €35.6 billion, the middle one to €115 billion, and the broad one to €233 billion.

Though none of them are being presented as a forecast. The difference is how many workloads end up in the two strictest tiers and how far the rules reach into private companies.

The middle case puts 20% of affected workloads in those tiers, and it also applies the rules to a quarter of cloud use in essential private sectors like energy and banking.

About €33.3 billion lands on public budgets. That works out to roughly €159 for each person part of the working-age workforce.

Around €80 billion, which is about 70% of the total, would fall on private companies. That only happens if the Commission uses Article 31 of the CADA to extend the rules to them.

Where the Money Goes and Who Feels It

About 69% of the total is paid for moving to new providers and rewriting software. Higher ongoing cloud prices account for roughly 30%. Postponed digital projects make up the last 2%.

This shows that moving is not a simple fork it and forget it job. There are plenty of cases out there where an app built around one provider's services may need parts of it rebuilt for another.

The EU average in the middle case is about €548 over 10 years for each person in the workforce. Germany sits at €396. Luxembourg is highest at €1,711, though its workforce count excludes cross-border commuters.

Since Germany, France, Spain, and Italy already apply national cloud rules to some government bodies, they face a lower blow to their costs in the study's model.

Smaller countries that have little homegrown supply at the strictest tiers may end up buying from bigger EU markets at higher prices. ECIPE cautions against reading the gaps as proof of any one cause.

What the study leaves out

The paper calls itself independent and says the views are the author's own. It puts no value on security or resilience benefits and says this is not a full cost-benefit analysis.

The Commission calls over-reliance on non-EU cloud providers a significant risk to Europe’s digital autonomy and resilience.

CCIA wants narrower rules. Its release asks for the sovereignty requirements to be kept for sensitive workloads and for technical safeguards to replace rules based on where a company comes from.

Enjoyed this update? Support independent Linux news coverage

It's FOSS has been helping people use Linux for the past 14 years. Help us stay independent from big tech. Become a Plus member, enjoy ad-free reading and get 5 eBooks.

Plus yearly

Ad-free, FREE ebooks

Join yearly Best value

Plus lifetime

Pay once, Enjoy forever

Go lifetime

Buy us a coffee

Any amount, no commitment

Support on Ko-fi

Skip the AI slop and SEO spam in your Google results

Tell Google you prefer It's FOSS, and it will show our Linux news and tutorials, created by experienced Linux users, more often when you search. It takes just a click.

Set as preferred source 🐧 Play today's Tuxdle — the daily Linux word puzzle →

Get FOSS Weekly in your inbox

A wholesome Linux newsletter with the latest releases, relevant news, tips and tutorials, trivia and memes, quizzes and deals for desktop Linux users. Free, every week.

FOSS Weekly #26.42: AI in Kernel, Ubuntu 26.10 Firefox Business, Mint Release Changes and More Linux Stuff

Abhishek Prakash — Thu, 15 Oct 2026 18:28:00 +0530

AI's role in kernel work is looking more apparent now. Linus Torvalds' use of Claude Code has tripled read speeds for concurrent file access, while Sasha Levin proposed an agents directory to house AI skills for kernel work.

And that's just the way AI is progressing, for good or bad. Last week's most popular news was an open source project that used AI to reverse engineer Adobe's Photoshop and other tools. Now the same project has used AI to 'clone' Microsoft Office.

These days, 9 out of 10 new open source software I come across is created with AI assistance. My inbox is flodded with new software review requests. One glance and I can 'feel' that both software and the coverage request email used AI.

So, like Linus Torvalds, I have made my peace with it. Until now, I was trying not to recommend open source tools that were openly developed with help of Claude or other AI tools. I don't see the point of it anymore now. If an open source software is good and I feel that readers would find it useful, I will feature it regardless. You can then decide on your own if you want to use it or not.

And this is also the time to get moving towards local AI. Where AI and models live in your system locally instead of a cloud. Sure, it won't match the performance of Claude and other frontier models, but some smaller tasks can still be achieved with local AI. Ubuntu's AI-based voice input tool Myna is a proof of that.

Do subscribe to the Local AI Weekly newsletter if you want to stay updated and use the AI on your system in true open source spirit.

This edition of FOSS Weekly is supported by PrivacyNotes, an open source, zero knowledge note management app.

Your notes, tasks, password, secrets. Keep them organized with open source tool, PrivacyNotes. Store them locally or encrypt them to a Swiss cloud. Start free, import the notes you already have, and see if it fits. If you want more storage with Pro later, it’s a one-time payment, not a subscription.

Try PrivacyNotes

📰 Linux news that matters

Ubuntu 26.10 is going to be released today. While we wait for Ubuntu 26.10 ISOs to appear, the next interim release already has a codename, "Tenacious T-Rex," marking the first time Ubuntu has ever used a dinosaur-themed mascot.

ONLYOFFICE Docs 10.0 brings AI assistance to every editor for text summarization and formula drafting, while adding collaboration features, spreadsheet speed improvements, and modular apps for forms and file management.

Strata is a new keyboard-first file manager for Omarchy and Arch that just hit 1.0, offering column view browsing, vi-key navigation, and a clever feature that remembers each folder’s sort order and icon size.

LibreOffice has come to the rescue after Microsoft's discontinuation of Publisher for 365 users. Using the Document Liberation Project’s reverse-engineered library, users can now open PUB files and migrate them to open standard formats.

Mozilla is targeting the commercial market with Firefox Enterprise, a product that would let organizations manage Firefox installations across employee devices through a self-hosted console.

Linux Mint has moved to an annual release cycle, with the next one, Linux Mint 27 "Adrien" arriving on Christmas. There won't be a Mint 23.x

The CachyOS team recently announced that Framework is increasing its support for the project, going from $250 per month to $850, taking the total figure up to $10,200 a year.

Open source boot firmware LibreBoot has a new release supporting more hardware now.

🧠 What We’re Thinking About

Six open source vendors have launched Open Productivity Software to expand openDesk from government use into the enterprise market.

🧮 Linux Tips, Tutorials, and Learnings

My Computer is a Shell extension that restores the unified "Computer" view that GNOME dropped from Files (Nautilus) in the GNOME 47 release. It displays drives, network locations, and removable media in one place rather than them being scattered across the sidebar.

Arch users run pacman -Syu for updates because it prevents dependency mismatches when the local package database is stale. Running just -S on an outdated system can leave you with incompatible package versions.

👷 Homelab and Hardware Corner

Pebble completed the full open source release of software, hardware schematics, and mobile apps in 2025, paving the way for its resurrection. Now the Pebble Round 2 smartwatch has entered production and begun shipping to preorders.

Zima, brand behind ZimaOS, ZimaBoard, and ZimaCube, is organizing a self-hosting event on Reddit where you can win homelab gadgets and AdGuard and PhotoPrism licenses just by sharing your self-hosting story. If you already self-host, why not try your luck? Or, at least explore how other people are self-hosting.

Self-hosting Day Event by Zima

✨ Apps and Projects Highlights

BentoPDF is a privacy-first, open source PDF toolkit that processes files locally in your browser instead of uploading to servers.

A new open source GIS tool is here; it lets you chat with an AI Assistant about map data and geographic workflows.

If you like what we do and would love to support our work, please become It's FOSS Plus member. It costs $49 a year (less than the cost of a McDonald's burger a month), and you get free ebooks, an ad-free reading experience with the satisfaction of helping the desktop Linux community.

Join It's FOSS Plus

📽️ Videos for You

For people who are working extensively with git, this terminal-based git client is worth a try.

Subscribe to It's FOSS YouTube Channel

💡 Quick Handy Tip

0:00

/0:15

In the Nautilus file manager, you can carry out a search in the current folder using Ctrl+F or search everywhere using Shift+Ctrl+F. When you find the item you were looking for, you can use the shortcut Ctrl+Alt+O to open its location.

Going further, you can also use the shortcut Ctrl+. to open a terminal at that location.

🎋 Fun in the FOSSverse

Call yourself a true Arch Linux fan? Are you bold enough to prove it?

A reality check for big names like Adobe. 🤭

🗓️ Tech Trivia: Long before IT became the industry we know today, British computing professionals were organizing themselves. On October 14, 1957, the British Computer Society was formally incorporated following a merger of two computing groups.

🧑‍🤝‍🧑 From the Community: A very interesting thread surrounding NixOS and Nix has popped up, featuring replies from supporters and skeptics.

If this helped you, consider supporting It's FOSS

It's FOSS has been helping people use Linux for the past 14 years. Help us stay independent from big tech. Become a Plus member, enjoy ad-free reading and get 5 eBooks.

Plus yearly

Ad-free, FREE ebooks

Join yearly Best value

Plus lifetime

Pay once, Enjoy forever

Go lifetime

Buy us a coffee

Any amount, no commitment

Support on Ko-fi

Skip the AI slop and SEO spam in your Google results

Tell Google you prefer It's FOSS, and it will show our Linux news and tutorials, created by experienced Linux users, more often when you search. It takes just a click.

Set as preferred source 🐧 Play today's Tuxdle — the daily Linux word puzzle →

Get FOSS Weekly in your inbox

A wholesome Linux newsletter with the latest releases, relevant news, tips and tutorials, trivia and memes, quizzes and deals for desktop Linux users. Free, every week.