What's coming next in blendOS?

We’re excited to announce a range of exciting new features in the upcoming release of blendOS. We have been working tirelessly to bring these improvements to you. The following major improvements have already been implemented and pushed to our Git repositories. An updated ISO incorporating all of these upgrades will be available within the next 1-2 months.

1. Nearly has been dropped in favor of a new implementation built as part of blend. We now have a state system which under the hood uses overlayfs, so you can install any Arch packages like you would on a regular Arch install and easily rollback to a previous state if something goes wrong (states are created automatically every 6 hours, but you can disable that). You can now install drivers, VPNs and other system utilities without having to disable immutability.

2. Distrobox too has been replaced, in favor of our own implementation using Podman built as part of blend, as it was impossible to implement the following features using distrobox:

• Applications and binaries now automatically appear on the system and there’s now a new priority-based system, where you can rearrange containers in the blendOS Settings UI too. Binaries from other containers can now also be accessed inside another container.

• We have written a new GUI configuration tool, with support for managing overlays and containers (and you can create containers using the UI directly).

All the exciting new features mentioned above have already been pushed to our Git repositories. We are now actively working on adapting the Jade installer from Crystal Linux to reflect these recent upgrades. Additionally, we’re open to incorporating further improvements based on user feedback over the next month, before releasing the next stable ISO in the next 1-2 months.

Our goal at blendOS is to continuously evolve and enhance the user experience through feedback and testing. Your input is crucial to helping us shape the future of blendOS.