It builds, it runs, it WORKS!

I was really surprised with how this OS turned out. After what seemed like a rollercoaster of issues that had me stumped for a while, and countless hours of debugging, I STILL managed to deliver a working product this soon. It relieved me, and I can consider myself both lucky and proud.

After fixing all said issues in the previous devlogs, I present Matcha Linux 2026.06.09 - the initial release.

Matcha Linux was made to combat e-waste, hardware pricing increase and provide a beautiful yet customizable experience to absolutely anyone! By being able to run it on any x86_64 UEFI-compatible piece of hardware, using very few resources, Matcha Linux aims to be the primary choice for people trying to escape bloat.

What was fixed since the last devlog:

• Swap not working due to a service not being run on boot
• Locales not being correctly set up due to a missing installer module

Additional tweaks:

• Reworked the permission system to be more reliable and controllable (when building the live ISO image)
• Implemented a proper post-install reboot mechanism by tweaking installer’s configuration
• Refactored build source files to be more compact, added comments where necessary
• Removed keyboard configuration from the installer due to it not being well integrated with GNOME
• Cleaned up repositories, added better documentation, published first working release files

I consider this experience a lesson not only about Linux, but also the need of doing things sequentally, planning and always going forward, no matter what challenge waits up front.

Do I have something else planned for the future?

YES! But these things may be quite difficult:

• A custom installer module to provide the setup for Distrobox (to run almost any Linux app (by default they won’t run unless installed through APK and are within Alpine Linux repositories. Running layered Debian, Arch or Fedora boxes creates disposable and highly capable environments))
• A custom updater program (probably won’t be integrated this summer)
• Further debugging and engaging with the community

I hope this project inspires many people to build projects and solve problems for the whole world.
Open source, as it should be.