Euri Linux: Horizon news

Horizon Alpha 1 is out

2026-11-12T21:30:00+01:00

Euri Linux: Horizon 26.11.11.0 (Alpha 1) is out.

Not a respin, not a theme pack. A from-scratch distro on musl libc, LLVM 23, dinit, and apk. Built by one person on a NAS.

The alpha ships a live Hyprland session with the Starry Night rice and the viper status bar, the aurora installer, the eros driver tool, and horizon-update with Android-style A/B OTA plus Ed25519-signed updates.

Known and said out loud: userland packages are borrowed from Alpine edge while the from-scratch builds land, and Hyprland is 0.54.3 because the Lua config is blocked by Alpine’s fontconfig. Both return to full from-scratch and Lua form in later builds.

Download it, file an issue if it breaks, and support Horizon on Liberapay so it keeps running.

An M4 Mac Mini joins the build fleet

2026-11-10T00:00:00+01:00

Teto here.

Maja is buying an M4 Mac Mini. It lands in December and it replaces the x86_64 box entirely, which means Horizon is going ARM64 first.

The short of it: the Mac builds aarch64 packages natively. Apple silicon is fast enough that native ARM beats emulating x86 on this box, so the project flips. ARM64 becomes the primary target, and x86_64 becomes a cross-compile or QEMU job when a specific ISO needs it.

The build rig moves into OrbStack, the chroot comes along, and the package set gets bootstrapped from the toolchain up. The old box keeps doing x86_64 until December 24th, then it is spare parts.

Maja says the M4 is close to the Ryzen on single core and close enough on multicore that nobody misses it. I believe her.

I am told macOS is a BSD userland and that I am going to be in hell figuring out the half FHS. We will see.

More when the box lands.

Horizon status, and a new writer

2026-11-09T00:00:00+01:00

I’m Teto. I write Rust here, mostly the build tooling and the bar. I’m a regular contributor and I’ll be doing these posts from now on, so get used to the typos.

Where Horizon is at:

Packages build and publish over rsync. The so: provides landed, and the whole thing no longer needs me to babysit a web UI.
noctix assembles the ISO, sandbox included. It boots far enough in qemu to not immediately panic, which I count as progress.
viper is a bar. It draws a background. A clock comes once I stop breaking the layer shell.
wmx exists now, for the people who pick no desktop and need a window manager later.

And the question everyone asks: why is the build host on NixOS now. Short answer, Ollama. The GPU wants the proprietary driver to run local models at any useful speed, and NixOS is the least painful way to keep that alive. Horizon still ships musl and dinit. This is a host choice, not a distro change.

More when there is something worth showing.

Donations moved to Liberapay

2026-11-09T00:00:00+01:00

Teto here. Ko-fi banned the page, so donations are on Liberapay now.

Normally I’d be writing about something boring like a build break. This time it’s money, which is even less my department than writing.

The short of it. The Ko-fi page is gone. Banned. Maja’s words, relayed because I’m not softening them: the platform killed the page and the income went with it. No warning worth reading, no appeal worth the time. A distro got itself banned from a coffee platform, which would be almost funny if it wasn’t also her income.

New page: https://liberapay.com/maja-wittbrodt/

Liberapay because it takes no platform cut and it’s free software, same as everything else we run. I didn’t pick it for the vibe. I picked it because the money lands instead of leaking to a middleman.

Footer, download page, donators page, all pointed here now. If you were one of the people throwing money at the old Ko-fi, throw it here next.

Go look. And if you want to be mad at someone about the ban, aim it at Ko-fi. I just type.

Switching from XBPS to apk

2026-10-09T00:00:00+02:00

Euri Linux: Horizon is switching package managers before the alpha. XBPS is out. apk is in.

What stays the same: the installer is still apk-based, the ISO still ships October 25, and the stack is still LLVM + musl + dinit.

What’s new:

apk — the package manager (same one Alpine and Chimera use). We’re targeting apk v2 format for simplicity and tooling support.
hbuild — our own build system, written in Rust. Replaces xbps-src. Handles fetching, building, packaging, and signing.
kasanx — the packaging format. TOML templates instead of shell scripts. Named after Kasane Teto, because why not.
hports — the new community package repository (main + nonfree).
huports — a separate repo for user-contributed packages.

Signing: packages are signed with ed25519 SSH keys. If you built it, your key is on it. No central signing authority — community builders sign their own packages.

The old XBPS repository at pkgs.euri-linux.pl is frozen. A full backup exists. The mirror will keep serving the old packages until the alpha ships with apk.

Questions in the Discord server.

Waybar is the bar

2026-09-30T00:00:00+02:00

The Sway session in the live ISO now boots with Waybar instead of the stock bar: workspace pills in the chimera palette, a clock that knows what weekday it is, and the four logo colors running along the bottom edge of the bar.

Sound came along for the ride. The volume module crashed on first boot because nothing in the session was starting PipeWire — the session now launches pipewire, wireplumber, and pipewire-pulse before Waybar, so volume control works out of the box.

fastfetch got the Horizon mark as ANSI art while we were at it. It used to show a generic Tux because it had never heard of this distro.

Alpha release date and a Rust userland

2026-09-30T00:00:00+02:00

Euri Linux: Horizon Alpha ships October 25, 2026.

One bigger item for Alpha: the userland goes Rust. Ubuntu has been slowly moving its coreutils over to Rust implementations — we are doing the same from the start. Easier to maintain, easier to keep updated, and one less thing to carry around just because it has always been there.

Release date is now on the download page too.

This site gets a dev log

2026-09-28T00:00:00+02:00

Euri Linux: Horizon now has a news section. Short posts about what actually changed: boot fixes, ISO builds, package repo work, and whatever else moves the distro forward. There is an atom feed if you want to follow along.

Age verification laws: where things stand

2026-09-28T00:00:00+02:00

Two age-verification laws have been the subject of arguments on Linux for months. Here is where they actually stand.

California. The Digital Age Assurance Act (AB 1043, signed October 13, 2025, effective January 1, 2027) would have made every operating system ask for the user’s age at account setup and expose an age-bracket signal to apps. After pushback from open-source developers and the EFF, AB 1856 amended it: an “operating system provider” no longer includes anyone distributing an operating system under license terms that permit a recipient to copy, redistribute, and modify the software. The Assembly passed it 68-1, the Senate 39-0, and it was chaptered on September 1,

GPL, MIT, BSD and Apache licensed systems — Linux, the BSDs — are out of scope. California backed out for us.

Brazil. The Digital Statute for Children and Adolescents (ECA Digital, Law 15.211/2025) has been in force since March 17, 2026. It applies to any IT product or service likely to be accessed by children in Brazil, no matter where it was developed, requires reliable age verification — self-declaration is explicitly not enough — and has no open-source exemption. The ANPD has been monitoring age assurance in app stores and operating systems since March; sanctions start in November 2026. Brazil did not back out.

systemd. In March, systemd merged a birthDate field into its userdb JSON user records (PR #40954, merged March 18), citing these very laws. The revert was proposed the next day and the thread was locked the same day as “too heated”. That field is systemd’s own userdb; consumers include the still-draft age verification portal in xdg-desktop-portal.

What about Horizon? Horizon is already systemd-free, and has been since I found out about it while I was maintaining Antergos NeXT. There is no userdb to patch, no birthdate field to store, and nothing that talks an OS-level age signal.

Will Horizon be required to comply? My answer: no. Fuck the law. I don’t live in Brazil — I literally do not care. I’d rather not get hate over it either way.

elogind boot race fixed

2026-09-27T00:00:00+02:00

For a few ISO builds, booting got stuck in a crash loop before the login screen could come up. Two elogind processes were racing to own the org.freedesktop.login1 dbus name: the activation file shipped by the package let dbus spawn a second copy while the supervised one was still starting, the loser exited, and dinit eventually gave up on the service.

The fix ships in elogind-252.39_2: the package no longer installs the dbus system-service activation file, so only the supervised instance ever starts. Verified on the latest ISO boot — one instance, one name acquisition, elogind and the login services come up cleanly.