Hi everyone,
I've been working on NexOS, a Linux distro aimed at students and makers who want a PC that's ready for electronics and development right after install, instead of spending an afternoon setting everything up.
What ships out of the box (each tested inside the image):
- Arduino Center: 100 curated libraries in 20 categories, with version, license and dependency info. 82 of them compile-verified offline, plus board and serial-port diagnostics
- KiCad 9 (tested ERC/DRC, Gerber export, 3D render)
- TeX Live + TeXmaker, including French and Arabic documents
- Python Center: 8 ready environments (science, AI, vision, electronics, data, code quality…)
- An AI assistant that runs fully offline on the CPU, loaded only when you use it
- One store (Debian packages + Flathub), Btrfs snapshots before/after every update with one-click rollback, ufw firewall on by default
Full disclosure: I built this with heavy help from an AI coding assistant (Claude). It wrote a lot of the build scripts, tests and docs under my direction, and every feature claim above comes from a test that actually ran in the image. The evidence is in the repo.
Honest limits:
- It's a prototype, tested in VMs (QEMU, VirtualBox) but not yet on real hardware
- It's not lighter than Ubuntu: about 1.07 GB RAM at idle in my VM tests. I published the comparison, including where it loses
- No proprietary NVIDIA driver yet; you need to disable Secure Boot to boot the ISO
What would help me most: if you try it in a VM or on a spare PC, tell me your hardware and what worked or broke.
GitHub (ISO in Releases): https://github.com/rayanetaieb/NexOS
Thanks for reading, happy to answer any questions!