Jester Linux public beta

We’ve been building a Linux distribution for a while now and we’ve reached the point where we want other people to try it. As this is the first post on this blog, let’s introduce Jester Linux before getting into the release itself.

What is Jester Linux?

Jester Linux is a desktop operating system built on Linux. It’s free and open-source. The rough goal is for it to be something you can hand to someone who has never used Linux before and have them be fine - your parents, a colleague who keeps getting viruses, whoever. It provides them with all the good parts of Linux without requiring them to figure it all out first.

Linux has been technically excellent for a long time. Fast, flexible, secure, runs on just about anything, costs nothing. Most people still haven’t used it, because getting started has historically required some investment from the user - reading documentation, configuring things, occasionally spending an afternoon chasing a problem you didn’t expect. Jester Linux is designed to avoid all that work which has made Linux difficult to adopt until now.

Install it, log in, and it works. Clean GNOME desktop, the apps you’d expect, and updates that happen in the background. No terminal required for normal use.

What makes it different from other distributions?

Under the hood, Jester uses a fully declarative configuration system. Every installed package, every service, and every system setting is described in a single config file. The whole operating system is reproducible from that file on any machine.

For everyday use, the practical consequences are:

Updates are atomic. An update either fully applies or it doesn’t. There’s no half-finished state to clean up after.

Rollbacks are always available. If an update ever causes a problem, you select the previous working version from the boot menu and carry on. No recovery USB, no reinstall.

The system maintains itself. Background updates are on by default. You don’t have to think about them.

Jester Linux can easily be configured using profiles. These are pre-configured stacks for purposes such as gaming (featuring Steam, Proton, and performance tuning), software development, home servers, and office work. Selecting a profile is optional, users can also use the base system as a starting point for their configuration.

What’s in this build?

This is a working build but we do not guarentee its stability fully yet. It ships with:

A fully themed GNOME desktop with Jester’s own branding, fonts, and wallpaper
The Calamares graphical installer - step-by-step, no terminal required
Automatic background updates out of the box
Boot-time rollbacks to easily resolve issues if anything goes wrong
Optional profiles for gaming, development, and office work

Jester Linux also runs fully from the live USB, this allows you to test it before installing it, which is a reasonable way to check hardware compatibility before committing.

Why a beta and not a release?

The foundations are solid, but some issues might remain. We need Jester Linux to be tested by a wider variety of users on a wider variety of hardware to see how it holds up before we’re ready to call this a stable release. It’s particularly difficult to ascertain hardware compatibility in-house.

This first public build isn’t a release candidate. It might have rough edges. While we’re not aware of issues causing data loss, keep backups of your important files just in case.

How to try it

Grab the ISO file from the Install page, flash it to a USB drive, and boot it. You can run it live without installing it.

If something breaks, open an issue on Codeberg. If something works particularly well, we’ll take that feedback too.

What comes next

Our priorities are: hardening the installer, fixing hardware compatibility issues, and ensuring the experience is genuinely smooth for people new to Linux. When this is confirmed by your feedback, we’ll prepare a stable release.

Questions or feedback? Open an issue or find us soon on the fediverse.