The Aeryn OS Linux distribution formerly known as Serpent OS has published a 2025 retrospective to recap the project changes over the past year as well as a look ahead to 2026.
Besides changing the name of the Linux distribution in 2025, another change was project founder Ikey Doherty quietly stepping away from the project. Similar to when he stepped away from Solus Linux he founded and without any trace (ultimately Ikey writing an open letter on Phoronix later on about the change), he left Aeryn OS developers without any real notice. The Aeryn OS developers note in their 2025 retrospective they still haven’t heard anything from Ikey but imagine he has stepped away due to personal/family matters.
In Ikey’s absence they have continued pushing Aeryn OS forward with transitioning their tooling to the Rust programming language. They also expanded their COSMIC desktop environment support, onboarded more developers, and reworked their cloud hosting.
Looking forward to 2026, they will be working more on tooling and infrastructure, among other improvements:
“For now, there is a deliberate, continued focus on our os-tooling and infrastructure code bases, somewhat at the expense of delivering a fully featured Linux distribution for end users.
As time goes on, the goal is for this balance to naturally shift as our code bases become more capable and featureful.
Over time, and as logical consequence of this shift, we hope to be able to onboard more contributors to help us scale out the recipe repo, once the tooling is in a state where it conveniently allows for this.”
More details for those interested via the AerynOS.com blog.
