While these days nearly every major desktop Linux distribution is using Wayland or at least making it available, a decade ago before reaching that maturity one of the options for showing off the potential of Wayland was the oddly-named RebeccaBlack OS. With “RBOS” it shipped the very latest Wayland components and different desktop and toolkit options to easily try out Wayland-based environments from a live Linux environment. Released overnight was a surprise update to RBOS.
Around fourteen years ago RebeccaBlack OS made it easy to try out Wayland as well as for easily running into Wayland’s different bugs and limitations of the time. But in more recent years with most Linux desktop distributions successfully shipping Wayland, the usefulness of RBOS hasn’t been as significant as during the early days of this alternative to the X.Org Server.
RebeccaBlackOS 2026-02-22 is now available though and it has re-based against Debian Trixie as its OS base while continuing to ship the very latest Wayland libraries, a variety of toolkits with Wayland support enabled, and different desktops/compositors like Weston, GNOME Shell, KDE Plasma, Wayfire, Sway, LXQt, and more.
The new ISO release has a number of improvements including various console changes for allowing a VT-less kernel build, log-in manager improvements, switching to the Linux 6.19 kernel for the latest kernel drivers, DRM Panic QR code support, Qt 6.10, and more.
Those wanting to try out the new RebeccaBlack OS release for a leading-edge Wayland experience can grab the new ISOs via SourceForge.
