Aurora OS
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Aurora OS is a beautiful, macOS‑inspired desktop on the rock‑solid Debian base, with your tools ready on day one. Free, open source, and yours to shape.
Private AI, built in
Undo any update
90 dev tools, one click
Steam, Windows & Android apps
Why I built Aurora
Aurora OS isn't a company's product. Ever since I was a child I've wondered what it actually takes to make an operating system: not an app, but the whole thing, a computer that starts up, installs itself and greets you with a desktop you'd enjoy using every day.
Aurora is my answer, built for the joy of understanding every layer, from the boot loader to the pixels of the dock, and of making the desktop I'd want for myself.
Designed down to the icon
Why people switch
Everything a daily desktop needs, the things other distros leave you to set up, and a few you won't find anywhere else.
Chat, writing tools, dictation and read-aloud, on your computer and in your language. It stays in a corner like picture-in-picture while you keep working. Drag in files or photos for the local model to read.
A snapshot before every update. Pick yesterday's system from the boot menu.
Editors, languages, shells, terminals, containers, databases: one click, official sources.
Steam with Proton, Epic and GOG, Windows programs and Android apps. Game Hub sets each up in one click.
Firewall on, automatic security updates, full-disk encryption, no telemetry, ever. Free and open source.
Beautiful by default
A menu bar on top, a dock at the bottom, and one key to find anything. Aurora's desktop is written from scratch and designed down to the last pixel.
Tap Super and start typing. Apps, settings, recent files, your git projects,
a calculator, terminal commands (> htop) and web search all live in one box.
Enter opens the top result.
12*(3+4), 10 km in mi,
100 usd in eur:rocket, and your clipboard history with Super+V
Select a file and press Space. Photos, videos, PDFs and source code open instantly in a preview, with syntax highlighting for code. The arrow keys move to the next file, and Space closes the preview.
Press Super+W, or push the pointer into the bottom-left corner, and every open window lays out in front of you. Type to filter, click to jump. The bottom-right corner shows the desktop. Pick what each corner does in Settings.
The Aurora landscape changes with the time of day, from dawn to a starry night, and fades gently from one to the next, in three painted series to choose from: Starfall, Veil and Horizon. Set the style to Auto and Aurora goes dark at sunset and light again at sunrise. Night Light warms the screen in the evening.
Pinned and running apps, a smooth magnification effect, Launchpad and the Trash. Right-click an icon for its windows and quick actions, or drag the pointer across it and watch it breathe.
Everything you reach for, one click away: volume and output device, microphone, brightness, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth with their device lists, power mode, night light, dark style, Do Not Disturb, airplane mode, screen recording and media controls.
Aurora AI
Ask from Spotlight with ?, fix and rewrite any text with Writing Tools, get the
right command in the terminal with ask, dictate, have text read aloud, and find
documents by what they're about. It runs on your computer, or with Claude or another
service if you prefer. Chats are saved locally; files and photos can be attached only to
the local model. Off until you turn it on.
Make it yours
Start from a preset, then change anything: bar and dock position, icon size, window buttons, corner radius, fonts, pointer, icons and accent color.
Menu bar on top, a floating dock with magnification, round colored window buttons.
Built for developers
No afternoon of setup. The essentials are already installed and configured, and heavier toolchains are one click away, always at their latest version. More for developers, and Game Hub →
~/code/api main py 3.13 ❯ git pull && docker compose up -d ✔ Container api-db-1 Started ✔ Container api-web-1 Started ~/code/api main took 3s ❯ portop PORT PROTO PROCESS SERVICE / CONTAINER 5432 tcp postgres api-db-1 8000 tcp uvicorn api-web-1 3000 tcp node — [k] kill [o] open [f] filter [,] settings
Ptyxis, the terminal, has tabs, profiles and one-click shells inside your distrobox, toolbox and podman containers. Add an informative prompt (git status, language versions, command duration), Ctrl+R fuzzy history and sensible aliases. Docker starts on first use, so it costs nothing at boot.
portop shows what's using every port (process, systemd service or Docker container) and stops it with one key.
About 90 tools in 17 categories: editors and IDEs, languages, shells and terminals, Git clients, containers and virtual machines, databases, web and mobile, debugging, data science, game engines, embedded, design and security. Each one installs from its official source, so you always get the newest release, and you see every step in a terminal. Project Workspaces reopen your editor, terminal and Files together. See them all →
Ready to use
Aurora comes with the everyday apps you'd expect from a complete desktop, and App Center opens the whole Debian archive and Flathub when you want more.
Firefox · Mail (Geary) · Transmission · Remmina remote desktop
LibreOffice Writer, Calc, Impress · Document viewer · Text editor · Scanner
Calendar · Contacts · Weather · Maps · Clocks · Calculator
Music · Videos with codecs · Image viewer · Camera · Sound recorder · Screen recording
Files · Settings · Terminal · App Center · Disks · Backups · Snapshots · System monitor · Logs
Solitaire · Mines · Sudoku · Mahjongg
Super+Z shows six layouts, as in Windows 11: point at a zone to see where the window goes, click, and Snap Assist offers your other windows for the empty spaces. Super+T keeps a window on top.
To-do list, countdown, sun and moon, progress of the year, recent files and clipboard join the clock, weather, notes and gauges. Each has its own options, and a compact gallery adds them where there's room.
Backgrounds work like Windows' Personalize page: dynamic, a picture, a slideshow from any folder, a solid color, or Bing's, NASA's or Wikimedia's picture of the day with its story.
The time on top, thick sliders and big tiles that light up in your accent color. The Aurora menu shows who you are and puts sleep, restart and shut down one click away.
A notification with a one-time code gets a Copy 482913 button: no more squinting and retyping.
Ctrl+Shift+Esc: apps and their processes, End Task, live performance graphs, startup apps and services.
See what fills the disk and free it in one click; Storage Sense cleans up by itself. Screen Time shows each app's day and reminds you at the limits you set.
Any screenshot can float above your windows while you work: Super+Shift+P, draw, done. Files resizes pictures and tells you which program keeps a file “in use”.
Battery Saver turns on by itself at 20%, Do Not Disturb during games, videos and screen sharing, and Spotlight runs “restart” or opens ~/Documents as you type.
GTK 4, GTK 3 and Qt apps, window borders and icons all follow your light or dark style and accent color, instantly.
Updates ready, battery low, a USB drive plugged in, a screen recording saved. The Activities menu tracks transfers, downloads and installs, with failures you can inspect.
A big clock over your wallpaper, a clean password field, and automatic locking when you step away.
Firewall on, automatic security updates, full-disk encryption in the installer, Secure Boot on installed UEFI systems, no telemetry.
Firmware for Intel, AMD, Realtek, Broadcom and MediaTek; Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, fingerprint readers, touchpads; guest tools for QEMU, VMware and Hyper-V.
Aurora takes a system snapshot before every update. If something breaks, pick Aurora OS snapshots in the boot menu and start yesterday's system. Your files are never touched.
Screenshots offer Annotate and Copy Text. Super+Shift+T copies the text inside any part of the screen, offline, in 18 languages.
With KDE Connect your Android phone or iPhone shows its notifications on the desktop, and you can share files and the clipboard. It's one switch in Settings.
Click the clock for your calendar, notifications and today's weather with the next hours. No account needed.
Set up your finger in Settings → Users and use it instead of the password for sudo and admin prompts.
A warm marimba motif when you log in and a gentle goodbye when you shut down. Both are original, and one switch turns them off.
Apps, violet folders with an emblem for Home, Downloads or Music, and every file type as a page with its label (PDF, PY, ZIP, DOC…). Famous brands keep their own logos.
Windows fade in as they open and files float in as a folder opens. One switch in Appearance turns them off.
Zoom the whole screen or a lens with Super+Alt+8, a screen keyboard, larger text and pointer, high contrast, reduced motion, a screen reader and visible scrollbars.
Automatic suspend, power button and lid, battery percentage, sound balance, notifications per app, what to do with a USB drive, a Compose key, online accounts, what Spotlight shows.
The round colored window buttons always show ×, − and arrows to expand or restore, not only on hover.
Backups with Déjà Dup, compressed RAM swap, and Flatpak apps that never touch the system.
Download
In the folder where you saved both files, run:
sha256sum -c aurora-os-latest-amd64.iso.sha256On macOS use shasum -a 256 -c …; on Windows, certutil -hashfile aurora-os-VERSION-amd64.iso SHA256 and compare.
Install guide
The full guide, with undoing updates, sharing and troubleshooting →
Install balenaEtcher, choose the Aurora ISO, choose your USB stick and click Flash. (Rufus in DD mode and Ventoy work too.)
Use GNOME Disks → Restore Disk Image, or a terminal. Replace sdX with
your stick. This erases it, so double-check the name with lsblk:
sudo dd if=aurora-os-VERSION-amd64.iso of=/dev/sdX bs=4M status=progress oflag=syncRestart and press the boot-menu key while the logo appears (usually F12, F10, F9, Esc or Del), then pick the USB stick. Both UEFI and legacy BIOS work. If your PC uses Secure Boot, switch it off to start the live USB; you can switch it back on after installing.
The Aurora menu offers Try Aurora OS (runs from the stick, touches nothing), Install Aurora OS (opens the installer right away) and a Language menu with 20 languages. From the live desktop you can install any time from the dock.
Pick your language, your location on the map and your keyboard. Then choose how to use the disk: erase it, install alongside Windows or another Linux, or partition manually, with optional encryption. Finally create your user and choose whether to log in automatically. Keep the default btrfs file system to get automatic snapshots. Installation takes a few minutes and works offline.
Remove the stick when asked. The Welcome app greets you on first login. Open Dev Hub to add your favorite tools, or App Center for everything else.
Under the hood
Why Debian, why labwc, why Python and GTK 4, why Calamares, Ptyxis, PipeWire, gtklock… For every component we document what we picked, what else we considered and why, so you can trust (and challenge) how Aurora is built.
Read the technical overviewFAQ
Yes, free as in beer and as in freedom. Aurora's own code is GPL-3.0-or-later, and everything else is open source from Debian and upstream projects.
No, on Debian 13 "trixie", the same base Ubuntu itself comes from. You get Debian's packages and security updates, with no snaps. Almost every guide for Debian or Ubuntu applies.
Security updates install automatically in the background, and App Center shows the rest. The kernel is the 6.12 long-term release with regular fixes. Newer kernels for brand-new hardware are available from Debian backports.
Both. Flathub is enabled in App Center out of the box, and you can install any Debian package
or a vendor's .deb with a double-click or apt.
Restart and choose Aurora OS snapshots in the boot menu. You'll find a snapshot from right before every update. Start it, check that all is well, then make it permanent with one click in Timeshift. This needs the btrfs file system, which is the installer's default.
No telemetry, ever. The only requests the desktop makes on its own are the weather in the calendar (only your time zone's main city is sent, and it can be turned off), today's exchange rates when you type a currency conversion, and update checks with Debian's mirrors.
Yes. Choose Install alongside in the installer and drag the divider to share the disk. A boot menu lets you pick the system at startup.
The open-source driver works out of the box. For NVIDIA's own driver, install
nvidia-driver from App Center or apt; Aurora ships the
nvidia-detect tool to tell you which one fits your card.
The live USB's boot loader isn't signed yet. Once installed, Aurora on UEFI uses Debian's signed boot chain, so you can turn Secure Boot back on. A signed live USB is on the roadmap.
Aurora is inspired by macOS's layout. Every icon, font, wallpaper and line of code is our own or comes from open-source projects. Aurora isn't affiliated with Apple.
Ready when you are
Try it live from a USB stick or a virtual machine. Nothing changes on your computer until you decide to install.