Just for fun.

Ever since I was a child I've been fascinated by programming. It's what I chose to study, and it's what I've built my whole working life around. Over all those years one question never went away: what does it actually take to make an operating system? Not an app, not a website, but the whole thing: a computer that starts up, finds its disks and screens, installs itself, and greets you with a desktop you'd enjoy using every day.

Aurora is my attempt at an answer. I build it for the joy of it: to understand every layer, from the firmware handing over to the boot loader, through the kernel and the packages, up to the pixels of the dock, and to make, along the way, the desktop I'd want for myself.

So I did it the long way. Aurora stands on Debian, because a distribution is also about trust, and Debian has earned it. Everything above it is written for Aurora: the shell with its top bar, dock and widgets, the apps, the installer's look, the AI assistant that runs on your own computer, the tests that boot and install every image in a virtual machine before it ships. Every bug we hit is written down, with how we fixed it, because learning was the point.

If you try it, I hope you have as much fun using it as I had building it.

— Luca Padovan