Glarion

A polished Linux desktop OS that treats gaming as a first-class citizen.

Built on Fedora Kinoite. Designed for developers who also want to play games without fighting their OS.

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What it is

• macOS-quality desktop experience on Linux hardware
• Gaming without friction — Windows games run via Proton, no manual setup required
• Developer-first — terminal, Git, Node, Docker, SSH all work exactly as expected
• Foundation-governed — no single commercial entity controls the storefront, OS, and hardware simultaneously

Reference hardware

Minisforum UM790 Pro (AMD Ryzen 9 7940HS / Radeon 780M)

All-AMD means all drivers are open source and upstream in the kernel. No driver headaches.

Known display limitations

4K120 over HDMI does not work on Linux for AMD hardware. This is a Linux-wide limitation (the HDMI Forum rejected AMD's open-source HDMI 2.1 implementation) and cannot be fixed at the OS layer. 4K60 over HDMI works fine.

Workaround for 4K120: Use the front USB4 ports with a USB-C to USB-C cable directly to a monitor with USB-C input, or a USB-C to DisplayPort cable. Avoid USB-C to HDMI adapters unless you have confirmed they have updated firmware for Linux compatibility.

Installation

Requires: Secure Boot disabled in BIOS

Try it live (recommended)

The live ISO boots a full Glarion session — desktop, Steam, the lot — straight from a USB stick without touching your disks. Download and verify it:

curl -LO https://pub-27e8de4c5aa14382b04372b8f9be06a2.r2.dev/glarion-live.iso
curl -LO https://pub-27e8de4c5aa14382b04372b8f9be06a2.r2.dev/glarion-live.iso.sha256
sha256sum -c glarion-live.iso.sha256

Write it to a USB stick of at least 16 GB (this erases the stick — find the device name with lsblk, or diskutil list on macOS):

sudo dd if=glarion-live.iso of=/dev/sdX bs=4M status=progress oflag=direct

Fedora Media Writer or balenaEtcher work too. Boot from the stick and try Glarion; the session runs entirely from the USB stick and leaves the machine's disks untouched.

Fresh install (unattended)

For provisioning a machine hands-off, the installer ISO installs Glarion without any interaction:

curl -LO https://pub-27e8de4c5aa14382b04372b8f9be06a2.r2.dev/glarion-installer.iso
curl -LO https://pub-27e8de4c5aa14382b04372b8f9be06a2.r2.dev/glarion-installer.iso.sha256
sha256sum -c glarion-installer.iso.sha256

Write it to a USB stick as above.

Warning: the installer is unattended. Booting from the stick erases the machine's first disk and installs Glarion onto it without asking. Only boot it on a machine you intend to wipe.

The installed system runs the signed Glarion image and receives updates automatically.

From an existing Fedora Kinoite system

# From a running Fedora Kinoite system, rebase to Glarion:
rpm-ostree rebase ostree-unverified-registry:ghcr.io/glarion-os/glarion:latest
systemctl reboot

# Then switch to the signed image (the first rebase installs Glarion's
# signing key and policy; from here every update is signature-verified):
rpm-ostree rebase ostree-image-signed:docker://ghcr.io/glarion-os/glarion:latest
systemctl reboot

Updating

Glarion checks for updates in the background, downloads them, and stages them automatically; the staged update applies the next time the machine reboots. No commands, no prompts.

To update everything immediately instead of waiting (OS, Flatpaks, containers):

ujust update

To roll back to the previous version:

ujust rollback

Useful commands

ujust --list          # Show all available commands
ujust show-tdp        # Show current TDP configuration
ujust apply-tdp       # Re-apply TDP configuration manually
ujust gpu-info        # Show GPU status
ujust status          # Show OS version and update status

Building from source

Requires podman. Docker will not work — the Kinoite base image exceeds Docker's overlay layer limit.

On macOS, set up a podman machine first (only needed once):

podman machine init --cpus 4 --memory 8192 --disk-size 100
podman machine start

Then build:

git clone https://github.com/glarion-os/glarion
cd glarion
podman build -f Containerfile -t glarion:local .

Pushes to main trigger an automatic build via GitHub Actions, published to ghcr.io/glarion-os/glarion. A weekly scheduled build picks up upstream Kinoite updates.

Contributing

Issues and PRs welcome. See CONTRIBUTING.md.

Licence

The Glarion configuration and build scripts are MIT licensed. Components pulled from upstream projects retain their original licences.