First Month With aerynOS

Let me start with my experience with Linux Distros. I've started using Linux in 2022 with Fedora KDE, which was a Spin back then. Of those 4 years I've distrohopped for at least 2.5 years and ended up with an Arch based distro, CachyOS.

I've loved my time of using CachyOS, everything was just perfect. I mostly used it with various configurations, DEs, WMs and filesystems (BTRFS, ZFS and yes even bcachefs). Before I switched to aerynOS, I used CachyOS with KDE, ZFS and ZFSBootManager. It was a great experience, but I wanted something new and with a new vision other than "same old Arch but faster".

I was looking for a new distro that would be stable, reliable and with a new vision. I was looking for distros that were not based off of anything and used Rust for most of their stuff. I came across aerynOS and I was excited to give it a try.

I installed aerynOS on my ROG Flow Z13 (2025) at the beginning of August. And now with the new version, that was released today, I wanted to write my first post about my experience with aerynOS.

Installation

It was not what I expected. Lichen installer is a cool new installer that I actually wasn't (and still isn't) a fan of. I've seen that they've kinda changed it with today's update, but I didn't have the chance to try it out.

It required me to do the partitioning myself, which I didn't mind because I'm used to doing it myself but if I wanted to recommend this distro to someone that didn't have any experience with Linux, I would have to explain to them how to do it.

I went with COSMIC DE because I haven't used that since its alpha stage and I wanted to give it a try. Funnily enough, a few days later a youtuber I love ZeiBytes also had installed aerynOS with COSMIC.

The experience

First week

I've actually loved it from the get go. The moss package manager felt amazing and refreshing.

I went with an Everforest Soft theme and COSMIC has made it really easy for me to set that up. And I loved their new Frosted Glass effect (which blur on KDE is ass).

Transitioning from ZFS to XFS was a breeze, it was just way faster and used a heck of a lot less RAM.

After using it for a bit I realized that aerynOS uses sudo-rs and uutils coreutils BY DEFAULT. Which is amazing to see.

After I checked for a gaming focused kernel (like how some distros have Cachy's kernel), I did moss search gaming and found they did have a gaming focused kernel. with OGC's patches, which was my first time using theirs.

First week was a breeze to get used to. It had everything I needed and loved in CachyOS, and more. A fast and smart package manager (which somehow allows XFS snapshots, I'm really curious how they did that), sensible defaults, and a great vision.

Overview

aerynOS is a rolling release distro that aims to be a simple, fast, and smart alternative to traditional Linux distributions. It's brand new and is still in development.

Gaming was not a problem at all. COSMIC has improved a lot since I first started using it. Their kernel is great and I actually had better performance than I did with CachyOS (which is weird, I'll do more tests in the future for that).

I wish there were more packages like brave browser, or helium browser.

Conclusion

Overall, I'm really enjoying aerynOS so far. And I don't see myself switching anytime soon. I would like to thank the developers of aerynOS for making this distro possible. I would recommend this distro to anyone who is tired of traditional Linux distributions and how they feel "stuck in the past".