The TunaOS variant catalog keeps growing — and this time it pairs the most familiar LTS base in Linux with one of its most elegant desktops. Meet Gurnard (🐟): Ubuntu 24.04 LTS (Noble Numbat) with the Pantheon desktop, rebuilt as an atomic bootc image.
Apple Silicon Macs are, by some measures, the most common ARM Linux machines in the world — and until recently they were mostly out of reach for TunaOS. That changes with the work landing in bootc-installer-asahi: a macOS-driven installer path that turns a TunaOS bootc image into a bootable Asahi Linux setup on M1/M2 Macs.
Snapdragon X Elite is the most interesting Windows-on-ARM silicon in years — and a growing number of Linux users are discovering that these laptops make excellent Linux machines. TunaOS ships two images built for the canonical X Elite device, the Lenovo ThinkPad X13s (Qualcomm SC8280XP): one based on Bonito (Fedora Atomic GNOME) and one based on Project Bluefin Dakota.
The "immutable desktop" space is crowded and the terminology is muddy. Fedora Silverblue, Bluefin, Aurora, Vanilla OS, NixOS, openSUSE MicroOS, Endless OS, and a growing list of bootc-based images all claim the same high ground: atomic updates, rollback, and a system that doesn't rot.
So where does TunaOS fit? This post maps the landscape honestly — what each family does well, and the specific gap TunaOS was built to fill.