KaadzOS v0.1

A Debian-based desktop
you can verify.

KaadzOS is a minimal Debian 13 (trixie) live image with a hand-built Sway/Wayland desktop, a theme rendered from a single palette, an on-demand package system, and a Calamares installer. Every push is built, booted on BIOS and UEFI, and installed unattended in CI before anything ships.

Download the ISO Watch the build

~1.4 GB hybrid ISO · BIOS + UEFI · SHA-256 alongside · live or install to disk

The KaadzOS live session: Sway with Waybar, a floating terminal and the Night wallpaper
Captured from the QEMU framebuffer by the boot test on every push — not staged. The run fails if the desktop shows a configuration warning.

What's inside

Small by design: the base image has no language runtime, no recommends, and only the packages a working Wayland desktop needs. Heavy tools are installed afterwards from declarative packs.

● Sway and Wayland

Waybar, foot, fuzzel, mako and swaylock, themed together and driven from the Super key. No X session required.

● One palette, every surface

The boot splash, boot menus, Sway, Waybar, foot, GTK/Qt, the console colours and the wallpaper all render from theme/palette.

● Installer included

Calamares unpacks the live squashfs onto disk and repairs it in place. The installed system boots through greetd into the same themed Sway session.

● Packs on demand

Eight declarative packs — dev, ai, android, windows, gaming, creative, privacy, cloudflare — installable with kaadzos add dev or from a fuzzel menu.

● Proven by CI

Pack resolution, both firmware boots, the swaynag gate, an idle-RAM report, and an unattended install-and-boot on both BIOS and UEFI run on every push.

● Secure Boot on disk

The installed system ships Debian's signed shim and GRUB, so it boots with Secure Boot enabled. The live ISO itself still needs Secure Boot switched off.

  • ai
  • android
  • cloudflare
  • creative
  • dev
  • gaming
  • privacy
  • windows

Download and verify

The ISO is published as a GitHub release asset with a sibling SHA-256 file, and mirrored to Cloudflare R2 when credentials are configured.

Download from GitHub Releases

sha256sum --check KaadzOS-trixie-amd64.iso.sha256

Write the image in DD mode — it is a hybrid ISO that boots from the same file on BIOS or UEFI.

# Linux / macOS — replace sdX, this erases it
sudo dd if=KaadzOS-trixie-amd64.iso \
  of=/dev/sdX bs=4M status=progress oflag=sync

On Windows use Rufus or balenaEtcher in DD mode. Boot the live session with Secure Boot disabled; an installed KaadzOS boots with it enabled.

Built in public

The repository contains the live-build configuration, the theme generator, the pack manager, the installer glue and the CI harness — nothing is hidden behind a binary blob or a build machine.

● Every run

Actions runs keep the ISO, both boot screenshots and both install logs as artifacts.

● The palette

theme/palette is the single source of truth for every colour shown here.