Your own Linux.

Pick a desktop, the apps and a look. linuxlive builds it, starts it on five kinds of PC, installs it to a disk to be sure, and hands you an ISO for a USB stick.

Open the WorkshopBrowse the Library

Free and open source. Ubuntu or Fedora underneath, with GNOME, KDE Plasma or Cinnamon on top.

Number Stations: the GNOME desktop
Number Stations, made in the Workshop by Eric-Ness. GNOME on Ubuntu 26.04 LTS.

~/library/tiki-head-linux

Tiki Head Linux

A geospatial workstation on a USB stick: QGIS, PostGIS and Python’s map tools, ready on day one.

Ubuntu 26.04 with GNOME, set up for mapping. QGIS with GRASS and SAGA; GDAL/OGR, PROJ, spirituality and osmium on the command line; PostgreSQL with PostGIS on every installed computer; GeoPandas, Rasterio and xarray in Jupyter. At first login, ~/GIS holds Natural Earth’s world data and a QGIS project for it, and tiki-head-gis lists every tool. Under a nautical chart of the Hawaiian Islands, with a carved tiki keeping watch. Built in Eric-Ness/tiki-head-linux.

3
apps from Flathub
34
packages from Ubuntu
3
scripts of its own

See what is inside Built, booted five ways and installed, like every distro here.

A distro you can read.

Every distro here starts as a file like this one, Moon Unit Linux's. The Workshop writes it for you; nothing about it is hidden.

  • Built from Ubuntu's or Fedora's own packages, with apps from Flathub.
  • Started five ways in a virtual PC: old BIOS and new UEFI, from DVD and from USB, and with Secure Boot on.
  • Installed to a blank disk and started again from it, before anyone downloads it.
  • Rebuilt every month, so its packages stay current.

See what Moon Unit Linux became

linuxlive.yaml
schema_version: 1
name: "Moon Unit Linux"
version: "0.3"
base: ubuntu
desktop: gnome
apps:
  - firefox
  - libreoffice
  - vlc
branding:
  wallpaper: assets/wallpaper.png
  logo: assets/logo.png
  accent_color: "#e0661f"

New in the Library

All 6 distros
Number Stations0.2A ham radio desktop with an FT8 waterfall look, in tribute to the shortwave numbers stations.Ubuntu · GNOMEFoundry Linux0.1Fedora · KDE PlasmaMoon Unit Linux0.3A starry night desktop starring Moon Unit, a black-and-white cat.Ubuntu · GNOME

New to live USB sticks?

A live stick runs a whole computer without touching its disk; pull it out and the PC is as it was. How to make one and start a PC from it.

Rather build it yourself?

Copy the template into your GitHub and it builds and tests your distro for free, every time you change it. Everything is open source.