Nebula Linux — Beta 1.0

An Arch-based Linux distribution featuring the Dank Linux UI — DankMaterialShell (Material 3 desktop shell built on Quickshell) running on the niri scrollable-tiling Wayland compositor.

New in Beta 1.0: 4 curated wallpaper themes with instant matugen retuning, Plymouth animated boot splash, full GRUB theme for installed systems, nebula wallpaper and nebula bugreport CLI subcommands, wallpaper picker in Nebula Welcome, and weekly auto-built ISOs via GitHub Actions.

⚠️ UEFI required. Legacy BIOS boot is not supported in Beta 1.0 — grub-install's device-path canonicalization has a confirmed bug in this GRUB build when /boot is on its own partition (required for reliable btrfs booting; see Desktop stack below). UEFI installs use a different GRUB target (x86_64-efi) that doesn't hit this bug. The installer detects legacy BIOS mode and warns you before proceeding. Enable UEFI in your firmware/VM settings first.

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              L  I  N  U  X

Download

⬇ Download the ISO from SourceForge (~2.2 GB)

SHA256: d06345f24d7a6f84f1546e7fe035daad98421d75f5004e3e725fed851090f588

Flash it with Rufus or BalenaEtcher, or boot it in a VM (4+ GB RAM). Or build it yourself.

Screenshots

The live desktop — DMS bar on niri	Nebula Welcome onboarding
Branded Calamares installer	DankMaterialShell settings
Apps on the scrollable-tiling desktop	Boot menu with nebula background

What you get

• Live ISO that boots straight into a full Dank Material Shell desktop (niri + DMS) as user nebula — no login required.
• Nebula branding everywhere: os-release, hostname, boot menus + BIOS boot splash, MOTD, TTY login prompt, logo (hicolor icons + pixmaps, shown in DMS Settings → About), default wallpaper (also the lock screen background, and matugen derives the whole Material color scheme from it), lock-screen user avatar, fastfetch ASCII logo, installer banner. The installer also rebrands the target's bootloader (systemd-boot entries / GRUB_DISTRIBUTOR).
• Installer: launch "Install Nebula Linux" from the app launcher (Super+Space) — a fully Nebula-branded Calamares GUI that installs by copying the live system, then strips the live-only pieces and sets up GRUB with the nebula background. (Calamares is built from the AUR during the ISO build and cached in out\pkgcache\.) A CLI fallback, nebula-install (archinstall wrapper), is also on the ISO.

Desktop stack

Component	Package(s)
Shell / UI	dms-shell-niri (DankMaterialShell from Arch extra)
Compositor	niri + xwayland-satellite
Login	greetd (autologin in live session)
Audio	PipeWire + WirePlumber
Network	NetworkManager, bluez
Terminal	foot (CPU-rendered — works in VMs)
Apps	Firefox, Nautilus, LibreOffice, Celluloid (video), Loupe, Evince, File Roller, Calculator, Text Editor
Theming	matugen (wallpaper-based Material colors) + adw-gtk3-dark, Papirus icons, qt6ct
Installer	Calamares (Nebula-branded, AUR-built at ISO build time)
Snapshots	btrfs by default + snapper + snap-pac + grub-btrfs (boot old snapshots from GRUB)
Login	DMS graphical greeter on installed systems (nebula greeter <dms|text> to switch)
Onboarding	Nebula Welcome app (install, niri tour, app bundles, Flathub)
Control	nebula CLI: update / snapshots / rollback / drivers / doctor / windows / wallpaper / bugreport
Themes	4 bundled wallpaper themes (nebula wallpaper list) — matugen retunes the whole desktop on switch
Boot splash	Plymouth "nebula" theme with orbiting singularity animation (installed systems, silent boot)
GRUB theme	Branded GRUB menu for installed systems (background, logo, wordmark, selection pixmaps)
Window modes	scrollable tiling by default; nebula windows floating for classic windows (also a switch in Nebula Welcome)
VM support	guest tools auto-start under QEMU/KVM, VirtualBox, VMware
Performance	zram swap (zstd), fstrim timer

Building the ISO

mkarchiso only runs on Arch Linux, so the build happens inside a Docker container. You need Docker Desktop (WSL2 backend) with ~15 GB free space.

.\build.ps1

The first build downloads several GB of packages (a named Docker volume nebula-pacman-cache caches them for subsequent builds). The finished ISO lands in out\nebula-linux-YYYY.MM.DD-x86_64.iso.

Test it in a VM (Hyper-V, VirtualBox, VMware, or QEMU). Give it 4+ GB RAM and enable EFI if available. Boot, and the DMS desktop appears automatically.

Handy keys in the live session

Key	Action
Super+Space	App launcher (Spotlight)
Super+Return	Terminal (foot)
Super+O	Overview
Super+Q	Close window
Super+,	DMS settings
Super+Escape	Lock screen
Super+Shift+/	Show all keybindings

How the build works

1. build.ps1 starts an archlinux:latest privileged container with this repo mounted read-only at /src and out\ at /out.
2. build.sh (inside the container) installs archiso, copies the official releng profile, then:
   • overlays everything under profile/airootfs/ onto it,
   • appends profile/packages-extra.x86_64 to the package list,
   • rebrands profiledef.sh, GRUB/syslinux boot menus (Arch Linux → Nebula Linux),
   • a pacman hook overwrites /usr/lib/os-release with Nebula branding during pacstrap (and again on every future filesystem package upgrade),
   • swaps releng's iwd/systemd-networkd for NetworkManager, removes the root tty autologin, enables greetd + graphical target,
   • renders the wallpaper SVG to PNG,
   • runs mkarchiso.
3. The live ISO creates the nebula user at boot (nebula-live-setup) and greetd autologs it into niri-session; niri spawns dms run.

Repo layout

build.ps1                        Windows entry point (Docker)
build.sh                         Container-side build script
profile/
  packages-extra.x86_64          Desktop packages appended to releng list
  airootfs/                      Files overlaid into the live filesystem
    etc/greetd/config.toml       Autologin session config
    etc/skel/.config/niri/       niri config (spawns DMS, keybinds)
    etc/systemd/system/          nebula-live-setup.service
    usr/lib/os-release           Nebula branding
    usr/local/bin/nebula-install     Installer wrapper (archinstall + nebulaize)
    usr/local/bin/nebula-live-setup  Live user creation
    usr/share/backgrounds/nebula/    Wallpaper (SVG, rendered at build time)

Roadmap

• Calamares graphical installer (AUR build + local pacman repo on the ISO)
• DankGreeter graphical login for installed systems (shipped inside dms-shell)
• Snapshot rollback stack (btrfs + snapper + snap-pac + grub-btrfs)
• Nebula Welcome onboarding app + niri tour
• nebula control-center CLI
• nebula-release / nebula-branding pacman packages + own package repo
• Plymouth boot splash, GRUB theme for installed systems
• Custom Material icon theme & default DMS settings preset
• Hyprland edition (dms-shell-hyprland)
• Weekly auto-built ISOs (GitHub Actions) + signed checksums