The Future of tauOS

We often get members joining our Discord asking about what tauOS is, when will it be ready, and how they can help contribute to it. Out of all of the projects we work on, tauOS is consistently within the top in terms of interest. However, the response we've given until now has basically been ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. This post will provide all of the answers to these questions and lay out a roadmap for us to stick to.

Catching up and some history

For those unaware, tauOS was the original project of Fyra Labs, what we were founded four years ago to develop. The goal of the project was simple: make desktop Linux competitive with commercial offerings by utilizing cutting-edge technologies, a pragmatic vision, and an examination of what a desktop experience could be from the ground up. This worked towards our ultimate goal as a organization: to bring open source software to the masses, specifically desktop Linux. Some would describe this path as delusional, overly ambitious, or describe us as out of our minds. In some senses I agree, but I point to the progress we've made as a young organization so far.

In more concrete and technical terms, tauOS is an immutable operating system (this was right at the time when immutable desktop Linux was starting to gain momentum), built with an in-house UI library focused on expressiveness, a refined desktop experience (built on GNOME, but planned to go custom), and online integration features that provided cross-device capabilities, similar to what you'd see in Apple or Google's ecosystem. For more information about the project, please see the project's website: https://tauos.co/.

So, what happened?

The TL;DR of it is: Ultramarine happened. At some point during early development, we got acquainted with the Ultramarine Linux team, leading to a strong and fruitful partnership between the projects, even leading to new Fyra Labs projects, such as Terra. At some point, it made sense for us to take over the Ultramarine project, due to a combination of maintainer burnout and strategy, and thus Ultramarine become a Fyra Labs project.

Of course, this left a conundrum for the team. Now we were maintaining two operating system projects. For a small team like us, this stretched our resources thin and took away much needed attention from both projects. We ended up shifting development focus to Ultramarine, as it already had an established user base, more immediate growth potential, and offered a path to build the organization up.

tauOS from that point was left on the backburner, with its future in question, both internally and within our community. This became even more apparent with the increasing successes of Ultramarine and other projects, community and organization growth, and increased clout due to our development on Ultramarine. However, this didn't kill off the community interest in tauOS, which has even grown recently, with no updates or communication.

Is the vision dead?

This brings us into the present day, with the most obvious question being: Is tauOS dead? The answer is kinda.

The vision we had for tauOS, was ultimately the vision that Fyra Labs as an organization and community had at its core: to empower people to improve their lives with tools that work for them, with desktop Linux as the vehicle. For Fyra Labs in its many forms to exist, we must continue to work towards and achieve this vision.

This leads us to the first real announcement of this post: tauOS as its own project is dead, but from its ashes comes something new, the transition of Ultramarine to take its place and achieve the goal we sought after. This means we'll build Ultramarine into what tauOS was supposed to be, instead of a separate deliverable. Luckily, this was already the direction that Ultramarine was steered towards, especially since the original vision for Ultramarine was grounded in similar principles to the vision of tauOS. Additionally, we get to reuse the components from tauOS, such as: libhelium, the various core apps, and our syncing architecture.

This will allow us to avoid the burden of maintaining two different operating systems, while reusing the infrastructure built up for Ultramarine, including its booming and vibrant community and user-base. I believe this is the best way forward to ensure that our efforts aren't duplicated or split, while using all of the available cards in our deck.

This isn't saying that Ultramarine is moving to immutable-only, or only offering one edition. Frankly Ultramarine will keep moving down the same road it has been, we're just moving the goalpost a bit further down.

What's next? (And, you.)

This is where we all come in as a community, figuring out what this new direction entails. The main unanswered questions are:

• Will this "tauified" Ultramarine be a separate image or integrated with the existing ones?
• What will happen to the tauOS branding?
• What specific ideas, visions, and features do we want to pull into Ultramarine?
• Should we still focus on creating a new desktop environment experience?
• What does the community think as a whole?
• What would an alpha version of taultramarine have?

When this post is published, I'll open a channel in our Discord so that we can discuss.

I'll see you there!