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The assistant is part of the system, not an app bolted on top — it can read the machine, run things, and fix what is broken, and it asks before it changes anything. Point it at a cloud model or at one running on your own machine. VolnOS is free, forever, with nothing to upgrade to.
2.10 GB downloadx86-64 · UEFIUbuntu 24.04 LTS baseUpdated 1 Sep 2026
My wi-fi keeps dropping. Can you look?
read checked network_status, read_logs
The adapter is resetting when power-save kicks in. I can turn power-save off for this connection — that usually settles it.
Approve this change?
$ nmcli connection modify "Home" wifi.powersave 2
ApproveDecline
What VolnOS is
Not a skin on Ubuntu with a chatbot in the corner. The assistant holds real tools, the privacy claims are things removed from the image, and "free" has no asterisk.
A login lands on the assistant, and
Super+Space reaches it from
anywhere. It has 17 tools — it can read your logs, check updates,
install software, change a setting, run a Windows app. The desktop is always one
Super+D away.
Ten questions a day work out of the box with no key and no account. After that, bring a key for any gateway you like — or point it at Ollama, LM Studio, llama.cpp or vLLM on your own machine, where nothing leaves it at all.
No telemetry, no crash reporting, no account, no ads, no Pro tier — now or later. Ubuntu's reporting packages are removed from the image, not just switched off, and your API key lives in your login keyring.
The assistant
An assistant that can only talk is a search box with extra steps. This one holds 17 tools and can operate the machine — so the interesting question is not what it can do, but what it does without permission. The answer is a short, fixed list.
Reads no approval
system_info, read_logs,
search_files, check_updates,
network_status and three more. Nothing changes, so
nothing interrupts you.
Opens off by default
launch_app, open_path,
open_settings. Opening a window is not changing a
system, but it is your call — turn it on in Control Panel → Assistant.
Changes always asks
install_packages, system_update,
set_setting, run_command and
two more. You see the exact command first. No setting turns this off.
The approval card is built from the command that runs — the same helper renders what you read and assembles what executes, so the two cannot drift. An unknown tool name falls into the strictest tier, so a model that invents a tool gets no free pass. Declining is a normal outcome: the assistant is told you said no and told not to retry.
And it is never root. There is no VolnOS polkit rule granting it
anything; privileged work goes through pkexec with a
fixed argument list, so your desktop's own password prompt is what authorises it.
Your model
Nothing is bundled, so nothing is chosen for you and nothing is quietly costing you. Three ways to have an assistant, and you can move between them whenever you like — the setting is in Control Panel → Assistant.
Ten questions a day
The picker's first row is VolnOS — our account, ten questions a day, reset daily. No key, no sign-up, no card. It exists so the headline feature of the OS is not behind a sign-up form on the first evening.
Your key, your account
OpenAI, OpenRouter, Groq, Together, Mistral, DeepSeek, Google AI Studio, xAI, a Cloudflare AI Gateway — or any other URL that speaks the OpenAI protocol. The model list comes from whatever the endpoint reports; any id can be typed.
Nothing leaves it
Ollama, LM Studio, llama.cpp, vLLM — anything serving the OpenAI protocol on localhost or your LAN. Usually no key at all. With a local endpoint, the assistant is answering from hardware you own.
If the model is on your own hardware, the assistant works with no internet connection and no third party in the loop at all. VolnOS does not ship a model because a good one is several gigabytes and the wrong one for most people — but it will talk to whichever one you have.
# whatever you already run, on this machine or your LAN $ ollama serve # :11434 # then, in the assistant: Gateway → A server on this machine or network $ http://localhost:11434/v1/chat/completions
Privacy
A privacy setting is a promise you can forget to keep. Most of this is not a setting — it is a package that is not in the image, or a server that does not exist.
ubuntu-report, popularity-contest, whoopsie, apport and the MOTD news fetcher are purged during the build — not disabled, not left for you to find.
Nothing to sign into. Installing, updating and using VolnOS needs no identity, and there is no VolnOS server keeping one.
An API key you add lives in your login keyring, never in a settings file, and is only ever sent to the endpoint you chose.
The assistant sends nothing when you are not talking to it. There is no background sync, no usage beacon, no “improve the product” toggle.
Updates come over apt from a GPG-signed channel. Fetching them tells the server nothing but that someone asked for a file.
No cookies, no analytics, no fonts from someone else's CDN. It makes zero external requests and stores nothing about you.
What does leave, when you use a cloud model: your prompt and the
output of any tool the assistant ran, to the endpoint you configured, and onward to
whoever serves that model. Tools like read_logs and
search_files can carry personal data in their output.
VolnOS says so on the onboarding screen and again in Control Panel → Assistant →
Privacy — and if that trade is not one you want to make, run the model locally and
it stops being a trade at all.
The full privacy statement spells out every one of these, including what the ten free questions travel over.
The rest of it
The AI is the new part. Underneath it is an ordinary, complete Linux desktop — deliberately, because an OS you cannot fall back to is not one you can trust.
Wine, winetricks and a prefix manager are installed and
configured, with .exe and .msi
associated out of the box. Mono and Gecko are handled at build time, so nothing
ambushes you on first run. Wine is a compatibility layer, not magic — check your
app against the WineHQ AppDB before you switch.
Ubuntu 24.04 LTS underneath, the stock GNOME layout on top. Every Linux application you already use installs the way it always did, and you can land on the desktop instead of the assistant whenever you like.
Control Panel → Updates runs apt against a GPG-signed channel — the same mechanism the rest of the system uses. No A/B partitions, no rollback engine, no agent phoning home.
The deal
Every feature is in the download. There is no paid edition being held back, no feature that becomes a subscription once enough people depend on it, and no advertising anywhere in the system. If that ever changes, it will not be this operating system.
Installing
Four steps from the file you just downloaded to a working desktop. The install itself is a conversation with the assistant — including the part where it asks permission before erasing anything.
A stick written from a truncated file does not announce itself. It installs a system with corrupt files and boots to a broken desktop — a fault that looks nothing like its cause. One line, thirty seconds.
echo "10832c4609d548367d17a036301375016563a9326d2316fd35dba1a20f7026d4 VolnOS-Setup.iso" | sha256sum -c -
echo "10832c4609d548367d17a036301375016563a9326d2316fd35dba1a20f7026d4 VolnOS-Setup.iso" | shasum -a 256 -c -
(Get-FileHash VolnOS-Setup.iso -Algorithm SHA256).Hash -eq "10832c4609d548367d17a036301375016563a9326d2316fd35dba1a20f7026d4"
Expecting 10832c4609d5…0f7026d4 ·
full digest
Any stick of 4 GB or more. This erases it, so name the right
device — lsblk on Linux,
diskutil list on macOS.
sudo dd if=VolnOS-Setup.iso of=/dev/sdX bs=4M oflag=direct status=progress && sync
diskutil unmountDisk /dev/diskN && sudo dd if=VolnOS-Setup.iso of=/dev/rdiskN bs=4m
Restart and hold the boot-menu key — usually F12, sometimes F10, Esc or Del. Pick the UEFI entry for the stick. Secure Boot has to be off: VolnOS's boot files are not signed with Microsoft's key, so a machine that enforces it will refuse the medium.
Try VolnOS Install VolnOS Try VolnOS (safe graphics) Check the installation medium for defects
Try VolnOS runs the whole desktop from the stick and writes nothing. If anything looks wrong, the last entry checks every file on the medium before you blame the install.
Install VolnOS opens the installer on its own screen, and it
is a conversation. It asks which disk — anything under 16 GB, the stick you
booted from, and read-only devices are listed with the reason rather than
hidden — then shows the plan, with the exact command it is about to run.
Nothing is written until you type ERASE in full.
Erase /dev/nvme0n1 (512 GB) and install VolnOS $ pkexec /usr/libexec/volnos-install-disk \ $ --device /dev/nvme0n1 --squashfs …/filesystem.squashfs Type ERASE to unlock ▸
Then first boot asks the rest — your name and login, a PIN or a password, time zone, the apps you want, the graphics driver, and whether you land on the assistant or the desktop.
Not ready to give it a disk? Try VolnOS from the stick for as long as you like, or boot the same ISO in a virtual machine — GNOME Boxes, VirtualBox, QEMU or anything else — with UEFI firmware enabled and a network connection. The installer needs the network because the assistant runs it; the write itself comes entirely off the medium, so losing the connection mid-install cannot spoil the disk.
Questions
No. Ten questions a day run on VolnOS's own account with no key and no sign-up. Past that you add a key for any gateway you like, or point it at a model running on your own machine — which needs no key either.
The desktop, entirely. The assistant needs whatever endpoint you pointed it at, so a local model keeps working with the network unplugged and a cloud one does not. The installer needs a connection because the assistant runs the install.
Free, and there is no second edition. No Pro tier, no ads, no account. The whole system is in the one download you already have.
Often, but Wine is a compatibility layer rather than Windows. Everything is set up for you — Wine, winetricks, a prefix manager, file associations, Mono and Gecko — but whether a specific application works is a question for the WineHQ AppDB.
Yes. Super+D reaches the
desktop from anywhere, and Control Panel → Assistant will land you there at login
instead. Nothing about the desktop depends on the assistant.
Ubuntu 24.04 LTS with GNOME, on x86-64 with UEFI boot. Updates come through apt from a GPG-signed channel, so the parts you already know keep behaving the way you expect.
Something not working? Support covers what usually goes wrong. More about the project: About VolnOS.