A desktop with an assistant in it, and nothing else watching.

What it is

An ordinary, complete Cinnamon desktop on an Ubuntu 24.04 LTS base, laid out the way Windows is, for 64-bit (x86-64) PCs that boot UEFI, currently 1.1.4 “vela”. Three things make it VolnOS rather than a wallpaper on Ubuntu:

• The assistant is part of the system. A login lands on it, Super+D reaches it from anywhere, and it holds 25 tools. Anything that changes the machine shows you the exact command and waits. The desktop is always one Super+M away.
• Windows applications work without setup. .exe and .msi are associated in the image, and first-boot Setup installs the Wine engine with the standard software set.
• Nothing reports on you, and nothing is for sale. Ubuntu's reporting packages are removed from the image rather than switched off, there is no account anywhere, and there is no paid edition.

How it is put together

• One medium, two jobs. The live ISO carries a single squashfs that is both the Try session and the install source. Installing writes a normal single-root layout of an EFI system partition and one ext4 root, with your files in /home, exactly like any other desktop install.
• Updates are apt. Control Panel → Updates checks and installs from a GPG-signed channel over HTTPS. There is no A/B partition scheme, no rollback engine and no update agent running in the background. That reverses an earlier design deliberately, because the mechanism most people already understand is the one least likely to strand them.
• No model ships in the image. The assistant speaks one protocol to whichever endpoint you point it at, so it works with a hosted gateway or with Ollama, LM Studio, llama.cpp or vLLM on your own hardware. Ten questions a day are available with no key at all, to get you started.
• The assistant is never root. Privileged work goes through pkexec with a fixed argument list, so your desktop's own password prompt authorises it. VolnOS adds no rule that lets it skip that.
• The applications are VolnOS's own: the assistant, Setup and the installer, Control Panel, Software, Terminal, Quick Settings, the greeter and lock screen, the package installer (the list is on the home page). Each is a package on the signed channel rather than a file copied into the image, which is what lets an installed machine converge on what today's ISO would give you, new components included, without reinstalling.

What it is not

Being clear about this saves people an evening:

• Not a Windows replacement by decree. Wine is a compatibility layer. Most things run; some do not. Check the application you actually depend on against the WineHQ AppDB before you switch.
• Not for ARM. x86-64 only, because that is where running Windows software works properly, and that is a core feature here.
• Not GNOME, and not KDE. The desktop is Cinnamon, reshaped to the layout Windows uses. Familiar keys and a taskbar were worth more here than either alternative, and Cinnamon is GTK, so it matches every application VolnOS builds instead of looking foreign inside its own OS.
• Not a server or a phone OS. It is a desktop, for a PC, laptop, mini-PC or virtual machine.
• Not open source, yet. "Free" here means the price is zero and will stay zero. The source is not currently published under a licence, so please do not read more into the word than that.

Where the project lives

Bug reports, questions and feature requests go to the public tracker at VolnOS-Org/ticket, which needs no account with us, only a GitHub one. The organisation page is github.com/VolnOS-Org.

The build sources are not published under a licence today, which is why nothing here calls VolnOS open source. The tracker is open to everyone regardless.

Where it is going

The commitments above are the fixed part: AI at the system level with your choice of model, privacy by construction, and no cost, ever, with no advertising or paid tier arriving later. Everything else is subject to being wrong and getting fixed.

Updates arrive through apt as they are published; the version shown in this page's header is read live from the update store, so it is whatever is current the moment you loaded it.