VolnOS 1.0.9 vela
Download2.10 GB

The project

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

VolnOS is a general-purpose Linux desktop, remixed from Ubuntu 24.04 LTS. It is built around one idea — that an assistant which can actually operate the machine is more useful than a chat window bolted onto it — and two constraints: it must never send anything you did not ask it to, and it must never cost anything.

What it is

An ordinary, complete GNOME desktop on an Ubuntu 24.04 LTS base, for 64-bit (x86-64) PCs that boot UEFI — currently 1.0.9 “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+Space reaches it from anywhere, and it holds 17 tools — it can read logs, check updates, install packages, change settings, run Windows applications. Anything that changes the machine shows you the exact command and waits.
  • Windows applications work without setup. Wine, winetricks and a prefix manager are installed and configured, with .exe and .msi associated out of the box.
  • 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 — 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 — a deliberate reversal of an earlier design, 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.

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 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 — no account with us required, 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, and 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.