Now closing on 1.0 — self-heal shipped & VM-validated
The stable desktop
everyone wanted.
The rock-solid foundation of Debian Stable, with fresh tooling for productivity, AI development, and enterprise deployment — and boot-time rollbackso a bad update is never fatal.
Why FoundryOS
Stability you can trust. Freshness you can use.
Debian Stable is the most trusted desktop foundation in the world — and it ships deliberately old packages. FoundryOS resolves that tension with layering instead of compromise, then makes the whole machine impossible to permanently break.
A bad update is never fatal
Every change is snapshotted. If an update breaks the system, reboot and pick the previous snapshot straight from the bootloader — back to a working machine in seconds, no rescue USB.
It heals itself
A boot-counting engine watches for trouble. Consecutive unhealthy boots are automatically routed to the last-known-good snapshot — the machine recovers before you have to.
apt can't delete your desktop
A self-preservation guard refuses any transaction that would rip out the desktop or core system — on both the apt and offline-update paths. No other apt-based distro ships this.
Breakage is explainable
A deterministic substrate journals every change and health-checks every boot, so the system tells you what changed and what likely broke — then fixes the culprit instead of nuking the whole update.
Encrypted & verified by default
Full-disk LUKS2 encryption and UEFI Secure Boot are baked into the installer — the signed shim → GRUB → kernel chain is validated end-to-end, including the DKMS module-signing path.
Ready for the org
Active Directory join and domain login work out of the box, with an image IT can standardize — without giving up Debian's stability or recoverability.
The design in one picture
Four layers. One cardinal rule.
Freshness flows down from the top; stability is protected at the bottom. A package belongs in the highest layer that can host it — so newer software can never contaminate the base.
Apps
Flatpak (Flathub) — browsers, IDEs, productivity, comms
Dev environments
Distrobox / Podman — bleeding-edge AI, CUDA, Python
Hardware enablement
Curated overlay — Mesa, kernel, NVIDIA, firmware
Base OS
Debian 13 Trixie — frozen · Btrfs + snapper + GRUB rollback
If an update ever breaks the system, you reboot, pick the previous snapshot directly from the bootloader, and you're back to a working machine in seconds.
The Freshness catalog
Newer software, only when it's proven safe.
Security fixes flow automatically. Feature and version jumps require your explicit consent — and a curated Freshness catalog tracks which fresher packages have actually been tested against the FoundryOS base.
We want that catalog to be deep and constantly re-verified. That testing runs on real machines and AI tooling — which costs money. Donations fund automated verification, so the approved catalog gets richer for everyone.
Help grow the catalog →The flywheel
- 1
Donations offset tokens
Community support covers the AI + compute cost of testing fresher packages.
- 2
Automated verification runs
Each candidate is installed, snapshotted, boot-health-checked, and rolled back in a clean VM.
- 3
Catalog gets richer
Proven packages join the approved Freshness catalog — fresh and safe.
- 4
Everyone benefits
You get newer software on a base that still can't be broken.
Pour a desktop that won't crack.
Free, open source, and built in the open. Try FoundryOS in a VM or on real hardware today.