// ITS FOSS — LINUX & OPEN SOURCE
This Solo Dev Already Built a Popular Distro. Now He's Trying It Again
Atomic distros work differently from the Fedora or Ubuntu install you're probably used to. Instead of layering individual packages on top of each other, the entire base system ships as one image, and updates land as a whole swap rather than a slow stream of package changes.
As a result, you get a system that's hard to break, where updates apply cleanly or not at all, rolling back a bad patch is easy, and there's no dependency hell to wade through since every install starts from the same known-good state.
The trade-off is flexibility. You lose the ability to tinker with individual system packages the way you can on a traditional distro, and anything outside the base image needs a workaround instead of a quick apt install or dnf install.
stillOS wants you to consider the upside of that trade-off. It calls itself a "maintenance-free" Linux desktop, built on an AlmaLinux 10 base with bootc handling the atomic updates.
Behind it is Cameron Knauff, who goes by the name "PizzaLovingNerd" in the Linux community, and this isn't his first distro.
His earlier project, risiOS, a Fedora-based distro aimed at smoothing out the rough edges for new users, picked up a solid following before it was absorbed into Nobara Linux, freeing him up to start stillHQ and, down the line, stillOS.
I tested stillOS 10.2 on a virtual machine in GNOME Boxes, running on my Fedora Workstation setup. Installation felt familiar right away. stillOS uses the same Anaconda installer AlmaLinux ships with.
If you've installed Fedora, RHEL, or any of their downstream distros before, you already know the steps involved here.
Onboarding is quick and doesn't waste your time. A short welcome screen kicks off Quick Setup, which walks you through installing apps, picking a browser, and grabbing essentials before dropping you onto the desktop.
Once you boot into stillOS, you will see that while the desktop is GNOME underneath, the distro ditches the usual top-panel layout for a taskbar-first interface, closer to Windows 11 than anything GNOME ships by default.