We write a GNOME-native office suite in Rust. It has three applications: Letters for text, Tables for spreadsheets, and Decks for presentations. They use GTK4 and libadwaita, and we release them as Flatpaks.

This post is about one part that other projects can copy. It shows how a small codebase competes with thirty years of office-suite work, and does not port one line of it.

Users of each image-based distribution ask the same question. How do you install one package? This is my answer. Its name is remora. It adds local layers in the container-native way. It operates in the same manner on each variant that we release, and the base can use dnf, zypper, pacman, apt, emerge, or apk.

sudo remora install htop

That is the full interface.

Picking a Linux distro has always felt weirder to me than it should be. Most of them are like 95% the same packages with 5% different defaults, and yet somehow choosing one feels like a permanent decision you're stuck with forever.

I didn't come up with this idea, to be clear. Bedrock Linux was mixing packages from different distros on one system back in 2012. Lennart Poettering wrote the whole blueprint out in his mkosi posts — sysext, confext, repart, UKIs, the works. CarbonOS took a run at OCI image delivery with btrfs snapshots on Fedora Atomic back in 2021. And Jessie Frazelle was running her whole desktop out of Docker containers in 2015, which honestly should have gotten more attention than it did. Everyone kept poking at the same idea from a different angle.

What actually made it usable were two things. bootc — you get an OCI image, you switch to it, it's atomic, and you can roll back if you screwed something up. And Project Bluefin proved people would actually use this every day, not just as a tech demo. Once I saw that working at scale I started wondering how far you could actually push it.

So that's what TunaOS is, I guess — pushing it. We ship 12 variants right now across 5 package managers and pretty much every major Linux family, and they all end up as the same desktop experience underneath. If you can swap the base OS out from under a desktop and nothing changes, the distro isn't really a decision anymore. It's just a setting.

Biggest change to the build system since I started this thing: desktops are now just a YAML file. No shell script per desktop, no touching the Containerfile, no CI edits. Wanted to write this one up because I'm pretty happy with how it turned out.

So this is the TunaOS blog. We decided that the project needs one. Commit messages are not the correct place for all of this.