SpaceOS: a personal Fedora bootc desktop and lessons learned building it

[SpaceShaman]

Hi everyone,

I’d like to share SpaceOS, a personal Fedora bootc-based desktop distribution that I built for my own hardware and workflow:

https://github.com/SpaceShaman/spaceos

It uses Sway and is delivered as an OCI image, with transactional updates, rollback support, an Anaconda-based installer, and automated image publishing through GitHub Actions and GHCR.

While building and using it on physical hardware, I worked through several interesting areas, including:

• installing alongside Debian using LUKS and LVM;
• keeping independent boot and EFI partitions;
• building EVDI for the image kernel to support DisplayLink;
• creating an installer ISO with the SpaceOS image embedded;
• rebuilding automatically when the Fedora bootc base image changes;
• staging updates in the background without forcing a reboot.

I wrote an article describing the motivation, implementation, problems I encountered, and what I learned along the way:

https://spaceshaman.github.io/posts/how-and-why-i-built-my-own-bootc-based-linux-distribution/

SpaceOS is tailored to my own setup, so I don’t present it as a general-purpose distribution. My hope is that the repository can instead serve as a practical example or starting point for people building their own bootc-based systems.

Feedback on the approach and implementation would be very welcome.

[Johan-Liebert1]

Sounds super cool!