a small, cheese-loving mouse building a minimal XFCE distro

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What is this?

XueOS is a minimal XFCE spin of Ubuntu 24.04 LTS, built to be two things at once:

1. A ready-to-go XFCE development environment — clone, build, and hack on real XFCE components (xfce4-panel, xfwm4, ...) the moment you boot it. apt build-dep/apt source work out of the box, xfce4-dev-tools is preinstalled, and the Xubuntu team's own staging PPA is wired in for testing pre-release XFCE builds.
2. The home for Besra, a Qt6, NetSurf-esque browser under active development — the eventual default browser here. Firefox ships in the meantime so the desktop is actually usable.

The desktop itself is kept stock XFCE on purpose — no custom theme, no rearranged panel. If someone links to this saying "come help develop our desktop environment," they should see upstream XFCE, not a reskin.

🐭 What's in the box

• Base: Ubuntu 24.04 LTS ("noble"), amd64, debootstrapped minimal — not a full Ubuntu image
• Desktop: stock XFCE4, LightDM, autologin
• Dev tooling: build-essential, xfce4-dev-tools, gdb, meson/ninja, deb-src enabled, Qt6 dev headers (for Besra) alongside GTK3/libxfce4ui headers (for XFCE itself)
• Browser: Firefox (via Mozilla's own apt repo — Ubuntu's archive firefox package is a snap stub, and this project blocks snapd outright)
• Chat: Element — XFCE's own community chat lives on Matrix
• Installer: Calamares, so you install once and update forever after via plain apt
• No snapd. Ever. Purged and pinned to -1 so it can't sneak back in.

🎨 Branding

Wallpapers, boot splash, login screen, and icon all feature Xue, the mascot — but that's where the customization stops. The desktop itself (theme, panel layout) stays stock XFCE, deliberately. See art/ for the source logo/wallpaper assets.

📦 Repository layout

build-iso.sh              # the ISO build engine (debootstrap → chroot → squashfs → grub-mkrescue)
Makefile                  # make build-iso / make update-repo / make clean
config/
  build.conf               # package lists, paths, repo settings
  build.local.conf.example # template for secrets — copy to build.local.conf (gitignored)
overlay/                  # files copied verbatim into the image: branding, calamares config, casper hooks
art/                      # source logo/wallpaper/icon assets
scripts/
  publish-deb.sh           # publishes a built .deb to the XueOS apt repo
ATTRIBUTION.md             # Ubuntu-base disclosure (see below)

Building it yourself

make build-iso              # needs sudo — debootstraps + builds xueos-dev-amd64.iso
make update-repo DEBS="..." # publish .deb package(s) to the apt repo
make clean                  # tear down build state, including any stray chroot mounts

Getting it

• ISO: https://xueos.mp.ls/iso/
• apt repo: https://apt.mp.ls (distribution besra) — nothing published there yet, reserved for when Besra ships

Attribution

XueOS is a derivative of Ubuntu 24.04 LTS, not affiliated with or endorsed by Canonical. See ATTRIBUTION.md for the full disclosure and licensing notes.

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_{made with 🧀 by the XueOS project}