// ITS FOSS — LINUX & OPEN SOURCE
This New Distro Wants to Achieve What Ubuntu Failed to Do Nearly a Decade Ago
Remember Ubuntu’s convergence dream? One operating system across your desktop, tablet, and phone, with apps that adapt to whichever screen you’re using.
Canonical pursued that vision with Unity 8 and Ubuntu Phone before pulling its investment in 2017. Now, a new project called Luma wants to tackle a similar ambition.
It’s early days, and only a desktop build is available to download. But its plans go well beyond becoming another desktop Linux distro.
The project's founder, Nick (nmcmil), has worked with a small group of people to achieve this, with the group answering to no shareholders or investors and taking all the key project-related decisions themselves.
When I tested it, it was built on Fedora 44 and ran a recent version of the Linux kernel. The team does say that they have reworked enough of the stack that it doesn't count as a typical distro.
Their blog on AI also points out that the distro features AI-assisted contributions, with contributors being held responsible for any work that carries their name.
The desktop is called Prairie, and the team describes it as a hard fork of GNOME. Its goal is to provide a shell, windows, fonts, and apps that all look and feel the same.
Apps are built with GTK and Libadwaita, with the project shipping LumaUI as a toolkit outside developers can use to make their software feel at home on the system. Luma’s original code is licensed under Apache 2.0, and anything taken from upstream retains its original license.
The distro comes with pre-installed apps built for it; these include Depot as the app store, Viola as the browser, Charlie as the email client, and Tide for any music needs, alongside the self-explanatory Filer, Notes, Photos, and Messages.
If you opt for the Creative Collection, you get access to Canvas for design, Focus for RAW photo editing, Grid for spreadsheets, Stage for slides, Write for documents, Reel for video edits, and Sessions for audio mixing.