In the light of this year’s roadmap focus on “rigidity, clarity, performance”, Sculpt OS 25.10 looks the same as the version 25.04 but might feel different as it includes countless under-the-hood improvements of the two preceding framework releases 25.05 and 25.08. User interaction on performance-starved platforms like the PinePhone has become visibly smoother thanks our recent CPU scheduling advances. The streamlined block-storage stack combined with various refinements of the package-installation mechanism make the on-target installation of 3rd-party components a bliss. Regarding supported hardware, we steadily follow the tireless work of the Linux kernel community. All PC driver components using Linux kernel code are now consistently based on kernel version 6.12.
↫ Sculpt OS 25.10 release announcement
There’s also an optional brand new configuration format, which optionally replaces Scultp’s use of XML for this purpose. Norman Feske, one of the co-founders of Genode Labs, published an article detailing how to test this new format, which also goes much deeper into how it works. For Sculpt OS’ 25.10 release, Alexander Böttcher has also released an experimental image with five different kernel to choose from. The image is for PC, and works as a live system so there’s no need to install it to explore Sculpt OS.
Speaking of Alexander Böttcher, he also published an article about improvements and changes to Sculpt OS’ lockscreen component. This component has existed for a very long time, and has been improved considerably over the years, and Böttcher’s article details how to install it, configure it, and use it.
The progress of Genode continues to amaze, and its technical characteristics leave Haiku in the dust, although the latter remains so much more usable for actual tasks.
I feel that for my own use case a mere handful more Qt apps from the KDE stable – complimenting the very solid Falkon port already there – would make it quite usable as a daily driver.
I am sure that others might counter that the browser, combined with the ability to run specific programs inside a guest OS by way of virtualization, is all that is required. And that having to remain compatible for actual programs between releases would make the blistering development pace slow down.