KognogOS is an Arch-based, semi-rolling, tier-aware Linux distribution. It's built on one simple idea: not all updates are equal.

Most rolling-release distributions treat every package the same — when an update is available, it gets installed. Your kernel and core system libraries update automatically alongside a trivial icon theme. One bad kernel sync and your machine doesn't boot.

KognogOS solves this with a three-tier update model enforced by nog, its tier-aware package manager. Tier 1 packages — kernel, bootloader, glibc, systemd, mesa — are held for 30 days after upstream publish, giving the community time to catch regressions. Tier 2 — desktop environment and key applications — are held for 15 days. Tier 3 — everything else — flows through in 7.

The result feels like a rolling release for most of your software, but behaves like a stable distribution for the parts that actually matter.

KognogOS ships with a curated in-house Forge suite — TUI tools for package management, bootloader configuration, and terminal customization — and is available in five editions matched to how you actually use a Linux machine: Basic, Office, Gaming, Development, and Full.

• Stability where it counts — kernel, bootloader, and core libraries get a 30-day community buffer before they land on your machine
• Freshness everywhere else — Tier 3 packages stay current without ceremony
• Safety by default — nog invokes pacman as a subprocess; every transaction goes through pacman's own signature verification
• Beautiful by design — KDE Plasma on Wayland, Catppuccin Mocha throughout, one opinionated terminal stack
• Transparent tooling — the Forge suite is readable source code, no magic
• Built to grow — the architecture is designed to eventually support a fully independent repo and build pipeline

KognogOS ships as five editions, all sharing the same core (KDE Plasma, nog-managed updates, the Forge suite, drivers, default terminal stack) and differing only in the app stack layered on top. Edition definitions live in config/profiles.toml — the single source of truth the Calamares installer will read.

The shared core. Boots straight into a KDE Plasma Wayland desktop with the KognogOS terminal welcome box, Fresh Editor as the default text editor, both Google Chrome and Brave ready to go, and nog + grubforge + alacrittyforge installed out of the box.

Basic + OnlyOffice, Obsidian, Thunderbird, Xournalpp, Elisa, Spotify, GIMP, Pinta, Discord, Telegram, plus a full CUPS printing and scanning stack.

Basic + Steam, Lutris, Heroic, Wine, Proton-GE, RetroArch, 32-bit graphics, Gamescope, GameMode, MangoHud, and OBS Studio for streaming.

Basic + VS Code, Neovim, rustup, Node.js, Docker, Tmux, a modern CLI toolkit (bat, eza, fd, ripgrep, fzf, zoxide), build tools (cmake, meson, ninja), and debuggers (gdb, lldb).

Basic + Office + Gaming + Development — everything KognogOS ships.

Every package on the system belongs to one of three tiers, enforced by nog:

The most critical packages on your system — kernel, bootloader, glibc, systemd, mesa. Updates are held for 30 days after upstream publish. Once the hold expires, the update flows through nog update like any other package. Expert mode: set manual_signoff = true in /etc/nog/tier-pins.toml to require explicit nog unlock <pkg> --promote for every Tier 1 upgrade.

Desktop environment and key applications — Plasma, SDDM, PipeWire, NetworkManager, the Forge suite, and more. Held for 15 days.

Everything else. A short 7-day safety buffer, then updates flow through automatically.

For full details, see the nog documentation.

KognogOS ships with an in-house suite of TUI tools that replace the "edit a config file and pray" workflow with safe, guided interfaces for common system tasks. All Forge tools are pinned to Tier 2.

Tier-aware pacman wrapper in Rust. Classifies every package, enforces hold windows via pacman's own --ignore mechanism, and delegates to yay/paru for AUR. Runs as your user; escalates only to sudo pacman when necessary. → v1.0.2 stable · github.com/jetomev/nog · yay -S nog

Full TUI for managing GRUB: safely edit /etc/default/grub, browse and apply themes, reorder boot entries, detect other operating systems, with timestamped backups before every change. → Shipping · github.com/jetomev/grubforge · yay -S grubforge

TUI for managing Alacritty's TOML config — font, colors, opacity, keybindings — with live previews and reversible edits. → Shipping · github.com/jetomev/alacrittyforge

A TUI companion for nog plus a unified interface across AUR helpers, Flatpak, and Snap. In active development. → Upcoming · github.com/jetomev/nogforge

KognogOS/
|-- assets/
|   |-- wallpapers/                # 10 wallpapers across Arch + Semi variants
|-- bootstrap/                     # Future: installer bootstrap scripts
|-- config/
|   |-- pacman.conf                # Shipped pacman.conf (core/extra/multilib/chaotic-aur)
|   |-- profiles.toml              # Edition definitions (Basic/Office/Gaming/Development/Full)
|   |-- dependencies.toml          # Legacy package manifest (being migrated into profiles.toml)
|   |-- tier-pins.toml             # Tier 1/2 package assignments shipped as distro default
|   |-- nog.conf                   # Shipped /etc/nog/nog.conf
|   |-- alacritty.toml             # Default Alacritty terminal config
|   |-- config.fish                # Default Fish shell config
|   |-- tide_config.fish           # Default Tide v6 prompt configuration
|   |-- fish_greeting.fish         # Terminal welcome-box trigger
|   |-- sysinfo.py                 # Terminal welcome-box script
|-- docs/                          # Future: documentation
|-- installer/                     # Future: Calamares configuration
|-- logo/                          # KognogOS logo (transparent, light, dark)
|-- repo/                          # Future: custom package repository
|-- LICENSE
|-- README.md

KognogOS is in active early development. The package manager (nog) and two of the four Forge tools (grubforge, alacrittyforge) are shipping to the AUR. The edition model is defined in config/profiles.toml. The installer, custom repository, and ISO pipeline are next.

What's solid today:

• nog v1.0.2 stable on AUR — tier-aware updates, AUR integration, documented privilege model, full dogfood pass
• grubforge shipping on AUR — full TUI for GRUB management
• alacrittyforge shipping — terminal configurator
• Five-edition product surface formalized in config/profiles.toml
• Default terminal stack: Alacritty + Fish + Tide v6 + KognogOS welcome box
• Full pacman.conf shipped with chaotic-aur enabled
• Wallpaper set: ten wallpapers across Arch + Semi variants

• Product surface formalized — five editions in config/profiles.toml
• nog extracted to its own stable repo + AUR package
• pacman.conf with chaotic-aur shipped as distro default
• Default terminal stack (Alacritty + Fish + Tide v6 + welcome box)
• KDE Plasma config export — capture the active Plasma configuration (panels, widgets, shortcuts, theme) into /etc/skel/ as the distro default
• Calamares installer — five edition radio buttons; auto-detect CPU microcode + GPU generation; reads config/profiles.toml as source of truth
• ISO build pipeline — archiso-based; unified installer ISO with edition selection
• nogforge — finish the TUI companion for nog
• Custom package repository — repo.kognog.org with staging / testing / stable channels
• First public ISO release

nog spun out; KognogOS repositioned around external nog + in-house Forge suite

Clean repositioning release. No new distro-level capability ships, but every piece of repo drift since v0.8.0-alpha is resolved and the product surface is redefined around the new reality: nog is now a standalone stable project, and KognogOS is the distro that ships it by default alongside a curated Forge suite.

Repository cleanup:

• 🗑 Removed the vestigial nog/ subtree — nog now lives at github.com/jetomev/nog and ships as an external AUR package
• 🗑 Removed empty docs/DESIGN.md and docs/TIERS.md stubs
• 🖼 Wallpaper set expanded: the old three-variant set was replaced by two five-variant sets ("Kognog OS Arch" + "Kognog OS Semi"), ten wallpapers total; new default is Semi Catppuccin Mocha

New configuration surface:

• 📋 config/profiles.toml — canonical edition-definition file with five editions (Basic, Office, Gaming, Development, Full). Calamares will read this at install time.
• 📦 config/pacman.conf — was a 0-byte placeholder; now ships with core / extra / multilib / chaotic-aur enabled, plus the distro's pacman tweaks (Color, VerbosePkgLists, ILoveCandy, ParallelDownloads=5)
• 🎚 config/tier-pins.toml — full factory pin coverage: every package the distro ships now has an explicit Tier 1 or Tier 2 assignment, so a fresh install has opinionated protection out of the box. Tier 1 expanded to cover linux-firmware, base/base-devel, all four kernel headers, CPU microcode, Vulkan ICDs, 32-bit graphics, and all seven Nvidia kernel module variants. Tier 2 expanded to cover okular, bluez, python, yay, pacman-contrib, fresh-editor-bin, cups, docker, and the Wayland-on-Nvidia glue. Legacy hold_days fields removed (since nog v0.8.0 these live in nog.conf). manual_signoff default flipped to false to match nog v0.9.0+ novice-friendly behavior. Browsers moved to Tier 3 (implicit default).

Positioning:

• 📖 README rewritten top-to-bottom around the new product surface
• 🌳 Tier model description updated to match nog v1.0 (30 / 15 / 7 days, not the old 10 / 3)
• 🧩 The Forge suite replaces the old per-tool README sections — one coherent story for nog + grubforge + alacrittyforge + upcoming nogforge
• 🎨 Editions section added — the product surface made explicit for the first time

Default terminal stack

• Alacritty config with Catppuccin Mocha, JetBrains Mono Nerd Font, 150x50 window
• Fish shell config with cargo path
• fish_greeting.fish triggers sysinfo.py on every new terminal session
• tide_config.fish applies the KognogOS default Tide v6 prompt
• alacritty, fish, alacrittyforge pinned to Tier 2
• ttf-jetbrains-mono-nerd and alacrittyforge added to dependencies

nog AUR package + man page (work subsequently migrated to the standalone nog repo)

• nog available on the AUR
• Man page added
• Version reads from CARGO_PKG_VERSION

Terminal welcome box

• KognogOS-branded terminal welcome box on every new session
• Live weather (Open-Meteo), live tier notifications (red for Tier 1 sign-off, green for Tier 2 ready)
• Built with Python + Rich, Catppuccin Mocha throughout

nog pin persistence (work migrated to the standalone nog repo)

nog update — Tier 1 exclusion (work migrated to the standalone nog repo)

nog search + system install + GrubForge included + KognogOS logo

Tier system + real pacman calls (work migrated to the standalone nog repo)

Initial release — nog CLI skeleton (work migrated to the standalone nog repo)

The KognogOS ecosystem lives across several repositories. All are developed by the same team.

• nog — tier-aware package manager, the engine that makes KognogOS semi-rolling. Stable on the AUR.
• grubforge — GRUB bootloader manager. Stable on the AUR.
• alacrittyforge — Alacritty terminal configurator. Shipping.
• nogforge — unified TUI for nog / AUR helpers / Flatpak / Snap. In development.

jetomev — idea, vision, direction, testing

Claude (Anthropic) — co-developer, architecture, implementation

KognogOS is a collaboration between a human with a clear vision for what a Linux distro should feel like, and an AI that helped design and build the pieces — one config/profiles.toml entry at a time.

KognogOS is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License v3.0 as published by the Free Software Foundation.

See LICENSE for the full license text.

KognogOS is in early alpha. Ideas, feedback, and contributions are welcome — open an issue or pull request on GitHub.

If this project resonates with you, consider starring the repository. It helps others find it and motivates continued development.