AerynOS 2025.08 (alpha) lets you choose between Gnome, COSMIC Alpha 7, KDE Plasma, or the Sway tiling window manager for your desktop environment. An independent Linux distribution (meaning it's not based on any other distribution) created by Ikey Doherty (the originator of Solus), AerynOS 2025.08 offers quite a few updates and improvements.

First off, there are plenty of software updates, such as Gnome 48.4, Plasma 6.4.4, Sway 1.11, COSMIC Alpha 7, Linux kernel 6.15.11, Mesa 25.2.1, LLVM 20.1.8, sudo-rs 0.2.8, and much more. 

This release is also transitioning to a package-set model for core packages. Package sets are a collection of packages that are related, making them much easier to manage. Each of the different desktop environments has its own package set. According to the official announcement, package sets are just a stepping stone to the system model approach that will make it possible for an "exact reproduction of a user's installed system."

Another improvement with AerynOS is the work done for virtual machine support (as both guest and host). The developers have also created a console-only option that installs a minimal package set that boots to the Linux console (so, no desktop environment).

You can read the full project update report and download an ISO of the alpha release.