In early development
A modern Linux distribution
built for the next decade — not the last.
Lintel is a Linux distribution focused on modern hardware, thoughtful engineering, and maintainable architecture. We believe operating systems should embrace today's capabilities instead of carrying unnecessary complexity forever.
Our goal is to build a clean, predictable, Rust-forward distribution that favors clarity over legacy, native solutions over wrappers, and long-term maintainability over short-term convenience.
Lintel is built for engineers, developers, creators, and enthusiasts who value deliberate design, strong defaults, and a system that stays understandable as it grows.
We are building in the open — but we are building carefully. Public releases will come only when they meet the quality standards we expect from ourselves.
Origin
This project has been a long time coming. Lintel's creator ran Gentoo as a daily driver all through high school, starting in the early 2000s — compiling everything from source and learning how Linux actually fits together in the process. By 2009, that had turned into building custom distributions on top of Linux From Scratch, and the itch to release a proper distribution never really went away.
That history left a lasting preference for minimalism — systems built from exactly what's needed and nothing else. It's a thread that runs through every decision in Lintel, from the base package set to the tooling that builds it.
Lintel is that project, finally done the way it was always meant to be done.
Inspired by
Lintel doesn't invent from nothing. It draws deliberately from three operating systems that got foundational things right — two Linux distributions and one BSD — and combines their best ideas into one coherent system of its own.
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Arch Linux
A rolling-release model, pragmatic minimalism, and a package build system in the same spirit as pacman and PKGBUILDs — plus the Arch Wiki's ethos that documentation should be precise enough to trust.
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Gentoo
A source-first ports tree, tiered package builds, and aggressive CPU-targeted optimization — Lintel builds exclusively for x86-64-v4 rather than the lowest common denominator.
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FreeBSD
A strict, disciplined separation between base system and ports, careful release engineering, and a filesystem layout that takes subvolumes and snapshots seriously by default.
Engineering principles
These aren't vague values — they're specific, opinionated calls we've already made about the platform. Lintel picks one good way to do each thing instead of supporting every way.
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x86-64-v4, no compromise
The flagship build targets
x86-64-v4exclusively — AVX-512 and all. No-march=nativeguesswork, no quietly downgrading the whole distribution to satisfy hardware from a decade ago. Other architectures may come later, but the baseline they'd join is a modern one, not the reverse. -
Wild linker by default
Lintel is targeting the Wild linker as the system default wherever the package set is ready for it — faster, more parallel links and a more modern toolchain experience out of the box, not as an opt-in developer trick.
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One boot path
UEFI, GPT,
systemd-boot, and signed Unified Kernel Images. No GRUB, no legacy BIOS, no CSM fallback path to maintain. Committing to one boot chain means Secure Boot and TPM2 unlock are treated as first-class, not bolted on. -
Btrfs with real defaults
A subvolume layout (
@,@home,@var,@log,@cache,@snapshots) and a snapshot/rollback workflow ship on day one — you shouldn't have to design your own filesystem topology just to get safe upgrades. -
Rust-first, deliberately
Every Lintel-owned tool — build orchestration, the package index, release management, the installer,
inkyandquill— is Rust by default. Shell stays limited to tiny, obvious glue; nothing state-bearing or security-sensitive gets written as a script. -
Modern crypto and compression only
Network-facing services ship modern-algorithm defaults, not legacy fallbacks kept "just in case." Package and image compression is benchmarked and centrally set, not left to whatever a given PKGBUILD felt like using in 2015.
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Reproducible, provenanced builds
Every package and image carries an SBOM, a signature, and a recorded builder digest. Reproducibility is a release gate, not an aspiration.
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Fully self-hosted
Lintel builds Lintel. Every package and image is produced by Lintel's own toolchain, running on Lintel's own build image — no outside distribution's binary repositories in the loop.
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Long-term maintainability
Decisions are weighed against years of upkeep, not short-term convenience — LTS governance, explicit package ownership, and no unsupported package silently riding along in a stable release.
Containers & VM images
The same Minimal package manifest that boots bare metal also produces a small, purpose-built OCI container image and virtual machine images — built from an empty root, not carved down from a general-purpose install.
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Small by construction
lintel:minimalis assembled from a precise package manifest against an empty root filesystem — no docs, no stray locale data, no package cache, no unrelated repository configuration or signing keys. Nothing gets deleted after the fact to fake a small image. -
Built for real workloads
Aimed squarely at CI workers, Kubernetes, Podman, and other OCI-compatible runtimes — including as the eventual build worker for Lintel's own CI/CD, once it self-hosts.
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Signed and attested
Every image ships an SBOM, a provenance attestation, and a signature, tied to an immutable digest. Tag promotion never triggers a rebuild — the tested digest is the promoted digest.
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VM images, same foundation
The Minimal profile is also the root for QEMU/UEFI virtual machine images — the same manifest, the same Btrfs and systemd-boot defaults, so what you test in a VM matches what ships on bare metal.
Join the conversation
Lintel's real-time discussion happens on IRC. It's the best place to follow development and talk with the maintainer during early development.
libera.chat / #lintel
Open #lintel in webchat