AerynOS maintainer confirms that founder Ikey Doherty hasn’t been in contact for six months but assures the project remains stable and on track.
During my brief exchange yesterday with the AerynOS team about the coverage of their updated 2025.10 ISO release, they mentioned something about the project’s founder, Ikey Doherty, that I wasn’t entirely sure how to take at first — specifically the part that stated, “he stepped back six months ago.”
He did exactly this with Solus, he didn’t even respond to requests to release maintainership to someone else for months. He’s the reason project governance boards were invented.
Brilliant coder, but he flames out and fucks off.
Not unique to Solus core, or Aeryn either. Budgie is still a perpetual clusterfuck, with impossible goals, unmet promises, unfinished rewrites, and is somehow barely even a functional soft fork of Gnome with an extra panel now.
What they have been planning to do with Budgie, for years now, System76 accomplished within a year of Cosmic development
AerynOS seems to be ok though. Tune Morling (erno) seems to be very active in their repos and he is the current project lead.
I mean, we will see. I guess it is still in Alpha.
Really looking forward to seeing where COSMIC goes now that they have the basics in place. It could really give Plasma and GNOME a run for their money.
As a Niri user, I am also very thankful for the maturity that COSMIC is driving in projects like Smithay.
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