AnigmaOS - up & coming!
Posted: 5. Feb 2026, 13:08
So gapan has been kind enough to invite me to the forum despite hoops and hurdles, posted a couple links.. let me fill in the blanks.
Salix is Linux for the lazy Slacker.
AnigmaOS is (to be) Linux for the learning Slacker.
Most of you are here because you know Slackware well and love its stability but find its ecosystem a bit 'over the top' for day to day operations. I can't say I disagree. With my project I plan to target the middle and 'advanced' (graphically/conceptually) with a method of onboarding.
AnigmaOS is to be a super polished graphically driven 'monstrosity' of an OS. By this I mean: I plan to take/make a list of all the things people say are "hard to do" in Slackware and drop in GUIs that either abstract the user completely, show them whats going on.. or show them & explain what's going on.
These are to be built with wails (golang+webkit2gtk) + React.js + likely TailwindCSS (blueprint doesn't scale well). The next 'big graphical apps' on the list are the onboarding/setup wizard to be used on first boot and the service manager. This service manager will be tied against sysvinit rather statically, but reading services with a modular approach. Meaning: cli based application core which reads compiled 'service drivers' which are trained to read/write/parse the same httpd.conf and start the same rc.httpd we've been doing for years. I'm going to drop in man pages, populate structs as sections, have graph-based dependency chain management (graphically, using existing libraries), etc. Rather than rewriting anything, the idea is to interface with things that have already been there for 30+ years and either allow people to use them without caring how they work (the grandma's in our lives), the learner (show me whats happening and explain why), and advanced (just give me the tools and let me do my crap).
These tools will be developed independently and any "automatic features" will be a cron entry calling a binary wrapped in a gui. No more daemons will be created for these systems. I am using things like dunst and whatnot as existing services to tie into services - but I have no intention of adding or modifying existing services in order to get done what needs to be done. This means that gapan and any Salix user (with installed dependencies) should be able to pick and choose from the 'ecosystem' I start writing and utilize whatever you may like.
AnigmaOS itself will exist as a stripped down subset of Slackware. Not everything is in place or has been made public yet. A domain has been registered and the new gpg keys ship using it (animga.systems). Here's the planned 'stack':
To tie them together I'm constructing a subsystem of binaries and json profile structure to allow for automatic (twice a day) change over from dark to light mode across the wms and DEs. i3's sessions will be tied in by default to check for these modes before launch. Backgrounds, status bar, qt/gtk settings to be manually 'synced' at this time to keep the UI consistent. Picom, rofi, etc installed by default. Volume buttons and brightness wired in with existing tools using dunst to display changes. Printscreen launches spectacle & blueman in floating mode by default, this sort of thing.
I'm tired of systems that either compromise in the form of friendly UI but slow and/or unstable.. or systems that force a heavy learning curve/onboarding experience before being able to "actually use them". The crew here is a rather interesting mix I'd say of advanced users who prefer not.. having to dive deep into everything they already knew just to 'install something'. I get that.. but that also means most of you are already more advanced than those I'm really trying to 'target with this'. But it also means you're the perfect crew to help me both test and hopefully critique whats going on in a way that isn't just the 'old guard' approach of: "Slackware has no GUIs. Slackware needs no GUIs."
While the above is entirely true.. I'm trying to make a project that just extends it one step further:
Slackware has no GUIs because Slackware needs no GUIs. But.. People want GUIs, so the Anigma Project is going to provide GUIs.
Salix is Linux for the lazy Slacker.
AnigmaOS is (to be) Linux for the learning Slacker.
Most of you are here because you know Slackware well and love its stability but find its ecosystem a bit 'over the top' for day to day operations. I can't say I disagree. With my project I plan to target the middle and 'advanced' (graphically/conceptually) with a method of onboarding.
AnigmaOS is to be a super polished graphically driven 'monstrosity' of an OS. By this I mean: I plan to take/make a list of all the things people say are "hard to do" in Slackware and drop in GUIs that either abstract the user completely, show them whats going on.. or show them & explain what's going on.
These are to be built with wails (golang+webkit2gtk) + React.js + likely TailwindCSS (blueprint doesn't scale well). The next 'big graphical apps' on the list are the onboarding/setup wizard to be used on first boot and the service manager. This service manager will be tied against sysvinit rather statically, but reading services with a modular approach. Meaning: cli based application core which reads compiled 'service drivers' which are trained to read/write/parse the same httpd.conf and start the same rc.httpd we've been doing for years. I'm going to drop in man pages, populate structs as sections, have graph-based dependency chain management (graphically, using existing libraries), etc. Rather than rewriting anything, the idea is to interface with things that have already been there for 30+ years and either allow people to use them without caring how they work (the grandma's in our lives), the learner (show me whats happening and explain why), and advanced (just give me the tools and let me do my crap).
These tools will be developed independently and any "automatic features" will be a cron entry calling a binary wrapped in a gui. No more daemons will be created for these systems. I am using things like dunst and whatnot as existing services to tie into services - but I have no intention of adding or modifying existing services in order to get done what needs to be done. This means that gapan and any Salix user (with installed dependencies) should be able to pick and choose from the 'ecosystem' I start writing and utilize whatever you may like.
AnigmaOS itself will exist as a stripped down subset of Slackware. Not everything is in place or has been made public yet. A domain has been registered and the new gpg keys ship using it (animga.systems). Here's the planned 'stack':
- Plasma (wayland/x11 support)
- i3 session (added, tiling, x11 support)
- swayfx session (-current+ required for this sadly, tiling, wayland support)
To tie them together I'm constructing a subsystem of binaries and json profile structure to allow for automatic (twice a day) change over from dark to light mode across the wms and DEs. i3's sessions will be tied in by default to check for these modes before launch. Backgrounds, status bar, qt/gtk settings to be manually 'synced' at this time to keep the UI consistent. Picom, rofi, etc installed by default. Volume buttons and brightness wired in with existing tools using dunst to display changes. Printscreen launches spectacle & blueman in floating mode by default, this sort of thing.
I'm tired of systems that either compromise in the form of friendly UI but slow and/or unstable.. or systems that force a heavy learning curve/onboarding experience before being able to "actually use them". The crew here is a rather interesting mix I'd say of advanced users who prefer not.. having to dive deep into everything they already knew just to 'install something'. I get that.. but that also means most of you are already more advanced than those I'm really trying to 'target with this'. But it also means you're the perfect crew to help me both test and hopefully critique whats going on in a way that isn't just the 'old guard' approach of: "Slackware has no GUIs. Slackware needs no GUIs."
While the above is entirely true.. I'm trying to make a project that just extends it one step further:
Slackware has no GUIs because Slackware needs no GUIs. But.. People want GUIs, so the Anigma Project is going to provide GUIs.
It's worth noting that this actually started years ago as "AllegianceOS". Name change occurred, but both SourceForge and Jesse Smith @ Distrowatch had commented that it seemed to be hard to find my 'method of production' and source (despite it being written mostly in Python at the time.. sigh..). The Anigma System Builder was my response to that: a pipeline which both allows me to build AnigmaOS and does so in a way that is deterministic, auditable, and done so via annoyingly extensive package-by-package command-by-command JSON based logging. Each build generates about 114mb~ of searchable JSON logs. The builder itself uses 4 levels of logging and has built-in log viewers. Transparency is the name of the game. I'm not going to be making announcements of what versions of a given program I'm shipping because it'll literally just be in a downloadable file.