2025: Still relatively uneventful
Welcome back to the yearly article, belated this time, where we look back on what happened with Feren OS this last year, aka 2025 in this case.
2025 was a special but relatively uneventful year — 2025.03 was released after the decision was made to release it without the new Store and instead release the upcoming new Store from scratch in a future separate update, and later on in 2025 celebrations began for a major milestone in Feren OS’s history — in 2025, Feren OS finally reached 10 years old!
However, 2025 has also been defined by draining motivation due to both internal and external factors, and a resulting art and coding block being experienced throughout the year, and even briefly in 2026 too. Normally I don’t talk about this, because there’s no need to add such a negative note, but it’s becoming hard to ignore as it also affects Feren OS’s development, isn’t it?
Fortunately, towards the end of 2025 I have begun to realise what the problems that have been consistently causing drained motivation as of late really are, and that my prior strategy of trying to address them has been nothing short of fruitless and that I should instead just walk away from them, so for 2026 I plan on finally doing that so that I can finally (hopefully) develop Feren OS without those problems happening so frequently anymore, hopefully finally ensuring a return to (mostly) form for Feren OS development that is, once again, ready for what lies ahead — my apologies for not realising that fruitlessness sooner, everyone. Hopefully, this year can be the return to form that has been awaiting Feren OS in the years since 2025.03 began development.
Regardless of that:
The new plan
A new plan for Feren OS is now in place, dependant on continuing external and internal factors, including new loose release projections and a revised plan for 10th Anniversary Release which you can read below:
10th Anniversary Release (Early 2026)
The upcoming release, rebased on Ubuntu 24.04 and shipping KDE Plasma 6 for the first ever time, featuring a new design for Feren OS in celebration of its 10 year milestone, and much more, has been pushed back to sometime in early 2026.
This release has taken a while as everything that could go wrong has gone wrong, whether it be internal or external factors — regardless, the plans for this release’s schedule are subject to somewhat change (between prioritising the redesign first or prioritising the system base first), which you will see the result of soon when the Alpha releases. As some examples, the Installer is currently recommending Feren OS be installed to an empty disk, some functionality like Bluetooth connecting is broken, and several more experience-ruining issues pending fixes — it’s an unprecedented mess that’s been taking a long while to fix while also dealing with external factors between.
In the meantime, Inspire 4.0 has been getting redone from scratch, with some early progress, for Plasma 6 (it originally started development on Plasma 5) — here’s some early previews of it so far:
The Major Update for this release is planned to release sometime after the initial release as several checks need to be added to the Major Updater, in lieu of Plasma 6 and its changes, meaning panels and other configurations will need specialised migration changes and all the packages sourced from KDE Neon will need to be modified to reinstate smooth transition paths for all 2025.03 users.
2025.03 Store Update, Unnamed post-”10th Anniversary Release” release (2026)
After 10th Anniversary Release is done, the next release in line will be a pair of releases — one for 2025.03 and another for 10th Anniversary Release — that add the upcoming Store that’s being completely remade from scratch with Feren OS, modularity and increased speed and reliability in mind, as well as providing a unified experience that introduces options currently missing such as an easy way to manage automatic updates and so on.
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This release is the remaining piece of 2025.03 that was delayed so that 2025.03 could be released, and is now planned to similarly be the remaining piece of 10th Anniversary Release so the release isn’t held back like 2025.03 infamously was.
Both releases will get unique version numbers, newer than 10th Anniversary Release, however the update to 10th Anniversary Release will be newer than the 2025.03 update to prevent confusion when downloading.
10th Anniversary Artwork/etc. (2026)
Upon the Store Update being released, the 10th Anniversary artwork and more will be released as a new special page of the new Store dedicated to finally celebrating the 10th Anniversary milestone that was reached in 2025.
As for the 11th Anniversary in 2026, I’m not sure yet about what will be done for the occasion — possibly a remake? Who knows.
Unnamed 26.04-powered Release (late 2026?)
Finally, there’s a release planned to rebase Feren OS to Ubuntu 26.04, although this is still a draft plan as circumstances might change beyond my control affecting what actually becomes of this release. What is for sure for this release is that:
It will be a minor release
Nothing special is planned for this release, besides coming with the Store Update pre-equipped upon its release — for those familiar with past teasers after the Store Update, the Transfer Tool rewrite is planned to occur in the release following this release.
It will be exclusively Wayland
However, this release will be making the switch to exclusively using Wayland instead of the legacy software that has powered previous releases (Xorg).
This switch will grant a smoother screen, greatly improved display scaling, support for modern hardware abilities, and much more on top of enabling the installation and usage of Wayland-exclusive applications such as Waydroid.
To aid in the transition to Wayland, the following is planned to be added in this release:
- Stubs for automation utilities such as
xdotool, redirecting to their compatible equivalents - If possible, transferring various settings such as display scaling automatically that normally would not automatically transfer
If all goes to plan, this release should involve a relatively seamless transition for existing users when updating to this release, although, to compensate for a very limited set of hardware whose graphics drivers won’t be compatible after the switch, there will be checks added in the Major Updater for this release (and those drivers, if still available, will be blocked from installation to prevent accidentally breaking Feren OS after the switch).
Given this, this release is currently expected in late 2026 if not early 2027 as, besides coming with the Store Update, this release’s switch to Wayland will require a lot of preparation, testing and backend changes to be made, alongside adding the aforementioned hardware checks for existing users.
