I built NexOS, a Debian 13 + KDE Plasma 6 workstation for makers (Arduino, KiCad, LaTeX, offline AI), with the help of AI. Early prototype, feedback welcome

Hi everyone,



I've been working on NexOS, a Linux distro aimed at students and makers who want a PC that's ready for electronics and development right after install, instead of spending an afternoon setting everything up.



What ships out of the box (each tested inside the image):

\- Arduino Center: 100 curated libraries in 20 categories, with version, license and dependency info. 82 of them compile-verified offline, plus board and serial-port diagnostics

\- KiCad 9 (tested ERC/DRC, Gerber export, 3D render)

\- TeX Live + TeXmaker, including French and Arabic documents

\- Python Center: 8 ready environments (science, AI, vision, electronics, data, code quality…)

\- An AI assistant that runs fully offline on the CPU, loaded only when you use it

\- One store (Debian packages + Flathub), Btrfs snapshots before/after every update with one-click rollback, ufw firewall on by default



Full disclosure: I built this with heavy help from an AI coding assistant (Claude). It wrote a lot of the build scripts, tests and docs under my direction, and every feature claim above comes from a test that actually ran in the image. The evidence is in the repo.



Honest limits:

\- It's a prototype, tested in VMs (QEMU, VirtualBox) but not yet on real hardware

\- It's not lighter than Ubuntu: about 1.07 GB RAM at idle in my VM tests. I published the comparison, including where it loses

\- No proprietary NVIDIA driver yet; you need to disable Secure Boot to boot the ISO



What would help me most: if you try it in a VM or on a spare PC, tell me your hardware and what worked or broke.



GitHub (ISO in Releases): https://github.com/rayanetaieb/NexOS



Thanks for reading, happy to answer any questions!

https://redd.it/1x8mes2
@r_linux