Matcha Linux

Matcha Linux is one of my most ambitious projects to date that I’m really proud of.

To put Matcha Linux simply, you can compare matcha to tea. With a little bit of extra setup, you get a smooth-sailing, performant experience that works.

It’s built on top of Alpine Linux with a beautiful Gnome desktop environment and extensions that not only make Matcha Linux look goodm but also provide real functionality and usability.

Alpine Linux base helps with 3 key things:

• Performance: startup times are way faster than something systemd-base, because of the lightweight nature of Alpine Linux.
• Security: Alpine Linux is known for its security, and Matcha Linux inherits that.
• Size: Alpine Linux is small, and Matcha Linux is small too, while providing a fully-offline installation experience.

To make Matcha Linux and shape its identity, several things were needed to be done:

• Custom Gnome extension and configuration: Matcha Linux by design is a green-themed Linux distribution, and to make it look good, several customizations were made to the Gnome desktop environment.
• Custom installer: Matcha Linux has a custom installer that is built on top of the Calamares installer, which was adapted and built for newer Alpine Linux versions, because official mirror support was dropped since Alpine 3.19.
• Custom ISO profile and branding: Matcha Linux is designed to be both easy to build and include no unnecessary packages.

If you want to shape a future where 8GB ram isn’t the bare minimum for an empty desktop, Matcha Linux is for you. It doesn’t get in your way when using it, and it doesn’t waste your time with unnecessary bloatware. It is a Linux distribution that is designed to be used and looked at.

If you want to learn more about how an idea became reality, you can read about the making of Matcha Linux here.

If you want to try Matcha Linux, you can download it from its official GitHub repository here.