A Linux you can read end to end.

01 What you get

from source

Every package is cross-compiled from the project’s own release by a recipe in the repository: more than 400 of them. The packages are signed, and doas apk upgrade keeps a rolling system current.

small parts

musl instead of glibc, BusyBox, runit instead of systemd. A service is a few lines of shell that you can open and read.

a real desktop

KDE Plasma 6.6 on Wayland with melon’s own look: login screen, boot menu, Plasma style, Konsole colours, lock screen. On first login it offers Firefox, VLC, Steam and Prism Launcher from Flathub, and asks before installing any of them.

real hardware

Touchpads, Wi-Fi (Intel, Realtek, MediaTek, Qualcomm), Bluetooth, webcams, USB drives, printers. If something doesn’t work, sudo melon-hwreport writes one file you can attach to an issue.

graphics

Mesa with LLVM: radeonsi and RADV for AMD, iris and ANV for Intel, nouveau and NVK for NVIDIA, llvmpipe when there is nothing else. NVIDIA’s own driver is an option too.

disks

XFS on GPT. One installer question gives you LUKS2 encryption. It also installs next to Windows without touching it and adds Windows to the boot menu.

tools

gcc, clang, Go, Rust, cmake, meson, git and QEMU are in the package repository, built for melon. They are not on the ISOs, and the welcome window offers the basic ones.

games

Steam through Flatpak, GameMode, SDL3 and melon’s own pinball. More below.

02 It looks like this

Screenshots from melon’s own automated tests, taken in a virtual machine.

03 Which ISO?

• melon desktopx86_64 · about 626 MB

  KDE Plasma on Wayland. A live session you can try first, and the graphical installer. This is the one most people want.

  Get it
• melon consolex86_64 · about 248 MB

  No desktop: a small system with a quick text installer, for servers, tinkerers and virtual machines.

  Get it
• melon 32-bit desktopi686 · LXQt · test build · about 633 MB

  LXQt on Wayland for old netbooks and 32-bit laptops, with the same installers. Tested in QEMU on an emulated Atom N270 with 2 GB; not yet tried on a real netbook.

  Get it
• melon 32-bit consolei686 · test build · about 379 MB

  No desktop, for 32-bit machines, with the quick text installer. Tested in QEMU only so far.

  Get it

Builds are test releases for now. Every file has its checksum on the download page.

04 Installing

1. Download the ISO and write it to a USB stick with Rufus, balenaEtcher, Ventoy or dd.
2. Boot from the stick. The live session starts Plasma by itself, so you can try melon before you commit.
3. Keeping Windows? Shrink it first in Disk Management (right-click C: → Shrink Volume) and leave at least 20 GB unallocated. melon goes into that space and adds itself to the boot menu. GRUB lists Windows too.
4. Double-click Install melon and follow the installer. Then answer a few questions. About two hundred of them. See below.

Needs: a 64-bit Intel or AMD processor, 4 GB of memory (8 GB is better), 20 GB of disk, UEFI or legacy BIOS.

06 Read a package

This is a whole package: recipes/zlib/MELONBUILD, as it is in the repository. The builder fetches the source, checks its hash, runs the two functions with the cross compiler, splits out the -dev files, signs the result and adds it to the repository index.

# recipes/zlib/MELONBUILD
pkgname=zlib
pkgver=1.3.1
pkgdesc="A compression/decompression library"
license=Zlib
url=https://zlib.net
source=(zlib-1.3.1.tar.gz)
subpackages=(zlib-dev)
build(){ ./configure --prefix=/usr --libdir=/usr/lib --shared; make -j$JOBS; }
package(){ make DESTDIR=$pkgdir install; rm -rf $pkgdir/usr/share/man; }

Services are as plain. This one turns on compressed swap in memory (/etc/sv/zram/run), and runit keeps it running:

#!/bin/sh
exec 2>&1
modprobe zram 2>/dev/null
[ -e /sys/block/zram0/disksize ] || { sleep 3600; exit 0; }
if ! grep -q "^/dev/zram0" /proc/swaps; then
  mem=$(awk "/MemTotal/{print \$2}" /proc/meminfo)
  echo zstd > /sys/block/zram0/comp_algorithm 2>/dev/null
  echo $((mem / 2))K > /sys/block/zram0/disksize
  mkswap /dev/zram0 >/dev/null && swapon -p 100 /dev/zram0
fi
exec sleep 2147483647

And on an installed system, packages are one command:

# more software, from melon's signed repository
doas apk add gcc g++ make pkgconf
doas apk add clang go cmake meson git
doas apk add rust cargo ripgrep
# keep everything current
doas apk upgrade