FlowOS v0.0.3 Release Notes
Boot Experience
- New animated GRUB splash screen — dark navy background with cyan tech grid, corner brackets, and the FLOWOS logotype. Displays behind the boot menu on both BIOS and UEFI systems.
- Initramfs ANSI splash — clears the screen and displays the full block-character FLOWOS logo in cyan as soon as the kernel hands off to init. Each boot stage (hardware init, media scan, filesystem load, overlay setup) shows a live spinner that resolves to a colored status line.
- Verbose boot entry added to GRUB menu for diagnosing boot issues without editing kernel params.
- RAM mode entry added — boots entirely into memory, useful for low-write environments.
Persistence
- Persistent boot mode — select "saves changes" from the GRUB menu and writes survive reboot via an OverlayFS upper layer on an ext4
flowos-datapartition. - Initramfs scans for the
flowos-datalabeled partition automatically; falls back to live mode with a clear warning if none is found.
Dual Boot
- GRUB menu includes a "Boot installed OS" entry that chainloads the first disk, preserving existing Windows / macOS / Linux installations.
SSH
- SSH sessions no longer prompt for an Anthropic API key. The key is loaded from
~/.flowos/api_keybefore the SSH check runs, so it is already exported in the session. - SSH host keys are pre-generated at build time so
sshdstarts on first boot without delay.
Bundled Tools
- Added to the ISO rootfs: Docker, Docker Compose, Node.js, npm, jq, tmux, rsync, nmap, netcat, strace, lsof, xclip, zip/unzip.
flowosuser is added to thedockergroup at build time — nosudoneeded for Docker commands.- DBus and Docker start automatically via OpenRC.
GUI Plugin Store
- Snap Store integration — search and install any snap package directly from the store UI without leaving FlowOS.
- Mode tabs let you switch between the built-in plugin library and the live Snap Store search.