Aero7 Weekly Devlog — August 16, 2026

[memegeko]

Aero7 Weekly Devlog — August 16, 2026

Period: August 10–16, 2026

This week focused on improving Control Panel integration, installed-system defaults, virtual-machine testing, installer rendering, and clearer boundaries between the Aero7 ISO and shell projects.

The repository also moved to its canonical home at aero7-open-project/aero7.

Features and additions

Native Control Panel support

Aero7 now includes the supporting packages and services needed by more native Control Panel pages:

• Plasma Network Management for connection settings
• UFW firewall management
• English and Dutch spell-check dictionaries
• AccountsService for account management
• UPower and power-profiles-daemon for battery and power settings
• PipeWire services for sound management

The firewall backend is now installed explicitly and checked by both source and release validation.

Better VM validation

The QEMU launcher gained disposable Disk Management fixtures for safely testing storage interfaces without exposing host disks.

The test configuration provides:

• A blank 8 GiB disk
• A 24 GiB disk containing PROJECTS and BACKUPS partitions
• A 64 GiB disk containing an ARCHIVE partition
• Unallocated space for testing partition visualization and actions

Opt-in SSH port forwarding was also added for installed-system validation and debugging.

Bugs fixed

• Fixed installer combo-box selection rendering.
• Disabled KWallet during installed-system setup to prevent unwanted first-login wallet prompts.
• Refreshed prebranded SDDM themes during installation so login branding stays current.
• Ensured the required UFW firewall backend is present instead of relying on an indirect dependency.

Project structure

The ISO and desktop shell are now explicitly maintained as separate projects:

• aero7-open-project/aero7 owns the Archiso profile, installer, disk backend, OOBE, recovery environment, media validation, and ISO documentation.
• aero7-open-project/aero7-shell owns the desktop configuration, application recipes, recovery tools, shell tests, and post-install integration.

The ISO pins one reviewed shell revision through sources.lock. Builds require a clean sibling shell checkout at that exact revision and copy only the approved runtime files into the image.

This keeps the installer image reproducible without merging or vendoring the complete shell repository.

Release status

The existing Beta 1 download remains available, but new ISO and package releases are frozen while final bug testing continues.

Source development and automated checks may continue. A new public artifact will only be published after the final release receives explicit approval.

No new release was published this week.

Testing status

All nine pushed commits received successful GitHub Actions source checks.

The latest run, covering the installer combo-box rendering fix, completed successfully.

The project continues to validate:

• Python installer and disk-planning tests
• Qt/C++ flow and controller tests
• QML components and screens
• Bash and Python syntax
• Release builds with CMake and Ninja
• Multi-resolution render-smoke captures
• Package manifests and pinned shell revisions
• Boot, display, and VM input configuration

Known limitations

• Aero7 remains Beta software.
• Only x86-64 UEFI systems are supported, with Secure Boot disabled.
• Intel RST/RAID On storage remains unsupported; disks must use AHCI.
• Encryption, unrestricted manual partitioning, offline installation, and legacy BIOS are unavailable.
• Hardware compatibility testing is still limited.
• Installation requires internet access.
• Language and regional selections remain limited.
• New release artifacts remain frozen during final bug testing.

Development activity

• 9 pushed commits
• 17 files changed
• 258 lines added
• 16 lines removed
• No merge commits
• No merged pull requests
• No closed issues
• No newly published releases

Notable changes:

• Add firewall and language-service support
• Ship native Control Panel services
• Add disposable Disk Management VM fixtures
• Add opt-in SSH forwarding
• Document project boundaries and freeze releases
• Fix installer combo-box selection rendering

Development this week was contributed by @memegeko.