Should I make this an official release?
I've been building this OS (Novalium) for myself over the past year and a half, mostly because the other OSes out there didn't quite give me what I wanted. Recently more and more people have come across it and seem genuinely interested in getting access to Novalium OS.
I'm a software developer who loves building and tinkering with software. A while back I figured I could combine my existing skills with the help of AI to build the OS I wanted and use it as my ultimate homelab setup. The interest in Novalium has grown beyond what I expected, so I'm posting here to start some discussions about it.
I wanted an OS where VPN (WireGuard, Tailscale), network DPI, metrics, Docker, VMs, LXC, iSCSI, NVMe-oF, SMB and NFS were all first-class citizens. I wanted detailed metrics and a privacy-focused OS. But above all, I didn't want to run traditional RAID and risk losing everything if two disks failed — so Novalium ships with NonRAID. Data stays on each disk as whole files, with a parity disk computed across all data disks. If I lose any single disk, I can rebuild it. If I lose the parity disk plus a data disk, I only lose the data on that one disk and keep everything else, because the files aren't striped across disks.
That's the intro.
I've also been spending a lot of time on the app store, getting common Docker templates available out of the box and making it easy for people to publish their own community templates. I'm thinking of making Novalium OS open-source with some paid tiers that unlock extra functionality, just so I can keep the project alive and keep spending time on improvements the community asks for.
Would anyone like to participate in an alpha phase?
Posted May 1, 2026, 9:11 PM UTC