No dates promised unless we actually have them. Finished items stay at the bottom, because they answer the question we get asked most: whether the project is alive.
The two defects that could stop a 26.06.3 installation were found by someone installing on a real BC-250, not by us: in a virtual machine they were invisible by construction, because the code that breaks the hardware is exactly what a virtual machine cannot execute. From here on no image ships without a full install on a real board, and the build refuses to produce an image when a check fails.
A step-by-step guide with real installer screenshots, reshot for every language: the interface changes, so translating the captions is not enough. A first-time installer sees exactly what is in front of them, in their own language.
The base moves from sid to trixie (stable) plus backports: a stable system with a recent kernel and graphics where it matters. This answers the fairest criticism we have had — sid gives you the newest software but it can break, and on a home console that hurts.
Play from another device while the board works away in a corner of the house. The module is planned for the remote panel, which already handles screen, terminal and AI.
A selector to install games on a USB SSD instead of the system disk. Steam ships as a Flatpak, so changing folder is not enough: the container needs the right permission, and that is exactly the part we want to take off the user's hands.
Polish was reviewed by a native speaker, and it shows. We are looking for someone to do the same for Ukrainian: if that is your language and you fancy lending a hand, you are welcome.
Until now SkillFishOS spoke four languages: Italian, English, Polish and Ukrainian. The downloads tell a different story — over the last thirty days Russia and Spain together account for nearly a third of them, with Brazil close behind. We have added Russian, Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, German and French: applications, installer, login screen, menu entries, remote panel and website. French does not come from the numbers — France is not in our ranking — and that is exactly why it is here: nobody arrives from a country whose language the site does not speak, so reading the downloads alone only ever confirms the languages you already have. Translations have moved out of the code into one file per language, so anyone who wants to fix one sends a single file instead of editing six sources they have never seen. The Polish was written by Cyryl Sochacki; for the new languages we have no native speakers, so they are marked as needing review and corrections are welcome.
Not just the applications: the infrastructure that turns a build into something installable is public too — the signed apt repository, the upload to the mirrors, the statistics, the website deploy. None of those scripts contains a credential: they read files that stay out of the repository, and the templates to fill in sit next to them. Anyone who wants to rebuild the same chain at home now can.
Done: every image also ships as a torrent, with a magnet link beside it, seeded by a machine of ours that stays up around the clock. The mirrors remain inside the torrent as HTTP fallback sources, so a download starts even when nobody else is sharing. From SourceForge in Europe you got around 250 kB/s: on a 4.7 GB image that was the first thing that made people give up.
We wrote our own. Btrfs Assistant is a good program, but it speaks the language of the filesystem: subvolumes, qgroups, snapper configurations, separate tabs. Someone who just wants to go back to last night because an update broke something has to learn all of that first. SkillFishOS Snapshots answers three questions and stops there: which snapshots do I have, make me one now, take me back to that one. Anyone who prefers the command line keeps skillfish-rollback.
Both done, though not where they were promised: they are two applications of their own, not two tabs in the Tuner. SkillFishOS HUD asks the machine which sensors it actually has, keeps only the ones that answer and writes its own configuration, so a BC-250 gets the panel it always had and any laptop gets CPU, RAM and disk instead of nothing at all. SkillFishOS Fan Control has the curve editor, with the lead that starts the fan before the heat arrives.
The system keeps five restore points, taken by itself before every upgrade, and lists them in the boot menu. skillfish-rollback takes you back to one of them for real, in a single command — your home directory is left alone.
Italian, English, Polish and Ukrainian across the applications, the login screen, the web panel and the installer slideshow. Plus a rule: if a translation is missing you get English, never Italian.
The board presents itself as 6 cores / 12 threads, but the two missing ones are switched off by configuration, not defective. SkillFishOS turns them back on at boot: +20% measured on multi-threaded work, with no BIOS changes.
Looking for what changed instead? That is in the news.
Got an idea, or is something missing? Requests are welcome: write from the contact page or open a discussion on GitHub. Building what someone actually needs beats guessing well.
