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Get Gloam

One live ISO for x86_64 PCs, built on NixOS 26.05. It runs the full desktop without touching your disks, and doubles as a NixOS installer.

Latest release

Gloam 0.2.1

Released October 6, 2026 · 2.33 GiB · Release notes

GitHub limits a download to 2 GiB, so the ISO comes in 2 parts. Download all of them, then join them into gloam-live-0.2.1-x86_64-linux.iso.

Part 1 of 2 gloam-live-0.2.1-x86_64-linux.iso.part0 · 1.86 GiB
Part 2 of 2 gloam-live-0.2.1-x86_64-linux.iso.part1 · 491 MiB
Checksum gloam-live-0.2.1-x86_64-linux.iso.sha256 · SHA-256 of the joined ISO

Join and verify

Linux and macOS, in the folder you downloaded to:

cat gloam-live-0.2.1-x86_64-linux.iso.part0 gloam-live-0.2.1-x86_64-linux.iso.part1 > gloam-live-0.2.1-x86_64-linux.iso
sha256sum -c gloam-live-0.2.1-x86_64-linux.iso.sha256     # macOS: shasum -a 256 -c

Windows (Command Prompt):

copy /b gloam-live-0.2.1-x86_64-linux.iso.part0 + gloam-live-0.2.1-x86_64-linux.iso.part1 gloam-live-0.2.1-x86_64-linux.iso
certutil -hashfile gloam-live-0.2.1-x86_64-linux.iso SHA256

Write it to a USB stick

Any tool that writes raw images works: GNOME Disks (“Restore Disk Image”), balenaEtcher, or dd. Everything on the stick is erased.

sudo dd if=gloam-live-*.iso of=/dev/sdX bs=4M status=progress oflag=sync

Replace /dev/sdX with the stick itself (check with lsblk), not a partition.

Or try it in a virtual machine

Gloam renders with your GPU on real hardware and falls back to software rendering in a VM. Give the VM a virtio GPU and a few cores:

qemu-system-x86_64 -enable-kvm -m 4096 -smp 4 \
  -vga none -device virtio-gpu-pci \
  -cdrom gloam-live-*.iso

What you need

A 64-bit x86 PC with UEFI or BIOS boot
4 GB of RAM (8 GB is comfortable)
A GPU with open Mesa drivers: Intel and AMD work best; NVIDIA is untested
A USB stick of 4 GB or more

Gloam is young and experimental. It is great for trying the Shady desktop and for tinkering; keep backups before installing it on a machine you depend on, and tell us what breaks.