Ikey Doherty Plans To Show How To "Properly" Build A Modern Linux Distro

Written by Michael Larabel in Operating Systems on 5 September 2026 at 02:35 PM EDT. 47 Comments
OPERATING SYSTEMS
Ikey Doherty is back in the Linux distribution space. Sort of. Ikey Doherty who was the founder of the Solus Linux distribution as well as Serpent OS (now AerynOS) as well as having been employed by Intel on their Clear Linux team is back at it again in the Linux space.

While being a full-time traveler and content creator, Ikey Doherty wrote into Phoronix to share his upcoming Linux plans. He says he is "not making another distro" or not directly, but does intend to publicly showcase how he feels a modern Linux distribution should be built. That will also include building his own new public package manager.

He explained that he has "declared war on the industry" and with this latest Linux distribution effort not planning on maintaining the distribution long-term but planning to just publicly highlight how it should be done. He envisions it as sort of like "Clear Linux meets Serpent".

Barney Linux distro


For those wanting to follow along on his journey for publicly chronicling how he feels modern Linux distributions should be built, he'll be publishing updates via his LinkedIn and YouTube.


In his initial video made public today, Ikey outlined the plans as a source-based, fully-optimized, update-friendly and immutable Linux distribution. And leveraging the Rust programming language as much as possible. It's being developed under the Barney name.
Related News
About The Author

Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

Popular News This Week