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URL: https://www.phoronix.com/news/RBOS-2026-02-22

⇱ RBOS 2026-02-22 As Latest Linux Live ISO To Showcase Wayland - Phoronix


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RBOS 2026-02-22 As Latest Linux Live ISO To Showcase Wayland

Written by Michael Larabel in Operating Systems on 23 February 2026 at 06:37 AM EST. 11 Comments
While these days nearly every major desktop Linux distribution is using Wayland or at least making it available, a decade ago before reaching that maturity one of the options for showing off the potential of Wayland was the oddly-named RebeccaBlack OS. With "RBOS" it shipped the very latest Wayland components and different desktop and toolkit options to easily try out Wayland-based environments from a live Linux environment. Released overnight was a surprise update to RBOS.

Around fourteen years ago RebeccaBlack OS made it easy to try out Wayland as well as for easily running into Wayland's different bugs and limitations of the time. But in more recent years with most Linux desktop distributions successfully shipping Wayland, the usefulness of RBOS hasn't been as significant as during the early days of this alternative to the X.Org Server.

RebeccaBlackOS 2026-02-22 is now available though and it has re-based against Debian Trixie as its OS base while continuing to ship the very latest Wayland libraries, a variety of toolkits with Wayland support enabled, and different desktops/compositors like Weston, GNOME Shell, KDE Plasma, Wayfire, Sway, LXQt, and more.

👁 RBOS example


The new ISO release has a number of improvements including various console changes for allowing a VT-less kernel build, log-in manager improvements, switching to the Linux 6.19 kernel for the latest kernel drivers, DRM Panic QR code support, Qt 6.10, and more.

Those wanting to try out the new RebeccaBlack OS release for a leading-edge Wayland experience can grab the new ISOs via SourceForge.

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.