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tuinix

A Pure Terminal Based Linux Experience

No desktop environment. No window manager. Just a carefully curated terminal on a reproducible, declarative NixOS foundation with ZFS encryption.

Download & Install Try in a VM

Install on Your Machine

Most users want to grab the ISO and install tuinix on real hardware. An internet connection is required during installation.

1. Get the ISO

Download tuinix.v0.4.0.iso (v0.4.0) or build it yourself from source.

# Or build from source
git clone https://github.com/timlinux/tuinix.git
cd tuinix && ./scripts/build-iso.sh

2. Flash & Boot

Write the ISO to a USB drive and boot from it. UEFI is required -- disable Secure Boot.

Use balenaEtcher or Ventoy to flash the ISO.

Advanced: using dd 
sudo dd if=tuinix.v0.4.0.iso of=/dev/sdX bs=4M status=progress

3. Run the Installer

The interactive TUI installer walks you through account setup, disk selection, ZFS encryption, locale, and hostname.

sudo installer

Full Bare Metal Guide Test in a Virtual Machine

What You Get

NixOS + Flakes

Fully reproducible, declarative system configuration. Roll back to any previous generation instantly.

ZFS Encryption

Native ZFS encryption with compression, checksums, snapshots, and self-healing data integrity.

Terminal Only

No X11. No Wayland. Minimal resource usage, maximum productivity. Every byte serves a purpose.

Instant Rollbacks

Every system change creates a new generation. Boot into any previous state from GRUB.

After Installation

Once installed, your system boots to a pure terminal with ZFS-encrypted storage and your tuinix flake at ~/tuinix for customization.

Contributing

Want to hack on tuinix itself? The development environment runs on any machine with Nix installed.