Collabora unveiled the Linux distribution Apertis 2026, originally designed for automotive systems but now adapted for a broader range of electronic devices, embedded technology, and industrial equipment. Apertis is utilized in various devices such as the gaming console Atari VCS, Raspberry Pi 4 board, automotive SoC R-car, and the Bosch D-tect 200 wall scanner.
Reference system images for architectures x86_64, arm64, and armhf are available for download. Manufacturers can create customized system environments independently due to the modular nature of the distribution, supporting both traditional deb package-based assemblies and monolithic atomically updated images based on OSTree. Each Apertis release has a maintenance period of 1 year and 9 months, with corrective bug fix releases issued every three months.
The distribution is constructed using packages from Debian GNU/Linux as its foundation, with a significant redesign to mitigate risks associated with certain free licenses like GPLv3, which prohibit tivoization. Apertis offers alternatives to GNU utilities, avoiding the GPLv3 family of licenses. For instance, the distribution provides modern alternatives like the uutils project’s coreutils and findutils written in Rust under the MIT license, alongside Sequoia-PGP as a replacement for GnuPG under GPL-2+ and LGPL-2+. Users concerned with GPLv3 legal issues have the option to use traditional utility sets.
Apertis 2026 is based on the latest LTS branch of the Linux kernel, employing the 6.18 kernel instead of the Debian 13 package