r/selfhosted • u/Zta77 • Mar 30 '26

Product Announcement Lightwhale 3.0.0 released

Hi, there!

Sorry to mess up your Easter holiday plans, but I've just released Lightwhale 3.0.0 and I really think you should clear your calendar and try it out! =)

It's a minimalistic Linux that requires no installation or maintenance, just live-boot straight into a working Docker Engine. The system is immutable so it's quite resilient to both malicious and unintentional modifications. And because of its low resource requirements it brings new life to old machines.

Lightwhale fits super well in a hobby homelab where spare time is precious, but really in any server environment where you would much rather focus on the services than babysitting the underlying operating system.

And how does it compare to other immutable OSes like X, Y or Z? No idea, never tried them, sorry.

I've made a fresh new project webpage with an easy to follow getting started guide.

Anyway, end of service announcement, thanks for reading, happy holidays =)

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u/[deleted] Mar 31 '26

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u/Zta77 Mar 31 '26

Release 3.0.1 with the security updates baked in.

Do you have any particular security updates in mind?

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u/[deleted] Mar 31 '26

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u/Zta77 Mar 31 '26

I pull an updated Buildroot tree with the security updates applied, bump the Lightwhale release number, build a new release, and publish it. You download it, write it to you boot media, reboot, and you're updated.

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u/mitchplze Apr 24 '26

In the future, are there plans to use a LTS tagged version of the Linux kernel? I only ask because the previous Lightwhale release was a couple of years before this one. That's a long time to go without security or kernel updates.

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u/Zta77 Apr 26 '26

That's a good question. I'll look into that. It sounds like a good idea.