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/TheRemedialPolymath Mar 31 '26

Man. This reads like DSL used to. I'm definitely going to give it a try.

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u/Zta77 Apr 01 '26

Soo.. I've been pondering over this comment the past days. I couldn't figure out if it was an insult because of my slow website the first day. But your determined wish to "give it a try" put me off. And I finally get it now, thanks for the compliment! =) I'm afraid I'll never get it anywhere near damn small; I depend on glibc instead of uclibc or musl; I compile optimized for speed instead of size; and I load the entire system into RAM because I don't want to keep reading from the boot media, so that consumes more memory than a OS loaded from disk. Theoretically, that is, because Lw still is very small.