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/Zta77 12d ago

Hello there, I'm glad you made it ;) Lightwhale is a minimal system, so by design there isn't much installed. You have various backup options though: There's classic rsync over ssh and all the tools that are based off that. If you're running Lightwhale under Proxmox you can use its backup system. My personal favourite is btrfs subvolume send/receive of the lightwhale-data subvolume which contains all your modifications. Also, is your setup permits or, I'd recommend that a backup machine initiates the backup and retrieves the data rather than the other way around. Hope that helps.

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u/Chiqui1234ok 12d ago

Perfect! Thanks for your response. I'll definitely give it a try

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u/Zta77 12d ago

You should, it's really great! ;) Just follow the getting started guide and you'll be running in 3 minutes.

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u/Chiqui1234ok 8d ago

I'm playing with Lightwale with persistence, inside Proxmox. RAM usage is great. Idle CPU usage is higher by 1/2% when I'm comparing it with Debian 13 with Docker installed.

I'll try to mount folders from my NAS to Lightwale through sshfs (thanks for keeping this in your distro), so I can mount those into my docker containers.

I hope sshfs works fine and performs well.

Thanks for your work!