meowvenos
Made of Arch. Blessed with pink.Get Meowven OS ↓

Get started

Your first steps into Meowven.

Start with the live desktop

Choose the KDE Plasma or Hyprland ISO. Both boot into a live desktop where you can look around, open the Shrine, and try the terminal before installing.

Hyprland 0.2.0 and Plasma 0.1.0 are still in early development. Start in a virtual machine with a disposable virtual disk. Installation and physical hardware support are still being tested.

Try it in a virtual machine

  1. Get your chosen edition from the download page and verify its checksum.
  2. Create an x86_64 Linux virtual machine with 4 GB of memory, two CPU cores, and a 40 GB virtual disk. These are suggested test settings, not measured minimum requirements.
  3. Attach the Meowven ISO as the virtual optical disc and boot it. Choose the live Meowven entry when the boot menu appears.
  4. Wait for the desktop. Open Konsole in Plasma, or press Super+Q for Kitty in Hyprland, and run fastfetch.

For Hyprland, the tested QEMU graphics path uses Virgl 3D acceleration. Its software-rendering path and physical NVIDIA graphics remain unverified. In Hyprland, Super+R opens the app launcher, Super+N opens the dashboard, and the launcher includes the Shrine. The key guide is at /usr/share/doc/meowven-hyprland/KEYS.html.

On an ARM computer, use an emulator such as QEMU with an x86_64 guest. Cross-architecture emulation is considerably slower. These x86_64 images cannot boot natively on ARM hardware.

Make yourself at home

Open The Shrine for a little Meowbah devotion, or open your terminal and explore the package command:

fastfetch
meow help
meow grant --dry-run kate

The dry run prints the pacman command without installing anything. Changes made in the live session normally disappear when it shuts down.

When you're ready to install

In Plasma, open Install Meowven OS on the desktop. Hyprland uses a separate Meowven installer (X11) session at the login screen. Read the edition-specific installer notes before trying it. Calamares walks through your language, keyboard, partitions, and account; check the final summary carefully before confirming.

For this first release, use a blank VM disk. On a physical computer, back up your data and review the hardware notes first. Alongside installation and physical NVIDIA operation have not yet been validated.

Read the installation guide →