Welcome to the website for F3OS: The Free Family-Friendly Operating System.
F3OS is a Linux distribution based on Devuan, a SystemD-free fork of Debian, that includes DNS-based web filtering designed to prevent access to pornographic and other objectionable websites, using your choice of any of eight free publicly-available DNS filtering services. The original edition of F3OS uses the Xfce (pronounced as four individual letters, as if it were all uppercase) desktop environment, which provides everything you need in a desktop environment while also using less memory than GNOME, Cinnamon, or KDE. To try it out for yourself, head on over to this page and grab yourself a copy.
LATEST NEWS (March 25, 2026): F3OS now has its own blog, at https://www.f3os.com/blog (under the “about” section in the menu).
LATEST NEWS (November 17, 2025): The latest version of F3OS have arrived, codenamed F3OS Exodus, since this a major update, version 2.0 of F3OS. As of today, F3OS is has switched bases from Debian to Devuan, which is a SystemD-free fork of Debian that was introduced in 2014. F3OS is available with your choice of the Xfce desktop environment (F3OS Original) or the IceWM window manager (F3OS Junior).
WHAT’S NEW IN F3OS EXODUS:
- F3OS is now based on Devuan instead of Debian in response to woke policies Debian has been pushing for some time as well as other controversies that I learned about earlier this year from conservative and independent tech journalist Bryan Lunduke. About the only difference you will run into is that anytime you need to manually restart a service, the commands are now different due to SysVInit now being the init service in F3OS instead of SystemD.
- The Waterfox web browser has now been replaced with Brave in F3OS Original and Chromium (the open-source base for Google Chrome, by the way) in F3OS Junior, which I discovered can be set to run in a mode that conserves as much memory as possible — a must for old computers.
- The /etc/hosts file is now controlled by a package named “f3os-hosts”. This way, I can easily update it by updating the package anytime I discover something that may be objectionable to families but that, for whatever reason, is not blocked by the DNS-based filters. You can, however, edit the file if you wish.
- Both editions of F3OS now use the XLibre display server. XLibre is a fork of XOrg, which was being held hostage by Red Hat, who refused to allow any updates to be made to it in order to promote Wayland, which, despite first being introduced in 2008, is still very buggy. Earlier this year (2025), German software developer Enrico Weigelt, who had also done significant work on the XOrg project, had enough of Red Hat’s stonewalling and took the XOrg code and forked it to create XLibre, which has already received numerous enhancements in the short amount of time it has been in existence.
- There are now new GTK theme variations. Previously, F3OS only had all-light or all-dark themes. Each color scheme now has a total of four variations — light, BP (stands for “black panel” or “brown panel”, depending on the theme — basically, a light theme with a dark panel), dark (dark theme, but with light backgrounds for where you type stuff), and darker, the new all-dark themes. There are also three other new themes — one with camouflage colors, a theme with Christmas colors, and a patriotic red, white, and blue theme, which I’ve dubbed “F3OS Old Glory”.
LATEST NEWS (November 4, 2025): Due to some very objectionable wallpaper (namely, the gay pride and transgender flags) being included in the “gnome-backgrounds” package, which is required to be installed with the Cinnamon desktop environment, I have been forced to completely discontinue offering F3OS with Cinnamon. I hated to do it, and I apologize in advance for any inconvenience this may cause, but this is something that, as a God-fearing and Bible-believing Christian, is completely unacceptable to me. Yes, I know some will not be happy about this, but I must answer to God and God alone on this matter, regardless of what anyone else thinks.
I, Fred McKinney, the creator of F3OS, am a born-again Christian who is deeply burdened over how easy, free, and unrestricted access to online pornography has morally and spiritually ruined my home country, the United States of America, and other countries as well. F3OS is my attempt to combat that, which I offer here for you completely free of charge and without any cost or obligation to you. Besides, things are changing in regard to operating systems, and Linux is slowly but surely gaining converts every day. In fact, earlier this year, in 2024, at the time I’m writing this, Linux now has a 4% market share on desktop and laptop computers, and that number is expected to rise as the years roll on. Therefore, we need a Linux distribution like F3OS to offer a family-friendly alternative. F3OS is, after all, my declaration of war against online pornography and the destruction it causes for individuals and families everywhere and is my attempt to make computing and the Internet great again.
If you are a pastor and would like to have me come to your church to talk about and demonstrate F3OS to your parishioners, I would be more than happy to do so. Please contact me, Fred McKinney, at a6ad36a6ad36 if you would be interested in having me come to speak.
As I said before, welcome to the F3OS website. Have a look around and see what it’s all about! :-)