First of all, I’d like to say thank you for considering F3OS.
F3OS Original (Xfce desktop environment)
F3OS Plus (Cinnamon desktop environment)
F3OS Junior (LXDE desktop environment)
F3OS Deluxe — coming soon!
In addition, in order to install F3OS to your hard drive, whenever you boot up a live DVD or USB of F3OS, at the splash screen, you now install F3OS by choosing the second item in the menu where it mentions installing F3OS to your hard drive. You will still go to the login screen and log in just as if you were running it live — but once you log in, it automatically fires up Systemback, which will guide you the rest of the way through installing F3OS to your hard drive.
Latest improvements (May 18, 2025): New releases of F3OS, based on Debian Bookworm 12.10 have just landed, in Original (Xfce), Plus (Cinnamon), and Junior (IceWM) editions. There have been a lot of updates with this one, as follows:
- Due to complaints about Mozilla Firefox having recently stated that they will use user data however they want, including selling your data, Mozilla Firefox has now been replaced in F3OS with the Waterfox web browser in all editions of F3OS, which I, Fred McKinney, have packaged and will periodically update.
- I recently looked up sites where people can submit photos that uses artificial intelligence to create simulated nude photos. While the filters do block out quite a few of these websites, I discovered some two dozen or so such sites that the filters missed that I have instructed F3OS to also block.
- The DNS Settings menu entries have been moved to the “Network” or “Internet” categories in the menus.
- The Educational Extras menu entries have been moved to the “Educational” categories in the menus.
- The “Educational Extras” and “Quick Installs” scripts have added the “sudo apt update” directive to all software installation scripts, in order to a) insure that you’re getting the latest version, and b) allow the scripts to run if you haven’t already updated the APT cache.
Latest improvements (January 10, 2025): LOTS of improvements with this release! With the last release on December 27, I discovered that putting the DNS Settings in as a package somehow erased my filtering settings. I saw that the APT packaging system does not work very well with making such related files immutable — thus, I went along with it and undid the immutable attributes of those files, and now see what a mistake that was. For those installation scripts, I have gone back to hard-coding them into F3OS, no longer in the form of software packages. In fact, those packages have been removed from the F3OS repositories.
Other big news — I tried installing F3OS with the Calamares distro installer on a laptop I acquired back in December that used to belong to a friend’s late stepson, and it installed perfectly. Previously, when I had tried to install F3OS with Calamares, Calamares would hang at about 75% of the way through installation. Therefore, I had used the Refracta installer in all previous releases of F3OS. The Refracta installer, however, does require some familiarity with Linux in order to install it. But since I was able to get F3OS to install with Calamares, this release now uses the Calamares installer. I still have the Refracta installer in the F3OS repos, however, and if you should run into problems installing F3OS with Calamares, it’s still available as an alternate installation system. Another issue with Calamares, though — when I tried putting F3OS branding into Calamares, I couldn’t get it to start. Thus, what you’ll see when installing is what you’d see during a stock Debian installation. But then again, F3OS is basically Debian with safeguards I’ve added to block access to pornographic websites.
Also, due to problems I had when installing the last edition of F3OS Junior, F3OS Junior now features the LXDE desktop environment. LXDE is, however, based on the Openbox window manager, and thus, it’s still possible to run it as pure Openbox without LXDE if you wish to do so.
Finally, I am expecting two more SSDs to arrive in the mail next week, on which I will be creating and releasing two more editions of F3OS. F3OS Classic will feature the MATE desktop environment, a fork of the GNOME desktop environment, which will be familiar to anyone who used Ubuntu between 2004 and 2010. F3OS Deluxe will feature the KDE Plasma desktop environment. While I can’t promise that I will do so, I will do my best to have these released before the end of January.
Latest improvements (August 9, 2024): I discovered that the latest Systemback would not install F3OS when I tried it. I have therefore decided to switch back to using Refracta Snapshot to build the ISOs and Refracta Installer to install F3OS onto your computer. As a huge bonus, F3OS no longer requires you to log in when running it live — it now instead automatically logs right in as the “demo” account. The password, however, should you need it, is still “demo” (minus the quotes). The package “update-notifier” has now been added to all editions of F3OS. Whenever a piece of software on your system has an upgrade available, you’ll see a yellow and orange icon in your taskbar notifying you of such. When it appears, just click it, enter your password, and it goes right ahead and does its thing. And, the biggest news is that F3OS Plus is now available, featuring the Cinnamon Desktop Environment, which offers numerous applets that let you trick out your desktop in countless ways, while F3OS Plus provides you the same protection against pornography and other online undesirables, just like F3OS Original and F3OS Junior do. Enjoy!
Latest improvements (July 25, 2024): Well, it already happened — I discovered something else that needed to be fixed, and that was my fault. I discovered that I had failed to put in the correct colors on the new brown themes, plus I decided to lighten up the brown highlight color on those themes a little. That has now been fixed.
Latest improvements (July 19, 2024): This release is based on Debian 12.6, which was released on June 30. This release also contains many theme fixes and updates plus the addition of the Orage calendar app, available either in system menus or by left-clicking on the clock, in both editions of F3OS. This release has also changed the default typeface used in the system as well as on this website to Ubuntu for the sake of better readability. Unless I discover something else that needs to be fixed, this will hopefully be the last preview release. After this, I plan to set up the F3OS software repository. Once that is done, a new release will be issued that’s no longer considered a preview, which should come out later this year. Once that is done, software fixes will be done at the repository level, ending the need for such frequent releases, with new releases coming out on a more fixed schedule.
Latest improvements (May 4, 2024): Two new tools have been added to F3OS by default: 1) zram-tools is a Linux kernel module that lets you set up compressed file systems and swap space, which is quite useful on systems with limited memory or servers running large amounts of data by allocating 100 MB of RAM as compressed swap space. If you need to adjust how much RAM it uses, this can be edited in /etc/default/zramswap (sudo / root privileges required). 2) Boot Repair is a graphical tool that repairs boot problems in F3OS, any other Linux distribution. or Microsoft Windows by reinstalling GRUB (GRand Unified Bootloader) and then restoring access to any and all operating systems you had installed before running into bootup problems.
Latest improvements (April 30, 2024): In the Quick Installs software script, I have added an entry to let people know about and, if they wish, install Timekpr-nExT, which allows parents or bosses to install Timekpr to help enforce computer usage times for children or subordinates. It is not installed by default, but I added it to the script to let users know that it’s out there and available if they wish to install it.
Latest improvements (April 13, 2024): Educational extras by grade and by subject have now been merged into a single educational extras installation script; DNS filtering and installation scripts now open up full-screen; the verse of the day now shows up in a popup upon logging in, plus there’s now an application that lets you see the verse of the day again. While the verse of the day no longer shows up when opening a terminal, you can still view it in a terminal by typing “verse”.
Latest improvements (February 29, 2024): Upgraded to a Debian 12.5 base; Keyboard shortcut for xkill changed from Win-Z to Win-Delete; F3OS Junior is now an Openbox-only edition.
Latest improvements (January 26, 2024): I realized, after the fact, that I had forgotten to include IPv6 addresses in the /etc/hosts file (see next paragraph) for those on IPv6 networks, which has been corrected. Also ran software upgrades.
Latest improvements (January 25, 2024): I will not mention them here, as I do not want to give anyone on a non-filtered system any ideas — but, for different reasons, I decided to permanently ban access to three different websites. These sites are not pornography sites per se — but one could use them to view such, combined with the fact that they fail to keep objectionable material off of there. To see what they are, in F3OS, go to the /etc/hosts file and you’ll find them there along with comments explaining why I decided to ban access to these sites in F3OS. The filename of the latest ISO file has added the word “original” to it. This refers to the fact that this ISO uses the Xfce desktop environment, which F3OS has, so far, used all along. Coming soon, however, will also be F3OS Junior, which is an even more lightweight system as far as memory usage goes, as it uses the LXDE desktop environment. Also, since LXDE uses the Openbox window manager to draw the window frames and titlebars, if you need something even more lightweight than LXDE, you can, from the login screen, click the session icon, where you’ll see a popup menu where you can select an LXDE session or a purely Openbox session for an even faster computing experience. F3OS Junior isn’t available yet — but it will be sometime soon, so keep checking back every so often.
Latest improvements (January 16, 2024): After much frustration with E-mailing various file hosting sites that host Linux distributions for free asking to have F3OS hosted with them and never hearing back from them, I finally took matters into my own hands and asked my wife if I could spend a little money to have 100 GB of storage with Google Drive (more storage space than I’m pretty sure I will need to host this ISO and any others I create, once I create ISOs with other desktop environments). I told her about it being only $20 a year (less than $2 a month) if you go with the annual plan, and she gave her consent. Previously, on MediaFire, downloads had recently become unbearably slow, taking several hours to complete on our cable Internet connection, which was not acceptable to me. I just uploaded the ISO file to Google Drive, which took about 15 minutes, and did a test download, and it downloaded on our cable Internet connection in less than 2 minutes. Needless to say, I was very pleased with the download speed. Also, since I now have 100 GB of storage space plus since I have now added timestamps to the ISO file names, I will no longer need to post a “currently unavailable” message whenever a new or corrected version of F3OS is being uploaded.
Latest improvements (January 14, 2024): Corrected a typo in the DNS Settings script that still said to, at the bottom of the terminal window, choose from selections A through J when two DNS filtering services, since deleted, failed to filter out pornographic websites (see next paragraph). It now reads A through F. Also, after this upload is completed, there will be updated screenshots on the screenshots page, as there have been a few minor changes to several things in F3OS. Corrected an error I had fixed in a previous release but didn’t correct where I store the file online, thus fouling up that part of the last release — it’s fixed in my file storage and the ISO file now. Added timestamps to the ISO filenames now.
Latest improvements (January 14, 2024): After testing of all of the filtering services offered, it was discovered that NextDNS and OpenDNS completely failed to filter out pornographic websites. Updated IP addresses from NextDNS were attempted, but those did not work at all, either. Therefore, NextDNS and OpenDNS are no longer available in F3OS. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause as well as for the failure of NextDNS and OpenDNS to filter out pornographic websites.
Latest improvements (January 13, 2024): Fixed error that prevented users from being able to change filtering services; also discovered that the filters other than CleanBrowsing’s Family Filter do allow one to comment on YouTube videos. Therefore, the YouTube Comment Enabler is no longer needed and has been removed along with its associated files as well as a cron job that enforced filtering on boot, which became redundant and is also therefore no longer needed. Added the Shut Down icon in the main menu and re-colored the logout button from red back to its original green. Added a keyboard shortcut — Super+Space now activates the Whisker Menu at the bottom-left corner of your screen.
Latest improvements (December 23, 2023): Fixed error that prevented wireless networks from showing up in the NetworkManager applet; added red GTK and icon themes among the preinstalled theme color variations, partly for the sake of users who wish to install F3OS with an enabled root account (note — I do not recommend installing F3OS this way, but to each their own), which will have a red theme and wallpaper by default with a message discouraging the practice of logging in as root.
Latest improvements (December 6, 2023): Fixed error where the default desktop wallpaper was not showing up when running live, added F3OS logo to the address bar on this website, added a bookmark to this website in the bookmarks toolbar in Mozilla Firefox.
Latest improvements (December 5, 2023): Since all of the filtering systems make it impossible to view, post, or respond to comments on YouTube videos, I have created a series of scripts that will temporarily disable all filtering for that purpose for your choice of anywhere from 5 minutes to 1 hour (it will not permanently turn off filtering, however). Additionally, should you reboot or turn off your computer before that time is up, whatever filter you had in place before disabling the filtering will be automatically restored. Administrative (sudo or root) privileges are required in order to temporarily disable filtering.
Latest improvements (November 30, 2023): Fixed an error I made causing the “Educational Extras by Grade” script to abort upon startup.
Latest improvements (November 23, 2023): Filtering settings and installation scripts have been modified for compatibility with either having the root account enabled or having it disabled and sudo being used in its place for temporary administrative privileges. I did this because I discovered that the F3OS installer gives one the option to install F3OS either with a root account or with sudo in place of a root account.