No usage stats, no tracking, no illusions of mass adoption. The only real signal we get is the occasional person who appears in our Matrix chat going "hey, it booted on my watch from 2014 and now it's usable again" — and that's plenty.
Privacy is non-negotiable: zero telemetry, no cloud, full local control. Longevity is the other half: we refuse to let good hardware become e-waste just because support ended. On the learning side, it's been one of the best playgrounds: instant feedback on your wrist makes QML/Qt, JavaScript watchfaces and embedded Linux feel tangible. The community is small and kind — perfect for people who want to learn open-source dev without gatekeeping.
Technically we're still pragmatic: libhybris + older kernels on most devices since it just works, but we've already mainlined rinato (Samsung Gear 2) and sparrow (ASUS ZenWatch 2) — rinato even boots with a usable UI. That's the direction we're pushing toward.
Repo: https://github.com/AsteroidOS Install images & docs: https://asteroidos.org 2.0 demo video : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U6FiQz0yACc Announcement post: https://asteroidos.org/news/2-0-release/
Questions, port requests, mentoring offers, criticism, weird ideas — all welcome. We do this because shaping a tiny, open wearable UX and infrastructure is oddly satisfying, and because Linux on the wrist still feels like a playground worth playing in.
Cheers, the AsteroidOS Team
I also still dream of one day daily driving a Linux smartphone, but that feels a bit more unrealistic to me, as I have more expectations from a phone, like being able to use bank apps and having a good battery life. But for a smartwatch, which I only expect to show me some biometrics and pass notifications from my phone, this seems perfect.
On this note: aren't JavaScript and QML/Qt too heavy/bloated for a device so small? I expect them to constrain performance and battery life quite a bit, but I admit I don't have a clue and would love to be proven wrong...
Have you looked into Gadgetbridge? https://gadgetbridge.org/gadgets/
Think of the space as less "I want Linux on my wrist", and more "I want a [cheap || not 1st world expensive] smartwatch as a gift."
These folks do gods work of making them supported and a real shared platform (c.f. their self-post "The only real signal we get is occasional [chat visitor] going "hey, it booted on my watch from 2014 and now it's usable again"")
So they could run mainline if the vendor or a user bothers to upstream drivers and hardware quirks.
A lot of the vendors don't meet quality expectations of the kernel team and sources are usually for older kernel versions and the code would need changes or refactoring.
I see the supported watches, still have a doubt: what is scenario looking like for the cheap smarwatches from Aliexpress and similar? Any chance to also flash a new firmware or is this limited to more CPU-powerful watches?
I like that peeking watch face switcher, companies like samsung even after all these years still takes way too long to apply a watch face.
I would love if it would support some of the no-brand Chinese watches you get usually for cheap, the hardware is great but the software usually is bad or outdated. I use one now, I don’t even know anything about it other than the Bluetooth name and app name, but it’s good in measuring distance, blood pressure, heart rate, sleep, among others that’s surprisingly it’s very accurate, it also has a builtin strong flashlight, I like it but with a fully fledged linux would definitely be better.
You have probably addressed that somewhere, but would it be possible to run your UI stack somewhere else? (PostmarketOS).
My other wish for AsteroidOS would be for it to leverage Wi-Fi better. Not sure how much more energy it would use, but having a longer range for my notifications would be nice (at least on LAN). Being able to perform a few other actions independently of my phone would be great: weather % time updates, e-mail notifications, home assistant control, etc. I get that it may affect battery life as well.
While I'm at it: tiny bug report, but I adjusted the time while the stopwatch was running, and this affected the stopwatch result.
We have implemented a wifi toggle in the quickpanel with 2.0. But the wifi credentials still need to be entered into connmanctl on the cli. As soon as you got wifi set up and connected, you can already now sync weather data usin asteroid-weatherfetch. But right, wifi usually uses up to 30% more power and should be enabled selectively.
For the postmarket question, yes, it is our longterm goal to mainline watches, which we are sort of doing in coorperation with the postmarket guys. But thats a humongous task and part of the idea of this 2.0 release is to interest capable contributors to push things further ;)
[1] of course open to other sources as well
I'm curious, is the challenge with newer hardware lack of chipset drivers for modern watches, or is there a fundamental difference between the new devices and the old ones that make them completely incompatible with asteroidOS?
I have a Tizen-based Samsung watch (Gear Sport, 2017). It's served me faithfully but I'm starting to notice the battery degrading. I'd be interested in trying AsteroidOS with it, if Tizen support ever lands.
One thing I wish for is Rust support, since its running Linux it should be possible, isn't it?
What a charming turn of phrase!
Thanks so much!
Literally clicked on that link thinking I had read _asteroids_, as in a remake of the 1979 game.
Total disappointment ensued.
(I feel guilty for pointing it out but I guess it's actually a compliment in this context: I even saw a beautifully reassuring mis-conjugated verb elsewhere on the website. I wonder if LLMs will have to start injecting these errors to give us an authentic feel. Maybe they already have).
I think we are at a point now where just coz AI is so prevalent, every post on any programming forum will have at least one comment saying "AI slop".
I didn't get an LLM vibe at all. Looking for it specifically, the bullet point about UI improvements is a candidate; the sentence following "mediawiki" could be an autocompletion; maybe the first sentence of the download section... but they're also all plausibly just a bit 'marketing team worded', so not necessarily LLM-sounding. And even if an LLM made suggestions to some small parts like these, who cares? There aren't any slop sections that waste your time, this is just like using a thesaurus — if these parts were LLM suggestions in the first place, which I don't actually expect because then there should be more of it
This type of post very poorly lends itself for auto-writing anyway. It'll put emphasis on the wrong aspects and not come out as intended, at least in my experience it's more work coaxing it to good results. It can be helpful not to start from a blank page but that's about it, I rarely find a sentence among the output that's fully usable as-is
This is the new "this has clearly been photoshoped" meme we used to see on every forum thread 2 decades ago and it is annoying as hell.
Wouldn't be suprised that before the end of this year we see more website declaring themselves to be "human-only zones", considering we won't be able to match the speed and quantity and replies from bots. Making it difficult to hold proper conversations.
