Soplos Linux is a distribution made in Spain that has been developed in the open for a little over a year. Through 2025 and much of 2026 it lived on alphas, betas and release candidates, until it published its first stable release on 5 August: 2026.08. It hasn’t stopped since. On 1 November came 2026.11, the fourth stable release in four months.
The project’s website is signed by Sergi Perich, and there’s a small community around it with its own forum, a wiki in eight languages and repositories on GitHub. DistroWatch lists it, and as of 3 November it ranked 59th on the site’s popularity table.
Three editions, one system
Soplos is built on Debian’s Testing branch, so its packages run well ahead of Debian stable. It’s the same starting point as SparkyLinux, with a different philosophy. It comes in three named flavours:
- Tyron, with XFCE, the lightest.
- Tyson, with KDE Plasma, the most complete.
- Boro, with GNOME.
All three ship on the same day from the same base. What changes is the desktop and a few in-house tools that only make sense on each one. If you can’t decide, we have a comparison of GNOME and KDE Plasma and another of lightweight desktops.
What changed in 2026.08
The first stable release brought a 7.1.5 kernel built by the project itself (7.1.5-soplos-v1), Mesa’s Vulkan drivers out of the box (mesa-vulkan-drivers 26.1.5) and the OpenSSH client from first boot.
The most visible change was removing NVIDIA’s proprietary drivers from the ISO (nvidia-driver, the DKMS module and cuda-drivers-580). The live system now always boots with nouveau, the free driver. According to the team, that fixes the mouse and desktop stutter seen in live mode on NVIDIA cards and makes the image much smaller. The proprietary driver is still available: it is installed afterwards from Soplos Welcome, which detects the card and pulls the driver from NVIDIA’s CUDA repository rather than Debian’s package. Soplos Welcome itself is no longer on the ISO either: the Calamares installer downloads it during an online install.
The project reckons each image is about 1.5 GB lighter than before. The ISOs came in at roughly 2.8 GB for Tyron, 3.4 GB for Tyson and 3.0 GB for Boro.
Each edition also got something of its own:
- Tyson replaces SDDM with Plasma Login Manager, KDE’s new login manager, which Debian already packages in Testing.
- Tyron gets a reworked Soplos Theme Manager (version 2.0.1-5), with tabs for GTK themes, icons and cursors, plus the LightDM login screen with a live preview. The panel and dock can also be edited while watching the result.
- Boro debuts Soplos Layout Switcher, which flips GNOME Shell between four layouts: Soplos’s own, a dock layout, a tiling one using the Forge extension and stock GNOME. It can be driven from the terminal too.
A new image every month since
The interesting part came afterwards. Because it tracks Debian Testing, Soplos has chosen to rebuild the ISO every month and publish the list of packages added and removed on its wiki:
| Release | Date | Soplos kernel |
|---|---|---|
| 2026.08 | 5 Aug 2026 | 7.1.5 |
| 2026.09 | 6 Sep 2026 | 7.2.3 |
| 2026.10 | 1 Oct 2026 | 7.2.8 |
| 2026.11 | 1 Nov 2026 | 7.3.1 |
The monthly changes are small (in Tyron 2026.11, seven new packages and sixteen fewer out of nearly 2,000), but they mean that someone installing today doesn’t have to pull hundreds of updates on day one. Existing installs don’t need reinstalling: they update with apt like any Debian Testing system.
Worth knowing before you install
Soplos ships a set of in-house tools that go beyond looks: a GRUB editor, a Plymouth theme manager, a graphical kernel builder with patches such as BORE or Zen, a system cleaner, a repository selector and a systemd service manager. Each has its own version history on the wiki.
The flip side is the base. Debian Testing doesn’t get security support with the same priority as stable, and dependencies break now and then. It’s a good fit if you want recent software without leaving the Debian world, not for a server or a machine that can’t afford to fail to boot one morning. In that case, go with Debian 13.
Minimum requirements range from 2 GB of RAM and 20 GB of disk for Tyron to 4 GB and 35 GB for the Plasma and GNOME editions. All three are x86_64 only.
We have added it to the directory: the Soplos Linux page lists every monthly release with its date.
Sources: “Soplos Linux 2026.08 ya es estable: todas las novedades” on soploslinux.com; the official Soplos Linux website and its release history (Tyron, Tyson, Boro); the GitHub repositories; the DistroWatch page; and Debian’s plasma-login-manager package.