Every now and then, a release isn't just a version bump—it’s a reset button. Kairos 3.4.0 is one of those releases.

In the last few months, we’ve been heads-down rethinking what makes Kairos powerful, approachable, and future-proof. The result is a foundational overhaul: a brand-new build system, native images for all major cloud providers, streamlined customization through system extensions, and a tighter Kubernetes story with built-in support for k0s. This release isn’t just packed with features—it reflects where the project is heading and how our community is shaping that direction.

Let’s walk through the biggest milestones in Kairos 3.4.0, how they work, and why they matter.

Kairos has always focused on making operating system deployments more predictable, reproducible, and manageable—especially in edge and embedded environments. But for all the benefits of immutability, one challenge has lingered:

How do you safely and easily customize a system after it’s built—without breaking the image or going full Dockerfile rebuild?

Today, we’re introducing a much cleaner answer: the new system extension management framework, now available via the Kairos Agent CLI and when Kairos 3.4.x releases.

Up until now, Kairos has shipped with first-class support for k3s out of the box. If you wanted something else? You had to rely on community-powered providers. And let’s be honest, while amazing in their own right, they’ve been... fragmented.

We’ve seen providers emerge for kubeadm, nodeadm, microk8s, and even another flavor of k3s. Each one added the ability to run Kubernetes on Kairos, but they were often self-contained efforts. Most didn’t plug into our cloud-init-style configuration, which meant you had to know your way around their specific setup to get them running. Power users and contributors made them work, but new users? Not so much.

Then there’s the provider-kairos, which offers a consistent configuration layer across setups and makes Kubernetes orchestration a breeze, especially for decentralized, peer-to-peer deployments powered by EdgeVPN. But it had one limitation: it only worked with k3s.

That is... until now.

🧱 Introduction​

Building Kairos has always been about more than assembling images — it's about shaping a flexible, powerful OS tailored for the edge. Over the past couple of years, we've learned a lot while navigating how to build and maintain Kairos across a growing list of base distributions, architectures, and board-specific targets.

Today, we’re excited to introduce something that marks a turning point in how Kairos is built: kairos-init.

This post isn't just about a new tool. It’s about simplifying complexity, rediscovering clarity, and embedding hard-earned lessons into something lean and extensible. If you've followed our journey, you'll know that we've gone from Dockerfiles to Earthly, and now to a new approach centered on declarative simplicity with Yip.

In this post, we’ll take you behind the scenes:

• Why the old ways worked (until they didn’t)
• How we outgrew our tooling
• What kairos-init changes — and why it matters

This is the story of how we rebuilt the foundation of Kairos, one layer at a time.

Picture this: You’re deep in focus, coding away, and the doorbell rings. Except… you never hear it. The mailman leaves, and now your package is on an adventure you didn't plan for. That’s exactly what happened to me, so I did what any geek would do—turn my dumb doorbell into a smart one using Kairos.

We’re thrilled to announce that since April 2024, Kairos has been officially part of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) as a Sandbox Project. This marks an important milestone for Kairos and, more importantly, for our entire community of users and contributors.

You might be wondering - what does being part of the CNCF mean for you? The CNCF is known for backing the most innovative, reliable, and secure projects in the cloud-native space, and having their support brings a number of crucial benefits. Let’s dive into why this matters.

I can't believe it's already October. I've been so busy following up on different events where we've brought some of the Kairos love that I forgot about Hacktoberfest. Thankfully, the month isn't over so let's get our hands dirty!

Kairos is versatile, supporting various Linux distributions such as openSUSE Leap, Ubuntu 24.04, and more. Our primary objective is to empower users to continue working with their preferred Linux distribution seamlessly. However, our previous documentation fell short of this goal. The scripts were tied to a default image, which often led to issues for users who preferred a different flavor.

Last week was a special week. We had our first hackweek! With everyone in the team connecting from their own corners of the world, Belgium, Greece, Italy and Spain, we came together not in person, but through a shared passion for hacking. Unlike typical team-building events, this hackweek was all about individual exploration — each team member diving into their own projects, driven by personal curiosity and the opportunity to experiment.

Over the course of the week, we set aside our usual tasks to focus entirely on these self-driven projects, tackling challenges we rarely have time to address or exploring new avenues. In this post, I’ll share a glimpse of some of the projects we worked on.

During the first day we got together to brainstorm. Many good ideas came from each of us on what to work on. It lifts my spirit to see that our project while very stable, still has lots of avenues to explore and that everyone in our team is keen on making Kairos a better project.

We recently added analytics to our website. We were hesitant about this before because we are committed to your privacy and didn't like the idea of setting up Google Analytics. Thankfully, we've found a good open-source solution that is designed for privacy. You can find more about them on their website https://plausible.io/about