SweetPotatOs - Arch-based Linux distro with the SweetPotato Swirl desktop

 

SweetPotatOs is an Arch-based Linux distro: a live graphical ISO with the SweetPotato Swirl desktop and a Calamares installer, built to revive slow old potato PCs and make them sweet again.

What you get

• Live Swirl session (liveuser, empty password, sudo without password)
• Autologin on tty1 → SweetPotato Swirl desktop (foot, Thunar, mako, NetworkManager, …)
• Installer autostarts on the live desktop; also Mod+i, desktop Install SweetPotatOs, or sweetpotatos-calamares
• Installed system uses the live squashfs, GRUB, and Ly on tty2

Swirl

Swirl is the Wayland compositor SweetPotatOs ships: a light scrolling tiling window manager forked from Scroll/Sway, with a layout inspired by Niri. Windows sit as columns on an infinite horizontal strip; workspaces move vertically. Config stays Sway-compatible under ~/.config/sway/.

Swirl ships only the compositor binary. The status bar and helpers are stock swaybar, swaymsg, and swaynag — same i3/Sway IPC, less to maintain.

Gesture	Action
3-finger left / right	Scroll the window strip
4-finger up / down	Next / previous workspace
2-finger scroll	Natural scrolling inside apps

Windows	Auto-tile
1	Full width
2	50 / 50
3+	Pairs of 50 / 50; odd last column full

Live session

Item	Value
User	liveuser
Password	empty (Enter)
Desktop	Swirl + SweetPotato
Colors	#a73b50 · #f79b29 · #1d1f21

Write ISO to USB

lsblk   # find the USB disk, e.g. /dev/sdX — not a partition
sudo dd if=SweetPotatOs-*-x86_64.iso of=/dev/sdX bs=4M status=progress oflag=sync

Prefer verifying the download with the .sha256 file next to the ISO on the Files page.

Download ISO