pcardenal/sentia-iso

Sentia OS

A Fedora Atomic desktop with a local AI assistant that never phones home.

Sentia is a desktop Linux system built on Fedora 43 Atomic. The interface is Hyprland with a custom shell, and it ships with Nyra, an assistant that runs its language and speech models on your own hardware. Nothing you type at it leaves the machine.

The system is image based. Updates arrive as a complete, signed system image rather than thousands of individual packages, and if one goes wrong the previous version is still sitting in your boot menu.

Download

Build	For	Size
sentia-43-20260804-x86_64.iso	Intel and AMD graphics, most laptops	7.9 GB	Download
sentia-nvidia-open-43-20260804-x86_64.iso	NVIDIA cards, GTX 16-series and newer	9.2 GB	Download

Take the first one if you are not sure, since it runs anywhere. The only thing you give up is NVIDIA hardware acceleration on a machine that has such a card.

Both images contain the entire operating system, so the install itself works with no network connection. You will need a USB stick of 16 GB or larger.

Install

1. Verify the download

Each ISO has a matching .sha256 file. Put both in the same folder and run:

sha256sum -c sentia-43-20260804-x86_64.iso.sha256

OK means you are good to go. FAILED means the file is damaged and you should download it again. Do not skip this. An installer that is corrupt halfway through can leave the disk unbootable.

2. Write it to USB

Everything currently on the stick will be destroyed.

The easiest route on any platform is balenaEtcher: pick the ISO, pick the stick, click Flash.

On Linux, Fedora Media Writer handles Fedora images most reliably. From a terminal it is:

sudo dd if=sentia-43-20260804-x86_64.iso of=/dev/sdX bs=4M status=progress conv=fsync

Check that /dev/sdX really is your USB stick before you press enter. dd will happily erase your laptop's internal drive if you point it there.

Windows users, see the Rufus note in Troubleshooting before you start. It catches almost everyone.

3. Boot the installer

Restart and open the firmware boot menu. F12 is the usual key, though F9, F11, Esc and Delete all show up depending on the manufacturer. The splash screen on power up normally tells you which.

Choose the USB device, then pick Install Sentia 43 from the menu.

4. Work through the installer

It asks for language, keyboard, time zone, and a target disk, then has you create your user account. That first account is the administrator.

You are never asked to set a root password. Administrative tasks go through sudo and graphical prompts, which is how Fedora Workstation and macOS both handle it.

The disk you select gets erased. Back up first.

Updating

rpm-ostree upgrade
systemctl reboot

Every image is signed, and your machine verifies that signature before it installs anything.

If an update breaks something, hold the previous entry in the boot menu at startup, or run rpm-ostree rollback. The old version is never deleted to make room for the new one.

Troubleshooting

Rufus writes a stick that will not boot

Rufus asks whether to use ISO mode or DD Image mode. You want DD Image mode.

Its default ISO mode unpacks the files onto the stick rather than writing the disk image, which produces something that looks fine in Explorer and does nothing at boot. This is the most common reason a Fedora-based installer appears broken.

NVIDIA graphics do not work after installing

The NVIDIA build carries a driver that Microsoft has not signed, so a machine with Secure Boot enabled refuses to load it.

On the first boot after installing, a blue screen called MOK Manager appears. Choose Enroll MOK, then Continue, then Yes, and enter this password:

sentia

The machine reboots and the driver loads. It is a one-time step.

If you would rather not deal with it, turn Secure Boot off in your firmware settings. Skipping both leaves you on basic graphics, which still boots to a usable desktop.

None of this applies to the non-NVIDIA build.

The USB stick does not appear in the boot menu

Some firmware hides UEFI devices until you disable Fast Boot or CSM. Others need the stick plugged into a USB 2.0 port rather than 3.x.

Already on Fedora Atomic?

Silverblue, Kinoite, Bluefin and other bootc systems can switch to Sentia in place, no ISO involved. It takes two reboots.

sudo rpm-ostree rebase ostree-unverified-registry:ghcr.io/pcardenal/sentia:latest
sudo systemctl reboot

That first rebase is unverified because your machine has no copy of Sentia's signing key yet. Rebooting installs it, so you can then move to the verified reference:

sudo rpm-ostree rebase ostree-image-signed:docker://ghcr.io/pcardenal/sentia:latest
sudo systemctl reboot

Everything after that is signature checked. Substitute sentia-nvidia-open for sentia if you have an NVIDIA card.

What you get

Hyprland as the compositor, with a shell written in Quickshell: a dock, window controls, a control center, notifications, and an application launcher.

Nyra runs locally on llama.cpp with Ministral 3B, and uses whisper.cpp for speech. You can reach it from the launcher or its own chat window.

There is a settings application, a first-run welcome screen, and a graphical app store for installing Flatpaks.

Underneath it is Fedora 43 Atomic, built from the Wayblue Hyprland image, so the usual Fedora tooling is all there.

Build details

Built 4 August 2026 from pcardenal/sentia-os.

Each ISO also ships a .provenance.txt recording the exact container image it embeds, the git commit it was built from, and the pinned image builder, so any download can be traced back to a specific source revision.

The installed system tracks these container images and updates from them:

• ghcr.io/pcardenal/sentia
• ghcr.io/pcardenal/sentia-nvidia-open

Both are public, and both are signed with cosign. Your machine checks those signatures on every upgrade.

Status

Alpha, and early alpha at that. Expect rough edges and unfinished corners, and keep it off any machine holding data you would be upset to lose. Testing so far has been on virtual machines and a single laptop, so hardware support beyond that is genuinely unknown.

Bug reports go to the issue tracker.