xcon OS
xcon OS is a Debian-based appliance operating system. It exists for one reason: to make every guarantee the software on it gives — durability, crash survival, memory budgets, snapshot semantics — a guarantee on a known, measured, versioned stack instead of "whatever happened to be installed on the box".
It is not a general-purpose distribution you tinker with. It is an appliance: you install it, it comes up, and you manage it from one place — the web console. The operating system underneath is fixed, read-only, and updated as a whole.
The shape of it
- Immutable base image. The operating system lives on a read-only
image that is never modified in place — it cannot be half-updated or
silently drift. Per-machine configuration (network,
/etcoverrides) and all runtime state live on a separate data partition and can change; the base OS underneath cannot. - A/B updates. Two system slots. An update is written to the passive slot and armed with a single atomic switch; if the new system fails to boot, the box falls back to the previous one on its own. Updates are transactions.
- One management model. You administer the box from the web console
(webadmin) and its CLI twin,
xconctl. There is a single sudo-capable account (xcon); root is locked. The firewall is default-deny; only what you enable is open. - Debian underneath. The base is Debian stable. Security fixes come from Debian; you receive them as signed image releases on our update channel, never as ad-hoc package upgrades on the box.
Two ways onto a machine
- From the installer ISO — boot it, answer a few questions, done. See Install from ISO.
- From a plain cloud Debian — one script converts any fresh Debian 13 cloud VM into xcon OS, with no provider APIs. See Install on a cloud VM.
Both produce the exact same xcon OS.