ThinFloeby oetiker.ai

github.com/oposs/thinfloerelease 4.4.0

A thin client that floats in RAM

ThinFloe boots a PC from a USB stick or the network and runs entirely in memory. At power‑off it is gone. Your home comes back at the next boot.

Download the stick image Read the source
The ThinFloe menu: tiles for ThinLinc, OxuLnk, Terminal, Back up home, Upgrade, Settings, Restart and Power off, the status area and the log.

Release 4.4.0 boots in a virtual machine, shown four times as fast as it ran.

This is the whole desktop

One menu. Tiles start the remote desktop, a terminal or a home backup; below them the machine reports on itself, and the log says what the system did.

The ThinFloe menu on a 3:2 screen. Eight tiles: ThinLinc, OxuLnk, Terminal, Back up home, Upgrade, Settings, Restart, Power off. Below them the status area: batteries of keyboard and mouse, a network traffic graph, network details, CPU load, memory, uptime and model, time and date. At the bottom the log, with lines of the add-on checks.
Tiles
ThinLinc, OxuLnk, a terminal, a home backup, upgrades, settings. Add your own with one small file.
Status area
The machine reports on itself: batteries of keyboard and mouse, network traffic, addresses, load, memory.
Log
What the system did and when, such as the daily look for new add-on versions.

Settings on the screen

WiFi and wired network, monitors, keyboard and the status area are set in the menu. A change applies at once and travels with the home.

The Packages tab: ThinLinc 4.21.0 and OxuLnk, both ticked and up to date, each with the address it comes from.
PackagesTick ThinLinc or OxuLnk. ThinFloe fetches it from its source, keeps it on the stick and looks for a new version every day.
The Network tab: the wired connection with a fixed address and gateway, and two saved WiFi networks, one of them hidden.
NetworkWired with DHCP or a fixed address, the WiFi networks this machine knows, and the DNS servers.
The Screen tab: two monitors side by side, the right one selected and showing the menu, with its resolution and rotation.
ScreenPlace the monitors, set resolution and rotation, choose which one shows the menu and when the screen turns off.
The Keyboard tab with the list of layouts open: Dari, Dhivehi, Dutch, Dzongkha and several English layouts. Below it Variant, CapsLock acts as Ctrl, Compose key and a field to try the keys.
KeyboardNew in 4.4.0. Layout and variant, CapsLock as Ctrl, the Compose key, and a field to try them in.
The Status tab: a list of status elements with tick boxes, sizes and Up and Down buttons, above a preview of the status area.
StatusChoose what the status area shows, in which order and how large. The preview shows the result.

What you get

A small Ubuntu system for machines that only have to reach a remote desktop. It keeps nothing on the PC and asks for no care between upgrades.

  • Runs in RAM

    The whole system loads into memory. The disk inside the PC is never written, and every boot starts from the same clean image.

  • Stick or network

    Boot from a USB stick, or from a boot server over the network with no stick at all. Both run the same image.

  • Upgrades with a way back

    A new release lands beside the running one, checked against its checksums. The previous version stays on the stick and starts from the boot prompt.

  • Your home comes back

    Restart and Power off save the home directory to the stick, or to the boot server. The next boot restores it before the session starts.

  • Settings on the screen

    WiFi and wired network, keyboard layout, monitors and the status area are set in the menu. A change applies at once and travels with the home.

  • Add-ons you tick

    ThinLinc and OxuLnk are not in the image. Tick one and ThinFloe fetches it from its source, keeps it on the stick and looks for a new version every day.

  • No password ships

    The image holds no login password and no root login. Nobody gets in over SSH until you set a password on that machine.

  • Ubuntu underneath

    Ubuntu 26.04 with a Wayland session, a terminal, SSH and WireGuard. Add your own tile to the menu with one small file.

Download
493 MB
RAM in use
0.7 to 1.3 GiB
Boot
UEFI and BIOS
Licence
MIT

Put it on a stick

Any USB stick with 4 GB or more will do. Writing the image erases the stick.

  1. Download thinfloe-usb.img.zst from the latest release.
  2. Find the stick. Run this before and after you plug it in; the new disk is yours.
    lsblk
  3. Write the image. Put the name of your stick in place of sdX.
    zstd -dc thinfloe-usb.img.zst | sudo dd of=/dev/sdX bs=4M conv=fsync status=progress
  4. Boot the PC from the stick. Later upgrades come from the Upgrade tile.

For network boot, building the image yourself and everything else, read the README. What changed in each release is in the changelog.