Try Linux from inside Windows — no repartitioning, nothing deleted, fully reversible.
▶ The latest green end-to-end run, sped up: Windows 11 → wootc → native Linux booting from a file → back to Windows. Play the full timelapse. Only passing runs are ever published here.
wootc installs a real, image-based bootc
Linux desktop into root.disk — a single file beside your Windows files — and
adds a boot menu entry for it. No repartitioning. No backup ceremony. No
point of no return. Windows stays your default boot until you decide
otherwise, and uninstalling is deleting a folder and a boot entry.
Setup asks for as much as a Mac's first-run assistant would: a password. Your username and computer name are mirrored from your PC, the disk is sized from your free space, encryption is TPM-backed by default — and your files, Wi-Fi networks, wallpaper, and taskbar carry over, so the first login already feels like your machine.
⬇ Download the latest release
— one exe, no setup wizard. Run it as Administrator; it fetches and verifies
its own boot pieces against the release's SHA256SUMS.
winget install TunaOS.wootc
(winget availability lands with the first accepted submission.)
Every release also ships branded installers — Bazzite-Installer.exe,
Bluefin-Installer.exe, Aurora-Installer.exe, TunaOS-Installer.exe — the
same engine wearing each distribution's identity, pre-selected to its images
and pre-downloading the OS while still on Windows (no network needed after
the reboot).
The binaries are not yet code-signed, so Windows shows SmartScreen and an "unknown publisher" prompt on the way in. Getting started walks through both screens; the user guide covers everything after, including putting everything back. Trying it on your own hardware? Read manual testing first.
Windows 11 → wootc.exe (arms the system) → reboot
→ signed shim → GRUB → deployer initramfs
→ fisherman: bootc install into root.disk
→ reboot → native Linux, loop-mounted from root.disk
→ (optional, later) graduate to a real partition
- Arm. The app creates
C:\wootc\disks\root.disk, stages a Microsoft/Fedora-signed boot chain on the ESP, and sets a one-shot boot entry. Nothing else on the machine is touched. - Deploy. One reboot: under Secure Boot, the signed chain launches a
small installer environment that writes the chosen OS image into
root.disk— with optional LUKS/TPM2 encryption. - Live in both. A boot hook attaches
root.diskon every boot and pivots into an unmodified, native Linux system. Windows stays on the boot menu, and your Windows drive is right there in the file manager. - Commit — or don't. Graduate Linux onto a real partition when you're sure, keep dual-booting forever, or uninstall and leave no trace.
- A password is the whole form. Solid defaults for everything else, stated on screen and adjustable under Advanced.
- Your stuff comes along — files, Wi-Fi networks, wallpaper, accent color, keyboard layout, taskbar pins, browser profiles (Firefox, Chrome, Edge), Steam libraries, MS Office → LibreOffice settings, WSL dotfiles and packages. Secrets never move silently: passwords, keys, and tokens stay put, and you sign in again where it matters.
- BitLocker-safe by design. C: is never decrypted — Linux gets its own unencrypted space while your Windows drive stays protected. Gated off in the alpha until the FDE path is matrix-green (#34): today the app stops and says so rather than proceed on an encrypted drive.
- A real image catalog — GNOME, KDE Plasma, Niri, and XFCE desktops on Enterprise Linux, Fedora, Arch, and Debian bases, or any supported custom OCI image.
- Try before you reboot — boot the result in a VM window from inside Windows first.
- An honest way back. Uninstall lives in Windows' own Apps list, removes the boot entry and installer, restores changed settings, and only ever reclaims a partition wootc itself created.
Every release is gated on a full end-to-end run: a real Windows 11 VM
(Secure Boot + TPM 2.0) installs that exact build through the real GUI, boots
natively into Linux from root.disk, and returns to Windows cleanly — no
green run, no release. Nightly green runs cut automatic pre-releases from the
exact commit they proved, and every failed check in the harness is
release-blocking by construction.
The current proven matrix — image families, Windows editions, filesystems, encryption modes — lives in docs/status.md. The project is in alpha on the road to a checkable 1.0: see the ROADMAP for the version ladder and its evidence gates, and docs/philosophy.md for the thinking behind it all.
| Getting started | download → first boot, screen by screen |
| User guide | living in the migrated system, and the way back |
| Philosophy | the North Star, the Wubi heritage, why a file |
| Status | the proven matrix and its evidence |
| SPEC | the full specification |
| Architecture boundary | the generic-migration / bootc seam |
| NTFS on Linux | the known hazards, and why the design survives them |
| Borrowed from Libertix | six boot-chain and recovery designs, specified against wootc's code, with task lists |
| WinUI 3 shell | the native Windows shell that replaces Wails: architecture, engine protocol, cut-over |
| Branding & distribution | one engine, five installers |
| Manual testing | pre-flight for real-hardware runs |
The stack: a Wails (Go + web) Windows app, a dracut-based deployer initramfs, POSIX-shell migration tooling, and a KVM E2E harness that drives real Windows VMs through the real GUI.
just test # fast tier: bats + go, no containers
just build # deployer initramfs + custom GRUB
cd tests/gui && npx playwright test # GUI suite over the built frontendSee CONTRIBUTING.md — the best first contributions turn a claim green: a red or unproven matrix cell, or an open milestone task on the tracking boards.
Windows installer components derived from WubiUEFI are GPL-2.0 (LICENSE-GPL-2.0); the deployer initramfs and GRUB configuration are MIT (LICENSE-MIT). fisherman, bootc, bootupd, podman, and skopeo are separate binaries under their own (Apache-2.0) licenses, invoked over a process boundary.