Channels and releases

The difference between stable and nightly, and how releases are named.

Arch is a rolling release, so lensOS never asks you to reinstall for a new version. Your system updates continuously. What lensOS controls is its own packages and its ISOs, and those come in two channels.

Stable

repo: [lensos]
packages are promoted from testing after they’ve been checked
ISOs are built per release and named codename + date

Nightly

repo: [lensos-testing]
built automatically from the main branch every day
for testers and contributors. Things will break.

Release names

Stable releases use optics terms, in order:

aperture → prism → refract → iris → focus → halo → caustic

The first stable release is Aperture. A full name looks like lensOS Aperture 2026.12.

Switching channels

Once lens exists:

lens channel testing   # opt in to nightly lensOS packages
lens channel stable    # back to stable

Until then, swap [lensos] for [lensos-testing] in /etc/pacman.conf.