Oreon Restructuring Going Into 2027

Announcements
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Oreon Restructuring Going Into 2027

As some may know, 2026 has been a very rough year for Oreon, but our team has been working on a plan to revive empty parts of the team and several community operations going into 2027.

Since late 2025, many people have decided to step down from the Oreon team due to leadership issues, leading to several teams being left completely empty, forcing us to suspend or limit operations to several community services. The following services have been suspended or limited:

  • Oreon Social Media Operations - Limited since November 2025
  • OreonMC - Suspended since February 2026
  • Community Events - Limited since January 2026, suspended since August 2026
  • Community Leadership - Suspended since February 2026
  • Team Leadership - Limited since February 2026

The vibe of the Oreon team and its community has majorly changed due to this. We used to have a team that felt alive, and it felt like a fun position to be in. Since February, things have felt a lot more quiet and slow. This is especially true for our Discord server.

Regarding the leadership issues, we now have dedicated project policies and guidelines available at Project Policies & Team Information | Oreon Wiki. All the problems have been addressed.

With the upcoming launch of Oreon 11, we’re aiming to resume all the listed operations going into 2027.

We’ll keep everyone posted on this thread, but comments will be locked to team members only.

If you’re interested in joining our team, see more at Oreon HQ.

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UPDATES:

  • Oreon 11 has been delayed from October 2026 to early 2027 as of 8/16/2026
  • Oreon Community Event operations have now been suspended as of 8/18/2026
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Hello Oreon community,

as of August 21, 2026, our restructuring plan has been majorly interrupted by the Oreon 11 delay, meaning our operation revivals may take longer than expected.

Don’t expect things to get better until around mid-2027 assuming we release Oreon 11 before that.

While things may look bad, I know things will get better eventually, and it takes time. As much as it may look like the end, it’s not, and we have ZERO intention to give up.

We will continue to keep everyone posted.

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UPDATES:
The following older Oreon sub-projects have been permanently discontinued:

  • Oreon Media Writer
  • Fetchy
  • Oreon-verify
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OreonMC Seasonal Service

We will soon be bringing back service to OreonMC, but it will be kept as a seasonal service from now on due to restructuring efforts. This may change in the future.

Confirmed Operational Seasons

  • OreonMC will return on November 2, 2026 and service will end on January 4, 2027
  • OreonMC will return again on June 7, 2027 and service will end on October 11, 2027

We look forward to seeing you soon.

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Updates & what we’re up to now

Hey everyone, I’d like to share some updates with what my team and I have been working on over the past couple months.

Progress on Oreon 11

Progress on Oreon 11 is good, the OS is much more functional than it was during early beta, and I am actually daily driving it on some of my devices, and it works surprisingly well aside from a few minor issues. The first-party features such as Oreon System Manager, Oreon Defense, and other UN-announced features are nearly finished, but need some polish. The only thing that we’re currently having difficulty with is maintaining the package repo for Oreon 11. There are a lot of outdated packages (not so bad that it makes it insecure or unusable), but its kind of a mess right now. We also have a couple holes (dependency issues) to fix before release, but we’re working on making automation have a bigger play in bumping packages so we can spend more time testing than maintaining. One way or another, we are still on track for an early 2027 release. No dates/months are confirmed yet because distro development is quite unpredictable sometimes, so that means Oreon 11 will likely be a surprise drop on some random day in early 2027. Most people dont really give a crap about Oreon 11, but once you see if for yourself, you will understand how truly huge the release is going to be, especially with the upcoming betas. Speaking of beta, more beta builds for Oreon 11 will be releasing in the coming weeks and months with more and more changes & improvements, leading to the final release.

Community & team changes

As a part of the rollout of Discord’s ID verification, we will be making our recommended team discussion & planning platform Matrix and Taiga instead of exclusively Discord. Discord will still be an option for team members to hold discussions, but will not be the default/only recommendation going forward.

Our Discord server will obviously still be fully open for public chat and the team.

Don’t forget about our Fluxer server, which is still a solid option for those who wish to exit the Discord platform. Both our Matrix Homeserver and our Fluxer server are bridged to Discord, but uptime may vary on the bridges.

I am also working on restructuring our roles, making it more clear who on the team does what and what codebase said role belongs to. More updates on that will be coming later.

To join the Oreon team, you may message me @brandonlester:matrix.org on Matrix, and we can discuss the process. Barrier to entry is low but you must have some experience.

Links

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Update on Oreon 11 Development

Hey Oreon Community, while this may sound extreme, Oreon 11’s entire repo (in its current form) has been scrapped and archived today, and we are re-building the package base from the ground up. Due to this, the Oreon 11 Beta program has been temporarily suspended, and we will soon be re-opening the Early Preview program as we rebuild the base once again.

Nothing is changing related to the OS features and goals. We’re doing this to comply with better packaging and security standards. I’m also reaching out to a few people that may be interested in providing us with more packagers to help with restructuring and the other difficulties that we’re currently experiencing.

The new packaging plan

Currently, work is being done to provide maintainers with friendly packaging guides/policies/standards, reproducibility, cleaner specs that have more maintainable macros, and an all-in-one CLI tool called orbscli for routine maintenance tasks.

Most importantly, Oreon 11’s source tree is no longer a hard-fork of Fedora 44, it is now entirely independent in the form of source recipes (spec files), which means we get better control of how we want specs to work without needing to dissect existing Fedora specs. It’s definitely harder first, but once we reach the point where we need to maintain OUR specs over existing Fedora ones, it will be much much easier and cleaner in comparison.

Final notes

Not everything works out first try, and that goes for everyone and everything, so this isn’t particularly out of the ordinary.

The future of Oreon is still looking good. I just want to make sure that things are done right and not rushed out carelessly. We want people to trust Oreon.