About ArashOS

ArashOS is a Linux system based on Arch Linux, with a desktop of its own drawn from Persian art and stories. It’s made to be safe from the first start: the whole disk encrypted (scrambled, so only you can read it), a way back from every update, and nothing running that you don’t use.

Arash the Archer

Iran and Turan had fought for years, and agreed at last to end the war where one arrow came down. Whoever shot it would set the border between them.

Arash, the best archer among the Iranians, climbed Mount Alborz at dawn and drew the bow with all his strength. He put his whole life into the shot. The arrow flew from dawn until noon and came down by the Oxus, far to the east, and the border was set there. Arash was never seen again.

The story is older than the Shahnameh, Ferdowsi’s book of the kings of Iran. The Avesta names Arash as the swiftest archer of the Iranians, and al-Biruni told the arrow’s flight around the year 1000, as the story behind the summer festival of Tirgan.

The names

The parts of ArashOS are named after the legend and the Shahnameh:

• Kaman (کمان), the bow: the desktop, from which everything is launched.
• Tir (تیر), the arrow: finds and opens your apps, fast and straight to the target.
• Simorgh (سیمرغ), the wise bird of the Shahnameh, who raised Zal and counselled Rostam: the assistant that answers by voice, off until you choose it.
• Rakhsh (رخش), Rostam’s swift and loyal horse: checks the computer’s security and health once a day and says what it found.
• Lajvard (لاجورد), lapis lazuli, the blue of a miniature’s sky, and Kaghaz (کاغذ), the manuscript’s paper: the dark and light themes, and the colours of this site.

Who makes it

ArashOS is made by the ArashOS project. To report a problem or ask something, write to hello@arashos.org. To report a security problem, use the same address; it’s also in security.txt.

What it builds on

ArashOS is built on Arch Linux, the Hyprland window manager and Quickshell, which Kaman is written with. Its installer was inspired by Ryoku, its AI features and keyboard shortcuts by Omarchy, and its first desktop was Caelestia, parts of which ArashOS still adapts.

This site is made with Zola. Its drawings are made for ArashOS, and its screenshots were taken in ArashOS 2026.11.1. The wallpaper in them is “The Feast of Sada”, a page of Shah Tahmasp’s Shahnameh painted about 1525 and attributed to Sultan Muhammad, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in the public domain. Its fonts are served from the site itself, each under the SIL Open Font License 1.1: IBM Plex Sans by IBM, Cormorant Garamond by Christian Thalmann, Vazirmatn by Saber Rastikerdar, Noto Nastaliq Urdu by the Noto project and Cascadia Mono by Microsoft.

Licences

ArashOS and this site’s code are under the GNU General Public License, version 3. The site’s words are under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0. The apps ArashOS installs keep their own licences.

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