About CapivaraOS

A family of Brazilian Linux distributions, rooted in the Pantanal and built on Fedora.

Where we come from

CapivaraOS started as a Debian remix, built with live-build and Calamares. CapivaraOS Marsh rebuilds that same idea on top of Fedora 44 with KDE Plasma, using the official Fedora Project tooling — kickstart and livemedia-creator to assemble the image, and Anaconda as the installer.

From Marsh, the project grew into a family of distros: CapivaraOS Pup brings the same idea to Xfce, in a lighter spin, and CapivaraOS Snout is meant to bring it to GNOME. The core idea stays the same across all of them: a polished desktop experience with its own visual identity, designed with Brazilian Portuguese speakers in mind.

Why these names?

Each distro in the family carries a name from the capybara's world, keeping the "M" of Marsh — the animal's natural habitat — as the starting point:

Marsh — the original distro, with KDE Plasma.
Pup — the family's lighter spin, with Xfce.
Snout — the upcoming GNOME spin, still in planning.

Visual identity

The name and mascot come from the capybara — a calm, social, and very Brazilian animal. Each distro is free to express that identity in a way that fits its desktop environment (global menu and dock on Marsh, a lighter default theme on Pup), but they all share the same wallpapers, logo and color palette that nods to nature — green is the project's signature color.

How we build it

Each CapivaraOS distro is built on top of the official base of the matching Fedora Live spin, with additional packages and a custom branding layer (wallpapers, icons, boot theme, login screen). We prefer keeping the system on official Fedora repositories, defaulting to free software wherever possible across the whole family.

Licensing

The operating system follows the licenses of the upstream projects it's built from (Fedora, KDE, GNOME, Xfce and other packages, each under its own free software license). CapivaraOS's visual identity (logo, names and original wallpapers) is exclusive to the project.

Want to help? The project is maintained by a small community and is in an early stage. Follow development and contribute by reaching out through our contact form.