The numbers, as of this week
Everything below comes straight out of the repository, the web server logs and the download mirror. No rounding up.
- 520 commits since the first one on 12 June 2026, by two people.
- 120,139 lines of Rust across 367 files: a UEFI bootloader, a kernel with its own paging and scheduler, a filesystem, a network stack, a capability security model, a desktop and a Linux/musl ABI bridge. No Linux or BSD underneath.
- 987 host tests that run on every build, plus boot-verified integration on real hardware and under QEMU, VirtualBox and KVM.
- 368 MB of current disk images on the mirror: UEFI raw image, QCOW2, VMDK, a cloud tarball and the Chromium pack.
- In the last 30 days: 34 image downloads (1.3 GB served), 88 live-try sessions where someone booted EuroOS in a throw-away VM from their browser, and roughly 500 unique visitors on the site from 60 countries.
- On GitHub: 42 stars, 2 forks, 1 open issue. On Liberapay: 0 patrons, 0 euro.
That last line is the reason for this post.
What "free" actually costs
An OS project has three kinds of cost, and only one of them is money.
1. Machines
EuroOS needs a build server that can compile a hundred thousand lines of Rust and run the test suite on every push, a host that can spawn QEMU virtual machines on demand for the live-try page, and a mirror that serves gigabytes of images. Today all of that runs on hardware we already own for other work, in Antwerp. That is why the bill is near zero, and also why it is fragile: it is borrowed capacity. At list prices, renting the same thing is in the range of 300 to 400 euro a month.
But the part that actually holds the project back is not the servers. It is physical test hardware. A kernel that only ever boots inside QEMU learns nothing about the real world: GPUs with their own firmware, Wi-Fi and Ethernet chips that behave differently from the virtio devices an emulator hands you, USB controllers, NVMe drives that lie about their queues, laptops with three different sleep states. Every one of those needs a real machine on a real bench, and every vendor family needs its own. Right now we test on the two laptops we happen to own. Broader hardware support for EuroOS, the thing people ask about most, is limited less by code than by the number of boards on the table.
So the first goal, 500 euro a month, is split in two: keep the borrowed infrastructure from disappearing, and buy, one at a time, the boards and cards needed to make GPU, networking and storage support real instead of emulated. Add the code-signing certificate a bootloader needs to be taken seriously by firmware, and the domains in 24 country variants, and 500 is what it comes to.
2. Time
520 commits in 12 weeks is roughly six a day, every day, weekends included. That is not a side project; it is a full-time job that nobody is paid for. We are not asking anyone to fund salaries yet. We are asking that the machines stop being borrowed.
3. Independence
This one is the point of the whole project. A European operating system that is financed by an American cloud credit programme, or by a VC that needs an exit in five years, is not sovereign in any sense that matters. The way to stay independent is boring: many small contributions from people who want the thing to exist, plus European public funding where it fits. We are applying for the second. This post is about the first.
Why the goal is only 500 euro a month
Because it is real. 500 euro covers the infrastructure and the test hardware described above, nothing else, and every board we buy with it will be listed here with its invoice. A goal of 5,000 would look more ambitious and sit at 2% for a year, which tells supporters their 10 euro does not matter. At 500, twenty-five people at 20 euro finish it. Your contribution moves the bar visibly the same day.
When the first goal is met, the next one will be equally concrete: one paid development day a week, so that the two of us can stop doing this only at night.
How to help
- Money: Liberapay is a European, non-profit platform with no fees on recurring donations, which is why it is our first choice. GitHub Sponsors works too. Monthly, cancel any time, any amount.
- Hardware: a spare dedicated server in an EU datacentre, or simply a laptop, GPU or network card you no longer use, is worth more to us than money. Odd hardware is the best hardware. Write to us.
- Attention: boot it, break it, and tell us. The best bug reports we ever got came from a Hungarian forum. Share this post with someone who cares about where their operating system comes from.
The live funding bar is on the home page. We will update these numbers here every quarter, including what the money was spent on.