Current status¶
UnisonOS is pre-release engineering software. The privacy, household, workflow, backup, multimodal, installer, and update foundations are increasingly complete and tested. There is still no supported appliance release for everyday installation.
The first public software-only appliance preview is now available: v0.6.0-preview.1. It remains unsupported while physical validation and promotion gates are open.
What is in place¶
- Personal and household foundations: independent identities, assistants, private data domains, invitations, explicit shared context spaces, and cross-person isolation tests.
- Privacy and control: default-deny policy, minimized disclosure, exact confirmations, revocable permissions, audit records, and untrusted-content handling.
- Useful workflows: bounded calendar, mail, commitment, household, contact, research, and travel journeys with cancellation and recovery.
- Interaction foundations: semantic responses, local speech, captions, interruption controls, keyboard operation, high contrast, reduced motion, and simplified-language preferences.
- Backup and recovery: provider-independent encrypted backup, tamper and rollback detection, storage-provider migration, and clean-device restore simulations.
- Replaceable components: policy-aware model routing and signed, revocable capability packages with compatibility and permission review.
- Governed model lifecycle: signed per-version model manifests, hard task/privacy/hardware eligibility, inspectable routing, untrusted semantic proposals, synthetic golden evaluation, bounded canaries, content-free health gates, and automatic rollback to a retained prior version.
- Private source onboarding foundation: encrypted document and image quarantine, private review and correction, source provenance, duplicate and version tracking, rollback and deletion, plus read-only OAuth PKCE, SMART health sandbox, financial test-provider, selected-folder, and bounded MCP connection profiles.
Private sources and connection foundation¶
The first three private life operations slices are implemented in software. You can select multiple documents or capture multiple camera pages, review their names and safety flags, and admit them to a private encrypted source library. The intake boundary checks media types, file signatures, archive paths and expansion, size, and malware policy before admission. Extracted text, metadata, tables, and barcode values retain exact source-region provenance and can be corrected without rewriting the original source. Imports can resume or roll back, and deletion removes the encrypted object and extracted indexes.
The initial Connection Broker requests only declared read-only scopes. It has profiles for generic OAuth Authorization Code with PKCE, SMART on FHIR, a financial sandbox, a selected local folder, and bounded MCP resources. Tokens remain behind opaque per-person handles, incremental sync deduplicates repeated items, and revocation stops further sync. The browser never asks you to paste a health or financial provider password.
These are local and sandbox software contracts. Production connection certification, live provider registrations, OCR quality on supported camera hardware, and production malware scanning remain release qualification work.
Model routing and lifecycle status¶
Unison now defines bounded interpretation, extraction, vision, semantic construction, synthesis, and conversation tasks. Availability is inventoried separately from eligibility. Signed immutable manifests describe each exact model version, artifact, runtime, task support, privacy limits, hardware needs, license, measured quality and latency, approved risk, limitations, and rollback compatibility.
The route for each bounded operation records the selected version, minimized disclosure, rejected candidates, rank evidence, and fallback. Models cannot broaden context, select a remote provider, create recipients or actions, remove recovery, or override deterministic facts. High-risk content follows a deterministic language path.
Candidates run against synthetic golden semantic journeys in shadow before a bounded canary. Content-free health gates cover contract success, semantic success, fallback, errors, and latency. A degraded canary returns to the retained prior version without changing your identity, memory, permissions, pending actions, or interaction preferences.
This is implemented software with synthetic qualification. Physical CPU, GPU, RAM, storage, energy, thermal, and realistic contention evidence remains open. No model and hardware combination is currently supported by the semantic experience program.
Private household, health, and financial operations¶
The household, health, finance, and governed cross-domain software packages are now implemented over the private source foundation.
Household operations organize products, receipts, manuals, warranties, service history, renewals, returns, recalls, subscriptions, procedures, and optional read-only Matter and energy observations. Product matching shows the exact identifiers compared and its uncertainty. Recall notices require an exact owned-product match. Purchases stay private until you explicitly share a copy, and repair or service work remains a draft. Unison does not purchase, schedule service, or control a physical device through this package.
The private health package normalizes supported FHIR sandbox records, preserves clinical and self-reported sources, shows contradictions, supports person-selected descriptive trends, and prepares cited timelines, visit briefs, and provider-message drafts. Inferred conditions cannot become confirmed diagnoses. Unison does not diagnose, change medication or treatment, or dismiss urgent care. Deterministic urgent-language rules direct you toward appropriate human help without claiming to rule out an emergency.
The read-only finance package reconciles source amounts, distinguishes observed facts from inferred categories and forecasts, detects duplicate charges, price changes, overdue refunds, subscriptions, and obligations, and prepares a cited weekly exception brief. Your private account contributes nothing to household totals unless you create an explicit contribution rule. Unison cannot move money, trade, open credit, file taxes, close accounts, or submit disputes.
Cross-domain packets require a purpose, selected fields, named recipients, and your approval. Removing a link preserves both independent sources. The unified attention review explains how risk, deadlines, your selected goals, and review burden affect priority.
The synthetic value baseline meets the current targets with a four-minute first useful result, 96 percent extraction precision, 90 percent useful-attention precision, two attention items weekly, complete deletion, 35 estimated minutes returned, and no boundary or unsafe-action incidents. These are synthetic software results. A genuinely opted-in human pilot and explicit human package and provider decisions remain required.
Appliance release work now implemented¶
The first support candidate is a native Ubuntu 24.04 LTS, x86-64, UEFI installation bundle. The current release does not publish WSL2, VM, bare-metal ISO, or arm64 downloads.
The candidate release path now has:
- one lifecycle owner in
unison-platformand one signed-update owner inunison-updates, both pinned by the authoritative workspace; - a 13-service supported runtime contract that requires immutable image digests, removes developer host ports from internal services, and binds its two host-facing surfaces to loopback;
- a deterministic release manifest covering source and Compose hashes, service digests, host packages and resources, schema/configuration/backup/model versions, model-profile hash, and licenses;
- byte-for-byte manifest reproducibility tests and rejection of missing, mutable, or placeholder image digests;
- a deterministic Ed25519-signed bundle containing the manifest, Compose contract, immutable image environment, host requirements, licenses, and model profile;
- pre-privilege bootstrap verification that rejects tamper, missing or extra files, substituted trust roots, and service/image reassignment, then binds confirmation to the exact bundle, key, installation path, and data path;
- installer preflight checks for the supported OS, architecture, CPU, memory, storage, virtualization, UEFI, Docker/Compose, clock, and audio;
- simulated transactional installation with atomic activation, idempotent reinstall, interruption recovery, repair, safe uninstall, and separately confirmed factory reset, plus a receipt that reconciles the installed tree with its release manifest and source commit;
- threshold-signed update metadata with expiration, monotonic channel and target versions, channel/hardware binding, artifact integrity, and dual-authority root-key rotation; and
- an independently verified staging authorization, pre-update data and receipt checkpoint, complete target staging, atomic activation, bounded health promotion, safe interruption resume, and automatic or explicit rollback.
- a public unsupported prerelease containing a signed x86-64 bundle, 13 digest-pinned runtime images, checksums, source correspondence, SPDX inventory, provenance, support status, vulnerability evidence, Ed25519 signatures, and Sigstore evidence;
- keyless signatures and scans for ten source-correspondent project images, with current base OS security updates and rejection of fixable critical findings; and
- a public-download job that verifies the published bytes, performs an installer transaction, and rejects incomplete or tampered mirrors.
Update simulations reject replay, freeze, expiration, wrong-channel metadata,
corrupt artifacts, wrong architecture, target rollback, signed-payload
tampering, invalid root rotation, changed authorization, expired roots, and
insufficient disk. They exercise successful N-1 to N, failed N to
N+1, migration failure, staged and post-activation interruption, and
replacement-restored state without losing the last known good release or data.
Adaptive maintenance software boundaries now implemented¶
Unison can now build a privacy-minimized profile of the current device, evaluate content-free health indicators, match authoritative security evidence to exact installed component versions, forecast capacity pressure, and explain software, configuration, model, or compatible hardware adjustments.
The System wellbeing experience reports security, reliability, performance, capacity, compatibility, and improvement opportunities. Recommendations include the measured need, expected effect, alternatives, authority level, confirmation, confidence, and rollback information. Memory pressure recommends a smaller or more efficient model before suggesting a RAM purchase. Hardware candidates fail closed unless their architecture, support tier, upgrade topology, firmware, and power requirements match the device profile.
The default autonomy is Recommend. You can grant a narrow, revocable maintenance window for reversible service recovery, disposable housekeeping, signed patch staging, or restoration of a last-known-good model or configuration. The Lifecycle boundary independently checks the exact device, action class, time window, action and downtime budgets, signed artifact, checkpoint, health gate, rollback, and circuit breaker. Every attempted action produces a receipt.
Reviewed community sources can now produce sandboxed, content-hashed claims. Unison clusters duplicates, records corroboration and conflicts, and may propose a bounded local test. External content remains untrusted and can never create a grant, approve an artifact, or invoke maintenance.
Eligibility checks now cover OS packages, containers, drivers, model runtimes, models, capabilities, and data/configuration. Firmware stays blocked until recovery is verified on the exact hardware. System wellbeing also exposes allowlisted maintenance history and discovery-only test proposals.
The maintenance pieces are now connected into one restart-safe appliance workflow. An authenticated device owner can grant one reversible action for a short window, revoke it, or defer a recommendation. The renderer only queues that decision. Appliance Lifecycle independently verifies the grant, signed artifact, checkpoint, health gate, and rollback before changing anything. Grants, budgets, cooldowns, circuit breakers, decisions, and receipts persist across service restarts.
The signed preview bundle now contains the maintenance service and hourly timer. Its release-signed source registry begins with read-only Unison release, Ubuntu security notice, GitHub reviewed advisory, and Hacker News discovery feeds. Collectors enforce HTTPS, signed host limits, redirect and size checks, JSON parsing, content hashes, and private local snapshots. Hacker News remains discovery-only and cannot authorize an action.
What is still required¶
These controls are implementation and CI evidence. A support announcement requires the remaining promotion gates. Before promotion, the project still needs:
- promotion of the preview image digests and trust roots into a supported channel after the remaining gates pass;
- deeper installer onboarding, repair, export, backup, and accessible first-run integration;
- real promoted update downloads, reboot health gating, repeated physical upgrade and rollback cycles, offline updates, and revocation procedures;
- two named reference systems and a versioned compatibility matrix;
- physical audio, firmware, Secure Boot, TPM, suspend, thermal, power, backup, restore, install, update, rollback, removal, and factory-reset results; and
- a time-bounded opt-in pilot, calibration on real workloads, and an explicit human decision before promoting any automatic action class.
- live-provider certification and a genuinely opted-in value pilot for the implemented household, health, and financial packages.
Seventeen physical checks are tracked separately so CI or simulation cannot be mistaken for hardware acceptance.
What that means for you¶
You can inspect the contracts, run the development stack, and evaluate the native preview. You should not yet depend on UnisonOS as a supported production appliance or put irreplaceable personal data into an evaluator installation.
Continue with the appliance release lifecycle, current download, installation status, or compatibility guidance.