Releases
- Releases (
YY.M.N, written up here) are changes to what Pulsar adds on top of Silverblue: the year, the month, and that month’s release number, so26.9.1is September 2026’s first. The About page, the boot menu,pulsar manifestandpulsar doctorall show it. - Nightly builds (
44.20260929.0) carry each day’s Fedora and Silverblue updates, listed in the nightly changelog, generated from the images.
Releases ship inside a nightly; both arrive through the same update. The two
move independently: a month with no new Pulsar features keeps its release
while the builds go on, so the About page may read
Pulsar 26.9.1 (44.20261103.0) in November.
26.9.1
The first numbered release: Pulsar’s own look, and glass.
Themes
- 20 themes, each recoloring the whole desktop in one step: GNOME Shell, GTK 4 and GTK 3 apps, the terminal, Text Editor, btop, coding agents and the wallpaper. Two-mode themes follow Dark Style on their own.
- The theme picker (Super+T) shows every theme as a card in its own colors;
pulsar theme set <name>does the same from a terminal, andpulsar theme revertputs stock GNOME back. - Flatpak apps are themed by default, and GTK 3 apps follow Dark Style.
- btop gets the theme’s own colors in light themes too, instead of labels drawn in pale gray.
Glass and light
- Menus, the top bar, OSDs, notification banners and app windows go translucent over a live blur of whatever is really beneath them, redrawn every frame, so it keeps up with a window dragged across it.
- Light: the button that opened a menu glows, the menu’s rim is lit from it, and the edge warms when the battery runs low.
- App windows get a little glass too, with their cards kept solid and lifted so they stay readable.
- Every effect is its own switch, in the picker’s Effects panel and the Pulsar Theme page of the Extensions app, with a tint slider and a Reset. High contrast turns them all off.
Under the hood
- The sched_ext scheduler (scx_bpfland) runs again on Fedora’s 7.2 kernels.
Two things had kept it off: a build check that misread the kernel, and a
missing link to the kernel config that every BPF scheduler needs.
pulsar doctornow names that second cause if it ever comes back. pulsar manifestandpulsar doctorshow the release beside the nightly build.
Written with help from AI and reviewed by a person before publishing. Spotted a mistake? Let us know.