AnduinOS Outlasted the Microsoft Job That Funded It

Anduin Xue, the Microsoft engineer who built AnduinOS as a nights-and-weekends Ubuntu remix, was laid off in July 2025. He said so himself, in a one-line update on the same letter that had introduced him as a Software Engineer 2 whose day job was not Windows.

The distro did not stop. By June 2026 it shipped version 2.0 from AIURSOFT LIMITED in Hong Kong, and on September 20 it reached 2.0.3. The Windows-like Linux that looked like a theme pack is now a company product with an enterprise page. The person holding the keys is still Xue.

He Added a Layoff Note in July

On May 6, 2025, Xue posted a public letter after DistroWatch noticed AnduinOS and his download server started groaning. He confirmed the job that later defined the coverage: full-time Microsoft engineer, not on the Windows team, financially stable, no plan to live off the project.

It’s not my main job, and I don’t plan to rely on it for a living. Each month, I dedicate only a few hours to maintaining it.

Anduin Xue, AnduinOS maintainer, May 2025 letter

He treated the Microsoft paycheck as the reason he could refuse donations. He called AnduinOS a toy assembled on a quiet afternoon, then said the thinness was the point. Critics called it Ubuntu with a theme. He agreed. That was the experience he wanted, and the system even identified itself as Ubuntu in /etc/os-release so users could lean on Ubuntu’s docs.

He also wrote that U.S.-China politics made him feel he could lose the job at any time. On July 20, 2025, he edited the opening. “Not anymore. I got laid off this month and will leave Microsoft soon.”

That is the fact that aged out every “Microsoft employee maintains a Windows clone” headline, including when his Microsoft job first became public. A later career timeline he published himself softens the same exit: Microsoft was cutting staff, he had been there five years after joining as an FTE in 2020 and moving to Suzhou, and he “chose to leave.” The July note is the contemporaneous one. He was laid off.

THE ANDUINOS ARC

1. May 1, 2025: AnduinOS 1.3 ships on Ubuntu 25.04 with GNOME 48 and Linux kernel 6.14.
2. May 6, 2025: Xue publishes the letter confirming the Microsoft job and the few-hours hobby.
3. July 20, 2025: He updates the letter. Microsoft laid him off.
4. January 12, 2026: He says the team is still just him and he is forming a Hong Kong company.
5. June 30, 2026: AnduinOS 2.0.0 is listed as released, after a June 29 announcement from AIURSOFT LIMITED.
6. September 20, 2026: AnduinOS 2.0.3 adds a Control Panel, offline voice typing, a refined installer, and Dracut.

In the original letter he said some venture investors had already called, and he had generally declined. He also left himself an out: enterprise support, custom hardware, or a sponsorship that would let him work on it full time. The layoff made that out look less hypothetical.

Hong Kong Is the Official Home Now

The most common complaint, he wrote on January 12, 2026, was a fair one. Do not trust critical infrastructure maintained by a single person. He said he understood it, and that AnduinOS could not stay a one-person project forever.

His answer was registering AIURSOFT LIMITED in Hong Kong. He said he chose Hong Kong “to maintain neutrality and avoid potential geopolitical complications.” The free desktop would stay free and, in that post, donation driven, a shift from the May letter’s no-donations stance. Revenue, he said, would come from enterprise editions. He promised on-call rotations, technical support, and a global hiring round.

He also said, in the same post, that the development team was still just him.

Six months later the 2.0 announcement spoke in a company voice. AIURSOFT LIMITED was now the official maintainer. The site added an AnduinOS Enterprise column: custom branding, cluster management, rapid deployment, kiosk images, and 7×24 on-call support where contracted. None of that proves a second engineer exists. It proves Xue built the wrapper he said he would build after the layoff.

Commenters on that January post still asked whether a Chinese government could lean on the project. Xue’s older answer still sits on the May letter: the code is public, users can rebuild the ISO, and planting a backdoor would be “irrational and easily exposed.” Hong Kong is his jurisdictional reply to the same worry. It does not add maintainers.

Version 2.0 Drops the Remaster Story

AnduinOS 1.x was, by Xue’s own description, an Ubuntu ISO with a Fluent GNOME skin and a builder other people could point at their own logos. People who spend an afternoon turning Ubuntu into a Windows look-alike were not wrong to see themselves in it. Version 2.0 is the project’s attempt to outgrow that review.

The June 29, 2026 announcement, dated Hong Kong, says 2.0 is assembled from a clean debootstrap and chroot pipeline, not by rewriting a finished Ubuntu image with bash. The core is split into 56 native.deb packages in three tiers: hard replacements (including ubuntu-desktop), soft overrides such as apt-config, and branding. Custom upgrade scripts are gone. Updates are apt update && apt upgrade. Packages move through packages.anduinos.com on Cloudflare nodes in the United States, Europe, and Asia.

The AnduinOS 2.0.0 release notes put the same architecture in writing and point at the open AnduinOS-2 builder on GitHub, plus AnduinOS-Packages and Apkg. AnduinOS-authored 2.0 code is GPL-3.0. Apkg is MIT. The 1.x GitHub repo still shows 1.3k stars. The 2.0 builder shows 74. The star count that made the hobby look big never moved onto the rewrite.

ANDUINOS 1.3 AND 2.0.3 COMPARED

The 2.0 notes also describe a CI gate that fails the build if snapd or upstream telemetry packages show up. That is the technical form of a line testers already use: AnduinOS is Ubuntu with snaps stripped, plus a Windows-shaped panel. Fonts move to Cascadia Code, Noto, Nerd Fonts Symbols, and Twemoji. Celluloid, Loupe, Amberol, Resources, and Geary replace heavier GNOME defaults. Developer metapackages are no longer preinstalled. A first-party GTK4 firewall panel sits on UFW.

What AnduinOS 2.0.3 Ships

The current download on anduinos.com is AnduinOS 2.0.3, the “Resolute Raccoon” LTS line, listed with support until April 2031. The product table names GNOME 50, Wayland, Linux kernel 7.0, a 2.35 GB image, and a September 20, 2026 release date. HDR, NVIDIA, Secure Boot, and ARM64 are listed as supported.

Xue announced 2.0.3 on X the same day, as the project account that still is his personal handle.

We have released AnduinOS 2.0.3: a new Control Panel, offline Voice Typing, a refined installer, and Dracut.

Download: https://t.co/9G6vOdylzg pic.twitter.com/q0RjiiFCYF

— Anduin Xue (@anduin17) September 20, 2026

WHAT 2.0.3 ADDS

• Control Panel: A searchable window that gathers system tools the 2.0 desktop had left scattered.
• Offline voice typing: Dictation that does not need a cloud round trip.
• Dracut switch: Dracut as an alternative initramfs path, after 2.0.0 already called it supported.
• Installer pass: Xue called it a refined installer; testers keep hitting USB-writer quirks around it.

The Appearance app, already in 2.0.0, is the feature that still does the Windows trick. It switches 11-style centered taskbar icons and a classic left-aligned layout, and it can pin the bar to any screen edge. GDM gets a Fluent login theme and a wallpaper picker. Xue’s notes say the project sponsors Vinceliuice’s Fluent GTK and icon themes, which is how a GNOME session ends up looking like a Microsoft shell without shipping Microsoft code.

He is still the support desk. On September 27, 2026, he told a user the USB stick was faulty, to burn with dd, and not to use Rufus in the suggested ISO mode because it breaks AnduinOS. That is not a company on-call rotation. That is the maintainer on a Sunday.

DistroWatch Traffic Does Not Make a Team

DistroWatch’s page-hit ranking, a count of visits to distro pages and not of installs, is how AnduinOS first got famous. A snapshot of that ranking still puts it in shouting distance of much older names.

DISTROWATCH PAGE HITS, SAME SNAPSHOT

DistroWatch itself says the ranking is not market share. Treat 612 as curiosity, not as a user census. It is still a lot of curiosity for a project whose January letter admitted the staff was one person, and whose September write-ups still describe Aiursoft as Xue in company clothing.

AnduinOS 1.1, the Noble Numbat LTS line from January 6, 2025, remains listed as supported until April 1, 2029. The short 1.3 and 1.4 branches are already EOL. People who installed the Windows-look ISO during the 2025 spike are split across a living 1.1, a dead 1.x short train, and a 2.0 rewrite that does not pretend to be a theme on top of Ubuntu’s installer anymore.

The bus-factor problem is the one Xue quoted, and it has not been closed by a Hong Kong registration. A bad update, an illness, or a lost domain still funnels through him. Enterprise 7×24 on-call is a product line on a website. It is not evidence of a bench.

Windows Switchers Still Have Zorin and Mint

The lane AnduinOS occupies, a Linux desktop that does not ask a Windows user to learn a new spatial language, was not empty when Xue published 1.3. Zorin OS sits at rank 7 on the same DistroWatch snapshot, with 1018 hits per day. Linux Mint sits at rank 2. Ubuntu, the actual base AnduinOS still rides, sits at rank 8.

Zorin timed a major release to Windows 10’s end of support on October 14, 2025. AnduinOS 1.4 landed the next day, on October 15, 2025, tracking Ubuntu 25.10 rather than the cutoff. That pairing tells you how Xue works. He follows Ubuntu’s calendar. He does not run a conversion campaign.

Mint wins people who want a traditional desktop that stays out of the way. Zorin wins people who want a layout switcher and a polished first boot. AnduinOS wins people who want the Fluent taskbar specifically, snaps gone, and an ISO small enough to copy without thinking. Those are different jobs. Rank 13 is the job of looking like Windows 11 on GNOME, not the job of replacing Microsoft for a family PC.

Xue’s May letter said the attraction might be fleeting because he was standing on other people’s work. Version 2.0 is him trying to own more of the stack so Ubuntu bugs are not a dead end. The Appearance panel, the 56 packages, and the Hong Kong company are that attempt. The September USB advice is the limit of it.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is AnduinOS an Official Microsoft Product?

No. Xue said his Microsoft work was.NET application development, not Windows, and Microsoft has never listed AnduinOS among its own open-source operating systems. The 2.0 code is copyrighted to the AnduinOS project under GPL-3.0, with Apkg under MIT, and the listed maintainer is AIURSOFT LIMITED in Hong Kong.

Does Anduin Xue Still Work at Microsoft?

No. He added a July 20, 2025 note to his letter saying he had been laid off that month. His about page later describes five years at the company after he joined as a full-time engineer in 2020 and relocated to Suzhou, then says he left during Microsoft’s cuts and turned Aiursoft from a one-man open-source group into a formal company.

Is AnduinOS Just Ubuntu With a Windows Theme?

Version 1.x was, and Xue said that was deliberate. Version 2.0 still uses Ubuntu 26.04 packages, so Ubuntu knowledge still applies, but the image is built with debootstrap and 56 of its own.deb packages, snaps are blocked in CI, and a first-party Appearance app switches the Windows 11-style centered taskbar and a left-aligned layout without a manual GNOME-extension scavenger hunt.

Why Is AnduinOS Based in Hong Kong?

Xue said he wanted neutrality and fewer geopolitical complications than operating the project from mainland China. In the same January 2026 note he said the personal desktop would stay free and donation driven while the company sold enterprise work: custom branding, cluster management, kiosk images, and contracted 7×24 support.

AnduinOS 2.0.3 is the current image, support on that line runs to April 2031, and the maintainer who used to do this in a few hours a month after a Microsoft shift is now the company. He is still the person who tells you not to burn the ISO with Rufus.