Hello Oreon Community, as we near the end of 2026, I'd like to share this year at Oreon HQ, what we've been working on, our milestones, the struggles we've faced, and our future plans.

A rough start

As we finished 2025 and entered 2026, we had a lot of people step down from the team, leading to suspended community services and slowed development. After the loss, we established clear project policies which help us prevent these kinds of things from easily happening again. We all learn from mistakes, right?

In August 2026, we opened the Oreon 2026 Restructuring Program, which is to help us get through the hardest times without needing a large team. We have the full progress on our community forum, which was linked in the last sentence.

A quiet but promising summer

In summer 2026, the Oreon team was at it's lowest activity in the history of the project, but we kept going and developed good progress towards Oreon 11.

We were proud to add OSUOSL and Melonslab to our sponsors list. OSUOSL provides us with infrastructure that powers Oreon Build Service along with an extra mirror to host our repos. Melonslab provides us mirroring for Europe.

Big thanks to all our sponsors that help provide important infrastructure.

Signs of recovery (finally)

Starting this November, I've seen significant improvement in Oreon team operations. We're about to hit double-digit team members once again after being stuck in the low single-digits pretty much all year.

More people are joining the Oreon team, and that's what I love to see, especially since we're working on Oreon 11, which needs a lot of manpower to build and maintain.

This month, we've also established new packaging docs and standards, which I announced in detail here.

What the future holds

The future of Oreon is looking good, especially with development on Oreon 11 actively progressing. We're aiming to open up Oreon 11 for beta testing early next year, although a stable release of Oreon 11 is not yet confimed for a release date. We want to keep beta testing open for a while so we can iron out all the bugs before a final release. I'd say Oreon 11 won't release to stable until at least mid-2027.

You can help too

You have a chance to help us too! Join the team and come help us further progress towards independence.