~/amber-linux

Amber Linux

Home of Amber Linux — applications, services, and themes for Linux Mint, shared in the open as part of a fundraiser for the distribution they run on. Come for the tools, stay for the birthday.

Explore Amber Linux Get kat800
Amber Linux

Projects

Source-available tools from the Amber Linux group, built and used daily on Linux Mint.

kat800

App

A tabbed, dockable terminal for Linux Mint — and a native tmux control-mode client. Git worktrees, files, notes, clipboard and AI chat live in docks beside your shells.

  • Odin
  • GTK4
  • Terminal
  • tmux

Ambrosia

Service

Everything you've copied, run, opened, bookmarked or noted — searchable, one keypress away. Six domains, one D-Bus contract (io.ambrosia.Manager).

  • Odin
  • GTK3
  • D-Bus
  • SQLite

Phosphorus

Theme

A Linux Mint theme inspired by the warm amber glow of 1990s CRT phosphor monitors. Brings a coherent, nostalgic aesthetic to your entire Mint desktop.

  • theme
  • linux mint
  • GTK
  • CRT

Amber LIB

Library

The Amber Linux package library for Odin. Go-modelled packages for filesystem paths, HTTP, DBus, GTK4, PTYs and more, with allocator-aware APIs throughout.

  • odin
  • library
  • packages
  • AI-written

Amberlin

App

A GTK chat client and AI harness, in development: models on your own GPU or a DGX Spark on the LAN, one D-Bus call away from every Mint application — with desktop context from Ambrosia.

  • GTK4
  • D-Bus
  • Local AI

Amber Odin

Package

A Debian package wrapper for the upstream Odin compiler. Installs a predictable /usr/bin/odin on Linux Mint without colliding with Ubuntu's unrelated odin package.

  • odin
  • compiler
  • debian
  • packaging
A personal note

Ten years with Linux Mint

On 1 May 2017 I made my first monthly sponsorship donation to Linux Mint. Not because anyone asked me to, not for exposure, but because Linux Mint had become the operating system I reached for every morning — and I believed the people building it deserved sustained, reliable funding.

Amber Linux — the group behind this site — is a celebration of that decade. As the sponsorship approaches its ten-year mark on 1 May 2027, we are doing two things at once: fundraising openly for Linux Mint, and releasing the developer tools and workflows I have quietly relied on throughout those ten years. Tools built to solve real problems on a real Linux Mint machine — not packaged and polished until now because there was never a good reason to share them. The anniversary is that reason.

The fundraiser is straightforward: encourage people who use and value Linux Mint to put money behind it. If Mint is your daily desktop too, consider joining the monthly sponsors at linuxmint.com/donors.php — even the smallest tier counts. Ten years of small contributions is how this project got its birthday. Everything on this site can be verified — the tools are source-available, the sponsorship history is on the Linux Mint forums, and the donation links point to linuxmint.com and nowhere else.

Fundraiser ends
1 May 2027
-- days
-- hrs
-- min
-- sec

Ten years of monthly Linux Mint sponsorship. Going until the end.

A note to friends and guests

Verify before you donate

Fundraisers tied to beloved FOSS projects attract imitators. Someone claiming to run a "Linux Mint sponsorship drive" or a "FOSS tools fundraiser" on your behalf is doing exactly the kind of thing bad actors copy. Before trusting anyone making similar claims — including me — verify the details independently.

01
Check the Linux Mint community forums

My sponsor history and any fundraiser announcements are posted and verifiable at forums.linuxmint.com. A real, long-term sponsor has a thread history, a profile with years of posts, and references from other community members. Accounts with no history and urgent donation requests do not.

02
Donation links must point to linuxmint.com

The only legitimate destination for Linux Mint donations is linuxmint.com/donors.php or the PayPal and bank links listed there directly. If anyone sends you a donation link to a third-party page, a crypto address, or anything not traceable to the official Mint site — do not use it. When in doubt, donate directly through the Mint website with no intermediary.

03
The tools here are source-available and inspectable

Every project on this site has public source code. The Amber Linux projects are all on GitHub under the Hyperquader-Coders organisation. If someone claims to have "improved" or "forked" these tools and is asking for payment or access fees, treat that as a red flag. The originals are free and always will be.

When in doubt, go direct: linuxmint.com/donors.php
~/.bash_history — 1995 
$ uname -a
Linux darkstar 1.2.8 #1 Mon Apr  3 20:34:21 CDT 1995
i?86 unknown

$ df -h
Filesystem      Size  Used
/dev/hda1       170M  168M  [barely breathing]

$ startx
Fatal server error: no screens found
[VGA CARD TEMPERATURE: CRITICAL]
Xlib: connection to ":0.0" refused
[this will be fine]

$ cat /proc/cpuinfo | grep "model name"
model name : 486? early Pentium?
[record corrupted — it was 1995]

$ free -m
             total   used   free
Mem:             4      4      0   [good luck]
Fun fact

It started with Slackware

My first Linux distribution was Slackware — it came with a 150-page printed manual (now up for auction on the fundraiser page) and the quiet, creeping dread of the pkgtool installer. The year was somewhere around 1995. The machine was home-built — a 486 or an early Pentium, honestly, I can't remember — with 4 MB of RAM and a VGA card that had done nothing to deserve what I was about to put it through.

Getting X11 running on Slackware meant hand-editing XF86Config: monitor horizontal sync range, vertical refresh, dot clock. Get it wrong and your CRT whines at a frequency only dogs should hear. I got it wrong. Several times.

Three decades later I am still on Linux, with a theme that looks like an amber phosphor monitor — and with the Amber Linux group named after it.