Hannah Montana Linux (HML) has become a conversation starter in the land of FOSS (aka FOSSLand?), and somehow, the year is 2026. The remaster, released by Noah Cagle, a developer/YouTuber, has taken us by surprise.
This new avatar of HML is a combination of Debian Live tooling and the Calamares installer, with most of the makeover happening inside KDE Plasma, the desktop environment of choice here.
For anyone unfamiliar, the original Hannah Montana Linux was bestowed upon us in 2009, riding on Kubuntu 9.04 and KDE 4.2, drenched in hot pink Disney Channel branding.
It might sound like a fever dream, but it was a real, functioning operating system, and that absurdity is precisely what turned it into a long-running Linux meme that never quite died.
HML in 2026!?
This variant of HML is built on Debian 13, with non-free repositories enabled from the beginning for easy access to proprietary hardware drivers. Noah used live-build, Debian’s tool for building custom distributions, and a few custom flags to get this up and running.
Most of the visual changes you see here are the result of cloning Plasma assets and manually editing them. The “pretty pink” color scheme is a copy of Breeze with only the window header and button highlight colors changed.
The wallpaper is rebuilt from the original 2009 PNG file, resized for widescreen screens, with a recreated glitter effect and Hannah’s cutout pasted back in.
The theme options and Calamares installer on HML.
Similarly, the icon pack ships with only one replacement icon for the kickoff start menu button, which was taken from the Hannah Montana logo. The panel’s pink color comes from a separate Plasma theme, copied and recolored from Noir Dark‘s panel background SVG in Inkscape.
All of these pieces are bundled into one Global Theme for quick access.
For the installer, the default Debian installer was replaced in favor of Calamares, with the distro’s existing Calamares-specific assets being reused and redesigned for use in HML to match the rest of the theme.
Grab an image
Noah has not hosted a dedicated website for this project, so you will have to make do with the GitLab repository that hosts the source code as well as the latest release of Hannah Montana Linux (v26.1 at the time of writing).
Btw, the main release isn’t the only option on offer. 👇
The HML26 Lite image swaps Plasma and SDDM for LXQt and LightDM, making HML a more suitable option for people running RAM-constrained, older hardware.
And if you already run Plasma and just want the look without needing to install a whole new operating system, the exquisite pink theme has its own standalone repository.
I must say, this is mostly a passion project, and only time will tell how maintained this new avatar of HML will be. If you just want to distrohop and see what this offers, then this is a great fit, but if you intend to daily drive it, your mileage may vary.
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