SkillFishOS Wiki
Steampunk gaming Linux for the AMD BC-250 (Debian sid + KDE).
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SkillFishOS — Aetherium
The steampunk, gaming-focused Linux distribution for the AMD BC-250. A cheap mining board turned into a real desktop and a games console — tuned, themed and ready from the very first boot.
Debian sid · KDE Plasma 6 · Release 26.06 "Aetherium"
⬇ Download the ISO · Website · Source on GitHub
What is it?
The AMD BC-250 is a semi-custom APU — 6-core Zen 2 "Oberon" + RDNA 2 "Cyan Skillfish" (gfx1013) with 16 GB of GDDR6 — sold cheap on the second-hand market. Fantastic value, but a hostile Linux target: non-standard SMU clock control, a broken DisplayPort hot-plug, locked compute units, unreliable suspend, no IOMMU.
SkillFishOS does all that work once and hands you a system that powers on and runs at full speed — no terminal required. Every kernel patch, governor, overclock profile, thermal guard and driver workaround is pre-configured and tested.
It began as a way to get kids to use and learn Linux while they game — gaming is the carrot, Btrfs snapshots are the safety net.
⚡ Benchmarks — the keystone
All measured on our own BC-250 at 1080p, 40 CUs unlocked. Full detail (settings, clocks, voltages, temperatures, power) on the Benchmarks page.
| Benchmark | Settings | Result |
|---|---|---|
| Black Myth: Wukong | 1080p, uncapped | 112 FPS avg · 128 max · 101 (1% low) |
| Unigine Superposition | 1080p High | 12 938 · 96.8 FPS avg |
| Unigine Superposition | 1080p Extreme | 5 513 · 41.3 FPS avg |
| Unigine Heaven 4.0 | 1080p Ultra, 8× AA, Extreme tess. | 113.7 FPS · score 2865 |
| vkpeak FP32 (40 CU) | Vulkan compute | 11 329 GFLOPS (~11.3 TFLOPS) |
Same hardware, +34% just by changing the OS — and gaming performance in Radeon RX 6600 / 6600 XT territory, from a ~50 EUR board.
📸 The experience — boot to desktop
A coherent brass steampunk look from GRUB, through the Plymouth splash, to the KDE Plasma desktop.
More in Screenshots.
🎮 What's inside
- Custom linux-tkg 7.0.10 kernel with the BC-250 patches (40-CU unlock, unlocked clocks, SMU governor)
- KDE Plasma 6 steampunk desktop — icons, cursors, wallpaper, live system HUD
- Gaming ready: Steam, gamescope, EmuDeck, ES-DE, Heroic, Proton
- On-device AI: Ollama + OpenWebUI, Vulkan-accelerated on the iGPU
- Live Compute Units — boots at the 24-CU driver baseline and routes up to 40 CUs at runtime (via umr, no kernel param), restored at boot by a service
- Btrfs snapshots with one-click rollback straight from the GRUB menu
- Native Tuner and AI apps — overclock/undervolt, fan, live Compute Unit grid (green/red CU squares, 24/32/40 presets, no reboot) with a CU health test (silicon lottery) and a pop-up live monitor (temp/freq/voltage/fan charts), no terminal — bilingual IT/EN
- A signed APT repository for tested, dedicated updates
⬇ Get it
SkillFishOS 26.06 "Aetherium" — BC-250 edition
Write it to a USB stick (balenaEtcher / Ventoy / dd) and boot. It starts in English to stay universal; you choose language and keyboard during installation. Step-by-step: Installation.
🔗 Wiki & links
- Benchmarks — full results, settings, clocks, temperatures
- Screenshots — desktop, GRUB, boot splash, apps
- Installation — from USB to first boot
- Website — https://skillfishos.com
- Source & issues — https://github.com/MTSistemi/SkillFishOS
Open-source · Based on Debian · KDE Plasma · GPL-3.0