Ikey Doherty’s Gone Missing Again

As AerynOS powers ahead without its founder, the open source world might ask: Why does Ikey Doherty keep going AWOL?

Ikey Doherty has evidently ghosted yet another project he started. I had hoped that maybe this time he would see it through — or at least let his team know if he had to take a break or something. Instead, it appears that he’s done his usual and just quit answering the metaphorical phone.

This time the news comes from Bobby Borisov at Linuxaic, who indicates that the problem might be money — or a lack of it — which seems to be what’s usually behind Doherty’s disappearances.

Before his latest return to incognito mode, Doherty was the lead developer for AerynOS — originally called Serpent OS — a distro he created in 2020 which has yet to have a stable 1.0 release (it’s currently in alpha). The distro is said to be something of a next-gen improvement on Solus, a popular distribution that Doherty also started and eventually ghosted. While at Solus, he also launched the Gnome-based Budgie desktop environment in 2014.

Actually, that Solus distro — which still lives, with a Distrowatch Page Hit Ranking of 40 — was Doherty’s second try at launching a distro called Solus. The first one he unexpectedly shut down in 2013, even though in that incident, he did leave a note.

Borisov said that he discovered that Doherty has gone missing while working on his coverage of Aeryn’s 2025.10 ISO in late October, after someone with the project mentioned in passing that “he [Doherty] stepped back six months ago.”

Then he discovered this on GitHub, written by Rune Morling, a co-founder of AerynOS, who apparently is now acting as the projects lead — at least for as long as Doherty is missing in action:

“Ikey has not been in contact with the project for six months.

“In his absence, I have taken up the Project Steward role, including planning and directing the various development workstreams, while @NomadicCore is handling external communications.

“In this time, we have continued to deliver on our goals, such as delivering on Rust based Infrastructure and landing KDE Plasma as an additional option. We also have more people coming on board across multiple areas of the project.

“We wish Ikey the best but rest assured, the project is in great shape and consistently hitting our internal project goals.”

The last time I wrote about Doherty’s habit of going AWOL Ikey contacted me afterwards, angry at first before he calmed down. The few snippets of that conversation that happened on social platforms survive, but most of it is lost now — earlier this year a hiccup during an OS upgrade resulted in the loss of all of my emails.

I remember that the picture he painted of himself led me to believe that he’s very troubled and thinks of himself as persecuted, which may be true. Ethnically he’s an Irish Traveller, a group that faces considerable discrimination both in Ireland and in the UK, which he blamed for much of his problems.

“As I mentioned I’m an Irish traveller living in the UK,” Doherty told me in a DM on LinkedIn in February. “The government has increasingly made our way of life illegal through what equates to modern day ethnic cleansing. My partner and I have come close to death multiple times in the past few years.”

At this point I can’t help but feel bad for Doherty, who is obviously wrestling with inner demons. I hope he conquers them and goes on to live the rich life that every human being deserves.

Christine Hall

Christine Hall has been a journalist since 1971. In 2001, she began writing a weekly consumer computer column and started covering Linux and FOSS in 2002 after making the switch to GNU/Linux. Follow her on Twitter: @BrideOfLinux

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