ける · keru keitō-teki
Keru is written ける in Japanese, and the project's full phrase is ける・けいとうてき (keru keitō-teki) — a system assembled the way you want it. The ethos is compact enough to sit behind a name: you don't receive a system, you craft it.
It's deliberately not a pronouncement. It's a description of the relationship Keru wants with you: you choose, it builds, and it has no agenda beyond honoring that choice.
The kiln and the craft
The package manager is called Kama (窯, "kiln"). The metaphor is warm on purpose — not a cathedral of machinery, but a kiln: you stack your ingredients, fire it, and what comes out is shaped by your hand, not by the kiln's preferences. A kiln doesn't have opinions about the pot. It just fires.
Principles guiding the work
- Source-only. You run what you built. Every package is compiled from original source.
- Legibility. Every decision is a script or a line in
make.conf you can see and change.
- Simplicity as stability. Fewer moving parts means fewer things to break — keeping the manager in shell is the point, not a compromise.
- Honesty at the edges. Unproven combinations get a warning, not a wall. You are never lied to about risk.
- No junk. No telemetry, no preinstalled opinions masked as defaults, no background assumptions.
What Keru is not
- Not a meta-OS that runs arbitrary kernels — it's a Linux distribution that composes the bits above the kernel however you like.
- Not an opinionless void — it holds one strong opinion: that you should form yours.
- Not a challenge to pick the "right" stack — there is no right stack, there's only your stack.
企業はあなたの選択の上に成り立つ — the distro stands on your choices.
Read about Keru · Read the philosophy