OS-Tan on Ivon's Blog

Ubunchu! Learn Linux Through Manga and Understand Free Software Community Culture

infoivonblog.nkfjt@aleeas.com (Ivon Huang) — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 16:00:00 +0800

The world’s first! Ubuntu school romantic comedy manga.

Ubunchu!, whose Chinese translation calls it Wubangchu, is a manga drawn by Japanese manga artist 瀬尾浩史. It was once serialized in Ubuntu Magazine Japan and has now ended.

The manga introduces the Ubuntu system in a light and humorous tone. Whether you are a newbie or an old hand, you can experience the fun of Linux from it.

It does not use the technique of operating system anthropomorphism (OS-tan). Instead, it truly acts out how Linux is used in daily life.

This manga was published in 2009. The system that appears in the manga is roughly from the Ubuntu 9.04 era, and later the heroine spends an entire day and night upgrading to Ubuntu 9.10. Perhaps because of trademark issues, the manga uniformly calls Ubuntu Ubunchu?

Although it is old, the things it talks about are still applicable today! For example, GNOME still occasionally fights with X Server and crashes. ( ~~Just cut X11 support directly and switch to Wayland, then you do not have to worry about this problem~~ )

Compared with Linux comics drawn by Daniel Stori and xkcd, Ubunchu! does not talk about too many technical things. It mainly talks about Linux and free software community culture, as well as the real-world difficulties encountered when promoting Linux to Windows users.

1. Ubunchu! Characters
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如月あかね: President of the System Administration Club. A fanatical Unix believer who prefers browsing the internet from the command line and did not know desktop graphical systems existed until high school.

御堂マサト: A Windows user, vice president of the System Administration Club, and Kisaragi’s archenemy.

椎名里沙: A Macintosh user and natural airhead, but also the first person to promote Ubuntu to the club members.

篠崎あきは: President of the Computer Science Club, opposed to free software solutions.

2. Resources for Reading Ubunchu! Online
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Official website of the manga’s original author: うぶんちゅ！ - 株式会社架空線

This manga is released under the CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 license, and users may freely modify and share it.

English translations (the translators obtained authorization from the original author):

Chinese fan-translation resources online are incomplete.

3. Episode Summaries of Ubunchu!
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Although this manga series can be freely reposted, for length reasons I only include the covers.

Episode 1: Ubunchu Appears!

うぶんちゅがやって来た！

Linux CLI hardcore faction vs. Windows user vs. Mac user.

Unexpectedly, it is the Mac user who first wants everyone to try Ubuntu? By the end, even the Linux CLI hardcore faction is shocked by Ubuntu’s friendly interface.

As long as you have Wine, you can even play Windows bishoujo games!

Episode 2: CLI and the Little Sprites

ＣＵＩとコビトとお姉さま

Introduces Linux command-line concepts.

In this episode, Shiina Risa treats Linux commands as little sprites working inside the computer, and the Linux desktop environment GNOME happens to mean a small sprite in English.

Ravimo, the Illustrator Who Drew the Cute Arch-chan: Anthropomorphizing Linux

infoivonblog.nkfjt@aleeas.com (Ivon Huang) — Tue, 12 Aug 2025 10:00:00 +0800

Arch-chan is the best！

Users who often browse the Reddit Linux boards should frequently see his artwork: cute Linux girls in a Japanese art style. Those are Ravimo’s works.

He has drawn anthropomorphized works of Arch Linux, Gentoo, Linux from Scratch, Manjaro, Athena OS, and others. Put simply, they are insanely hot. The character designs not only match the Japanese art style, but also contain many details that geeks can happily dig into!

Some of his works have shaped part of the public image of certain Linux distributions as girls. Simply put, although OS-tan works already existed 20 years ago, there have not been many character designs for each Linux distribution. Japan paid more attention to the Windows family, including the classic Windows 3.1-tan. There were fewer Linux-related creations (most people probably do not even know what a distribution is). Therefore, with the images created by Ravimo, Linux anthropomorphism has gained a new chapter.

According to his Pixiv profile, he is an extremely chad illustrator. All his works use the CC-BY 4.0 license, letting you lick the waifu to your heart’s content.

(Note: the images in this article have been compressed. If you need the originals, please look on Pixiv or Twitter.)

First, here is an image that makes fans of both sides ecstatic: the symbol on Saigyouji Yuyuko’s head looks just like Debian’s spiral pattern.

Ravimo’s most classic work is the image of Arch Linux-chan. Although Ravimo did not clearly state her attributes, we can observe that her image is that of a mischievous little loli wearing a cool hoodie, fond of teasing users (because rolling updates often break?). If we cite Moegirlpedia’s design, we can give a more specific definition: “Arch Linux-chan’s masters are capable users. By giving them genuine and complete system control training ability, she makes her masters fully responsible for their own systems, thereby satisfying these masters’ evil needs.”

This image depicts common elements of Arch Linux. sudo raises user privileges, and the little spirit on the hat at the right reflects the pacman package manager. The Systemd on the clothes is a core system component. core, extra, and community represent Arch Linux repository categories. Under Arch-chan’s jacket, the design has her wearing only one thin garment, letting all gentlemen easily see everything (?) Perhaps this reflects the KISS principle. After all, Arch Linux’s founder once said: “If you try to hide the complexity of the system, you’ll end up with a more complex system. Layers of abstraction that serve to hide internals are never a good thing. Instead, the internals should be designed in a way such that they NEED no hiding.”

A funny comic where Arch-chan uses sudo privileges to command Manjaro-chan, incidentally teaching you the command to quickly join sudoer. From the information in this image, Ravimo probably also designed an image for Manjaro-chan, but it has never been publicly released.

Could this be Arch-chan’s “backdoor”? It is time for some penetration test and stress test!

AlmaLinux Operating System Anthropomorphism: Alma-chan

infoivonblog.nkfjt@aleeas.com (Ivon Huang) — Sun, 03 Aug 2025 10:00:00 +0800

Another addition to the OS-tan family, this time an enterprise-driven project. I only now learned that the Japanese IT company Cybertrust helped AlmaLinux launch an operating system anthropomorphism mascot named Alma-chan (あるまちゃん), with images licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.

Coincidentally, Japan recently has a new robot anime called アルマちゃんはかぞくになりたい. Do not confuse it with this one, haha, although forming a family with a robot little sister would also be nice.

According to the setting provided by the official website サイバートラスト AlmaLinux 広報キャラクター「あるまちゃん」: she came from the planet Alma by UFO in order to search for her younger sister from a previous life, but because of a system failure, she cannot return home. She is trying to use the highly reliable AlmaLinux system to repair the UFO. Miracle-chan (みらくるちゃん) is her younger sister from a previous life!

The Miracle-chan mentioned here refers to Miracle Linux, an RHEL-derived distribution maintained by Japan’s Cybertrust with a 22-year history.

Then what is Rocky Linux? The villainess role? No… the final BOSS should be the evil RHEL, while CentOS is the already distant utopia.

Based on Alma-chan’s setting, Cybertrust officially launched the manga あるまちゃんの冒険. These updates can be followed on the Twitter account みらくるちゃん & あるまちゃん【MIRACLE LINUX ＆ AlmaLinux】.

The official website みらくるちゃん&カーネルくん provides beautiful wallpapers and cute manga. This penguin named “Kernel-kun” is the common language of all Linux distributions~

Some free software concepts are mentioned here, including Open Source Program Office. Companies establish dedicated offices to promote free software, which can be said to be a common standard practice around the world. It is clear they are quite good at promoting free software!