To join the Nirvati partner program, we have certain requirements towards your hardware:

1. Nirvati should not be modified by you unless it is required for the hardware.
2. As an open source project, we encourage modifiying our code. However, the Nirvati partner program is designed to provide an “official” Nirvati experience. Hardware certified through the Nirvati partner program may not modify Nirvati. It can however use any certified Nirvati distribution.
3. Adding more apps to the app store or preinstalling certain apps, as well as branding customization through branding.json is allowed.
4. The hardware must be configured in such a way that the user can gain root access if they want to.
   Unless Nirvati is running a VM, Nirvati should not be combined with other container managment software to avoid port conflicts.
   Server managment solutions that only contain container managment as an optional feature (like Cockpit) and that are not easy to integrate with Nirvati are allowed.
   This requirement may be removed in the future depending on how Nirvati continues.
5. Hardware should use an officially supported operating system, which currently includes:
   Debian 11 and 12
   Ubuntu 22.04 LTS We prefer Debian for most use cases, but Ubuntu is also officially supported
   RHEL 9.1
   Any RHEL-based distro like CentOS Stream, AlmaLinux, Rocky Linux, Oracle Linux, …
   Fedora 38 or any later version
6. Hardware should be as free as possible and any firmware you develop or modify for it should be open source unless contracts with 3rd parties prevent you from doing so.
7. The operating system should be as minimalistic as possible by default. If you need to ship a desktop environment, you should also offer a version without one.

These requirements only apply to hardware shipping with Nirvati preinstalled:

You of course can offer other software choices that do not meet any of these requirements.

Exceptions to the requirements:

Depending on your use case, we can make exceptions to the requirements. Even if you pass all the requirements, you may not be added to the program. We can remove you from this program at any time, at which point you will be unlisted from our website and we recommend stopping advertising as a “Nirvati Partner” on your website.

With these guidelines, we want to ensure people can rely on hardware from the Nirvati partner program and get the best experience possible.