Once more, with feeling

This week has been a blast. I've had a nasty cold for 5 days and missed 2 days at Verge.IO - my new employer. Literally started a new job with "I'm sorry, I'm too sick today" at day #2.

And then Phoronix picked up my linkedin post from over the weekend where I first publicly posted about the project. And then Reddit reposted it, and a few other websites linked it and my inbox has been wild.

It's still a project, not one distro!

But it's interesting to see how much people are reading over the article and seeing what they want to see, and not what is actually there. It goes to show you what users are looking for, and what not. Users don't care at all how you're making it. Have you ever watched that video about the guy on youtube who restores an old cast iron saussage maker? The guy is in Romania, give him a thumbs up if you find it. Anyway, most users could care less about it, up to a point. There's a saying that feels oddly relevant here about this, but I can't put my finger on it.

That's great and all for most hobby spin offs (not caring about how it's made), and in a way it explains the popularity around a few currently hyped (and some even under-hyped) distros. Some of these are truly doing great work here. I want them to succeed, because their goals are to give better software to users.

But I'm in it to work a little lower in the stack. All these good distros are doing content curation. A tedious and hard job. Long hours scanning for things that need updating, reading and judging whether things are okay to merge or will cause some downstream dependent to fail, and worrying about ingesting something bad that will make everyone look like freshly caught squirtles.

An opinionated build system

Just a quick reminder - I don't want to make an opinionated distro. I am making an opinionated distro build system. Its opinion on the content is very biased: All content shapes must be possible products of the build system. What kind of distro users will then make with it is going to be the surprise. I will certainly make my initial "official" repository opinionated in some way, but it's opinionated because it's meant to be a good starting point for all other opinionated distros that users then build themselves.

But what about companies?

There's more users than "users". We all think mostly intuitively of users as just people who decided to install Linux instead of Windows 11 because their computer was too old to upgrade, and they're trying something new. If not that, then some bearded guy like me who knows what a punchcard is and understands what a pencil does to a TDK D-C60.

There's an awful lot of companies out there that are starting to use Linux as a daily driver. An even bigger lot of companies that are using it in the cloud or as part of their own data center. And many of those are currently trying to figure out how to better build their own software stacks. And they're not getting that much out of the community really. Either they're stuck subscribing to something based on RHEL or something based on Debian. The alternatives are pretty thin. The outlier is Valve who chose to migrate away from Debian and onto Arch for the handheld platform. It makes sense for Valve to avoid RHEL or any derivative as a base. It's notable that they avoided Debian.

Here's the catch: Making a new distro is time consuming. I'd love to know the political/internal reasoning as for why Arch as a base for the handheld was used, but I can think of a few reasons. Ultimately, Valve will need to do a lot of work to make their own legal department happy about - it opens them to some risk and they'll want to get their bases covered.

This is exactly why I'm starting this project. It's fun to build a cool and fast distro. I did that! It was fun. It was cool. It was very fast. But we had to appease the corporate lawyers. Like, make them confident that we were doing an okay job and we had things covered. And we did. We had everything streamlined. Provenance records. CVE scanning. Vulnerability detection and hacking our own software. Red team stuff. Static code analysis. All that stuff.

It pays the bills

I foresee good things when small companies have not only an incentive but also a platform to collaborate with others, their own end users, and experts in the field. This creates a true community. Not an echo zone of users that want the same thing. Or companies that push the boundaries in a way that users lose control over their own devices. I want companies to be truly invested in their own customers' success and well being. Companies should work to please their users, and give them the security and trust that users need.

My new employer is such a company. They employ a ton of smart people and want me to do exactly this for their customers - deliver something that makes their customers happy to stay with their product because of the knowledge that they can rely on it. Not just - but verifyably put their trust in it. And I'm not the only Linux Professional who has made a career out of delivering OSS solutions to companies. There are probably millions of us. We all benefit in a healthy ecosystem where collaboration is good for everyone.

I've built the platform once before, and we ran it as best as we could, but it had no survivability outside the company, because it was owned by the company. It was a dead end from day #1, probably. I ... am just glad that despite all that what happened, that I'm still here turning it into something that hopefully will be good news for everyone. Us software professionals are still here. There's still companies wanting to make good products using Linux, and there's still users that want to see neat, cool, secure, fast distros.

--sofar (aka Auke)