Distribution quotes of the week

The two people (including me) involved in this Debian port did not have the hardware, so we created the port entirely through cross-compiling from other architectures, and then compiling inside Qemu. In a sense, we were creating a Debian port for hardware that "does not [physically] exist". The software that we built was tested by people who had hardware available in FPGA, though, so it was at least usable. I understand that people working in the arm64 port had to work similarly in the initial phases, working in the dark without access to real hardware to compile or test.

As I mentioned in a blog post about Fedora Workstation last April the core idea for Fedora Workstation is to stop treating the operating system as a bag of parts and instead look at it as a whole, because if we are to drain the swamp here we need to solve the major issues that people face with their desktop regardless of if that issue is in the kernel, the graphics drivers, glibc or elsewhere in your system. We can not just look at the small subset of packages that provides the chrome for your user interface in isolation.

Sometimes I wonder if people think free software is so fragile that if anyone who works on it ever touches non-free software, everything we built will crumble. I think our community and ecosystem is a lot more robust than that.

There are too many Linux distributions nowadays. Choice and variety are wonderful, but in this case, they spread resources very thin. Linux-based operating systems might be further along by now if more developers came together to work on projects. For someone new to Linux, finding a distro can be a daunting task. Many of the releases are simply noise, making it hard to find the quality operating systems.

KaOS is one of those quality operating systems. It is a wonderful Linux distribution that focuses on KDE. Quite frankly, if you are a KDE purist, this should be on your radar. To cerebrate the two-year anniversary of the distro, the team releases 2015.04. Whether you are a Linux noob, or even an an expert, you should give it a try.