While I do agree it will be alot of work, I have to say that this would not be the first distro to successfully mix repos. Look at Manjaro,Bodhi, & even the early versions of Chakra. All mix(ed) repos belonging to their parent distro with their own repos. These are not the only ones doing it either.
All that being said, I do take your thoughts seriously & yes, I am looking at ther "parent distro" options. Let me try to be more clear about what I am trying to accomplish here, maybe this will allow folks to give even more advice & thoughts. Reality is that I do not truly care what the parent distro is. Hell, for all I care it could be it's very own independent distro. But the things that absolutely MUST be true are these: First, the distro MUST be as user friendly (or more so) as Ubuntu. Second, the distro must be at least as stable (by default) as Ubuntu (but users should be able to easily enable less stable "testing" repos if they wish). Next, package management MUST be as easy or easier than Ubuntu. The distro MUST be rolling. One of the primary goals is to create a distro users can install, and keep up to date without EVER needing to manual upgrade as they must with standar releases such as Ubuntu. There are other features I would LIKE to have, but these are the absolute musts (at least that I have determined so far)! A nice software center that works & looks as well as say Ubuntu Software center or Deepin Software center would be the ideal. Highly configurable auto-upgrade options would be important. For example, lets say the repos are updated daily (hypothetically). A user should be able to decide if they want to manually upgrade when they are ready or auto-upgrade daily, weekly, monthly, bi-monthly, so on. Free choice is another essential. Users should be able to choose ANY DE they want. What would be cool is to have sort of a build it yourself setup for the initial distro download that lets the user create an ISO (in an easy GUI way) with the packages they want pre-installed. Of course, they could always choose from a variety of pre-built iso's too. As I have pointed out in my earlier posts, this is the earliest stages here. It is literally just an idea in my head that I wanted feedback on. Do not misunderstand me, I am committed to this project! I have given alot of thought to this (& still do) &I fully intend to make this a reality. The dialog I am getting in these forums is helping me to determine more specifcally what I hope to create here. So thanks all for the feedback! Keep it coming! Fuduntu IS user-friendly, but not Ubuntu friendly. I feel it is missing some key features that I want for this distro. Have any of you ever used Zorin? It is an Ubuntu based distro designed to make the transition from Windows to Linux "seamless". THAT is what I want for this distro, but in a rolling relase format. I want a Windows or Mac user to be able to pick this distro up & be able to use it almost immediately. It needs to be THAT friendly. |
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I also cannot help getting the impression that you want to create a one size fits all distro. Quote:
Personally, I think such a project is over-ambitious, but if you have enough determination and people to help you, go for it and good luck.:) |
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That is why distros like LMDE are not using a true rolling release scheme. |
Windows is not rolling-release (look how many are still using XP!) and Mac OS in not rolling-release. Windows and Mac users are much more comfortable with a nice stable system that doesn't constantly change under their feet; this is why Ubuntu, Mint, Debian, Fedora, Slackware, Red Hat, etc. are the most popular distros.
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The question of work also arises with the goal of offering all the desktop environments. I've used 7 desktops and 12 window managers, and there are still ones I haven't encountered yet!
Even if you keep to the most popular, the extras are often inferior to the flagship one. For OpenSUSE, KDE is better than Gnome which is better than Xfce. Why? Because they have more KDE users, since it's the only one on the live disk, and few Xfce testers because it's not in the beta-test releases. Similarly, Mint is not so good when it comes to KDE or Xfce. Supporting everything needs a lot of work, and it's also difficult to get it tested. Over the years I've come to the conclusion that you need to have a very clear vision of what a distro is supposed to do and whom you expect to use it. That's one reason why Slackers are happy: Slackware is very focused on their needs and preferences, even if it's caviare to the general. |
So I have actually done some more research & thinking. It seems to me that making a Ubuntu based rolling release should (in theory) not be as hard as most seem to think.
I mean Ubuntu has testing repos. You can download the next version any time you want. I have already been playing with 13.04 for example. I may be totally wrong in the assumptions/theories I am about to propose, I will admit that up front. But lets think about this. Keep in mind, its all theoretical. So, what if you created a distro that can access the exact same repos that are used for the Ubuntu version in development? Of course, you would want to make it easy for a user to decide how often the system updates. In other words, daily, weekly, monthly, etc. You would also need to find a way to make the updates automatic. or at least partly automatic. One of the points of a rolling release is to eliminate the need to reinstall every time a new version comes out. So you would have to find a way to get the system to update from the Ubuntu testing repos without having to reinstall. I do not intend to imply that this would be an easy task. Alot of challenges would face us in developing this distro. For one thing, we may need to have direct help from Canonical (to get the needed level of access to the repos). Extra steps would need to be implemented to increase stability of the distro since the Ubuntu testing repos are obviously not totally stable by nature. Perhaps the distro could have it's own repos that pull from both the testing & stable Ubuntu repos, but instead of including EVERYTHING in the testing repo, we (well, the development team) include only those items that are tested & known to be relatively stable. In addition, the maintainers could add additional packages that are stable. For those more brave users, they could enable another set of repos that include the full Ubuntu testing repos packages. (BTW, sorry if I am confusing anyone here, I am thinking out loud. I am hoping that sharing my thoughts will help create a dialog that may some day lead to this idea becoming a reality). So essentially, this distro would have it's own repos which are built from the Ubuntu repos, rather than actually using the Ubuntu repos directly. It would have a "Stable" repo built from both the main Ubuntu repos & APPROVED packages within Ubuntu's testing repos. The second repos would be the "Testing" repo, built from the main Ubuntu repos and a wider range of "testing" packages. Finally, there would be a third repo modeled around the Arch User Repos concept. This repo would be made up of packages that may or may not be approved by this distro's team, but are contributed by the distro's users. So I have alot more going through my crazy head about thiss, but I think I have given some good food for thought & discussion. Like I said, this these ideas are primarily theoretical,and as such, may not be workable. But I wanted to share it & see where it leads! |
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Make your distro an independent distro, you can still port Ubuntu's (or whichever distro's) tools to it, but you will get rid of the problems that inevitably will occur when you mix older packages into a rolling release distro. |
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I am one of those who is on the fence about LMDE's status as a rolling release. I mean the current LMDE iso comes with GIMP 2.6 and 2.8 has been out for more than a year! I admit I am leaning towards an independent distro, with Ubuntu's best tools/features ported over. The end goal is a rolling release that is as user friendly as Ubuntu, but more up to date. And perhaps, this is the best way to accomplish this. (Do you relaize that kdenlive is on 0.9.4, but Ubuntu repos still have 0.8.2? That release is over 2 years old & 0.9.2 is the most recent "official" release!) |
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It seems to me that the real objective is a distro that looks and feels like Buntu, but is better. Is that not what Mint is supposed to be? Quote:
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The next comments have been answered in previous posts where I mentioned the distro having it's own repos. The repos would not make it as easy as Mac or Windows to use. That would be accomplished through other GUI tools. For example, I already have a look changer simialr to the one found in Zorin (actually based on it) to make the system look like Windows or Mac. There would be several other tools that would make the distro look & feel enough like Windows or Mac to make it comfortable or familiar to Windows/Mac users. "Offering stable, unstable and experimental packages, and leaving it to the users to decide how to mix and match them, requires a level of knowledge well beyond point and click." Other distros have managed to do exactly this quite successfully: Bodhi, Manjaro, & Vector for example. The big difference here would be that where as in these distro's you have to manually change the source lists, in this new distro it would be done via a nice little gui. Try to think of it as a scalable system. When a new user picks it up with little or no Linux experience, they get a fast, stable, & up to date system. As they become more familiar with Linux, they can "tweak" it to get more advanced features, package updates, & bleeding edge software. I will repeat once again since some don't seem to be getting it: this is an idea, a concept in my overactive imagination. The more this discussion progresses, the more I am able to "tweak" or "sharpen" the image of what I hope to create. The open source community is one of the most creative communities in the world! Opensource developers are well know for doing things that "can't be done" or that are "too complicated". I hope I am carrying on that tradition! |
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Edit Another idea to consider that would require more work, but would have a better chance of bearing fruit, would be to have two separate releases. A stable beginner's system that only has stable older packages, upgraded at regular intervals; and a rolling release with cutting edge packages for advanced users. Upgraded packages would move from the rolling release to the stable release after the bugs have been worked out. A stable rolling release is improbable, but a dual-release distro would offer both. The distro's web site should have copious documentation and/or links to it, encouraging users of the stable release to read documentation. The immediate goal being to help new users move up to the rolling release, but also with the long-term objective of helping them become knowledgeable Linux users. |
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Before going further I would recommend to get more knowledge about this topic. Try to go through LFS one time, so that you can see what actually happens under the hood of a Linux system. Go ahead and mix some packages of the Ubuntu testing branch into the current stable branch and see what happens and where the difficulties with that really are. Then go through your vision again and test it against your new knowledge. Become at least a little bit of a developer, planning a distro is a job for developers, not managers. |
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