[om-council] Council meeting April 21st follow-up [1]

Bernhard Rosenkraenzer bero at lindev.ch
Fri Apr 22 20:00:37 EDT 2016


On 2016-04-22 21:18, Raphaël Jadot wrote:
> If we continue loosing manpower, depending on which field we really
> lack manpower, shouldn't we think about
> - being based on another distro (not Ubuntu but maybe OpenSuse or else)

I don't think so. We need to have control over the core system.
That's what sets us apart from the others.

We're the first distribution to use clang as its main compiler. That 
would be thrown away if we were to move to something else as a base.
We were among the first to start supporting aarch64 - we wouldn't have 
the freedom to do that anymore if we had to wait for something we're 
based on to make the move.
We tend to be ahead of the rest of the pack when it comes to including 
newer versions (at FOSDEM, one guy from KDE was impressed when he looked 
at our demo box, "finally a distribution that has the right version of 
Qt") -- we'd lose that if we were to be based on something else.

And what could we really add to something else?
Most of the things we do well, and our current developers enjoy doing, 
are in the core system. We don't have a lot of GUI application 
developers or so - so really, what would we add on top of OpenSUSE, 
Fedora or something else to be based on?

> - or staying independant but contacting another distro to see if we
> could join forces (like Kaos)

That could be interesting - I doubt it would lead to something because 
people working on a distro typically don't want to change what they're 
doing any more than we want to change what we're doing, and if there's 
already a big divergence somewhere, it would be hard to find a common 
base to start from.

KaOS could be interesting to talk to because we share the goal of being 
among the best KDE implementations out there (while I could see the KaOS 
guys being less than excited about the fact that we support desktops 
other than KDE -- I think one of the points they're trying to make is 
that nobody needs anything else). KaOS is x86_64 only, so they might be 
interested in working with us to get other CPUs supported or so - but 
they're based on Arch, so it would essentially mean one distro would 
have to give up its entire packaging system and work on top of what the 
other has.

Purely from a technical perspective, it may make sense to talk to Mageia 
and/or PCLinuxOS because their bases are closer to ours than most other 
distros - but that may be pretty much impossible from all other 
perspectives.

ttyl
bero



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