Why We Fork aptosid

From Knoppix to sidux

Anyone who has been lingering around in the orbit of Sid-based Distros for some time, will know the history from Knoppix over KANOTIX to sidux and aptosid.

There isn’t much to say against aptosid (on the technical side of things), it’s solid, released on a regular basis, maintained responsibly. In two words: it works. What hindered aptosid from having the success that sidux promised it would have is firstly the discourse with users, which implies that a community is not really wanted and rather cumbersome. Evolving from this latent feeling was a group of users deemed as renitent, which have been consequently expelled due to their criticism. Finally I as well had to realize, that despite it’s technical brillance, which up to that point still kept me in their ranks, there was no future there for me.

From sidux to aptosid

Many among those users who now participate in this new reboot hadn’t taken the step from sidux to aptosid anymore. At that time, I hadn’t lost all hope yet and have tried to give a platform to the German users, that wasn’t restricted by, from my point of view, absurd and excessive censorship and would instead favor respect and free speech. As long as this forum exists, this concept proved to be unproblematic. What was to be expected, as aptosid.com is the only forum I know of, incapacitating and expelling it’s users in such a rigid way.

From aptosid to a friendly OS

The things stated above don’t fully legitimate a fork in my opinion, and our ideas don’t end here. But we are convinced, that a distribution should first of all live by involving it’s users. After all the give & take is a basic principle of free (and open) software. This principle is also valid for the upstream direction. We should give back as much as possible to Debian. At aptosid, my efforts to get closer to Debian have always been eyed suspiciously. Whenever practical results were possible, there was retreat. For example ceni is still not in Debian, despite some lively interest. There was also never an infrastructure to ease bug tracking and triage, to work towards Debian. This shall now change.

The aptosid artwork got worse and more inconsistent in recent releases, a concept is not perceivable anymore. The attempts to create a Corporate Design at sidux failed due to the departure of two members of the art team. aptosid design has a recognition value by now, but rather for bad design.

We will not force our own preferences on our future users with kernel options, package selection and pre-configurations, like for example with aptosids K-menu defaults. Wherever it seems wise, the community shall co-decide. We will always prefer free software and drivers, but in no way prevent nonfree variants. It’s important for the user to know, what free and proprietary means in this context. From there on, he/she has to decide on his/her own.

We are siduction, your friendly aptosid fork 2011 🙂

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