Today marks the day of soft-launching of my Debian derivative, which I’ve been using on several of my own machines for the past year or so. This is still work in progress, but I wanted to establish a launch date of the project so below is the DiffOS manifesto as motivation for continued work.
DiffOS is For Freedom! DiffOS is the Debian Increment For Freedom Operating System.
- Aspire to the goals of GNU FSDG and become a recognized Free GNU/Linux distribution.
- Uses Debian GNU/Linux as upstream.
- Support for all architectures supported by Debian.
- Provide Containers, Cloud Images, LiveCD and installer ISOs.
- Provide standalone hosting of the package repository.
- Provide documentation and issue tracker.
- Keep changes to a minimal, in particular:
- Upstream-first policy to prefer that any changes are made in Debian, and only if that fails they are considered for DiffOS.
- Binary package re-use for as much as is possible.
- Don’t modify any source-level Debian package unless REQUIRED by the FSDG (e.g., for freedom concerns) or REQUIRED by the Debian project (e.g., for branding reasons).
- Publish a list of packages that are added, removed or modified compared to Debian, with justification for each change.
- Publish Diffoscope-style outputs comparing our artifacts with comparable Debian artifact.
- Everything built from CI/CD pipelines, inspired by the Salsa CI pipeline but extended to cover the package repository and installation images as well, to allow modern GitSecDevOps of the entire supply-chain.
- Use inspiration from other Debian-derived FSDG distributions Trisquel GNU/Linux and PureOS, and broader with GNU Guix especially on how to approach existing freedom concerns in packages.
- Git Forge agnostic. While currently hosted on GitLab.com, scripts and configuration are (or will be) designed to allow setup on self-hosted GitLab instance, Codeberg.org or self-hosted Forgejo.
- Maintained by Humans – THE HUMAN MANIFESTO FOR THE AGE OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE.
Happy Hacking!