I have not used Trisquel in a long time (Fedora user now), but I still follow
these developments regularly. They interest me. I have followed this entire
thread, and I must repeat one suggestion made earlier, in spades:
If Trisquel is going the LTS-only route w/backports (which appears certain
now), and base on Debian instead of Ubuntu (which is a maybe), we SHOULD and
MUST merge with gNewSense.
Why? Because it'd be damn redundant if we didn't.
What's the purpose of gNewSense? To be a totally freedom-respecting distro
based on Debian. What's the purpose of Trisquel if it does get based on
Debian? To be a totally freedom-respecting distro based on Debian.
There is NO sense in splitting the fully free distro community into two camps
working on nearly identical stuff (let's disregard additional fringe elements
like the Dyne and Dragora folks for now). This community is small enough as
it is, and the shorthandedness makes it tough to deliver something truly
competent. If both communities merge, possibly under a new name (Libix
GNU/Linux?), I can't envision much of a downside to it. Why not have just one
larger community with the same idea of what to achieve? gNewSense is already
in dire straits as it is ... they should jump on our bandwagon.
Base it off of Debian testing branch (like Ubuntu LTS), strip any remaining
nastiness from that base, and offer the best possible user experience to
people who are passionate about freedom by fine-tuning the intitial default
apps and configuration and backporting important core stuff. And DEFINITELY
have a software center as a priority.
All these decisions together would buy us more valuable time and helping
hands to continue offering mini editions for as long as that is relevant
(maybe 1-2 more releases), to actually release on something resembling a
schedule (I'm tired of "when it's ready"), and maybe even to offer Edu and
Pro editions again (and maybe Studio, Gamer, and other flavors to boot), as
that is something which made Trisquel unique in the first place.
Every other time I hear news about Canonical or Ubuntu now, I see it as bad.
They are so intent on doing things "their way", which tends to break or
complicate things for the rest of everybody. Their endless "our way, our
brand" BS made the prospects for derivatives bad before and it's not getting
any better.
Also, it's probably better to use MATE, not Cinnamon. They are both
traditional desktops, but Cinnamon is considerably more resource hungry. And
it won't work for users with AMD GPUs, even with kernel 3.8. However,
whenever Trisquel
