**Date:** May 08 2020 Since I have forked KISS, I have received many questions that can be summarized as "Why?". I have realized that I never truly answered this question. That's the reason I am writing this post, to give some background on Carbs, and some differences between KISS Linux and Carbs Linux for anyone who may be wondering. Perhaps I could make this a "FAQ" page later on. History ------- I had the idea of creating my own Linux distribution since the May of 2019. Back then, I had my own [Linux from Scratch] build, and I wanted to slim it down my own way and replace the software (with musl,sbase,etc.). The name Carbs Linux was in my mind since then. I wanted to write my own package manager, but I wasn't satisfied with anything I had built. I had written some incomplete package managers (all named `fat`) and I quickly threw them into the trash can, where they honestly belonged. I would want to share them with you for laughs, but my hard-drive got wiped and I have a problem of not doing an "initial commit" until a program I write is in a usable state. I have obtained the 'carbslinux.org' domain name in September 2019, but then life got on the way, and I stopped for a long time. One day on Reddit, I saw Dylan's post on [r/unixporn] about KISS, and I really thought that it was interesting. Here is my [comment] to Dylan on that post. I checked out the package manager and the repository. The packaging system was extremely clean and well-thought. I decided to give it a go and fork KISS. [Linux from Scratch]: https://linuxfromscratch.org [r/unixporn]: https://reddit.com/r/unixporn [comment]: https://www.reddit.com/r/unixporn/comments/ducd34/sowm_kiss_d/f7lua7x Differences between KISS and Carbs ---------------------------------- Now, I still baffle when people ask me this question. My intention was never to create a distribution with specific differences between KISS. My intention was being my own BDFL of a distribution I maintain. There are lots of differences between the main repositories, but they are subtle and not worth talking about. I personally never even installed KISS Linux on my system. So Carbs, isn't something like a downstream fork of KISS, it is just a distribution that was initially based on KISS. I try to contribute as much as I can to KISS Linux. I think that it is a brilliant distribution, and it was a great starting point for Carbs. I am really grateful to Dylan and all the other contributors. What I'm working on now ----------------------- Currently I have a few projects that I'm working on for Carbs. These are, A BSD port for Carbs. For a while, I have been working on BSD compatibility on my fork of the [package manager]. I have tested, without any more issues, on OpenBSD and FreeBSD. The biggest issues remaining are choosing a vendor for BSD, packaging the BSD source, and providing a minimal base (like busybox for BSD). If you aren't familiar with BSD, BSD has a single source code for all of the utilities. Contributions (even chipping in ideas) are very welcome. Adding binary package distribution support natively to the package manager. Biggest issue in small/old computers are compile times. This feature is for the bigger packages such as webkit, clang, llvm that take a considerable amount of time. Some computers with low memories cannot even compile firefox/webkit. Adding rsync repository support to the package manager. This is not a current issue, but rather a futureproofing. As time passes, distribution repositories grow larger. KISS and Carbs are young distributions without this problem right now. But in something like 5 years, this size will presumably increase to hundreds of megabytes. At that point it will be pointless to have the repository sources unless you specifically need them. [package manager]: https://github.com/carbslinux/kiss What's up with all the init/service daemons? -------------------------------------------- If you have ever checked the [repository], you may have noticed that there are lots of init/service related packages. I have had my fair share of time with all of them, and it is an area that I am really interested in. I have even written my own [init daemon] and [service supervisor]. I maintain all those packages on KISS Community Repository as well with the exception of busybox. Those are, `busybox init/runit`, `runit`, `sinit`, and `sysmgr`. I would definitely recommend checking out `shinit` and `sysmgr`. [repository]: https://github.com/carbslinux/repository [init daemon]: https://github.com/cemkeylan/shinit [service supervisor]: https://github.com/cemkeylan/sysmgr Why I don't publicize Carbs --------------------------- There are a couple of reasons I don't publicize Carbs a lot. KISS is the better alternative in terms of support and community. I work on maintaining this distribution just as hard as Dylan, but in the end, Carbs is based on his original hard work, and I believe that he deserves the recognition more than I do. Since I cannot answer questions like "What is the difference?", I prefer staying as the silent sibling project of KISS Linux. Plus, there is no point in dividing the newly-emerging community in half. That's not because I don't have ideas for the future of Carbs, I do. I just think that I will deserve the recognition once those above lists are checked. I think that's about it, if you have questions you can send me a mail, ping me on IRC (my handle is `merakor`), and I will be happy to answer. Maybe your question fits this post, and I can update it to thoroughly give an explanation. Cheers, Cem