Interview with KaOS creator

KaOS was created by Anke Boersma, native of the Netherlands, a horse-trainer by trade, needing modern tools to use for advertising & promoting for the job, thus the odd combination of horse-trainer and Linux developer started to occur.

When I was 8-9 years old, my father brought home a computer (that is around 1970-1972) to try and figure out some things. He ended up having no idea what to do with it and never used it, I got as far as getting a command prompt with an indication I needed to use Cobol to interact with it. That was the end of using that system for me too, I had no idea how to use Cobol. So that system left our home after about 4 weeks.

Real usage started when I had just moved to the USA, around 1990. First system was a Windows 3.1 based PC. Usage then was mainly for accounting, scheduling, and billing.

The husband of a customer of mine introduced me to Knoppix in 2001. I received some floppy disks I could try and use in Live mode. For the next two years, I regularly tried to work with and start to understand this very different system, initially not with much luck or seeing a real need to use it.

That changed around 2004-2005 when I started using computers for advertising, promoting and freestyle editing. Scribus is actually the program that made me switch to Linux the most. There was no way I was going to fork over more than a thousand dollars for a good copy of Adobe’s creative suite and I needed something good and complete for desktop publishing. I found that Scribus was a very good alternative for me, but the Windows version had a lot of issues, being slow, hanging regularly. Since it was clear it really was developed on and for Linux, I ordered a few CDs of different Linux distributions to try and see if I could make it work with Linux. Running Scribus on any of them was no issue and miles better than on Windows, thus I started having a second (older, leftover pc) running Linux. That stayed for about three years and since 2008 I pretty much fully switched to Linux.

It was during this period that I started to see what the monopoly of closed source could do to the quality of software. Internet Explorer had created a monopoly for web browser software and once it had market dominance, there was no longer an interest in improving that browser, nor had anyone with an interest in improving access to the code. Since then it was important to me to support opensource as much as possible.

From 2008 to 2010 I did the usual for many who switched to Linux, that is distrohopping (moving from one distribution to another, multiple times). I did start seeing the struggles of newer, up and coming distributions with innovative ideas. Often there were not enough users for proper testing, not enough manpower to sustain the ambitious idea.
 
That is when I decided to start helping with one such small, ambitious and great design distribution. Initially, it was just testing, but within a few months, I started packaging for this distribution. Eventually, forum moderation, documentation writing, website maintenance, some basic coding, and mentoring new packagers were added.

After about two years of supporting that distribution, it had come to a point that the ambitions had far outstripped the resources. Choices were not made to decide what could be properly maintained within the limited resources and quality was severely suffering. That caused friction which eventually led to my leaving that project, with the thought of me just using larger distribution. But the qualities and setup I was looking for just wasn’t available.
 
I had been dabbling a little with Linux from Scratch in 2011 & 2012, so by early 2013 I used some of my LFS experience, the knowledge I had gained of using pacman & makepkg the last three years and general experience in packaging to create a distribution for myself and a few of my friends and customers in southeastern US, thus KaOS was started.
 
Since I had seen quite a few times, the biggest downfall for starting distributions is to try and do too much and Linux distributions in general do not want to make choices, KaOS was a big departure from that. It deliberately was very limited with simple goals and strict choices (one desktop environment, one toolkit, one soundstack, one init system, repositories with a maximum of about 2000 packages).
 
KaOS has been a rock-solid foundation for my computer needs, being it as a work station, buildserver or web server. Since it was easier to have my customers who also used KaOS get the needed updates from a server, KaOS packages and a simple website went online in April 2013. About two months later some Linux enthusiasts in South America had discovered the website and started blogging about KaOS, so slowly it came to a decision to move it to a more public distribution. By late 2013 it was public, though it was lacking a proper installer.
 
In 2014 I was involved in the foundation of Calamares, now a widespread used, distro-agnostic system installer, thus by late 2014, KaOS also had a proper installer. My contributions to Calamares were mainly in Python, though a little C++ code was added too, plus work on the initial website.

Most days it takes one to two hours to update or rebuild packages.
Coding on tools (or website) for KaOS is not as regularly, but when working on those it usually takes the better part of a day.Main system is a self-build desktop PC (motherboard, 4 core AMD CPU, AMD gpu, 12 Gb RAM from about 2014), Intel laptop for testing. The buildserver in Sweden is much more powerful then my own hardware (14 core AMD CPU, 32 Gb RAM).
 
Most used tool is the KaOS buildsystem. As for tools used, I have gone more and more simple, no more fancy IDE for website editing or coding, most is done with Yakuake, Kate and Dolphin. Just QTCreator has been used quite a bit for KaOS applications creation. Eric6 to help some with correct python coding.
 
For the design parts, my favorite tools are Krita, Inkscape, and KDEnlive.I subscribe to many mailing lists to stay up to date for new releases and security alerts. Some of the sites regularly used:

http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/
https://packages.gentoo.org/packages/updated
http://www.spinics.net/lists/kernel/
https://cgit.kde.org/?s=idle
https://distrowatch.com/
https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/firmware/linux-firmware.git
https://github.com/aarnt/octopi/
https://github.com/calamares/calamares
http://download.qt-project.org/
http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/systemd-devel/
http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/xorg/
https://download.kde.org/stable/
https://www.archlinux.org/packages/?flagged=Flagged&sort=-flag_date
http://googlechromereleases.blogspot.com/
https://bugs.kde.org/describecomponents.cgi

No, it actually still costs more then it brings in. KaOS needs a few servers to run. One buildserver is donated, but the other three are running on VPS, which bills are not covered with the donations to KaOS. So there is absolute zero money for my time and effort, which is common for opensource still. Of course, there is the issue of hundreds of distributions to choose from, so there is no incentive for most to pay anything for the use of free software.

Horse-training, home renovations/construction, websites maintenance, hiking with my dogs, sailing.

Testers with all kinds of hardware to help prepare new ISO releases. Artists to keep the look of KaOS modern and different. Pull requests for all parts of KaOS. All code is on Github, just to make it easy for anyone to fork any project and contribute. Donations (having more hardware would help a lot with quality control, option to have KaOS as a part-time job instead of just volunteer work).

https://kaosx.us/
https://forum.kaosx.us/
https://kiwiirc.com/client/irc.freenode.net/#kaosx
https://gitter.im/KaOSx/KaOS/
https://github.com/KaOSx