Studio 8502 
Torn between the desire to express my “vision” for what a Linux distro can be by actually making it, and not wanting the responsibility of maintaining an entire fucking operating system my bloody self.
The thing is there are a million samey Linux distros, they all do pretty much the same thing, and the few that try something bold and new get derided by an endless parade of the world’s second most depressing nerds, who are second only to the people who complained that the new character design for She-ra didn’t have size DDD tits.
Johannes Brakensiek@mos_8502 Yes, most distros don‘t need to exist as „operating systems“. They just could be Debian packages, because basically they do some GUI polishing or exchange a small part of default Debian.
Be sure to know Nextspace and https://airyx.org though.
@lazarus Neither of those are that close to what’s in my head, but I do respect them.
@mos_8502 But regarding your original post: I‘d appreciate a text that expresses your vision. And I‘d like to test your work on any project that already exists. 😉
@lazarus Basically, what I want is an OS that puts GNUStep up front and centre, and anything that's baked into the base system is there to support that or it got cut right out. That means paring it down to the bare minimum of "first-party" packages, and trimming the complexity of the underlying OS as much as possible without compromising in the slightest the ability to compile and run any GNUStep based application.
So for example, it would have the simplest init system, a very spartan command line environment, etc, and the actual distribution would be supporting *only* the included software; the rest would be pulled in through something like Homebrew, or by installing .app bundles to /Applications or ~/Applications, etc.
It would not be concerned with POSIX compliance, nor of being like every other system, it would be concerned with providing the best out-of-the-box GNUStep experience possible. Beyond that, if the user wants to install something custom, they are welcome to it.
@mos_8502 Thank you for your post! I really like #GNUstep and its concepts. The biggest challenge I see regarding you idea is the current state of GNUstep. It barely is the thin application layer #OpenStep / Yellow / Blue Box was meant to be, which later became Cocoa. Fixing it to work like intended already is a huge task. Making a desktop environment out of it (projects like #Nextspace or #GWorkspace try) are even bigger ones.
@mos_8502 Still, both are missing interfaces and libraries a real operating system would need. So you'd need to write libraries and interfaces for a good UI (maybe adopt Wayland, but that's still not Quartz) and for integration with the kernel (init system, devices). Making a distro could be a task for one person. But that are tasks for a 100, imo.