I've been writing the docs for this project for a while now, I guess it's time to tell you a bit more about it and how I found it.
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My involvement with blendOS
I originally found out about the distro from a news video by Nick from The Linux Experiment (forward to 8:45):
After checking out the site, I thought the distro was kinda cool (site: blendos.co).
I then joined the discord from the link on the site, and sort of lurked there for a while. I didn't want to switch to this new distro right away, but at the same time, I felt it had potential. I knew about VanillaOS but I had forgotten about it at that point, so I thought it was the only one offering this kind of thing.
VanillaOS vs. blendOS
VanillaOS already has a core team and a stable base. It is miles ahead of blendOS, it has a good installer, apx, abroot, and distrobox (and flatpak support). It has VanillaOS settings, it has a solid community.
blendOS is new, but I think it can serve a different purpose. It's much more versatile, with an ISO builder already coming out. It's based on Arch, and only offers 2 DEs, with the aforementioned build tool to allow people to make their very own versions. It does not use distrobox, it uses a podman implementation called blend, which has some code from distrobox for NVIDIA driver support in containers. It has built-in Waydroid support as well (but linux-zen doesn't come preinstalled for now).
It's the true end to distro-hopping as it takes the idea behind VanillaOS and makes it better for people who want to do more with their systems and new users.
My steps with the project (the docs)
I hung out for a while, but after Rudra posted a message in #infrastructure about docs needing to be written, I was excited. Some contributors said they'd start but they never did, so I decided to fork the repo and get to work. The docs use Docusarus and the yarn package manager by the way.
I checked out what was there and it wasn't much (If you're reading this before my PR merge it's still basically empty! docs.blendos.co). I wasn't able to get GitHub pages working so I set up Cloudflare Pages (I highly recommend it for your web projects especially if you use a non-JS webserver, #notsponsored). I eventually made my fork and got to work.
The People
I assumed a user base of new users based on current support tickets in the forum, so I needed screenshots for everything and some clear explanation.
Enter SvGaming. He had a few blendOS test VMs and was willing to help me with screenshots. Thanks to him, I have good functional docs.
Ray Vermey later jumped on after I talked with him. He handles testing for new builds. He pointed out some inconsistencies and was the first blend docs member that I talked with on Matrix.
Everyone who ran a mirror was also helpful in allowing everybody to try this wonderful distro 😉
Rudra Saraswat (rs2009) (creator of blendOS and Ubuntu Unity) was not involved with this at all.
Noa Himesaka was the resident T2 guy (T2 is a security chip in Intel Macs). He wrote the T2 guide for blendOS.
Do not discuss Silvery Gaming with me he has done nothing so far.
The Container Guide
Link: blend-docs.shinken.studio/guides/container-..
My first order of business was writing a guide to teach new users how to use the blend-settings tool. These were a pain in the ass to write, but so worth it. I had to get some help from Sv and set up my own VM for blendOS to test everything. SvGaming gave me better-cropped versions of some screenshots I made and supplied all future ones. I still have to finish the Waydroid bit (or maybe this is the future and I already did it), but, I'm proud of them.
The Install Guide
Link: https://blend-docs.shinken.studio/guides/installation-guide
Oh boy. Now, the first 3 steps were made by Rudra, but they weren't too helpful. I had to start from nothing again. SvGaming was a huge help as always and I slowly built the guide up. It was actually a while before I added the manual partitioning and post-install stuff. You can see this history through my list of Cloudflare pages deployments.
I worked the hardest on this because I had to make it work for new users. We still have to do the dualbooting guide.
The T2 Guide
Link: https://blend-docs.shinken.studio/guides/installation-guide-for-macs-with-t2-chip
Noa Himesaka wrote the guide as I know nothing about the T2 chip. Not sure what he was thinking or anything, so not much to say here.
What I can say is I was happy to have a break for once and the easiest pull request review of my life. I just had to ask him to revert the Docusarus config back to default and then I could merge.
Merging
I hope to merge these with master after I update the docs for v3.
What's next?
BlendOS v3 (no codename yet) will have linux-zen by default, have a fully immutable filesystem and this:
It will also have the ISO builder for more desktops and WMs. I also pitched the idea for a Docker Hub-style registry for user-made distro containers. It will also have more distros like Kali (didn't list any more distros but said there'd be "5 or 6 others". There will also be auto-updates in the background installed on-the-fly and applied at reboot.
Source (he meant pacman -Syu):
Now, I know there are a lot of bugs and stuff, and Rudra and the contributors claim v3 will fix them. I'm not too sure it will, to be honest. I've also been told to hold off on a PR until v3 comes out and I update the docs accordingly due to all the changes. There will probably also be miscellaneous Waydroid fixes and updates to the blend-settings tool.
EDIT: Update on what the build tool will do in the future:
EDIT: the docs for the build tool are now out! https://blend-docs.shinken.studio/docs/category/building-blendos
Hopefully, SvGaming's bpkg will also release by then. (Link: https://fossfor.serveo.net/SvGaming/bpkg) It's blendOS's version of apx but with some twists, like container preference set by a config file. This will run through each package manager by your order of preference. He's hoping to integrate it with the Podman CLI to be able to update container lists on-the-fly. It's unofficial, but it's the best we have.
EDIT: A beta ISO for v3 is now out (HIGHLY UNSTABLE!!): https://sourceforge.net/projects/blendos/files/ISOs/gnome/1685619811/blendOS.iso/download
Thanks for reading my first actual post! Feel free to leave a comment or something with anything I could improve!
For those of you looking at getting into the internal chat, N O.
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EDIT: changed misc. to miscellaneous.