What if we could have all the Linux distributions in the same installation? This would be blendOS, the latest project from the creator of Ubuntu Unity

blendOS

Rudra Saraswat is back in the news. Not content with being part of the official Canonical team because of his work on Ubuntu Unity or GameBuntu, he has brought his revamped desktop to Arch Linux, has open fronts on Ubuntu Web and UbuntuEd, and now he has set out to make us forget about distro-hopping. ». I eat? Well, creating an operating system that can contain any Linux distribution in itself. his name, blendOS, and was born just a few hours ago.

By saying that it has been born, we are referring to the fact that there is already an ISO image available to test and that its developer has already published something on social networks. Retweeted by the official account of Ubuntu Unity, blendOS is presented with a message that invites "hype", and more so considering that the project belongs to someone so young and with so much journey ahead.

blendOS is based on Arch Linux

Imagine having all your Linux distributions (Arch, Fedora, Ubuntu) at your fingertips on a single operating system at the same time. Say goodbye to distro-hopping and hello to the future with blendOS, an immutable operating system that seamlessly blends all your distributions together.

To check how things work, I think you'll have to create a Live USB or try VirtualBox, something I haven't had time (or inclination) to do; It hasn't worked for me in GNOME Boxes. Yes, I have dived into its website to see everything it promises, and at first it is not little:

  • It is based on Arch Linux, and I don't know if this is "cheating" a bit on Canonical, considering that he is an official member of the team.
  • It is immutable, in the sense of unbreakable, since it is read-only.
  • It uses GNOME by default, but supports the installation of more graphical environments.
  • Able to install applications from any distribution, and can use apt, dnf/yum, pacman and yay from the blendOS shell.
  • Supports flat packs.
  • Below the default session, a graphical environment can be installed from any of the distributions in a single session.

Supported distributions: Fedora, Arch Linux and Ubuntu

The distributions it supports are Fedora, Arch Linux and Ubuntu, and to install applications it uses its own installer called blendOS Installer which is based on that of Crystal Linux.

Regarding the package manager, in the FAQ it says that does not use pacman, even though the operating system is based on Arch Linux. It uses blend, a package manager designed to work with multiple distributions, and makes use of different containers to make all of this possible.

where will all this end

Or put another way: can Saraswat handle it all? It is difficult to have confidence, since, as we have explained, He has many projects on his hands.. My personal opinion, and non-transferable, is that he will have to release ballast sooner or later. The first to fall seems to be UbuntuEd, since the leader of the Ubuntu Studio project and his wife are preparing the resurrection of Edubuntu. But there are still Ubuntu Unity, the Unity desktop and its variants, Ubuntu Web and this new blendOS (I don't remember if I left something out).

If you manage to carry out your projects, what you will be doing is offer possibilities to users in the Linux community. He's already done it with Unity in what some say is "teaching" or "refreshing" Canonical because he pulled off something that Mark Shuttleworth and company had to abandon.

As for whether I would use blendOS as my main system, well, I tend to go with something that has some experience, but never say never. I like the Arch base, and being able to install anything from Ubuntu, for which most network documentation is written, too. We'll see what all this is.

Link to the project page.


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  1.   Diego German Gonzalez said

    Knowing the Linux community, I don't doubt that it won't take long for there to be 4 or 5 distributions that do the same.