Trident goes Linux. Meet the first new distro of 2020

Trident goes Linux. A follower of the devil teaming up with the penguin might be a great plot for a Batman sequel, but for the moment it promises to be one of the biggest novelties of 2020 in the field of open source. And the news is welcome considering that as I wrote at the beginning of the year, nothing interesting happens on Linux anymore.

What are you talking about Diego?

Let's start at the beginning. BSD was a programming language based on a source code from Bell Labs. Su development was in charge of the university of Bekerley. Years later, Bell Labs closed access to its code. In response to this, the university modified its own operating system to make it Unix-like.

Note: How well noted two readers; BSD was an operating system, not a programming language. In my defense, I am taking flu and the leaflet recommends against conducting or writing Linux articles.

On the basis of BSD other open source operating systems appeared, one of which is FreeBSD. As time went by, PC-BSD emerged. PC-BSD pretended to be to FreeBSD what Ubuntu or Linux Mint to Debian or Manjaro to Arch Linux. In other words, a friendly version with abundant use of graphical installers compared to the mother distribution.

Recently, the developers of PC-BSD decided to stop focusing on the end user and dedicate themselves entirely to servers and to serve as the basis for building distributions. The project was renamed TrueOS. But, since there were people who still wanted a friendly xBSD distribution, the Trident project was born. Trident (trident) is the tool that the devil has in his hand in medieval representations, and the devil is the mascot that FreeBSD identifies.

Having explained everything you need to know (or the only thing I am able to explain) let's continue with the story.

The explanation of why Trident is moving to Linux

I want to clarify that there are other friendly versions of FreeBSD like GhostBSD. But the developers of the Trident project do not consider being based on FreeBSD to be a necessary condition for its existence. In his own words:

The goal of Project Trident is to improve the usability of an operating system as a graphical workstation through all types of means: custom installers, automatic configuration routines, graphical utilities, and more.

Why are FreeBSD and TrueOS not working for them? They also explain it in the announcement:

Over the years, we have accumulated multiple problems with the FreeBSD operating system. These problems have to do with hardware compatibility, communication standards, or package availability and they continue to limit Project Trident users. After many years of waiting for solutions, there seems to be no resolution on the horizon. To continue striving to achieve the project's goals, we have had to make the difficult decision to shift our focus and move to an operating system that is better suited to what Project Trident is trying to offer our users.

Here it is important to establish some points.

FreeBSD is a robust and secure server operating system. Some say that in construction, performance and features it is much better than Linux. Now, if you used any of the friendly distributions, you may have noticed that in performance they are what Ubuntu was in 2006. and cWith most non-Windows and MacOS resources targeting Linux, there's not much hope that this will change.

And which Linux distribution will they be based on?

If you thought that we were going to have another distro that is a faithful copy of the main ones, but with another name and wallpaper, you will be pleasantly surprised. The base distro will be Void Linux. Void linux It was built from scratch and does not use systemd as a means of initialization. It also has its own package manager.

With the move to Linux, Trident is expected to achieve these improvements:

• Latest versions of the applications.
• Better support for graphics and sound cards.
• Better support for WiFi and addition of support for Bluetooth.

For obvious reasons, the new version will not be compatible with the previous ones, so it will have to be installed by default.

What is not clear is that if Trident goes to Linux they will continue to use Lumina Hair Care, the lightweight and configurable desktop created at the time for PC-BSD. I guess we'll have to wait until January 2020 to find out