Labor of Love

SDesk aspires to be the Fedora of Arch Linux. We talk to Stephen Byrne about his passion project.

- By Bruce Byfield

These days, distributions are large-scale projects. Major distributions such as Debian and Fedora are often the size of medium-sized corporations, with dozens of middle management roles, thousands of contributors, and well-developed methodologies. By contrast, SDesk [1] is reminiscent of the earliest days of free software, when distributions were often a labor of love for a single developer. Based on Arch Linux, SDesk is full of individual small design choices, including the option to add parental controls to an account during installation, the Marwaita icons and themes, Gnome extensions enabled by a single click, and the default Swirl Web Browser. Many of SDesk's idiosyncratic choices are enhancements to Arch Linux, such as the inclusion of SELinux. Here,

Author

Bruce Byfield is a computer journalist and a freelance writer and editor specializing in free and open source software. In addition to his writing projects, he also teaches live and e-learning courses. In his spare time, Bruce writes about Northwest Coast art (http://brucebyfield.wordpress.com). He is also co-founder of Prentice Pieces, a blog about writing and fantasy at https://prenticepieces.​com/.Stephen Byrne, SDesk's developer, talks about his ongoing solo project.

Linux Magazine (LM): Tell readers about yourself and your involvement with free/open source software.

Stephen Byrne (SB): I'm 16 years old and I have a background in systems programming and desktop software development. I got my start in open source software many years ago when I grew an interest in modifying 2D Flash-like games in my free time - mainly projects utilizing the Haxe programming language. From there, I learned more about computers and found an interest in basic compiler development and eventually basic operating system concepts over the course of a few years.