The Making Of A 'Made In India' Linux Distro

- Jagmeet Singh

“It is not very hard to build a Linux distribution,” says Kumar Priyansh, the 20-year old developer who has single-handedly created BackSlash Linux. As a child, Priyansh had always been curious about how operating systems worked. But instead of being merely curious and dreaming of developing an operating system, he started making OpenSUSE-based distributions in 2011 to step into the world of open source platforms. He had used the SUSE Studio to release three versions of his very own operating system that he called Blueberry. All that experience helped Priyansh in bringing out a professional Linux platform that debuted as BackSlash Linux in November 2016.

“To try and build a new Linux distro I decided to dedicate a lot of time for development, and started attending online tutorials,” says Priyansh. Going through many online tutorial sessions, the Madhya Pradesh resident observed that he needed to combine multiple parts of different tutorials to understand the basics. “I started connecting parts of different tutorials from the Web, making an authentic and working tutorial for myself that allowed me to build the necessary applications and compile the very first version of my own distribution,” he says.

It’s Ubuntu behind the scenes, but with many tweaks