Disclaimer: This post just sums up a concept for a new distribution which matches certain ideals. It is not the announcement of a new distribution. These are just abstract ideas. (However, if there is high interest in a project like this, it might of course develop into something real…)

I have been involved in Debian and Ubuntu for a long time now. When Ubuntu started, I was a Debian Testing user, and I immediately switched to Ubuntu when it started, because I liked the idea of a short-release-cycle, user-centric company-supported Debian based Linux distribution. However, I am now back to Debian for a long time, because of many reasons which nearly all had to do with Canonical policy. But this is not a post to criticise Ubuntu, so I’ll leave out most of that part. I am highly disappointed on how Ubuntu develops – not only the technical decisions are at least questionable, but also the social and community part is not that great anymore. There is a high asymetry in the relation between Canonical and other developers, Ubuntu mailinglists basically don’t create meaningful results, they sometimes even mutate to a Canonical Q/A session. The community does not seem to have a large influence on decisions about core services, and it can’t have it if there are things developed behind closed doors. (This is all, of course my subjective impression)

But really nobody can argue against the basic idea of Ubuntu and the great things Ubuntu created Also, many of the processes Ubuntu uses to develop the distribution are just great and well-working, as well as there is a highly active community around it. As you simply cannot argue with Canonical to change their policy (they are a company and have hidden plans, also they have every right to apply whatever policy they want), the natural way in any OSS project would be to fork it. But doing that blindly would just create another distribution, which would almost certainly vanish again soon, since there are already many Ubuntu derivatives which cover many use-cases using an Ubuntu base.

I discussed this stuff with Daniel some time ago, and we did some kind of brainstorming about what a perfect distribution would look like, from the perspective of a developer who wants to use a Debian-based distribution.

Here is a list of points which would define such a project:

• Every available package complies with the DFSG and Debian policy.
• Packages of DISTRO stay in close sync with Debian packages, changes are preferrably applied in Debian. DISTRO might work as a playground for new technology while Debian is in freeze.
• DISTRO stays as close to upstream as possible. It applies as less patches as possible, to deploy desktop environments which look like the thing upstream intended it to look like. Changes for DISTRO are developed upstream and only applied downstream if doing that doesn’t make sense or changes are distribution-specific and can’t be abstracted.
• All desktop environments are treated equally. There is no preferred DE.
• DISTRO stays in sync with release …read more
  Source: FULL ARTICLE at Planet KDE