In this post, I’m just going to introduce Caprice Linux as detailed as I can. So, most of questions people have in their mind will be answered. Also, I’ll give you a little road map at the end of the article. But first, wanna know why I chose the name Caprice? fine.

The name Caprice comes from one of my favorite cars. I love cars! Specially those American mascular cars. Caprice is one of the models made by Chevrolet. I love the 1975 - 1976 models, and you can see one of them in the picture below :

1976 Chevy Caprice

So, I just let you know why I chose this name, let’s get into the depth of this article.

Why I make Caprice?

As I said in the about page, I am hired by a Free Software Association to make a desktop Linux distribution. I had enough experience in the field, so they contacted me and interviewed me. And what was my answer? I just said Hell! Yeah!. I love studying and developing operating systems and I’m sure one day, I’ll write a functional operating system from scratch (which no-one probably use :P). Anyway. Long story short, I put a bunch of different tools for making a distribution, and I found something. I said to myself I of course need a playground.

You know my head is the place of my ideas. But I can’t implement every idea I have on a commercial product. It easily can distract the project goals and it even can easily make us not meet the deadlines, and this is horrible. So, some day I just decided to make another distro with pretty much the same features to be the playground or a place for doing a bunch of tests. It was really needed to have some sort of lab rat. This thoughts actually tickled my brain to do this a bit differently. And I’ll explain it further.

For instance, my employer wants a GNOME-based desktop environment. Like what you see in Fedora workstation or Ubuntu. No problem boss! I’ll make it happen. And I did. But I was thinking about my personal preferences. I think it’s more than one year that I’m not using GNOME - although I have 16 GB of RAM and a good graphics adapter - and like the old days, XFCE become my first choice as the desktop environment. So, Why not adding my personal taste to the project?! The next thing is that as we’re Iranian and the users of the other project will be all Iranians, they decided to make everything Persian, our sweet mother-tongue. But again, I have the habit of using my operating system, mobile phone and other services in English (mostly because when I started learning to work with a damn computer, our language couldn’t even be shown in most places of a particular operating system!) so I decided to keep Caprice more international.

Long story short, Caprice is a serious and fun project at the same time. In a short time, I could make a very small community of people who are interested in contributing in FLOSS projects, and most of them are actually positive about this.

And what about the roadmap? fine. Let’s have a quick look at the Caprice road map.

The Road Map

  • Creating a live disc with the GUI : Of course we’re going to make this as soon as possible. We haven’t decide about the GUI yet, but I think the primary versions will come with XFCE desktop (Or maybe another lightweight X11 based DE.)
  • Creating a list of needed software for the end user: I think this is even more important than having a proper GUI. We’ll make decisions about the web browser, office suite, multimedia, etc. in the final product.
  • Creating an installable image: This is what I am currently working on. I’m sure a text-mode installer will be available soon.

Items above, are Caprice development priorities. We’re just talking about these stuff in our community forum and we’ll let other people into the community, as well.