Although 2020 was a crazy year and still one month remains to give us more surprises, it wasn’t very bad for me. Caprice Linux was the project I’ve built in this crazy time and it had a lot of fun and benefits for me. For example, one of the most important events of this year for me, was creation of the Caprice Linux Community. A group of great people who helped the process of building a Linux distribution become as fast as possible. And now, I’m honored to announce a new child in our family!

The Minimal Caprice

Minimal in the world of Linux has a strong meaning. Minimal distributions are usually light-weight and suitable for old-ass computers. They usually do not have a big DE like GNOME or XFCE, they do not come with a ton of packages and they’re not easy-to-install for a newbie user. But then, who will use those? I tell you, my friends and me. Why? because sometimes you need an environment to help you focus on what the hell you’re doing and not bombarding you with un-needed announcements and notifications. Also, this is not the whole story. In past couple of months I was busy developung Caprice Unified Base System (CUBS for short) as a system installer so we needed a version (other than our enterprise one) to test cubs out. This is a preview of Minimal Caprice on my computer:

Minimal Caprice

And as you can see, now it sucks less, at least in terms of the user interface.

Features and decided software

  1. A light-weight and minimal window manager. Dynamic Window Manager aka dwm has been chosen as the main user interface. Special thanks to Hooman for coding the modifications on DWM.
  2. cubs as the installer. It’s a bit hard to get it right, but hey, who cares? Let’s have a geeky version of our Linux distribution! BTW, we’re just going to pivot most of our focus on the server edition because that’s where we can make money from to keep the project alive. So, we give the community the ability to use the tools we’ve coded for the server to test them and tell us where they actually may suck. This is the whole concept and idea of doing this.
  3. And now, it’s based on Debian’s testing branch. Minimal version will be on testing, while the main desktop branch will stay on stable.

Future plans and the GNOME version

Development process of the GNOME version has been frozen for some reasons, but we’re getting into it. More news and details about Caprice Linux, Minimal Caprice and Caprice Enterprise Linux will be available very very soon.