Frequently Asked Questions

  • Why is the project called Caprice ?

As I mentioned before, there are two reasons behind this. First, Caprice is a musical forms, where variations and movements have sudden changes. Also, it’s a model from Chevrolet. I love that car and these are my reasons for calling it Caprice.

  • What’s the difference between Caprice Linux and Debian GNU/Linux in general?

Caprice Linux is a step further, comparing to the Debian GNU/Linux. Actually, Debian is the parent project and Caprice Linux is the child of Debian. But, we have different repositories (with different update cycle) and we also have different policies.

And to be honest, Debian Live discs are really good (some of them have even more packages pre-installed comparing to Caprice Linux TBH) but they’re very Debian-is. I mean, Debian developers have to follow Debian guidelines, and Caprice Linux developers have to follow their own guidelines as well. Some things are a bit easier in process of Caprice Linux development such as shipping with non-free branch enabled by default.

In middle of June 2020, we also decided to implement NetBSD’s pkgsrc as a secondary and pro-friendly package/port management system in Caprice Linux.

  • What’s the difference between Caprice Linux and Debian GNU/Linux Live/Install Images which are shipped with XFCE?

This is the point. When we ask What’s the difference between Caprice and Debian?, it means we actually didn’t study Debian so well, and know nothing about Caprice Linux. But this one, is the actual point. I haven’t tested live discs shipped with XFCE. But I tested installation images. First of all, install images are not really easy to use for beginners and they don’t provide much packages (mostly because of non-free dependencies or dependencies which are not classified as XFCE tools or programs) but in Caprice, we provided a lot of tools from GNOME to make working with the system much easier.

  • What’s the difference between Caprice Linux and Debian Live Project?

Debian Live Project doesn’t focus on any certain GUI. They make images with most known DE’s such as GNOME, KDE, XFCE, LXQt and Cinnamon. But Caprice Linux is focused on XFCE as the main DE for now.

  • Why does Caprice Linux still uses systemd?

There’s a funny story behind this. I used to make the filesystem.squashfs of Caprice Linux using debootstrap on my main laptop, which has Ubuntu installed and as I made Caprice to be a light port of another project, I wanted to keep to as close as possible to that. This is the reason why Caprice still ships with systemd.

  • Is Caprice Linux a national or local project?

No. It’s not. Although we’re sponsered by Iranian free/open-source software association and companies which support the association, but Caprice is never going to be called a national project. And as we never included Persian(Farsi) locales or Persian keyboard settings by default in Caprice, it’s even not a local project.

  • Is there any plans for dropping systemd?

Of course. As Caprice Linux has nothing to do with any other projects, we have some plans to change the init system. But, for now, Caprice will be shipped with systemd.

For now, NetBSD init system works besides systemd and we hugely suggest it for installing services.

  • How can I contribute to Caprice Linux?

We have built most of our packages from Debian’s Salsa and we also got our own Git repositories and you can contribute to both of these. Contribution to Debian or Ubuntu, is contribution to Caprice and vice-versa.

  • Will Caprice Linux be available for other architectures?

For now, we prefer to stick to amd64. Most of machines currently have amd64 and this makes Caprice Linux a fine choice for every home or work machine. For future, we may have some other ports for ARM processors as well.