Existing custom ublue distros?

[greenrd]

I started to make a custom image with a vscodium dev environment on it, with batteries included for the programming languages I use in my projects at home, and it's really fun and easy so far to start from startingpoint - just what I've wished for out of a customisable distro for years and years - but then I wondered...

Has someone already done what I'm planning to do?

And if so, how would I find it?

I notice that my distro (which doesn't have any IDE stuff in it yet, so it's not interesting yet) wasn't created as a fork on GitHub when I used the automatic setup method, so it won't show up in the list of forks of startingpoint on GitHub. So my first idea - "look at the list of forks of startingpoint" isn't going to cut it. Also, that wouldn't scale anyway, because there are already over 100 forks! (Congratulations for that BTW!)

I guess I could just use a search engine... but have you thought about creating a wiki or something like that where people could post their custom images when they feel they're ready to be advertised? Or is that too risky from a security and reputation and anti-spam standpoint?

I can see how this could be tricky because on the one hand, it's good to make custom images discoverable to reduce duplication of effort, and because you don't want to include everything and the kitchen sink in main/nvidia, but on the other hand, you could imagine say crypto spammers linking to crypto-stealing malware images or something, maybe disguised as innocuous useful things, or other nasty things like that.

[xynydev]

I guess I could just use a search engine... but have you thought about creating a wiki or something like that where people could post their custom images when they feel they're ready to be advertised?

I have created that as a website that showcased the official images and it didn't really catch on.
Nowadays that URL is used for a better automatic setup wizard which just needs a little bit more testing and love from @castrojo to be added to the docs & become more official.
https://github.com/orgs/ublue-os/discussions/173

It could very easily though be added to the same site as a revamped mechanism for showcasing people's custom images, so if you're interested in adding your image to that I'd be happy to do it.

[EyeCantCU]

I think asking if someone has already done what you're planning to do isn't always the best approach. If you're genuinely interested in doing something, you should do it regardless because it can be a great learning experience and inspires innovation as usually you're going to have a different approach to handling things than someone else will

With that said though, no I have not seen anyone ship VS Codium specifically in their builds with support for various languages. What I have seen are people including VS Code in their builds with support for whatever they need. Bluefin dx comes to mind

If you want to make sure though, you can always look at forks of startingpoint. Even if it's not reflective of everyone who has created an image from it

[xynydev]

It can be useful to learn from prior art. Odds are that you might come up with a hacked together solution while a better one is already out there.

[EyeCantCU]

It can be useful to learn from prior art. Odds are that you might come up with a hacked together solution while a better one is already out there.

I certainly agree. I took it more as the desire to want to use something that's already built versus making their own image

[castrojo]

have you thought about creating a wiki or something like that where people could post their custom images when they feel they're ready to be advertised?

Yeah we have a repo just for this: https://github.com/ublue-os/awesome-custom-images/

However I ran out of time and it needs love and some reorganization. Then we can just add that page to the website and people can search it, etc.

For the quality concerns I think what we do is just ensure that the instructions for checking the signature of images are clear and that we only list images that have open containerfiles for inspection. If someone wants to drive this repo and make it better feel free to start sending in PRs and we can go from there!

[xynydev]

Forgot about this.