An overview of 3 actively developed Linux distributions from India, and trying to answer the question 'Do we need more?'

Since the early 90s thousands of Linux distributions have been created, and many of them have ceased to exist when development was stopped due to lack of interest or funding. As per Distrowatch there are close to 300 active distributions at the moment. When I looked up distributions originating from India, the number came out to be 19. After checking out all their websites, I found that only 3 were being actively developed at the moment -

BOSS Linux

Bharat Operating System Solutions aka BOSS Linux was created by the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) which falls under the purview of the Government of India's Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology. Boss Linux is based on Debian and comes in three versions - Desktop for the regular desktop users, EduBOSS for educational institutions and Server for server deployments.

BOSS Linux has been around for a long time and was even authorised to be installed in their offices by the Tamil Nadu state government way back in 2011. The distribution also has additional applications with localisation, thereby improving ease of adoption. However the adoption doesn't seem to have taken off as expected, and the number of six million deployments advertised on the website is pretty miniscule for a country like India. I also came across an old Reddit post saying that the version of BOSS Linux used by the Army and Navy was hacked, which doesn't really inspire confidence.

Linux has the reputation of giving a new lease of life to old hardware, and a distribution like BOSS Linux which comes with India-specific utilities could prove to be a great operating system to be used in public schools and government offices instead of having to spend so much money on buying Windows 10 (and now Windows 11) licenses and upgrading hardware to ensure that Windows would run well. With some work on the website and a bit of active outreach efforts, this process could definitely be set in motion.

Garuda Linux

Garuda Linux was created in 2020 by a team of 20-odd people hailing from various countries, led by a 24 year old software engineer Shrinivas Vishnu Kumbhar from Kolhapur. Garuda uses Arch Linux as the base and is focused on improving the gaming experience on Linux with its performance tweaks and tools for installing and managing games. It uses the Chaotic AUR, a curated repository of pre-compiled packages, along with the original Arch Linux repositories.

Garuda has flavours with the six most popular desktop environments - GNOME, KDE Plasma, MATE, Cinnamon, XFCE and LXQt; and three window managers - Sway, Qtile and i3. They also offer a special version with a customised KDE desktop which is aimed towards eye-candy appearance.

Archcraft

To describe this distribution in the words of its creator Aditya Shakya -

Archcraft is just another Linux distribution, made on top of Arch Linux. It uses window managers and lightweight applications, which makes it super fast. With pre-configured settings, Archcraft provides you the best out of the box window manager experience.

Archcraft comes with seven window managers pre-installed - DWM, i3, XMonad, Herbstluftwm, Berry, Fluxbox and Sway. All these window managers are pre-configured with custom themes which can be changed with a few clicks, and with custom keybindings for launching and managing applications. Aditya has also created pre-configured and pre-themed versions of a few more window managers. However, the users wanting to install these have to pay a nominal amount to download the necessary files. This has led to some criticism, with people saying that it goes against the FOSS philosophy. However, Aditya is using it as an additional avenue along with donations to pay for the infrastructure to maintain the package repositories.

Parting Thoughts

Creating a Linux distribution is difficult, but maintaining it is a lot more difficult. That difficulty increases further when the maintainers do not have any steady financial support and have to work on the project alongside their regular day-jobs. Therefore it might be possible that Garuda and Archcraft stop being maintained some time in the future, and they might get replaced by a new distribution. But I really hope that BOSS Linux finds a lot more traction than it has right now. It could prove instrumental in increasing longevity and eliminating licensing and maintenance costs for software.