Hi guys. Just joined the Linux Questions Forums.

I thought I'd tell you guys I'm working on my own Linux distro - nothing really serious, just something to work on and take some time. It is Arch-based and is currently under development.

The website is http://unwindlinux.org/. Currently no release is out but one should be out by today, if not August.

The selling point is to be friendly while not including a bunch of extra stuff. You get a browser, package manager, desktop, and the typical GNU tools. The interesting part is that the main developer, me, is 17 years old, however, I don't think that affects who develops it. It depends on the developer's maturity in my opinion.

Any thoughts/suggestions/help?

My only thought, apart from the unhelpful '...but we have enough distros already...', is that the better that you can define the target user group as a distinct group with known likes and dislikes, the more likely you are to be successful.

By targeting, I don't really mean the trivial stuff like 'people who like green backgrounds', or something, but 'people who want the latest software, because they are techno-savvy, but don't want to do a lot of messing around to get it' (or their opposite, in some ways, '...people who get a buzz from fiddling around with their computer and still have it working afterwards...').

It has to be a worthwhile sub-set of users (so, not people who type 'a' a lot, nor people who have a dislike of cats) and not just any old grouping ('people from 19 to 32.5 years old' is not only arbitrary, but they don't really have shared characteristics that allow you to take decisions based on their particular preferences, because their preferences will be all over the place).

The better that you define a group, or a few similar groups, of people that you think should like what you are trying to do, the better is the chance that you can provide them with what they want....as opposed to, say, some user interface that no one really wants, apart from the developers, and which irritates the hell out of everybody. I'll leave you to work out who that might be.

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As salasi pointed out, there are already too many distros, so:
1) Your distro should offer something the rest do not or do things a better way.
2) Keep in mind the kind of people the system is meant for. People who prefer the command line, people who prefer a GUI, people who want to do as little work as possible during package management, people who want to compile from source, et cetera.
3) What about package repositories? Do you want to create and maintain your own. (A team of developers required.) Or do you plan to use an existing distro's repositories?

With the second point in mind, what is the target demographic?
A user-friendly Arch? To making Arch "friendly", you might need to delay up-dating packages, until they are stable. Most people do not consider frequent bugs and crashes friendly. However, this could cause difficulty if using Arch's repositories (point #3), making extra work for your team.

I do not mean to be discouraging. I simply want to give you some idea of the things you need to consider before delving too deeply. You need to think about everything that is required and plan a development strategy for the first few years. Once the full plan is place, finish developing the distro.

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