Welcome, Again

Hi, it’s been a while. This is Gaveen, and this post will be a little personal. However, before anything else, I want to apologize for the extended radio silence. With this post, I want to explain, in the context of Asura Linux:

• Why was there no update?
• How things have changed, and
• What I want to do in the future.

When I announced Asura Linux as a project, I was trying to scratch a particular itch—I wanted to build the Linux user experience I wanted to use. That hasn’t quite changed, but at the time, my itch was mainly about the desktop user experience. I still think there are many possibilities there. However, two years later, those aren’t my top priorities, and I’m not even the same person.

It’s not as dramatic as it sounds. I’ve been using Fedora Workstation with GNOME + PaperWM for a while (perhaps Niri on Fedora Silverblue sometime later) as my desktop setup. However, I want to put my thought process in the proper context and set realistic expectations about the future of Asura Linux.

What “Project Asura” is

First and foremost, Asura is a personal side-project. It’s a vehicle for my experimentation as a technologist. It was always so, and it’ll likely remain—unless something emerges from it that other people find meaningful. This is also an open source project. That much has not changed.

These days, I introduce Asura Linux as follows. Asura Linux is an Open Source project to experiment with different ways of building and running modern general-purpose Linux systems—and to share what we learn along the way.

What happened

Despite my claims not to, due to my eagerness to have a functional desktop UX sooner, I ended up trying to build a usable distro. I could have gone the Atomic/Universal Blue approach, but that wasn’t exactly what I wanted. Since I wasn’t trying to adjust an existing flavor to taste or attempt to write my own full-featured Wayland compositor, I was trying to do too much too early. For example, building packages from source and generating custom ISOs was a lot of work—even without spending any real innovation tokens yet. This quickly became a bottleneck due to two personal reasons.

At the time, I was relatively new to my neurodivergent journey. I had just figured out a fundamental truth about myself. My mental health was better than ever, I was kinder to myself, and everything felt great. But I was yet to fully understand my particular blend of neurodivergent traits. Because I was now accepting my needs and setting accommodations without guilt, some of my less-dominant and previously obscured traits started to make me struggle. In gist, I have since learned a few more things. For example, not to eat that proverbial frog first, and to avoid listening to toxic productivity advice. It took a while to get here, and I still have much to learn. But it was a journey I had to make time for—it was never optional.

On the other hand, during this period, I also had to step up at work. I was already the first employee and the face of the company for C-level executives, VIPs, foreign delegations, etc., from existing and potential clients. But the necessity demanded that I also take on acting CTO/COO responsibilities. Without going into much nuanced and NDA-riddled details, I’ve been running a tier 3, commercial, and high-density colocation data center. It has prevailed so far, 100% uptime maintained in the initial 3+ years of existence, and the clients remain satisfied. However, my free time and the side-projects weren’t left unscathed. I’m lucky that the bundle of joy that’s my son knows how to make the most out of any free time at my hand.

I wouldn’t say I thrived in the past two years—I survived and endured. Hopefully, I did right by the people in my care the best I could under the circumstances. For context, I should mention that Sri Lanka is still on the path to recovery from its worst economic crisis post-independence. We were able to peacefully and democratically elect a new president (which still feels surreal) and a corruption-free government with the honest intent to fight for a better future for everyone, not a select few. I believe they are making a net positive progress. Time will tell if we actually get there.

In summary, this is why there was no update from Asura Linux in the past two years. However, I’m finally at a point where I can afford reflection and think about the way forward.

The future of “Asura Linux”

I recently found some time to reactivate this blog and migrate the Asura Linux Mastodon account (from Fosstodon to Hachyderm). Does that indicate the project is back? Yes, and also, no.

To quote the project introduction again:

Asura Linux is an Open Source project to experiment with different ways of building and running modern general-purpose Linux systems—and to share what we learn along the way.

I don’t think I’ll be spending time on trying to build a usable Linux distro anytime soon. However, there are intriguing ideas I want to try, especially from an infrastructure perspective. For example, I’m currently working on converting an OCI container to a Firecracker microVM and running it on a standard Linux host. It may (or may not) have something to do with my views about Kubernetes. And there’s more where that came from.

In summary, Asura Linux will focus on experimentation and knowledge sharing on smaller components of Linux systems, smaller projects, or proof-of-concepts for more ambitious ideas. I believe Asura Linux will be an umbrella project, a vehicle for my experimentation as a technologist. If there’s anything I can share, it’ll be public and open source.

Welcome to the Asura Linux Project, again.