The Vision and More In Depth History of Illumarine

I wanted to share more about the history of the "Illumarine joke" and the things I envisioned and currently envision for the project. The reason I wanted to do this was because I want to provide context on why I am working on this project, and why I give a shit.

The History Behind Illumarine

I have never once touched a Windows or Mac operating system once, ever. I started on the original Mandriva (if I remember correctly) and stuck to Linux for many years of my life. For a few years I used OpenIndiana, a fellow illumos distribution. I used OpenIndiana since around 2015 or 2016. While I had many people in my life use *BSD systems, even one person was making their own FreeBSD distros (plural), I have never used a BSD system. That same person in my life making a FreeBSD distros also made many Linux distros. While I don't talk to this person anymore (because of the harm I caused them), they were a massive inspiration to me, despite how I treated them.

Fast forward some complicated history, I became a good acquaintance to Jade of Fyra Labs, who was a friend of said inspiration. Jade is the COO of Fyra Labs, the company that acquired Ultramarine Linux, and is developing the Linux ecosystem further through Ultramarine Linux (a Fedora-based distribution of Linux). At this point the inspiration to finally make my own operating system has never been higher.

I originally proposed Illumarine as a joke in the Fyra Labs Discord server. The joke, admittedly, was a bit of (as Jade put it) a "highdea". I have had a long running history of drug abuse, and my drug of choice is meth. Even though I am still struggling with my addictions, and problems managing myself in general, I feel as if Illumarine would be like my SerenityOS. 

While I never used SerenityOS, I do pay attention to Andreas Kling. Yet another inspirational figure who made an operating system. I can't find it now, but Andreas Kling talked about how SerenityOS development was his replacement for his drug abuse problems, and named it after the serenity prayer he learned in rehab (the reason I don't go to rehab is due to very complex issues I will not get into here).

I ultimately want to work on Illumarine to help me keep busy and to have something I am genuinely proud of. While I have made my fair share of (poorly coded) tools that I use because of my paranoia issues that do persist today, I wasn't proud of them because it was just so I could hide more and more.

Illumarine is a passion project, only. One where I can build a community, and maybe run it for a couple years. I know I won't do Illumarine forever, I will ultimately move onto something new, but there is another aspect for why I am developing Illumarine.

The Illumarine Vision

Ever since touching illumos and OpenIndiana, I always missed the good ol' days of Linux. When Linux companies were plentiful, and the goal was to make Linux as easy as possible. While OpenIndiana is (from my perspective) more about maintaining the legacy of OpenSolaris, and other projects based on illumos having their own vision, they are different from mine.

I want a world where kernels compete again. Linux dominates the Unix-like market, with the BSDs also having a decent (but not as strong) hold with decent desktop and server support for newbies. While OpenIndiana is doing an undeniably good job at being inclusive, there is no distro to illumos, that Ubuntu is to Debian.

What I mean by that is that I want to make illumos as human-friendly and frictionless as possible. I will never make money from this project, point blank simple. I don't want to, as I feel as if that will dilute the merits of the project, and thanks to that friend I mentioned before, I know a good few ways to get around having to pay for expensive infra.

Thanks to the generosity of others, being supported by the generosity of others, and massive platforms that offer generous free-tiers, I already have the basis of what I need to build a solid operating system. But back to that Ubuntu analogy, there is one core piece that's at the core of this project. Fork-ability.

The importance of fork-ability is something me and many of my friends (past and present) share. We are open-source fanatics. Part of open-source is, in me and one of my past friend's visions was that we would build software with the intention that other people won't just use it, but modify it. While right now I am doing things very quick and dirty, I do ultimately see Illumarine being the origin point of someone else's distribution of illumos. That is the main driving factor. While I am nowhere close to the extremes that my past friend who made their own distros of Linux and BSD would ever take it, nor will I ever be, I want Illumarine to be a long-term home to new ideas in illumos.

That is why I chose XLibre. That is why I am not 100% against supporting Wayland on illumos. I want to see the illumos systems one day be as prevalent as many BSD systems like GhostBSD, BastilleBSD, DragonFlyBSD, etc..

While I admit that it will be many many more years before illumos is ever going to be as popular as mainstream BSD systems, and many more beyond that to meet where Linux was years ago, I still think there is a lot of passion within this community. And as I continue to build Illumarine, the more I want to provide the best experiences possible for you to make something awesome out of illumos.

Final Notes

The TL;DR is that Illumarine isn't the Linux Mint or Ultramarine Linux of illumos. Rather it's more of the Ubuntu/Fedora variety that people use to extend. I will not be here forever, and I have no plans on making money from this project.

- Samatha (aka. Barry)