About Redcore Linux

Who's behind? 👤

Redcore Linux was started and is currently developed by Ghiunhan Mamut, who wears multiple hats: a full-time maintainer, programmer, packager, ISO creator, bug squasher, and more... In a word, this means that he is working alone. However, he warmly welcomes contributions from anyone, regardless of their area of interest (website, wiki, bugs, packages, etc.). He's just an ordinary guy who's passionate about technology, especially GNU/Linux. He doesn't hold an IT degree but is self-taught and loves to learn new things and experiment with GNU/Linux system parameters. He's been using Linux every day for more than 15 years since 2006. During this time, he used to be a classic distro-hopper, trying out many distributions, but he never felt completely satisfied with any of them. He tried: Ubuntu, Mint, Debian, Fedora, openSUSE, Mandriva, Rosa, ArchLinux, Chakra, Slackware, NixOS, and in the end, he settled with Gentoo in December 2012, a distribution he fell in love with and has never left since. ❤️🐧

What is? 🤔

Redcore Linux is a distribution based on Gentoo Linux (testing branch) and is a continuation of the now-defunct Kogaion Linux. Kogaion Linux itself initially based on Sabayon Linux and later on Gentoo Linux was developed by the RogentOS Development Group since 2011. Ghiunhan Mamut himself joined RogentOS Development Group in January 2014. Unfortunately, after more than 5 years of development, the RogentOS Development Group decided to discontinue Kogaion Linux in November 2016, but Ghiunhan Mamut didn't want the project to die, so he forked it and Redcore Linux was born.

Why? 🤨

Redcore Linux shares the same idea as his defunct ancestor, Kogaion Linux: to bring the power of Gentoo Linux to the masses. Its aim is to provide a quick way to install a 100% Gentoo Linux compatible system, without spending hours or days compiling from source code. To achieve this goal, it provides a repository with prebuilt binary packages which receives continuous updates (rolling release model).

For who? 🎯

Redcore Linux targets casual Laptop/Desktop users and, to some extent, Workstation power users. It will nicely fill any gaming, multimedia, office, and internet browsing needs. Some development tools are also available. For that reason, one cannot expect to find any server application in the repository (apache, lighttpd, mysql, nginx, etc.). The repository will always remain small in size, focusing on quality rather than quantity.

How it's built? 🏗️

Redcore Linux is built from Gentoo Linux stage3. We then add a kernel, a bootloader, and a few other elements like dbus and an initramfs generator (Dracut), we configure the init system (OpenRC), and so we have the core of Redcore Linux, a Gentoo Linux compatible stage4 if you will. Deploying this stage4 will give you a very basic console-only bootable Gentoo Linux compatible system. We then squashfs this stage4 and use it as a base to compile binary packages against and as a base for the live ISO images. Easy peasy!

What's inside? 🧰

Under the hood, you will find the following components:

 * Linux kernel
 * Dracut
 * OpenRC
 * Eudev
 * Elogind
 * GCC
 * LLVM/Clang
 * Mesa
 * Xorg server
 * DKMS
 * Cryptsetup
 * Calamares installer

Redcore Linux supports both BIOS/MBR and EFI/GPT (no Secure Boot) installations with or without full disk encryption enabled.

On the desktop side, you will find the following components:

 * KDE Plasma 5
 * LibreOffice
 * Mozilla Firefox and Mozilla Thunderbird
 * Steam and Lutris
 * Qbittorrent

As of this writing, the repository has 2196 binary packages and is growing. I invite you all to explore and discover the goodies. 🎮🖥️🔍