FYI fork at trylinux.today

[rugk]

FYI there is a fork at https://www.trylinux.today/

Source at https://gitlab.com/danarel/trylinux

toot: https://mastodon.technology/@danarel/103771755570284556

Crediting it with "Brought to you by ThinkPrivacy © 2020. Some rights reserved."
(though legally they kept the license statements, so it is all fine.)

At https://www.trylinux.today/about/ it says:

Try Linux is a fork of the popular (but now unmaintained site) Compute Freely by Sam Hewitt, and aims to carry on the tradition of making Linux more accessible to everyone.

I see no tries that they did to contact you here. Did they?
Is this project really unmaintained?

Edit: I've asked for a better credit: https://gitlab.com/danarel/trylinux/-/issues/1

[snwh]

This is unfortunate to learn. I was not reached out to by @danarel or anyone. I have been on a long hiatus from my projects for personal reasons.

[snwh]

I'm quite disappointed to see this, especially since it is without sufficient and appropriate credit that honors the original licenses and authors of computefreely content and code.

[danarel]

Sorry you're so disappointed, but as you can see I submitted pull requests a year ago that went untouched with many others and found this project to be completely dead. It's also been almost a year since @rugk posted this issue.

As far as credit goes, I felt I did a good job referencing more than once (In the about page, I name you and the site, as well as crediting the site as the source in the readme file. If you'd like further credit, or if there is some standard way of putting credit on forked projects that I am unaware of, I would be happy to comply.

But also, if this project is not dead, as that may be the case, I am more than happy to shutter TryLinux and point people to your site. The fact it was so outdated at the time made it hard to use as a credible source any longer. I am happy to help keep this project up to date with you and other contributors.

I have put almost no work into marketing TryLinux other than linking to it from my site to help people find distro's that are right for them, which is why I originally linked to ComputeFreely to begin with until it went stale.

I am more than happy to help rectify this in anyway, and am sorry that it disappoints you and meant no disrespect and only to carry on the sites original work and try to add on to it.

[snwh]

It's more the public assertion that this project is dead or unmaintained on your fork I'm not happy about. A year is indeed a long while but as I said I've neglected a lot of my projects for reasons.

Besides, I don't think the information on this site is urgent to update as it's not a download directory or anything, keeping up with distribution point updates would be a never-ending task, hence the disclaimer that "some information may be outdated".

Compute Freely is largely meant to defer to the projects' own pages for the nitty-gritty details like what version is the latest, etc. and those things aren't as important here so much so as the philosophy, stories, or motivation of each project--version number isn't a primary reason someone switches to a Linux OS, in my opinion. (Folks have distrowatch for tracking that stuff) But if you see an out-of-date version number as not "credible" the simple solution is to remove that from all entries entirely, it would save everyone needing to keep up with it.

I'm not upset about a fork, you can carry on if you feel. As for the credits, I didn't do a deep dive, it was largely that I noticed I was removed from the AUTHORS file and the CONTRIBUTORS file was gone which pointed to all the folks who contributed to this repository (restoring that would be gathering their names from here and putting it in a file).

[danarel]

AUTHORS and CONTRIBUTORS have been updated correctly.

To your point about keeping the distros up to date, while you're right Distro Watch is really good at that, it's not the most user friendly site, which is what I love about Compute Freely. It offers an up-to-date look at the distros but in a easy to use way.

While I don't think the version number is as important, what I meant by credibility is the appearance to being up-to-date. Showing the most recent release, imo, shows the maintainer is still watching these distros and recommending them based on some form of criteria.

But again, I am happy to close the fork and put that effort into Compute Freely. I don't think two of this site needs to exist if the main one is being maintained. The fork was meant to only carry on the work, not compete with it or simply offer a replication.

[rugk]

Hmm both trylinux.today and compzrefreely vanished/are down now … now a great situation. #74

[danarel]

Hmm both trylinux.today and compzrefreely vanished/are down now … now a great situation. #74

I had saved the code I used for TryLinux with the slight modifications I had made. It's out of date on a lot of distros now, but you can find the site live again at trylinux.thinkprivacy.ch and the source at https://codeberg.org/ThinkPrivacy/TryLinux

[rugk]

Thanks! https://trylinux.thinkprivacy.ch/ works. And I hope it kinda stays online. Otherwise IMHO a thing like this could just be hosted on GitHub/GitLab/Codeberg Pages/Neocities or so, i.e. the most simple way of hosting plain HTML pages, where hosting is done by someone else and all the effort and stuff one probably messes up in the future is not a problem.

[danarel]

Thanks! https://trylinux.thinkprivacy.ch/ works. And I hope it kinda stays online. Otherwise IMHO a thing like this could just be hosted on GitHub/GitLab/Codeberg Pages/Neocities or so, i.e. the most simple way of hosting plain HTML pages, where hosting is done by someone else and all the effort and stuff one probably messes up in the future is not a problem.

Hosting isn't an issue now and it won't go anywhere. The biggest challenge will be upkeep, but thats why it's open source!