(likely unoriginal) idea

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spikeb
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Joined: 12/10/2013

Apologies if this has been brought up before and answered.

Have you guys considered talking to the gnewsense team about combining resources into one project? I ask because it seems neither one of the projects has enough contributors, and both have at least one similar goal: making a 100% free deb distro.

Michał Masłowski

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I am a translator!

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Joined: 05/15/2010

The goals are different: one is based on Ubuntu, the other on Debian.
(The same was true before they both changed their upstreams.) This
leads to important differences like Trisquel having useful Ubuntu
changes, and gNewSense supporting Loongson systems with a CPU
architecture not supported by Ubuntu.

Most packages changed in Trisquel aren't changed due to nonfree things
in Ubuntu: there are many branding, accessibility and usability changes.

I think there are both Ubuntu users who would not use Debian and Debian
users who would not use Ubuntu. Different free distros are better for
them.

Technically, there are big differences in how both distros modify
packages (gNewSense 3.0 moved from a package-helpers-like scripts to
adding patches to source packages). There is cooperation on freeing
packages and finding nonfree ones, this needs only adapting patches to
the specific format that the distro has.

(I'm not a developer of these projects, while I have submitted some
patches and suggestions to gNewSense.)