Linux has always been centered in Europe and North America. However, in the last few years, India has started to become another center of activity. Currently, Linux has a 14.51-percent market share in India – almost three times above the world average [1]. Indian developers, many of them young, are contributing to popular distributions, and Indian-based distributions are also starting to appear, notably blendOS, which runs multiple distributions via containers, and BackSlash, a heavily-tweaked version of Ubuntu. Since March 2024, these distributions have been joined by Bharat Operating System Solutions (BOSS) Linux [2]. What distinguishes BOSS from most distributions in any country is that it is government sponsored, with goals that are less about technology than about bridging the digital divide and helping to improve India's technical infrastructure.

BOSS is developed by the Centre for the Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) at Chennai, a research and development institute with an emphasis on postgraduate studies and a mandate to help create and expand India's technical infrastructure. C-DAC is the National Resource Centre for Free and Open Source Software (NRCFOSS) with a focus on, among other concerns, software as a service (SaaS), ubiquitous computing, cloud computing, and education and training. Its areas of research include defense, online analytics, all-in-one software management, a mail server, cloud services, municipal management, and a FOSS document server. In all these areas, C-DAC places a heavy emphasis on security. BOSS Linux fits in well with both C-DAC's technical and political goals.

With such interconnections, it is unsurprising that in the few months of its existence, BOSS has had six million downloads and multiple releases. The BOSS drishti release is designed for education, while unnati is for servers. BOSS Minimalist Object Oriented Linux (MOOL) is experimental, attempting to redesign "the Linux kernel to reduce coupling and increase maintainability by means of object oriented abstractions. Excessive common coupling prevails in [the] existing kernel. MOOL features a device driver framework to write drivers in C++ and insert them as loadable kernel modules" [3] – efforts that apparently have not yet been submitted to kernel developers. Pragya, the version I focus on here, is for the desktop. It is based on Debian and in the latest version uses the Cinnamon desktop, although it formerly used Gnome. Its memory requirements are low (2GB RAM and 15GB memory) in keeping with its mandate to promote FOSS throughout India.

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