Another approach to Arch Linux

Labor of Love

Article from Issue 297/2025

Author(s): Bruce Byfield

SDesk aspires to be the Fedora of Arch Linux. We talk to Stephen Byrne about his passion project.

These days, distributions are large-scale projects. Major distributions such as Debian and Fedora are often the size of medium-sized corporations, with dozens of middle management roles, thousands of contributors, and well-developed methodologies. By contrast, SDesk [1] is reminiscent of the earliest days of free software, when distributions were often a labor of love for a single developer. Based on Arch Linux, SDesk is full of individual small design choices, including the option to add parental controls to an account during installation, the Marwaita icons and themes, Gnome extensions enabled by a single click, and the default Swirl Web Browser. Many of SDesk's idiosyncratic choices are enhancements to Arch Linux, such as the inclusion of SELinux. Here, Stephen Byrne, SDesk's developer, talks about his ongoing solo project.