VeltOS is a new operating system that's been in the works for a while now, and it has been announced as using a Budgie-based desktop. It seems that the developer didn't like what Budgie was offering them and decided to fork it.

Forking is a regular practice in the Linux world. It's useful sometimes, but developers forking projects unnecessarily happens quite a lot. Why go through all the trouble of working on a desktop by yourself when there is a team doing the same thing already? The answer is pretty simple: control.

Developers want to have full control over what they are doing, and they don't want to rely on upstream to make the changes they need. It often happens with the upstream project to reject the patches sent by other devs. It's not a perfect system, but it's the system that's been enabled by the open source community.

VeltOS is forking Budgie, but they didn't need to

This brings us to the Budgie implementation in VeltOS. If you hadn't known this already, Budgie is the desktop environment for Solus, and it's built by the same people. In any case, the makers of VeltOS felt that they wanted something else and forked the project. It's not wrong to fork a project, but it's useless in this case.

"For a number of reasons, we here at Velt feel as if the Budgie desktop isn't really what VeltOS should be using. We believe the users should have more control over the design of the environment and the environment itself should have tighter integration with VeltOS. So we decided to try our hand at designing our own desktop environment," the developers wrote on the official VeltOS forums.

One of the Budgie developers, Ikey Doherty, explained that they didn't need to do that since the same result could have been achieved with some patches sent upstream. Moreover, the next version of Budgie will also implement some of the changes proposed by VeltOS, so they are actually working in vain.

Forking is both a blessing and a curse for Linux systems, but it's also a powerful drive for innovation. In this case, it's almost useless.