CentOS and Scientific Linux and Princeton’s Pisa, among others. What was once a simple (boring?) decision for Linux admins who wanted RHEL compatibility without RHEL’s various overheads, the neighborhood is becoming more and more crowded. And now, a completely new project is working its way out of the tall grass.

AscendOS, http://www.ascendos.org/, is in the process of forming and on initial inspection it offers a lot of promise. The reason this group has decided to form is pretty obvious from their website. They weren’t satisfied with the current offerings out in the world so they decided to give it a shot themselves.

Every distribution of EL has their own pros and cons. One may add additional stuff and have an open community, but may not be exactly 100% compatible with upstream. Another one may focus more on getting things out quicker, but is more obscure, and doesn’t do as much testing. Another one has name recognition, but tries so hard to be 100% compatible and perfect that the turnaround for a certain major release has become almost half a year since its original release. It’s just that varied.

I can’t really argue that a whole heck of a lot. Several of my past thoughts have been focused on some of the major Enterprise-level Linux distros out there. The effort seems to have started around June of this year, so it’s really just getting started.

A quick trip through their forums has the usual discussions about setting up their build environments and what to name their first releases. Not a ton of activity, but they seem to have some traction it seems within Scientific Linux and possibly some other distributions.

Right now AscendOS is mainly a desire to be a fresh take on process/workflow in how a group rebuilds RHEL. Most of their major points and goals are described in this forum post. I know there’s not a whole lot of information right now, but I wanted to make sure that I included them in the conversation as they get started on their journey.