Cucumber Linux

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About

Our Mission

Cucumber Linux aims to provide a Linux distribution that is usable as an every day, general purpose operating system. It aims to do this in as minimalistic a way as possible and in a way that follows the Unix Philosophy. Our mission is three fold: to focus on the distribution's simplicity, stability and security.

Cucumber Linux favors simplicity and modularity of design over simplicity of use. We believe that if the Unix Philosophy is followed and the system is designed in a simple and modular way, then simplicity of use will follow; simplicity of use should be a byproduct of good design, not the main goal.

Cucumber Linux follows the old addage "if it ain't broke don't fix it." To achieve this, we employ a stable, fixed release model and support policy. We publish patches for security and bug fixes regularly, however we do not update software just for the sake of having new software.

Cucumber Linux places a strong emphasis on security. Every vulnerability always receives a full disclosure on our security tracker. We believe in the OpenBSD philosophy of patching all vulnerabilities in a timely manner, no matter how small they may seem. Since we are an independent distribution, we can place a large emphasis on security and apply patches quickly, without having to wait for an upstream distribution to publish them. For this reason, Cucumber Linux is often one of the first distributions to release security patches for a vulnerability.

Also, since Systemd blatantly violates all 17 of Eric Raymond's Unix Rules, Cucumber Linux will always strive remain a Systemd free distribution.

Features

While Cucumber Linux does aim to be minimalistic where possible, it doesn't sacrifice functionality to accomplish this. The latest version of Cucumber Linux contains the following features:

• Linux 4.9 LTS
• GNU Userspace Utilities
• System V Init 2.88dsf
• Apache 2.4
• MariaDB 10.1
• PHP 7.2
• X.org 7.7
• XFCE 4.12
• Firefox Web Browser 60 ESR
• Thunderbird Email Client 60
• LibreOffice 5.3
• And much more...

See http://mirror.cucumberlinux.com/cucumber/ for a complete list of packages.

A Brief History of Cucumber Linux

Cucumber Linux began as my Summer project as college student in May 2016. The first alpha (released in August 2016) didn't have the X window system, any useful daemons or many applications, however it was a stable base to build upon. Plans were put in place to turn Cucumber Linux into a general purpose desktop and server operating System. By the end of 2016, many common daemons had been added to the distribution and Cucumber Linux was now usable as a server operating system. In early 2017, support for the X window system and the XFCE desktop environment was added.

On July 10, 2017 version 1.0 of Cucumber Linux was released. This version included several common daemons (including Rsync, SSH and the LAMP stack) and a fully functional desktop environment, featuring XFCE, Firefox, Thunderbird and LibreOffice. A month after the release Cucumber Linux was listed on DistroWatch, and two months later a Cucumber Linux forum was created on LinuxQuestions.org.

Now as I continue to develop Cucumber Linux, I always try to remain focused on my original goals when creating Cucumber Linux: to create a usable, practical Linux Distribution without Systemd that follows the Unix Philosophy of keeping the system design simple, using several modular programs (each of which does one job and does it well) opposed to a monolithic system and using shell scripts and plain text files wherever possible.

A huge thanks goes out to Patrick Volkerding of Slackware Linux and the Linux from Scratch development team. I couldn't have done it without inspiration from your systems and guidance from your buildscripts.

// Scott