This is the first blog post where I refer to myself as a person. I'm http.llamaz, the founder and project lead for Rolling Rhino Remix. Some avid fans of the distribution may have noticed that we have not released a disk image in October, and there is a good reason for that.
Rolling Rhino Remix began as a hobby project, back when my username was MrBeeBenson. I started it with a friend, who has since left the development team for their personal life. Overtime Rolling Rhino Remix evolved and changed drastically, under the hood, however I am not the same programmer I was then. Rolling Rhino Remix was honestly, made with little effort and is still held together by scripts that keep the Operating System running. It was a proof-of-concept, and the fact that people utilised it as a daily driver astounded me. It was more stable than I anticipated. Rolling Rhino Remix kept adding more and more utilities until it simply was no longer just a rolling release flavour of Ubuntu.
Rolling Rhino Remix has ultimately served its purpose though, speaking with Ken Vandine, the engineering manager at Canonical, they have told me about a potential new project to have a Rolling Release version of Ubuntu, which would have an LTS base, with the Linux kernel itself being a snap package.
I have made teasers about what the team is working on next, and it is not a complete departure of our original aim, which was to provide a rolling release version of Ubuntu. I would like to introduce Rhino Linux, the official successor to Rolling Rhino Remix. This is a large undertaking that completely overhauls the fundamentals of Rolling Rhino Remix, and 2 new core developers have been added to the development team to help flesh this idea out.
Rhino Linux will be an Ubuntu-based, rolling release operating system with Ubuntu, Pacstall and XFCE at the core of the distribution.
Our users may be familiar with Pacstall itself, and how useful it is as an AUR-like package manager for Ubuntu. It is extremely extensible. We have adopted our own Pacstall repository specifically for Rhino Linux, which is headed by our Deputy Project Lead and the founder of Pacstall, Plasma. Core packages for the distribution such as XFCE (and our dotfiles), the Linux kernel, our plymouth bootsplash, and the Firefox web-browser will be installed via Pacstall.
We have chosen a slightly-customised version of XFCE as our desktop environment of choice due to it's renowned stability and speed.
Ubuntu as a rolling release is still at the very core of our concept. Rhino Linux is not a departure from Rolling Rhino Remix, but rather re-imagines it as the more stable, mature distribution it should have shipped with originally.
2022.11.01 will be the last disk image that we produce of Rolling Rhino Remix, as we prepare for the development of Rhino Linux. Rolling Rhino Remix as an operating system will continue to be maintained for 3 months after the release of Rhino Linux.
From the release of this blog post the development for Rhino Linux, set to release sometime in 2023, will go public on our Discord, and will not be locked to our core developers.
To everyone who has supported Rolling Rhino Remix thus far, thank you, and I hope you will continue to support us as we move to the next chapter of this distribution.