about · a confession

I never meant to build a distribution. There were already too many — everyone knew it, I knew it. Then I found Void Linux and something clicked. runit. xbps. No systemd. No corporate agenda. A distribution that behaved the way Unix was always supposed to behave. I switched, and I stayed.

But I kept noticing the same gap. The distributions closest to the Unix philosophy — Void, Gentoo, Slackware — are also the ones that demand the most. They are right to demand it. But they leave something on the table: the graphical layer. The tools that should exist but nobody built. Not because they are hard, but because nobody bothered. The systemd world had everything; the non-systemd world had the terminal and the assumption that you already knew everything.

So I built them. A kernel with BORE scheduling, native to Void via xbps. An installer that works without systemd. A package manager with a face. A control center that looks like one app but runs as nine independent modules — because that is how Unix works.

The software preinstalled is deliberately minimal. You decide what goes on your system. Odyssey does not decide for you.

This distribution is maintained by one person. Anonymous. Unknown. If I disappear, Odyssey slows down. If I get sick, Odyssey gets sick. I am telling you this because you deserve to know.

Odyssey is Void with three extra packages, and the tools that should have always existed. Nothing more. Nothing less.

unix for human beings.

the team · companions on the road

Odyssey was born alone. One person, one machine, one stubborn idea. But from the very beginning the road gave me company. I never set out to build a team. The team found me along the way.

I am the founder. The principal maintainer. The one who stays awake too long, breaks things, and fixes them again by morning.

Adrian is the first. The first true collaborator of Odyssey, a real member of the team. The bug tracker is his: its complete management, every report that arrives, every report that closes. When you file a bug, it passes through his hands.

One name today. I hope to write more in the months ahead.

origins · between scylla and charybdis

Odyssey is global. International by intent, a distribution for everyone, from every corner of the earth. Whatever your culture, your faith, your politics, whatever road your life has taken, we meet here united by one thing: digital freedom. Linux. open code.

And yet. I believe that to truly accept the other, the different, the stranger, you first have to know yourself. Your own origins. You have to love them. So Odyssey has no nationality, but it carries Calabria in its heart.

Hot summers. The scent of rosemary in your nose along country roads that follow "fiumare". Bergamot trees. A grandmother's kiss. Wine drunk in great rounds, jokes that go on too long. Values centuries old, worth keeping, worth making modern, worth keeping alive.

Calabria is one of the oldest corners of Western civilization, the very place where Odysseus once steered between Scylla and Charybdis. The myth that gave this system its name was carved into that coastline thousands of years before the first line of code.

We were. We are. We will be. And I carry every one of you in my heart.

— nobody

creator · maintainer · user
odyssey linux · somewhere on the internet