in my words

Unix philosophy (1) before everything. From there comes the rest: efficiency (2), keeping only what's essential — but never at the cost of the experience of whoever is actually using the system.

The heart of this distro is keeping the purity of the distributions closest to Unix, like Void and Slackware, and giving them what they never had: a clean user experience (3), a design you actually want to look at. And a system that is secure and privacy-oriented (4) without asking you to become an expert first. I think security is one of the biggest challenges Linux will have to face, and Odyssey is my attempt at an answer.

Odysseys are sailed alone — they are an adventure of people who share the same destination. I believe independence (5) is essential to keep faith with every other value on this page: no GitHub, no SourceForge for the downloads — everything lives on Odyssey's own server, which will never accept any sponsorship. This is not a commercial project, and it doesn't answer to commercial logic. No company will ever tell me which computer to use, which cloud, or who to thank. The only people I want to thank are the ones who truly believe in this project and climb aboard.

This project is apolitical (6). Who you are, what you believe in — not my business. Odyssey wants to be a meeting point for digital freedom and open source, not another battlefield. There are other places for those fights. Here we talk about Linux, code, and technological independence.

And it's a FOSS project: when features are equal, GPL (7) comes first.

And one last value, for which you'll allow me to use my own language, because in Italian it has a far more beautiful and telling history than in translation: Gentilezza (8) — kindness. The word comes from the Latin gens, meaning family: the gentes were the founding families of ancient Rome — Julius Caesar belonged to the gens Julia. In time, at the end of the Middle Ages with Dante and the Dolce Stil Novo, the word shifted from meaning "of noble family" to meaning "of noble soul". It evolved further still, taking on connotations tied to the other — to the intrinsic disposition of the soul, to the way we choose to relate to those around us.

Yes: Odyssey is a kind project. Kindness — between the community, the users, and everything else — is one of its founding pillars. Here there are no enemies. There are no plots, no passive-aggressives. Here we believe that human beings, the world, and things themselves have, deep down, a benign nature.