why odyssey
First point, a very honest one: a distribution has to be tried to be judged. The words and intentions of its creator have some value, but they count for little next to the experience of the person using it. And that is exactly what I worried about: the experience of someone with a job, who loves technology but doesn't spend hours in front of a terminal; of the kid who wants to practice. Not power users — but still faithful to the power-user distributions, the ones closest to the Unix philosophy: minimal, simple, robust, deeply configurable. Slackware, Void, Gentoo — distributions that 90% of Linux users wouldn't go anywhere near.
Odyssey wants to bring you inside that world. A real journey — an odyssey, in fact. A great adventure: easy installation, graphical tools — but for advanced things, things that still demand your commitment — personalization, and much more. That is the void this distribution wants to fill.
But there are other voids, and they concern security and privacy. Linux is not secure by default: Linux is secure because it allows you, through deep hardening, to turn the system into an almost inaccessible fortress. Twenty years ago that was true, and it worked. But today? Today, with Linux going mainstream, 95% of distributions — and I'm being generous — ship neither a firewall nor AppArmor by default, nor compile the kernel with security parameters (that one is a feature I'll bring in the 2028 edition, due in September 2027). That is Linux today: fragile, buggable packages and repositories that put the user at risk.
Odyssey tries to answer all of it: AppArmor and firewall active by default, and above all graphically configurable. A supply chain designed for its own repository: reproducible packages, public manifests, an enforcement system, and public scanning visible to everyone. I believe — and I say it without pomposity — that nobody until now has put all of these security ingredients inside one repository.
Last act of this long page: coherence. I say it as a Linux user and developer with twenty years behind me, without meaning to offend anyone: 99% of distributions are amateur projects. Some have excellent technical solutions and a website that barely stands; others are beautiful and fragile. Odyssey is coherent — an overall vision, a project with a head and feet: an idea of beauty in its aesthetics, its structure, its governance, its technical composition, its community.
I don't know whether Odyssey is a great distro or a wreck. I only know that it is certainly one of a kind in the Linux landscape. So, claims aside — and marketing phrases too — it's up to you: to set off on this adventure, to believe in it, to stay or not. Or simply to take a ride, and jump ship at the first rough sea...