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Maintainer of Linux Distro AnduinOS Revealed to Be Microsoft Employee (neowin.net) 29

After gaining attention from Neowin and DistroWatch last week, the sole maintainer behind AnduinOS 1.3 -- a Linux distribution styled to resemble Windows 11 -- decided to reveal himself. He turns out to be Anduin Xue, a Microsoft software engineer, who has been working on the project as a personal, non-commercial endeavor built on Ubuntu. Neowin reports: As a Software Engineer 2 at Microsoft (he doesn't work on Windows), Anduin Xue says he's financially stable and sees no need to commercialize AnduinOS. Explaining the financial aspects of the project, he said: "Many have asked why I don't accept donations, how I profit, and if I plan to commercialize AnduinOS. Truthfully, I haven't thoroughly considered these issues. It's not my main job, and I don't plan to rely on it for a living. Each month, I dedicate only a few hours to maintaining it. Perhaps in the future, I might consider providing enterprise solutions based on AnduinOS, but I won't compromise its original simplicity. It has always been about providing myself with a comfortably themed Ubuntu."

In our coverage of the AnduinOS 1.3 release last week, one commenter pointed out that the distro is from China. For some, this will raise issues, but Anduin Xue addressed this in his blog post, too, saying that the source code is available to the public. For this reason, he told lacing the operating system with backdoors for the Chinese government would be "irrational and easily exposed." For those worried that the distribution may be abandoned, Anduin Xue said that he intends to continue supporting it and may even maintain it full-time if sponsorship or corporate cooperation emerges.

Maintainer of Linux Distro AnduinOS Revealed to Be Microsoft Employee

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  • so it is just Ubuntu with a windows 11 looking skin, heck I can take any distro and install a skin and call it another distro, but I will NOT do it, "just because you can do something does not mean you should".
    • by sodul ( 833177 )

      I do not use Windows at all, so there is zero appeal to me to make my Linux instances more like Windows.

      Now, almost 10y ago I tried to make a Lenovo laptop running Linux behave more like macOS. My primary complaints were the keyboard shortcuts, which are inconsistent from one Linux GUI app to the other, and the trackpad/mouse behavior. I was able to connect a magic trackpad and Magic Mouse to the machine but the accelaration, gestures all felt very 'off'. It felt like going from driving an automatic car to

      • Mostly it is anything Apple stuff that consistently fails to work with anything else. Can't say I have had any mouse feel 'off', ever.
        • MacOS uses a proprietary acceleration algorithm for Apple trackpads and it is widely praised for how well it works. It simultaneously allows great precision with small movements without making larger and faster movements feel sluggish. It's been a while since I've used a Mac but I know exactly what the poster is talking about.

          With that said, macOS's acceleration algorithm for mice drove me absolutely crazy and I couldn't stand the fact that I wasn't able to change it to something more traditional. I d
  • by Anonymous Coward

    -Install Linux
    -Theme it to look like macOS or Windows after your first week.
    -Tell our tech-illiterate techbro gamer friends herp derp what version of Windows do you think this is? Oh it's acksually Linux! Har har har
    -Someone says oh wow you're a genius you are literally Linus Torvalds himself or probably just Steve Jobs since everyone knows that guy
    -You sit back and reflect what a smart genius you are and decide to roll your own distro
    -It's really just Ubuntu underneath. Which is really just Debian undernea

  • I am under en exclusive agreement with my employer that pretty much makes all software (and possibly more) I produce to be owned by my employer. Whether related to the business or not, the language is very vague could even cover gardening tools as we do produce hardware... This also shuts down any contribution to OSS, sadly.

    Does MS not have such agreements in place?

    • by ljw1004 ( 764174 )

      Does MS not have such agreements in place?

      I used to work at Microsoft. My employment contract specifically called out a load of personal pre-existing projects, plus ongoing and future ones, and stipulated that MS would have no ownership nor claim. I did ask for these callouts, but they were happy to go along.

  • A chinese dev who works for Microsoft who doesn't want to commercialize it or take donations and does this in his spare time releases an embedded OS based on Ubuntu and designed to resemble Windows?
    Did I miss anything?
    This doesn't sound like an embedded OS to me. It sounds like the worst of all worlds, with the most dubious of explanations... or possibly the setup for a joke. If you're smart enough to be doing embedded development, you should be smart enough to know this is not the right foundation for your
    • by ffkom ( 3519199 )

      It sounds like the worst of all worlds, with the most dubious of explanations... or possibly the setup for a joke.

      That is what I thought of systemd, too, and yet there were people willing to welcome this Trojan Horse from a Microsoft employee.

      • by ufgrat ( 6245202 )

        Strictly speaking, Poettering wrote systemd while working for Red Hat.

      • there just is no accounting for bad taste in extra drudgery for nothing.. You're right. Somebody might like it... no... Love it. It could happen. You're also right about <cough> systemd. I went down the Ubu path for several years, but with plenty of distro hopping, but the fonts seems to be a non issue in Ubu before the others figured that out. Fonts are actually a big deal if you don't have hires. Ubuntu was good at that... but I digress... so that's how they snuck it into the most popular distro
  • Could someone please tell me what the actual point of this distro is?

    It sounds like it's basically just a modified theme that mimics Windows, more or less.

    Am I missing something more substantive?

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