When i first joined AxOS, I wasn’t sure what to expect. As someone new to open source collaboration I knew that it was pretty difficult for me to pick up on stuff but I still wanted to contribute to the project. While working with projects like AxOS, I realised the true challenges of building an operating system. And it had taught me a lot of lessons along the way as well. In this blog, I want to share the reason I joined AxOS.
I switched from Windows to Linux during late 2024. It was pretty new to me but I liked the customisability and freedom that Linux provided. Well then I started to experiment with Linux commands, Linux tools etc. And then I thought of making my own kernel in rust. Well I found a really useful blog on the internet and I followed it and I managed to create a somewhat decent kernel. It could handle kernel panics, show texts, capture user input etc. And then one day, I thought of making my own Linux distribution (dumb me tried that after a month of using Linux for the first time). Well guess what? I bricked my system. So, I was disappointed but from that day on, I wanted to learn more and more about Linux and its underlying architecture but I was busy with my other projects.
I found out about the AxOS project on a discord server where Ardox posted about it and was looking for contributions or ideas for AxOS. The post intrigued me because I have never seen an indie developer (solo developer) making a Linux distribution, a wrapper for pacman, a desktop enviornment, etc. I was facinated by the fact that he has been maintaining this project for over 4 years. And I wanted to contribute in some way but I was not that good with low level programming but since I have already finished my recent project, I decided to give it a go and learn about linux which I wanted to do for a very long time.
Even though I was bad at low level programming, I felt motivated to contribute to AxOS so that I can learn more about linux and also because I didnt have any more ideas for new projects and I was getting bored. And I am glad that I did that because I learnt a lot while contributing to AxOS.