AUSTIN (August 31, 2021) — Adélie is pushing ahead to accelerate platform development and testing in the face of unanticipated challenges. Our top priority remains responsibly releasing the Adélie Linux platform version 1.0 to the public. It has been 19 months since our first release candidate, and we’d like to share another update before it’s been a year since the last. We’re working hard to get a third release candidate into your hands.

Communication is quintessential to trust, and trust is perhaps the most desirable property of a Linux distribution. Trust that it will work reliably, securely, and to specification. Trust also implies a certain type of self-sustaining expectation that it will continue in perpetuity.

Adélie has experienced a number of recent difficulties, most notably a lack of developer and hardware availability. We had been without access to POWER hardware for several months and could not get an estimate for when we’d have access again. Security updates needed to be published. As a POWER-focused distribution, this was unacceptable.

Therefore we purchased an IBM S822L POWER8 server. Clocking in at 20 cores and 160 threads with 256GB main memory and solid state disks, this machine will be sufficient for our POWER-related building and testing needs. It will soon live in our Texas data center.

This solves one important issue. But packages don’t bump, build, or test themselves. While there’s a team behind the scenes to make this happen, we can’t do all of this work alone. We’re looking to expand our user and developer community.

Earlier this spring, as we were preparing for a leadership change, the importance of online outreach became clear. Much of Adélie’s community exposure came as a natural byproduct of our developers’ individual open-source work and interaction.

However, without a coherent public relations strategy our visibility was inextricably tied to and fluctuated with each person’s level of engagement. In turn, personal factors like health and employment had disproportionate influence on the public’s perception of Adélie.

In addition to our 2021 Status Update, we are prioritizing the writing and refinement of our technical literature for both contributors and users to simplify the onboarding process and reduce developer burden.

Adélie wants to emPOWER you, and the only way we can do this is by getting software into your hands. We’re continuing to reduce our dependence on third-party services in order to mitigate these delays, and we are grateful for your continued support and interest.