So I was researching different distros, and I stumbled upon one called Poseidon (based on Ubuntu) which was intended primarily for scientific modeling. However, it hasn’t been active since 2018; also, after Poseidon 4, they shifted to focus primarily on oceanography.

So my question is, firstly, is there an active distro that has a similar intended purpose, and comes with all the relevant software? Barring that, is it easy enough to replicate just by downloading the relevant packages?

If the answer to both is no, my question is, how could one best go about resurrecting it as a fork? Would it be better to start from either Poseidon 9 (the latest) or Poseidon 4 (before they shifted direction), and then try to update all the core components? Or to start with the latest Ubuntu (or better yet Debian), and then simply install all the software needed to make it functionally identical to Poseidon?

Bonus question: if you start with an OS, and gradually replace one component at a time until all components have been replaced, is it still the same OS? (Theseus was a son of Poseidon, but unfortunately the name is already taken)

  • artyom@piefed.socialEnglish
    3·
    5 hours ago

    There’s not much info about it that I can find. Do you have more info about what was specific about it? Wikipedia says:

    Poseidon Linux was aimed at the international scientific community, it came with a range of applications for fields such as GIS, 3D visualization, and statistics.

    So it sounds like it just came with some apps pre-packaged (which is what most Linux distros do). If that’s the case then yes, you absolutely can. How easy it is depends on what the specific apps are and their installation methods.