There are lots of reasons to build a system with Linux.  We could have chosen any of the unixes such as OpenBSD, Mac OS X or GNU/Linux.  We could also have chosen Windows from Microsoft.  But for lots of reasons, we chose GNU/Linux.

For one thing, with many GNU utilities that build nicely on top of the Linux kernel, we can choose which pieces we need and which we don’t.  For example we don’t need a file manager since Synchromesh takes care of that for us.  We also don’t need a desktop environment since Synchromesh will be the only application the user is running.  The fewer pieces we have in the system, the more stable and consistent an environment it is for the user.

The Unix systems from Sun, SGI and Mac (Solaris, Irix and OS X) each have their own kernel and their own versions of the various utilities.  And they are generally built to be operated in a graphical environment with a specific look-and-feel.  Microsoft’s Windows is similar in this regard, but they have a very different underlying system.  We want to be able to tailor our underlying system to our needs.  And Synchromesh should have its own look-and-feel no matter what’s underneath.

Since there are so many ways to assemble a GNU/Linux system, everyone does it a bit differently.  So you’ll find linux distributions called Debian, Gentoo, Red Hat, etc.  These “distro’s” also have different offshoots.  One that’s quite popular right now is Ubuntu which is a Debian-based system from Canonical, LTD.

The distribution we’ve chosen is Arch Linux and it’s a system that you can easily set up on a variety hardware.  But the reason we chose Arch their “keep it simple” philosophy in that it installs only the base GNU/Linux system and you have to install everything else manually.  After the base install you won’t even have a working mouse.  We’ve installed Arch and then added the X windowing system and a few other libraries.  And the Synchromesh application of course.

So basically we’ve chosen to build Synchromesh on a simple, stable platform that’s designed to do only one thing: give you the best possible experience.