WTF does libre mean in this context? Or are we talking about Mexican wrestlers again?
The term Libre is used by many in the FOSS community instead of "free", so they won't have to keep explaining the diference between "free as in speech" (free to use and modify) and "free as in beer" (cost).
They're downstream from Ubuntu instead of Debian because Ubuntu is more end user-friendly than Debian. I would imagine that could change depending on how Ubuntu changes over the next few releases.
I'll be downloading Toutatis today. Along with my main (gaming) rig (which runs Linux Mint), I maintain a "free box", which contains nothing but 100% Free (tm) software, mostly as an experiment to gauge the current status of how useful a box with only free software is (or isn't). I have to say, it's become a lot easier than it was in the old days, where almost nothing worked after you stripped out the nonfree bits. Modems and network cards were notoriously hard to get working. Brigantia, the prevous release of Trisquel, supports every peice of hardware on the box except the ethernet port (the box has an nVidia nForce-based motherboard), but the wireless worked, so I didn't really try. Interestingly, I've been increasingly using the free box over my gaming rig for day-to-day use, and may end up scrapping the gaming rig as I don't game as much these days.
Some things that are challenging on a free box:
- Anything that requires heavy graphical use, e.g., no serious games. The free box has an nVidia card, running X using nouveau.
- Flash-based stuff is iffy. I have flash video supported, but no apps (and in my case at least, little of value was lost).
- Any java programs that require Sun's implementation of java.
- The fonts are hard to look at. Does anyone konw here I can get some good libre fonts?
- Using proprietary audio/video formats. In many cases playback works, ostensibly becuase in many countries there are no software patents (yet). Since I''m in the USA and try to keep the Free box free, I stick to free formats (fortunately I ripped most of my music collection to FLAC a long time ago. For the free box, I wrote a script to go thorugh my collection and convert any remaining mp3's to Ogg).
As you can see, most of the issues revolve around proprietary languages, hardware, fonts, etc.
Congrats to the folks who put Trisquel together for getting Toutatis out. I can't wait to try it!