Tech on Gaveen Prabhasara

Project Asura

Tue, 02 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I started Asura Linux as a new Open Source project to experiment with different ways of building and running modern general-purpose Linux systems—and to share what we learn along the way.

In other words, I want to experiment with different ways of building and running Linux systems. My reasoning is simple—I want to build the Linux user experience I want to use.

While the “what I want to use” is always a moving target, there have been enough exciting recent developments in the Linux world that shed preconceived notions about how Linux distributions are put together.

Welcome, Again

Thu, 04 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Guess who’s back, back again? Sorry to dissapoint you. It’s just me.

I just posted an update on my side project, Asura Linux:

What happened

Despite my claims not to, due to my eagerness to have a functional desktop UX sooner, I ended up trying to build a usable distro. I could have gone the Atomic/Universal Blue approach, but that wasn’t exactly what I wanted. Since I wasn’t trying to adjust an existing flavor to taste or attempt to write my own full-featured Wayland compositor, I was trying to do too much too early. For example, building packages from source and generating custom ISOs was a lot of work—even without spending any real innovation tokens yet. This quickly became a bottleneck due to two personal reasons.

My vim story

Fri, 14 Feb 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Once you have used ’notepad.exe,’ you have used all text editors—they said. A text editor is a text editor is a text editor—they said. After the first few years of running Linux/Unix professionally, I had subconsciously almost agreed with this idea, even though I knew Vim—more accurately, I thought I knew Vim. But when other people who actually knew how to use Vim used it, Vim still looked like magic.

If you have worked in a command line at some point, I am sure you can appreciate the wisdom of learning how to use a text editing program properly. On Unix/Linux command lines, text is king. Therefore, learning how to manipulate text effectively goes a long way for your productivity. If you can open a file and edit its content, it enables you to configure your system.

I don't believe in Kubernetes

Sun, 01 Dec 2019 00:00:00 +0000

I was always a believer in Cloud Computing. Even when some “big executives” called it a fad, I still believed in the cloud—or its promise.

The belief itself is not an achievement. As with so many other people in tech, it spoke to me from a place of understanding. It was not so much an achievement to be had. We may not have called it a cloud, but when Amazon opened the gates of their Web Services to everyone, we saw good things we recognized. We realized it was an opportunity to build better.

The future of networking is software

Tue, 01 Oct 2019 00:00:00 +0000

I believe the future of networking in the data center is software-based. The water is wet, and thank you for coming to my TED talk.

While what I just mentioned may be obvious to say—given how pretty much everything has its future in software—you would be surprised at the state of the networking industry if you came to it as an outsider. The cloud has already happened, and computing has embraced it with open arms,… tentacles, and whatever else is available. Storage is slower to move but not too far behind. Cloud-scale storage technologies are becoming closer and closer to being commoditized¹. Network—in a way—is the last frontier in the data center that is not yet fully subscribing to cloud ethos.