My name is Fred McKinney. I’ve always been fascinated by computers, and have been an internet user since 1994, when I bought my first computer. However, I’m ashamed to say that soon after buying it, I discovered some things online that I shouldn’t have, yet those things used to consume a lot of my spare time. In 2005, I got to where I had my fill of Windows and switched to Linux, having used quite a few different Linux distributions since that time, and the world of Linux has always fascinated me. But still, my porn problem remained.
In May of 2010, while listening to a sermon by Southern Baptist evangelist Jim Elliff on unregenerate church membership, the Holy Spirit convicted me and pierced my heart about what I’d been doing online when he quoted Hebrews 12:14 (“Follow peace with all men, and holiness, without which no man shall see the Lord” — from the KJV). I spent the next several days broken over how I had displeased the Lord all those years in spite of how I had everyone else and even myself convinced that I was a Christian. I begged and pleaded the Lord’s forgiveness, beside myself over my years of sin, and asked for the power to change. It wasn’t easy, of course. There were still quite a few times I would fall. In fact, I discovered that I was powerless to change in and of myself, and the Lord showed me that it was only HE that could clean up my act for me. An excellent article about this, which was also a great help to me, can be found here. As a result, I am happy to say that I have been porn-free since that time and have grown MUCH closer to God, and in fact, now have true assurance of salvation. PRAISE THE LORD! :-)
While taking a walk around my neighborhood sometime in late 2011 in St. Louis, where my wife and I were living at the time, the Lord gave me an idea for a Linux distribution with built-in web filtering. I said “Lord, I’ve never tackled anything like that before. Besides, I’m not a programmer.” The Lord said to me “Fred, I don’t call the qualified — I qualify the called.” I then looked for a good tutorial on setting up DansGuardian, eventually finding one, and had something that worked beautifully. DansGuardian, however, had a very serious limitation. Only a year or two later, sometime in 2012 or 2013, the HTTPS transport protocol began to be widely used on websites other than E-commerce pages — and DansGuardian could not filter sites using HTTPS (it could only filter sites using HTTP). Therefore, I was forced to shelve the idea of F3OS. However, in 2022, I noticed that Ubuntu Christian Edition had returned, with a completely different filtering system. Ubuntu, however, has made some decisions in recent years that have been very highly controversial. Therefore, I felt that a similar project was needed, but based on something else. Since Debian has over 64,000 software packages in their software repositories, probably the largest software repositories in the Linux world, I decided to go with that as the base for F3OS.
Another reason I created F3OS was because, as a Christian, I am deeply burdened over how pornography is affecting our country. Pornography, especially online, is so prevalent anymore that a significant number of young children have seen it, either discovering it by accident or by someone else showing it to them. It has also been proven that pornography warps one’s mind, by 1) re-wiring their brains similar to the way drug abusers have warped their minds, and 2) changing men’s attitudes of how women are to be treated, and not for the better. Pornography has been proven to be responsible for marital dissatisfaction, extra-marital affairs, spousal abuse, divorce, rape, sex trafficking, and child sexual abuse. Even worse, it’s fairly common for pornography users to unknowingly view pornography in which the performers are underage, which is illegal in most parts of the world. There are no winners where pornography is involved. It’s a situation where everyone loses — and F3OS is designed to combat the destructive effects of pornography by, as much as possible, eliminating the risk of anyone in your family running across it when F3OS is installed on your computer.
I also wanted the system to be lightweight, making it suitable for older computers as well as new ones. My personal desktop of choice for the last few years has been Xfce (pronounced as four individual letters), which has gained a bit of a following in the Linux community in recent years and in fact, in early 2023 was voted as the #1 Linux desktop environment. While I’ll readily admit that it’s not as lightweight as some others, it strikes a very nice balance among being lightweight, easy to use, and highly configurable. I do also have plans to create other editions of F3OS that use other desktop environments, so please check back often to see what’s new.
Now I can hear some of you thinking that I’m re-inventing the wheel, since there is also Ubuntu Christian Edition. To be sure, UCE does fulfill a need in the Linux community for Christians, and in fact, I thank God that it’s out there. Yet, there are some issues I have with it. The biggest problem I have with it is the Snap packaging system, which has turned out to be littered with problems, all of which have been documented here. Because of all of its problems, I have disabled the ability to install Snap packages by default in F3OS. Second, in 2012, Ubuntu introduced a feature that took users’ search results and sent them to Amazon. Many in the free software world consider this to be an example of spyware, and rightfully so. Ubuntu eventually wised up and discontinued this so-called feature in 2020 — but by then, the damage had already been done to Ubuntu’s reputation, never mind how Ubuntu revolutionized Linux when it was first introduced in 2004. Third, Ubuntu Christian Edition is only available with the GNOME desktop environment. In 2011, GNOME radically changed the direction of their desktop environment, which has changed it into a desktop environment that you either like or you hate (I’ll be honest here — I’m among the latter). Moreover, GNOME now uses more memory than any other desktop environment, with the possible exception of Cinnamon, according to some sources I have perused online. Thus, I felt that a new filtered Linux distribution was needed — one that’s lighter on system resources and one that goes to great length to avoid technological controversy. Currently, at the time I’m typing this (December 2023), F3OS only comes with the Xfce desktop environment, but I do plan to introduce other editions of F3OS with other desktops, as I do plan to offer a bit of choice in that department.