“Interface hack” of Mac OS X Snow Leopard and Ubuntu desktop version. Presentation format: Promotional poster, promotional video, CD box, and code graffiti.
> x-devian.com/leopard/index.html

X-Devian is centered on the fictive operating system X-Devian, which is in fact the conceptual repackaging of Ubuntu’s latest desktop version (based on Debian GNU/Linux). However, while the work literally distributes an actual piece of free software, it does not simply distribute the source code and functionalities of X-Devian as much as the cultural vocabulary, discourses and ideas of free software, operating systems in particular, and free software in general. The “front end” of X-Devian looks like your standard commercial proprietary software—the entire design is an appropriation of Mac OSX Leopard—but behind the seductive surface the content of the system is involved with economics of a rather different kind, namely that of a collective creativity resistant to pre-packaged product thinking and open to all sorts of hacks, continuous speculation and processes of experimentation. As such, the work suggests that the development of aesthetics or even poetics of free software is inherent to an understanding and development of its unique form of creativity and resistance.