If you'd like to be an alpha/beta/release tester of this system, hit me up via email please. I'll start with an initial closed alpha release here in a month or so, if there's interest.
Now for the donation drive: I have plenty of time and a stable situation to work on this system, but the one drawback is I have little funds--and unfortunately my workstation is getting pretty long in the tooth. (AMD FX. I'm getting Left Behind here.) The main thing holding me back is compile speed, especially doing work on Chromium and WebKit.
So I'm hoping to bump into an "angel investor" who either has some old Xeon (Broadwell or newer?) hardware laying around they would donate, something with lots of cores and memory, or who can make a cash donation for me to buy the gear I'm looking at on Ebay. $400-500 is enough for a nice 5x upgrade. (Amazing how cheap this stuff is.) A better video card would be nice too, if you're feeling generous. Mine is a GTX570. I'd love to have a GTX7xx or newer, or equivalent AMD. That's more of a want than a need however.
If anyone out there is in a position where they can help this project in some way, email me please! Thank you.
Accessibility should be something that the system fully supports. There is speech synthesis and other useful bits installed so far. Maybe someone would like to work on this project. Email me if interested.
So, I'm not going to test your distro or switch from my Gentoo. I like Gentoo a lot, most of all because it's so very-very easy to patch any official package. Just put the patch in /etc/portage/patches/<package> and that's it. It gets automatically applied on the next install.
I'm using a Phenom II x6 1100 on a Gigabyte 880G. Firefox compiles in about 3-4 hours I think, not really sure. I do all Gentoo updates over night and it's usually ready in the morning. I can't say about Chromium or webkit - never used them - but 12h seems waaay too long.
If you like Gentoo, more power to you. It's not for me.
This isn't just another run of the mill distro. It's like nothing else that's out there.
Chromium and WebKit are ginormous, and more importantly they are compiled with the latest C++ standards, which are slow as hell to compile. Nothing wrong with my system, it just takes forever to compile this giant bloated crap.
I guess there are alternative "forks" like QtWebEngine that just try to bring in only the blink engine part.