Major Changes

Over the past few months you may have noticed how long it took for me to release 1.0 as opposed to .5. I originally intended to have 1.0 done by December/January or at the very latest early March, but instead it got delayed all the way until early May. The reason for this is simple: the project was becoming too much of a grind for me that I didn't want to work on it. I would rather use the computer I have that runs Spark for daily things and not simply to develop Spark. The driving force behind Spark from Day 1 was to develop my perfect Linux operating system, and I had drifted away from that too much in the past few months. From now on you can expect some big changes coming to the project that I think will provide a better experience.

1. From now on we will be based off the latest Linux Mint version as opposed to Ubuntu LTS. What I am running now is Linux Mint 15 Cinnamon and I really like it. I like how usuable it is out of the box and especially the way it handles Flash videos, so from now on Spark will be based off of Linux Mint

2. What Spark will be from now on is a direct copy of my operating system I use on a daily basis. This goes hand in hand with #3. I don't tend to install many
   applications, so Spark won't ship with that many applications.

3. I kind of touched on this in #2, but we will be shipping with a considerably less amount of applications than in the past. This goes back to making it MY ideal operating system. 1.0 was full of a lot of things that I didn't need nor want and I threw them in there just to make other people happy. This also helps reduce the size of the .iso. It was at 1.7 GB for 1.0, which is incredibly disproportionate to the amount of applications that were included. A smaller .iso can lead to a faster download and a faster operating system as a whole. If people want it, I could include something like a script to install all the packages that were in 1.0.

The reason behind all these changes is to make this more fun for me, which I hope can lead to a better product for you. Thank you for all the support you have given me, as 42 downloads in under a year is more than I could have imagined. I hope you can continue to support me further during this period of change.