Hi! Welcome to Sovereign Computing. It’s better here. Start9 is an open-source software company that leads and maintains the fully free and open-source personal server operating system, StartOS. We generate revenue by selling servers preinstalled with StartOS. The Start9 team packages, maintains, and supports a small group of core services. We are working hard to nurture a development community interested in packaging various open-source software projects to run on StartOS. Anyone can package for StartOS if they are willing to acquire the necessary know-how.
StartOS is a Linux distribution based on Debian, but it is configured in a specific way to be plug-and-play for end users. It has highly opinionated and resilient configurations, which means it is easy to set up and easy to use. The vast majority of tasks are handled for you, making it hard to break. The trade-off is that it lacks the flexibility you would have if you ran the same software from scratch on Debian, or some other general purpose Linux distro. StartOS is not a hacker’s Linux distribution.
Regarding the question, “Can I run X, Y, or Z on StartOS?” the answer is that just about anything that can run on Linux can be packaged to run on StartOS. Anyone can package for StartOS. You could even maintain your own software registry that others could use to increase software availability on their StartOS server. See this blog post for more information on our Marketplace strategy.