simplyNUX was born out of Pierrick Le Brun's passion for sharing computer knowledge and Free Open Source Software.

This passion found its first expression some years back in an associative project where more than a thousand refurbished computers were sent from France to Benin, a small country in Western Africa, and were donated to numerous schools and training centers of the country.

However a computer is not much without software and it was only natural that involvement with the FOSS movement soon followed. Reading a biography of Richard M. Stallman and briefly corresponding with him led to the search for the perfect GNU-Linux distribution, the one that would be light enough to run on older computers while being modern enough to offer relevant applications. Since the computers in Africa were put in the hands of children and teachers, it also had to be easily manageable by non-tech users.

When it became obvious that this ideal distribution was not available at the time (2004/2005) he searched for ways to help it materialize, and in the process of scratching one's own itch, ended up initiating the original ZenLive project in May 2006 and developed it for a few years together with a friend while ZenLive subsequently became Zenwalk Live. This continued until SalixOS was created, together with like-minded enthusiasts in June 2009, in a renewed effort to design a lightweight, user and hacker friendly, stable, secure, modern GNU-Linux distribution developed in a Open Source cooperative fashion.

However, Pierrick's main activity in balloon twisting and decoration (where he is known as "Môssieur Ballon") has been expanding these last few years and do not enable him to contribute as much today as in the past.