I appreciate the encouragement! The work is being done in 3 stages, compiling SP itself, packaging via the appimage tools and then a limited testing distribution. For testing, with Sam’s approval, I’d like to see it perhaps tested by forum users on as many distros as possible before a wider release to check for compatibility, bugs, tweaking, etc.
Anyway, that’s the plan. I suspect the most time-consuming part will be to get a suitable compiling environment set up. Sonic Pi is a bit of beast to compile with all it’s dependencies and versioning requirements. My current work PC runs Lubuntu 19.04 with their new LXQt desktop (which is a really nice release btw) but is not setup for development. I decided instead to re-purpose an older PC I have with an install of Ubuntu 18.04 (more mainstream) for this project. That’s where I am now.
AND, a big THANK YOU! to Robin Newman as I’m using his post on compiling for Raspberry Pi as a help guide to get this project started: Building SP3.2dev from source on a Pi4
Keep you posted. Cheers.