# Cutefish Calamares > Calamares is a distribution-independent system installer, with an advanced partitioning > feature for both manual and automated partitioning operations. Calamares is designed to > be customizable by distribution maintainers without need for cumbersome patching, > thanks to third party branding and external modules support. ## Target Audience Calamares is a Linux installer; users who install Linux on a computer will hopefully use it just **once**, to install their Linux distribution. Calamares is not a "ready to use" application: distributions apply a huge amount of customisation and configuration to Calamares, and the target audience for this repository is those distributions, and the people who make those Linux distro's. Calamares has some [generic user documentation](https://calamares.io/docs/users-guide/) for end-users, but most of what we have is for distro developers. ## Getting Calamares Clone Calamares from GitHub. The default branch is called *calamares*. ``` git clone https://github.com/calamares/calamares.git ``` Calamares is a KDE-Frameworks and Qt-based, C++17, CMake-built application. The dependencies are explained in [CONTRIBUTING.md](CONTRIBUTING.md). ## Contributing to Calamares Calamares welcomes PRs. New issues are welcome, too. There are both the Calamares **core** repository (this one), and an **extensions** repository ([Calamares extensions](https://github.com/calamares/calamares-extensions)). Contributions to code, modules, documentation, the wiki and the website are all welcome. There is more information in the [CONTRIBUTING.md](CONTRIBUTING.md) file. ## Join the Conversation GitHub Issues are **one** place for discussing Calamares if there are concrete problems or a new feature to discuss. Regular Calamares development chit-chat happens in a [Matrix](https://matrix.org/) room, `#calamares:kde.org`. The conversation is bridged with IRC on [Libera.Chat](https://libera.chat/). Responsiveness is best during the day in Europe, but feel free to idle. If you use IRC, **DO NOT** ask-and-leave. Keep that chat window open because it can easily take a few hours for someone to notice a message. Matrix is persistent, and we'll see your message eventually. * [](https://webchat.kde.org/#/room/%23calamares:kde.org) * [](https://kiwiirc.com/client/irc.libera.chat/#calamares)