Thanks Deby.
Devuan derivative. That is interesting.
I was going to do an experiment in Devuan with init systems.
Might try it in Star. Small simple distros are good for experiments.
Neville
Yes, Star is minimal and would be perfect for CLI system. The only review on Distrowatch with rating of 1 mentions that Star is barebone, but it is a big advantage for me because Star provides a solid base and full freedom of building very specific custom system with zero bloat. To take a full advantage of the minimalist system I use the netinstall ISO - star-3.1.0-spock_2021.03-netinst_amd64.iso
Cheers
@Deby
I would need to get at the source code.
I assume it is accessible
In Devuan I can get src thru the package system
Neville
Neville, my curiosity is spilling over. Is the concern with light/fast/minimal distros a hobbyist obsession or what? Sure, most of us abandoned Windows because of the intrusion, the bloat, and the inability to clean up after itself. But even the most minimal of available computers can handle just about any Linux distro and run beautifully compared to Windows. The descriptions of light and fast distros is beginning to sound like wine descriptions–many words, meaning not much.
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I’d say it’s a highly irrational and sometimes pretty extreme obsession, as can be seen in this thread.
Some things that have been said here are extremely far away from reality. For example, even the biggest and most filled dsitributions, like Ubuntu, are still super lightweight and small, compared to what a non-techy end-user needs.
Another example is the promotion of bare and empty distributions, as to avoid so-called “bloat” in Ubuntu, etc. This is utterly unrealistic and straight up punches 99.99% of users around the world in the face, just because they are not as interested in diving in too deep into the Linux topic, as we are. This is inacceptable behaviour nowadays, where we want more and more non-techy people to be able to access computer technology, without having them to take a Linux course of 500 hours upfront, instead of pushing them away even further, by creating the illusion that Ubuntu and other relatively bigger GNU/Linux distributions are supposedly too bloated. This is an absolutely incorrect statement, looking from an end-user perspective, the way a normal (non-techy) human looks at it.
Voilà. Precisely.
You hit the nail on its head!
Whenever I see that we have the year 2022 and at the same time I see people complaining about disk space, I just feel like I am watching a mental asylum.
It’s the year of the lord 2022. Nobody, literally nobody in their right mind, cares if your OS takes up 2.9 GB or 7.9 GB or even 21.9 GB of space on disk. Nobody cares, literally. The only time you need to care is if you deploy it onto a micro-controller, which only has a couple of MB of space. That’s it. Otherwise, it literally does not matter at all, from a human end-user perspective.
The average end-user just wants stuff to work. The average end-user does not care one drop in the ocean about the OS taking 3 or 30 GB on disk. It just has to work.
You can buy a high-quality slim 1TB hard drive for about 50 bucks. And this is the price for the expensive ones.
If you look at how much space your OS takes on that (by today’s standard pretty small) hard drive, visualized inside a piece of software, displaying hard drive usage, then you literally wouldn’t even notice the difference between 3 and 30 GB, because the difference is so small on that 1TB hard drive, that it literally does not matter. Does not matter, at all.
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You are basically right, except when it comes to wanting to run Linux on small underpowered, underresourced computers.
@Akito says it all. Most users want everything included.
There are 3 ways to get what you want, if you dont want everything
- start with a distro that has everything, and delete the apps you dont need
- start with a distro that is minimal ( eg a network install) and add things
- find a distro that has exactly what you want
I have done it all 3 ways. It does not make much difference to the end result. If you want very little it is probably less work to start with a minimal distro and add stuff.
There is also the question wanting a very specific combination of apps, that none of the distros do exactly. I am a bit like that. I am not at all,intrested in LibreOffice or music or videos, but I want all this weird maths stuff like R and Latex and Octave… But I still use some normal apps like browser and email. So I have to build it anyway
Cheers
Nevilledd9
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That is exactly it… except the larger it gets the less chance it has of just working.
Take Ububtu. The latest release apparently has some stability issues.
That is really serious for a newcomer.
It is happening because the problems of maintaining large numbers of interacting packages are getting insurmountable.
The solution might be
- flatpaks
- smaller distros
- better distro management
From an average users point of view it means choose a distro that works today… That is not easy, it keeps shifting.
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I tried a new distro, can’t remember the name, but I installed it from a 640K USB stick. It had a cheeky nose, with notes of marigold and compost. Medium body, with an oaky or walnuttty finish. The tannins were sufficient to pucker my nether regions, but in console mode it scripted well in Pascal. The installation on my Commodore 64 only took a week. [Sorry, I keep falling out of my chair.]
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One of my Acer laptops with Celeron n3350 has only 32 GB eMMC storage, which is soldered to the motherboard and not upgradable. This is when 3 GB or 29 GB occupied by OS makes a huge difference. The laptop also has 4 GB RAM soldered to the motherboard and not upgradable. Ubuntu 22.04 uses 1 GB RAM on boot and Star Linux uses 129 MB, which also makes a huge difference in performance and speed. Nobody knows whether it is 99% or 50% of users don’t care how much RAM and disk space the OS requires - each case is unique.
This - this is the $64,000 answer…
F–KING “architects” (I LOATHE most of these people with great passion) thinking we’re still in the 1980’s FFS - the bugbear of my last job, and probably will be the bug bear of my job going forward until retirement - penny pinching MORONS thinking - “Lets HARD partition 4 GB of disk for “/” and 4 GB for “/var” - and that should be plenty” (the same mindset that thought 640K was plenty)… FFS! And get this? It’s NOT EVEN REAL “disk” - it’s virtual storage on a FUCKING SAN (or a NAS - I vastly prefer NAS to SAN) that’s almost INFINITE in capacity - need more? Buy more populated disk chassis! Too easy!
It’s the THIRD decade of the 21st century! STORAGE IS DIRT CHEAP - system admins on six figure incomes getting woken up at 3:00 am is NOT CHEAP! MORON! FAIL!
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These things maybe look like laptops, but they are essentially just tiny mini computers, looking like laptops.
Yes, this is one of the niché cases, I was talking about. It’s valid to be aware of system resource capacities on such uncommon niché devices. Such device is only suited for the most basic operations, nothing more. It’s more of a quick backup to call for help when your actual computer fails.
I doubt it makes that much of a difference, even on that tiny mini computer disguised as a laptop. Have data on it?
Actually, it’s obvious, that 99% of users don’t care and they just want stuff to work. The only way to care about it is to psychologically Mr. Monk into the topic. That’s it. It’s irrational, by all means.
If, let’s say, 50% of users would care about disk size, then Windows would be entirely different. It becomes huger and huger over the years, yet only a tiny minority of users care about the size increase. In fact, this will be hard to accept for you, most people don’t even notice. They eventually just purchase bigger hard drives anyway, so it’s harder to notice the increased disk space usage.
Many of the mainstream users also have the exact opposite mindset:
They see that something is wrong with the software, usually related to performance, which leads them to think, they need better hardware. Then they get that new hardware, without questioning if the software just got “worse”, for example by using more space.
When talking about the average user, we have data on what the average user uses and you can always look at something like sale numbers, too. Each case is unique in the details, but when it comes to general stuff like hard drive usage, there is no doubt, that the vast majority of users doesn’t care if the OS takes 10.9 GB or 21.9 GB of space on the hard drive.
All that said, I don’t understand your defensive reactionism. You already proved before once more, that you are obsessed with the idea of running a “slim” operating system, no matter the hardware. So, why mention your niché hardware example?
You already had shown earlier, that you care about slimness, even on hardware which wouldn’t even notice one hair width of a difference between 10 GB or 20 GB disk space usage.
Finally, I do not want to engage in a deep discussion on this topic, as I deem it a futile interaction, but instead want everyone to know that you are absolutely obsessed with the idea of minimalising everything on your GNU/Linux distribution.
That’s, in itself, not a bad thing! Do your thing, do what you want to do. It’s great, that people do something.
For me, the fun stops when this obsession is presented to beginners, as if it were common practice, or a “smart move”, to similarly obsess about that topic. This drives beginners and newcomers away, for no reason at all. There is no reason at all for a beginner to watch out for slimness when using their first GNU/Linux distribution. For a beginner, it’s best to choose an easy distribution, which makes the path to using Linux as comfortable as possible. As even the most comfortable way will still be pretty difficult for newcomers, especially those coming from Windows.
To make it even more clear:
If someone used Windows for at least a year and got used to it, even the biggest Linux based operating systems, like for example Ubuntu and Endless OS, are still super tiny and minimal compared to Windows.
That’s what I mean, when I say “real world” and “average user”. You are in a different world. You are trapped in the loop of optimising the crap out of everything on your system. You, however, need to see that your way of perception is neither suited nor reasonable for a beginner/newcomer or even amateur non-expert.
P.S.:
You are the one who skipped downloading an entire software stack, just to save about 100 MB of disk space…
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I’ve tried a few of the big ones: Debian, Ubuntu, Zorin OS, Fedora, BUT I always come back to Opensuse.
What needs to be presented to beginners is stability, or trouble free running, or hitch free installs. In some cases ‘small’ is better at these things than ‘large’… just because large complex distros are more of a challenge to keep bug free… not always, but that is a trend.
@TrekJunky has a point about OpenSuse… it is fairly large, but the management is good. We dont hear about it falling into holes every week, like some other large distros lately.
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