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My pretty minimal installation of Xubuntu, running with dwm (no desktop or related crap) is beginning to feel like a lead weight. It is plenty fast on the old i5 ThinkPad (I've been scaling down - a couple of years I only used i7's), and I have few complaints, really. But I feel like I am drowning.
It is running like 200 processes, without me doing anything taxing right now. I have no clue what 95% of these are. Some are downright scary sounding: idle_inject, stub_flushwq, migration... kworker processes are running even though I don't think I've installed anything kde. Every time I look at top I get a little sick.
I know I am not supposed to worry about these things. And I think the current thinking is that if you have spare capacity, it should be used by something like prefetching, indexing, buffering and whatnot, instead of sitting idle, but it bugs me. I miss the days of putting in a floppy with a specific application and hitting the power switch.
I was never a Linux guru, but for a while I could figure things out, when needed. Then, the Web always had the answers to any questions. After a while the web had 10 conflicting answers to each question, because some are 20 years old, and some are plain wrong but for some reason people feel the need to repeat what they read elsewhere. And now I often can't even find the answers that make sense, and things I knew are way out of date. Not in a good way either -- new stuff is just layers of stupid stuff on top of old stuff, with a variety of configuration files that counteract each other or are ignored.
For a while I thought about a different distro - maybe Arch. But I stop myself because it's yet another rabbithole. Lately I've been looking at FreeBSD. I even loaded it up on qemu, and yeah, top reports 21 processes, most of them getty's. That's more like it.
Maybe I am getting old, or maybe Covid had wrecked my brain, but I perceive a lot of things as noise. There is so much useless noise all around, things I have to respond to, memorize, research, fix, script. I want simplicity.
I see a similarity with Gemini. Some people say you can just use a minimal subset of HTML to the same effect, but it's really not the same -- you still have the giant browser and all of its UX quirks. It's just not the same. Running an Apple ][ simulator on Linux is just not the same experience as the real thing.
What I want is so little. I just don't want it attached to a horrible giant thing behind the curtain, one that I am supposed to ignore.
2023-10-02 · 6 months ago · 👍 aRubes · 🤔 1
🍩 wholesomedonut · Oct 03 at 05:25:
Here's a think for you.
Try Alpine Linux.
You can get a very simple OS set up, and if you go with the smallest you're talking less than 1GB even with all the bells and whistles.
It does not come with a DE. You can choose to put one on if you want.
You can choose to build it up yourself, and the basic processes and RC init and whatnot that come with the OS are so easy that even my dumb brain can wrap around it at a more proficient level.
Give that one a try!
😎 flipperzero · Oct 03 at 06:09:
You can always try something systemd-less if you're used to debian-based distros, plus I'd caution away from ubuntu-based these days. There's MX Linux, which is itself based off Antix. There's also Devuan, all of which use init-based daemon services. I also believe there's better more worthwhile as well as minimal debian-based like puppy linux which could serve you better for what you're looking for, eliminating the bulk of the bloat you're running into effectively cutting the fat off your system processing usage. I hope this provides a little bit of insight, can't wait to hear more on this topic. Cheers.
🚀 stack [OP] · Oct 03 at 16:40:
I actually installed FreeBSD in qemu, and it was pretty painless (dealing with qemu took more effort than FreeBSD!). From knowing next to nothing about it to a minimal working system with X and dwm in a couple of hours -- a couple of hours well spent. I think I can do it in 10 minutes on real hardware...
It felt pretty good even as a VM, and with a tiny footprint. I spent a couple of hours in the bathtub reading about ZFS, which seems pretty ****ing incredible.
I got used to the linux hodgepodge, but having a unified OS seems like a really good idea. I am almost ready to get my T470 BSD'd (it looks like it's pretty compatible).
It is unfortunate that BSDs have not gotten more recognition and users - a BSD developer pointed out that there is Linux, and there are some rounding errors as the user base goes...
I believe that all of the processes you mentioned are processes internal to the Linux kernel, so as long as you are running some recent version of the kernel, you will be running those processes. kworker included.
🦀 jeang3nie · Oct 03 at 22:41:
The problem with taking something like Xubuntu and trying to slim it down is that you have to do a lot of research on what to uninstall and what is best left in place. If your goal is minimalism, you are almost always better off working from the other direction and taking a truly minimal install, and then installing only what you will use.
FreeBSD does fit that bill quite nicely. I'm definitely not going to be telling you not to use it. I use it myself. Just make sure you know what you're getting in for and you'll be fine.
I use i3 instead of DWM, but I suspect we have similar taste even so. I like to know what's running on my system, and to know that nothing else that I don't know about is going on.
🚀 stack [OP] · Oct 04 at 00:06:
@marissa: having thought about this one, I think you may be wrong: Linux is not a microkernel and the kernel really should not be starting processes in userland. I think these are low-level GUI-related things, and it bothers me quite a bit. Much like the fact that there are a bunch of Firefox processes even when I close all my Firefox (Librewolf, actually, but same difference) windows. There is just a bunch of noisy crap running all over.
🚀 stack [OP] · Oct 04 at 00:11:
@jeang3nie: you know, I am actually sold on FreeBSD. I am backing up stuff, and as soon as I can free my Samsung 980 Pro M2 drive I am going to stick it into my ThinkPad T470, and go full FreeBSD. I hardly use anything other than LaGrange and dev tools, so I am probably OK...
🍄 Ruby_Witch · Oct 04 at 05:23:
To be honest, it really sounds like Arch is the correct solution for your situation. If you're worried about what every single running process does, then using a distro that starts with basically only the kernel and building up from there may give you the best perspective over what every running process is.
I normally use the archinstall script because it streamlines things a lot and makes Arch installation completely painless, but you may not want to in your case.
Also, if you feel like the Gemini browser UI is too much for you sometimes, why don't you use a TTY Gemini browser instead? There are plenty of them out there...
Maybe https://vanilla-dpup.github.io/ would be good for you. It has few running processes and I optimized it for low CPU+RAM consumption. Unlike a minimal Debian/Alpine/Arch system you need to install and configure yourself, it's a pretty complete package.
🐉 gyaradong · Oct 05 at 10:30:
My understanding is that a lot of the complexity in today's linux comes from cgroups. It's not bad or bloated, but the threshold for understanding is high.
🦀 jeang3nie · Oct 05 at 15:06:
@dimkr I didn't realize you had an association with Puppy Linux. I learned how to use and abuse the shell on Puppy. Managed the first CE release way back in 2006 and was behind the Grafpup distro.
@jeang3nie Yes, I do, I'm a self-appointed "maintainer" of https://github.com/puppylinux-woof-CE/woof-CE, because nobody else seems to be interested in keeping Puppy alive by fixing years old bugs and migrating away from dead stuff like GTK+ 2, X.Org and aufs. I do some new development in https://github.com/vanilla-dpup/woof-CE/tree/vanilladpup-11.0.x and maintain dpup, which is the only viable path forward IMO.
You might like my story.
Ten years ago, frustrated by experiences like [1], and frustrated by my attempts to slice complexity off Ubuntu, I decided most software was parasitical [2].
After some time investigating Forth and OpenBSD and so on, I went off to build a new computing stack from scratch, intended above all to be easy to build, easy to run and easy to understand: Mu
I worked on this for 5+ years, paying particular attention to the number of languages I was using [reason]. For example, I think it's an abomination that Python requires gcc, and gcc requires Python.
I eventually gave up on this mostly because of the burden of building an OS and supporting hardware. I was kinda aware of the device driver problem going in, but I'd assumed I could build something lowest-common-denominator if I didn't care about performance at all. This assumption turned out to be optimistic. For example, I was reading and writing 1 byte at a time from disk and still only supporting 40% or so of hard disks. And there's also the problem of debugging on real hardware. I thought for a while that I was done after implementing something on Qemu, but this too was wildly optimistic.
These days I've become a little less dogmatic about a few things, and discovered a language I hadn't quite paid enough attention to back when I was researching Forth: Lua. My current setup feels like a good sweet spot between minimalism and capability.
— https://akkartik.name/freewheeling
🍄 Ruby_Witch · Feb 02 at 09:58:
@akkartik Just a random question that represents my own viewpoint: Why try to make your OS that you were writing have wide compatibility? I understand that it can be nice for other people to be able to enjoy and appreciate your work, but if it were me, I'd be focused purely on writing a system that was compatible with my own hardware.
Obviously, this kind of approach would limit adoption and outside contributions to a software ecosystem, but...so what? I guess what I'm saying is that everyone should have their own personal TempleOS if they're capable of doing such a thing. :)
Very interesting question. Probably just boils down to my own motivations. I never chased mass adoption but I also wasn't comfortable entirely foreclosing on the possibility. On the other hand, the hardware I built for was indeed precisely the hardware I had. So it didn't feel like the two were in tension.