💾 Archived View for bbs.geminispace.org › u › stack › 5875 captured on 2024-05-26 at 16:11:48. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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@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.
2023-10-04 · 8 months ago
🚀 stack [OP] · 2023-10-04 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 · 2023-10-04 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...
😈 dimkr · 2023-10-04 at 06:20:
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 · 2023-10-05 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 · 2023-10-05 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.
😈 dimkr · 2023-10-06 at 14:03:
@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.
Getting Sick of Linux — 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,...