I absolutely love the overall objectives here!
Unfortunately I can't see a reason to use this over Alpine Linux, which is also quite simple and minimal and has been around for a while and works fantastically well.
Kiss – A Linux distribution with a focus on “less is more”
171–180 of 229 posts
Re: Kiss – A Linux distribution with a focus on “less is more”
#172I love this! The only part I find questionable is the use of tools written in shell. Shell is a very difficult language to understand and use correctly. To the credit of the author, he is aware of this and the code is linted using shellcheck. Still, I wonder if it wouldn't have been a better idea to write the utilities using Python or Lua or even (gasp) C! (Or Rust, or Go or ... Just pick one that isn't completely es…
shell is the only portable language. It works on all Linuces, BSDs, and even on WSL. Anyone with a tiny bit of sysadmin experience knows sh. Python is far too much overhead for something as simple as firing shell (!!) commands and dumping new files in a tar archive. And also, shell is extensible in the most simple way: you just write a program name, and boom, it runs. Shell is simple, stable (remember the debacle of…
> The only remark I have regarding code quality is that the word splitting warning is disabled for the entirety of kiss: I would have disabled it on a per-occurence basis.
There are 8 occurrences of word splitting in the source, each and every one is intentional.
I also enable all lint errors when working on the package manager itself (to catch any unintentional word splitting which may slip through my fingers).
The ideal goal is to reduce the word splitting count to zero though! :)
(I'll go ahead and make the change you're suggesting until I do remove all word splitting).
Re: Kiss – A Linux distribution with a focus on “less is more”
#173Keep making the biggest problem of Linux bigger, please... Yeah, this problem is "fragmentation", and it is not solved with "simplicity".
This isn't going to cause any meaningful fragmentation because, simply looking at its goals and features, very few people will find it usable at all, and those who do will be an extremely small set of highly technical users.
Re: Kiss – A Linux distribution with a focus on “less is more”
#174Isn't there a distro that's already based on the KISS principle? (Arch Linux) Is there something that the Kiss distro achieves that Arch doesn't?
Arch unfortunately has gotten more and more complicated over the years. Their decision to adopt systemd was really disappointing, imo.
Of the major distros I feel Arch has one of the best KISS implementations of systemd. For my use cases and system admin style, I'm really glad they made that decision.
Re: Kiss – A Linux distribution with a focus on “less is more”
#175In which world replacing removing Wayland in favour of X is considered KISS? We seem to have very different understanding of KISS with those folks.
The big problem with Wayland is that it isn't actually an obvious improvement over X. X is awful and long in the tooth and well overdue for replacement, but the best I can say about Wayland is that it is just differently awful. It's been in development for what, over a decade now? And it still would be missing a lot of basic functionality if it weren't for people like Drew Devault stepping up and creating new standard protocols to cover for it, as well as a library to make dealing with all these protocols less of a nightmare.
Re: Kiss – A Linux distribution with a focus on “less is more”
#176Keep making the biggest problem of Linux bigger, please... Yeah, this problem is "fragmentation", and it is not solved with "simplicity".
This "problem" you talk about is not a problem in my view but rather a essential freedom in free software. People's computers are like their cars we like to customize and mod them because it's cool and remember, you own it so it gives a sense of pride.
My problem with the proprietary software is that they compete by creating incompatible standards for the same thing to fight each other while I'm suffering implementing them or using them and having to jumping from one to the other.
There was a glimmer of hope at the start when the focus was on just getting the full free software stack working. But then it went back to making near-exact copies of the most trivial parts of it.
Why nobody ever copies the hard parts?
Re: Kiss – A Linux distribution with a focus on “less is more”
#177A simple solution is often worthless if the underlying problem is complex. It's nice this project foregoes on complex things like pam, systemd, gettext, etc. But these things are often created to solve problems. Problems this 'simple' solution needs to account for as well (if not now, in the near future when use X needs feature Y). And then new functionality is introduced in the solution making it complex again (and often non-standard).
Re: Kiss – A Linux distribution with a focus on “less is more”
#178Kudos for not using any pointless HTML tags on the website. I like how you skip head and body. :)
Yeah, I spent a lot of time ensuring the website would load quickly and I do away with a lot of "optional" cruft.
There's no Javascript full stop, no stylesheets (all CSS is embedded in each page) and every page load is a single web request (with the exception of the screenshots page).
Even the SVG logo is embedded in the pages!
Writing it this way also causes each page to be self contained, a download of the HTML page includes all of the CSS, logo and information so it can easily be saved and viewed locally. :)
Re: Kiss – A Linux distribution with a focus on “less is more”
#179In which world replacing removing Wayland in favour of X is considered KISS? We seem to have very different understanding of KISS with those folks.
In what aspect Wayland makes more KISS?
You cannot completely remove X anyway, so using Wayland inevitably introduces much compatibility headache. Just sticking with X is the simples and KISS way to get GUI for now.
Re: Kiss – A Linux distribution with a focus on “less is more”
#180A simple solution is often worthless if the underlying problem is complex. It's nice this project foregoes on complex things like pam, systemd, gettext, etc. But these things are often created to solve problems. Problems this 'simple' solution needs to account for as well (if not now, in the near future when use X needs feature Y). And then new functionality is introduced in the solution making it complex again (and…
Nothing stops a user from packaging and installing these things in KISS, they just aren't included by default.
I envision KISS as a minimal base in which you extend to suit your needs and not something you need to cut to size.
As I state in the Philosophy; "it's easier to add things to a system than it is to remove them".
A user has actually gone ahead and done this! \[1\] They run KISS with systemd, pam, dbus, pulseaudio, glibc, chrome etc etc.