ITT: People on _hacker news_ complaining about someone building their own linux distro... Go install windows and be happy in your mono culture world, but don't shit on other peoples creativity and effort.
HN heavily skews MacOS though.
Kiss – A Linux distribution with a focus on “less is more”
181–190 of 229 posts
Re: Kiss – A Linux distribution with a focus on “less is more”
#182A 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, pulse…
The Philosophy is "it's easier to do things that were already done before".
So the project is an arbitrary reduction of scope and then writing the implementation just for that scope.
Re: Kiss – A Linux distribution with a focus on “less is more”
#183In 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 standar…
I'm not sure which point you're trying to make. Of course every new technology needs someone to do the work. That doesn't take away from the technology's merit. If Drew is now doing all this work, then great! Now is the best time ever to be adopting Wayland.
(Speaking as someone who just switched to Sway two weeks ago.)
Re: Kiss – A Linux distribution with a focus on “less is more”
#184Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, that's not the point of FOSS. Having a right doesn't mean that you have to exercise it for the sake of it. When I use/advocate Linux and other FOSS apps it's because ultimately I'll be able to fix any issue that they have, or that nobody will be able to take it the software away from me. But I'm not creating patches for every piece of software I use. We developers should grow past that point, the reason why so ma…
Really, there are de-facto standards. If you are a big corporate enterprise, like a bank, the standard is going to be RHEL. If you're conservative organization but don't want to pay for licenses or support, you're probably going to go with a RHEL clone like CentOS, or worse, Oracle Linux. If you're a trendy Web 2.1 startup you'll probably go with Ubuntu or containers of Alpine Linux etc. EDIT: source - been doing Lin…
They fragment on trivial parts which is pointless for the evolution.
Re: Kiss – A Linux distribution with a focus on “less is more”
#185A 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, pulse…
But for me that beats the purpose. You still end up with the complexity. Only now you have to add and manage it yourself in some other way, probably being worse off then when you would have started with all that complexity but integrated in one standardised package (distro).
Imho, the issue is not that the solutions are complex but the problems we (assume we) need to solve are. Just making simple solutions that ignore the bigger problems underneath do not really help in the end.
Re: Kiss – A Linux distribution with a focus on “less is more”
#186Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 standar…
I'm not sure which point you're trying to make. Of course every new technology needs someone to do the work. That doesn't take away from the technology's merit. If Drew is now doing all this work, then great! Now is the best time ever to be adopting Wayland. (Speaking as someone who just switched to Sway two weeks ago.)
My point is that in setting out to replace X, they created something that doesn't actually do that and it took about ten years for third parties to do it for them and there still isn't consensus that Wayland is superior to X.
In comparison, Windows Vista introduced a perfectly functional compositor with brand new driver model at about the same time and I can't think of any significant functionality it lost in the process, while I can name many significant improvements.
Re: Kiss – A Linux distribution with a focus on “less is more”
#187I 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…
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Re: Kiss – A Linux distribution with a focus on “less is more”
#188Earlier quoted context omitted.
This kind of distro is exactly the point of FOSS & Linux imo. Diversity of ideas breeds innovation and competition, we need that. Otherwise linux will at some point go the way of browsers, with everything effectively owned by google/microsoft/whatever and a big fat artificial lock-in.
You are right ! diversity is the good move, that is how life decided to grow, by diversifications. Ok, it consumes loads of time, but the result is without point of thinking. M$ did the opposite in '80, and is not quite winning nowdays... Just a question of time and experimentations ;)
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Re: Kiss – A Linux distribution with a focus on “less is more”
#189In which world replacing removing Wayland in favour of X is considered KISS? We seem to have very different understanding of KISS with those folks.
X is widly used since 30 years. Its configuration (and security model) is well documented (xorg.conf). It is as simple as launching the X server using a simple command line and being able to connect any client (even remote) thanks to a single environment variable (DISPLAY). How do you launch a wayland server and how do you forward "display" (ssh -X or -Y) to launch a remote application ?
As for display forwarding via SSH, you may be interested in this summer's GSoC project Waypipe[1].
Re: Kiss – A Linux distribution with a focus on “less is more”
#190Kudos 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 pa…
My main issue with the site is that in my browser i get the mobile version instead of the desktop since i do not use my browser maximized (i have a 1366x768 monitor). Isn't there any other way to figure out if i use a mobile phone instead of using the horizontal resolution?