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Kiss – A Linux distribution with a focus on “less is more”

getkiss.org

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Re: Kiss – A Linux distribution with a focus on “less is more”

#201

Post by michaelmrose »

jimnotgym wrote: post #79

Just what we need, another Linux distribution. Spread the effort even more thinly. No thanks

Much of the work that goes into the open source software ecosystem goes into projects that benefit more than one particular platform be they user facing apps or system components. A minority goes into distributions.

Distributions mainly require infrastructure, packaging, and distro specific software like package management.

Many distros are quite derivative and represent largely Linux set up as the author desires.

You see a lot of these because they are easy to make they also suck near zero resources from the broader pool of resources because they are stuck packaging their own software and the skills needed to make them wouldn't translate directly into improving system components anyway.

More complex efforts which are the minority are the way people explore possible paths forward. Many are already increasingly converging on common patterns that make it easier to focus on the things that are truly important to that project.

Complaining about a diversity of options seems poorly thought out when discussing a platform that exists only because others desired more options.

Hell if we all standardized on redhat we might well be trading 10% more progress for 99% fewer options.

Re: Kiss – A Linux distribution with a focus on “less is more”

#202

Post by UIZealot »

tom_mellior wrote: post #105
jamiek88 wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s a woman with the top of head cropped

A woman who is not fully clothed, because We Are Tech Bros.

Lots of women dress like this. What's wrong with depicting it in a logo?

Re: Kiss – A Linux distribution with a focus on “less is more”

#203

Post by LinuxBender »

moviuro wrote: post #167
norswap wrote: post #163

I 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…

I agree with this. I would just add that you can get great linting / syntax checking with ShellCheck [1] [2]

[1] - https://github.com/koalaman/shellcheck

[2] - https://www.shellcheck.net/

ShellCheck is in many of the distro package repositories already.

Re: Kiss – A Linux distribution with a focus on “less is more”

#204

Post by anigbrowl »

lowercased wrote: post #27
anigbrowl wrote: post #20

Looks cool but WTF is that logo? I'm an artist and I can't figure out what it's supposed to be even after staring at it for 5 minutes ¯\(°_o)/¯

i think it's a woman leaning over - we're seeing some cleavage there. but... it may just be a rorschach logo...

Yeah I thought so too but then other parts it stop making sense. Vastly ahead of its time or just bad? Either way, it's kind of a millstone around the neck of the project.

Re: Kiss – A Linux distribution with a focus on “less is more”

#205

Post by hackeridiot »

geowwy wrote: post #33
reificator wrote: post #16

That logo makes it a non-starter in any organization I've seen in the last decade.

> That logo makes it a non-starter in any organization I've seen in the last decade. Could be what they're going for. There's a subset of the free software movement who are actively opposed to politically correct corporate culture.

i.e. a subset of the FSM that want to keep alienating women

Re: Kiss – A Linux distribution with a focus on “less is more”

#206

Post by skohan »

adamnemecek wrote: post #197
skohan wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who works in computer graphics this idea makes me sad. I mean I know web is the closest thing we have to a universal interface, and there are a ton of advantages to it, but the idea of moving more toward a world where every single thing you do on a computer has this thick layer of web technologies between the user and the hardware is just depressing. Like why should AMD and Intel even bother innovating if…

Once wasm is commonplace, this might not be that bad actually.

Wasm is a step in the right direction, but it's not the same as machine code. Also the API's currently pretty limited. For instance, if you want to talk to the GPU you still have to go through javascript.

Re: Kiss – A Linux distribution with a focus on “less is more”

#207

Post by antpls »

skohan wrote: post #114
antpls wrote: post #66

What i am looking for is a distro where the only UI is through webpages. I had idea about installing a local Prometheus agent, cockpit and other modern administration tools, but it could'nt match all the features of Gnome 3. Especially, I couldn't find a webtool to manage hardware, such as Wifi, keyboard configuration, display, mouse, etc. Also, a very good, fast, and stable web terminal isnt easy to find

As someone who works in computer graphics this idea makes me sad. I mean I know web is the closest thing we have to a universal interface, and there are a ton of advantages to it, but the idea of moving more toward a world where every single thing you do on a computer has this thick layer of web technologies between the user and the hardware is just depressing. Like why should AMD and Intel even bother innovating if…

It depends on your use case. In my case, most of the ram of my computer is already dedicated to a web browser anyway. I prefer to have everything done in the web browser rather than having another complex graphic framework running in parallel. Plus HTML is highly hackable and there is no reason we cannot reuse the many tools developed for monitoring remote servers on a local machine.

I like the idea of Google Chrome OS, but I would like to be free to chose the web browser I want.

Re: Kiss – A Linux distribution with a focus on “less is more”

#208

Post by antpls »

ktpsns wrote: post #73
antpls wrote: post #66

What i am looking for is a distro where the only UI is through webpages. I had idea about installing a local Prometheus agent, cockpit and other modern administration tools, but it could'nt match all the features of Gnome 3. Especially, I couldn't find a webtool to manage hardware, such as Wifi, keyboard configuration, display, mouse, etc. Also, a very good, fast, and stable web terminal isnt easy to find

Have you thought about using tools like http://www.webmin.com/ or https://cockpit-project.org/ ? They are thought for managing servers, but they might also work for desktops. Also I wouldn't be surprised if tools like http://yast.opensuse.org/ offered a web GUI. Furthermore, for a web based terminal, thanks to https://xtermjs.org/ , terminal.js and friends, there are plenty of products available nowadays. Maybe this…

I tried cockpit and liked the UI. It's modern, simple and clean. However the features were limited (disk space, CPU graphs, but no management for wifi).

I aslo tried ajenti.org but same issue, I couldn't even manage wifi with it.

I will maybe make something myself. Maybe something that can take any linux tools in input and make a primitive web interface for it as output automatically.

Re: Kiss – A Linux distribution with a focus on “less is more”

#209

Post by charlesdaniels »

Looks interesting. Shell can be a good tool for this type of thing, as long as rigorous care is taken to maintain good quality. I view it kind of like PHP, Perl, or JavaScript... you can definitely write good code in these languages, but it requires more discipline than in other languages. Shell offers a number of benefits too, namely it's ubiquitous, most people that would be interested in this distro will know it already, and it makes it easy to drive around other tools and processes.

One concern I would have though is that it seems their package manager does not currently have any way to include patches to packages (or if it does, it's not mentioned in the documentation). This can make it hard to port things if they require even minor tweaks to build properly.

Re: Kiss – A Linux distribution with a focus on “less is more”

#210

Post by antpls »

mappu wrote: post #71
antpls wrote: post #66

What i am looking for is a distro where the only UI is through webpages. I had idea about installing a local Prometheus agent, cockpit and other modern administration tools, but it could'nt match all the features of Gnome 3. Especially, I couldn't find a webtool to manage hardware, such as Wifi, keyboard configuration, display, mouse, etc. Also, a very good, fast, and stable web terminal isnt easy to find

This isn't a particularly practical suggestion, but you might be interested in the Nintendo ES operating system. EDIT: Maybe XPenology can run the DSM web interface on a desktop OS? EDIT 2: Most of KDE Plasma (well, the QML parts at least) will probably run through the WebGL streaming QPA. Likewise using Broadway for Gnome GTK3 apps.

Thank you for the pointers!

If at some point we can run classical Gnome apps in the Browser, I guess it could be a solution. I would prefer to have only one "way" of presenting information, based on web standards.

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