Best way to avoid bloat and AI – selfcontaining OS • Hacker News Board

Best way to avoid bloat and AI – selfcontaining OS

#1

Post by bialamusic » Sun, Aug 02, 2026, 11:47 AM UTC

I wanted an OS that I could truly own. Most modern systems have become server-controlled clients, bloated with dependencies (Gtk4/Qt/Rust/Wayland) and centralized source control on GitHub. If you cannot audit the dependency tree and Big Corp controls the source, it is no longer real open source.

I built OneManBSD to address this. It is an OpenBSD-based system built on a single 2012 ThinkPad L430.

Project Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2wHaoQhXOYY Project Page: https://bialamusic.com/onemanBSD/

Re: Best way to avoid bloat and AI – selfcontaining OS

#2

Post by KinetiNode » Sun, Aug 02, 2026, 4:06 PM UTC

This is a cool project. But i have some questions. You repeatedly said that its way simpler and smaller than other OS but failed to mention how much , also does removing rust / Qt / wayland actually help at all?? And your missing real-world examples on why we should use it and what i can actually do with this OS? my main question: Why OpenBSD? Why not Linux? why not NetBSD or FreeBSD? you're also missing the target audience, for developers theres nothing better than Linux (currently maybe you can build something better haha) Also screenshots are barely enough. You need to show whats different in here than a traditional OS those are my critiques.

But Overall it's an interesting vision! Keep building

Re: Best way to avoid bloat and AI – selfcontaining OS

#3

Post by toplinesoftsys » Mon, Aug 03, 2026, 2:16 AM UTC

Absolutely amazing project. I did something like that myself back in 2017. It was a desktop-like interface for iOS and then Android tables, well before windows were added to tablet OS. Here are demos:

- iOS: https://youtu.be/Wwf1TZEbFGE

- Android: https://youtu.be/_v3JiK6ZN3U

Re: Best way to avoid bloat and AI – selfcontaining OS

#4

Post by KinetiNode » Mon, Aug 03, 2026, 6:09 PM UTC

KinetiNode wrote: post #2

This is a cool project. But i have some questions. You repeatedly said that its way simpler and smaller than other OS but failed to mention how much , also does removing rust / Qt / wayland actually help at all?? And your missing real-world examples on why we should use it and what i can actually do with this OS? my main question: Why OpenBSD? Why not Linux? why not NetBSD or FreeBSD? you're also missing the target a…

I was expecting a reply but alr

Re: Best way to avoid bloat and AI – selfcontaining OS

#5

Post by bialamusic » Tue, Aug 04, 2026, 7:40 AM UTC

KinetiNode wrote: post #4

KinetiNode wrote: post #2

This is a cool project. But i have some questions. You repeatedly said that its way simpler and smaller than other OS but failed to mention how much , also does removing rust / Qt / wayland actually help at all?? And your missing real-world examples on why we should use it and what i can actually do with this OS? my main question: Why OpenBSD? Why not Linux? why not NetBSD or FreeBSD? you're also missing the target a…

I was expecting a reply but alr

Unfortunately it is impossible to build Linux distro today as single person on a single machine. Every Linux distro is a collection of libs and apps but the sad reality is that they are all interconnected in a huge mess of dependencies. To avoid usind libs as binaries you need to build every single one and to do so you need to first build its dependencies and so on... Some dependencies are so huge that building them makes no sense at all as build times become unreasonable and the source code so huge that one person will never be able to trace or understand - it becomes black box turning open source into an empty words. So I am removing those huge dependencies for the apps that essentially do not need them. Linux stupidity is so that today GTK2 depends on GTK4 which depends on Rust to build. GTK2 is very old and can run perfectly well without these if you manage to clean them. Rust on the other hand requires Rust compiler. Rust compiler can only be build with Rust compiler. This makes the machine to require connection to download and execute binary during build time - that is black box again. Then Rust compiler is 2 million lines of code and again uses libs from the net which is a code injection. In my view what Rust does is to make your build dependent on Rust servers and Rust code from internet. My idea is independence for one person on one machine. No connection required to rebuild, no mess of dependencies and no black boxes. Also I have made some fixes in openBSD code. At the end the result is that OnemanBSD is simple yet capable distro that one developer is able to understand and support. It comes with ALL source and full documentation