ITT: People on _hacker news_ complaining about someone building their own linux distro...<p>Go install windows and be happy in your mono culture world, but don't shit on other peoples creativity and effort.
Not to be dumb, but for a newcomer such as myself who read the blurbs about it being simple to use and develop for, not being able to have a single ISO to download and install is from this point in my Linux Journey, not simple.<p>I'm not making a value judgment as to whether or not I should know how to compile source code and running this on top of another Linux and so fort, but I can intuit my way through installing Debian or Manjaro or Arch Linux or knoppix or any other distro that provides a binary ISO.<p>It seems like this is simple in terms of 'lightweight for linux pros', not simple as in 'intuitive for users to use'.<p>I'm not sure that's a bad thing, just pointing out that I am unable to try this with my current skill level
Last time I've checked, kissing involves the mouth, at the least, so if the logo was some sort of play on the KISS, it fails anatomically. On top of that, there is no connection between the logo and the product which is what probably sets people off more than the content.<p>If it's by some ways a Rorschach case (doubt it), then it fails again as a logo, which should be clear and concise and aligned with the product. If no such alignment can be done graphically, then a text oriented logo would be far better.<p>I've been doing branding for a big part of my life, consider taking the suggestions from the other commentators as well in revising the logo if this is to be a serious endeavor; think of the various cultures and settings this would be seen.
Also see "The Pure Bash Bible" posted today, and created by the same person; HN username "dyanaraps":<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21013150" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21013150</a>
I love this!<p>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 esoteric and isn't Perl, then stick to it.)
I'm surprised at the closed-mindedness of the comments here: usually browsing HN I read wonderful insights on tech how "you can't assume X, technology Y has a place and that place is Z".
Here commenters appear unable to accept that this tech has a place because it doesn't include "app/feature X" or it doesn't abide by "rule Y".
I'm more interested in the ripple effects seen here than the original article.
First off, I love the philosophy, and the package format is nice.<p>I'm not a language hipster, I don't care what language you write something in as long as it fits the purpose well, and shell can certainly do that here. However, some uses of shell in the package manager are non-obvious, and that will make it more difficult for people to troubleshoot or maintain this code.<p>@OP: I imagine you've examined Slackware's pkgtools? (<a href="https://slackware.osuosl.org/slackware-12.1/source/a/pkgtools/scripts/" rel="nofollow">https://slackware.osuosl.org/slackware-12.1/source/a/pkgtool...</a>) They're written in shell too, and have been in use since 1994. I wish they would get a bit more updated to do things like read metadata (especially for Slackbuilds) and handle build dependencies, but I always found them pretty easy to understand and modify to my needs. Later I threw together some scripts to automate the most common configure/make/make install/packaging steps (<a href="https://github.com/psypete/public-bin/tree/public-bin/src/slacktools" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/psypete/public-bin/tree/public-bin/src/sl...</a>). My scripting experience was, let's say... "limited". :)<p>I ended up making a couple thousand packages from tarballs. What that taught me was that actually managing build dependencies, and the complications of layering different software into the same file tree, was a lot more weird than it seemed. So depending on people's intentions with this distro, it may end up being a lot more complicated for them to manage than they think.
What i am looking for is a distro where the only UI is through webpages.<p>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
Isn't there a distro that's already based on the KISS principle? (Arch Linux)<p>Is there something that the Kiss distro achieves that Arch doesn't?
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.<p>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.
What is the standard pick these days for a no-frills, stripped back, but still usable Linux distribution? One that doesn't start with much, but isn't boiling the ocean like Arch or Slack if you want to add more?<p>I used to like Xubuntu, but this was like a decade ago at this point.
Before deciding to try a new distribution, I want to know which important application it supports or not. I assume it supports usual stuff like ssh, vim, emacs, python, ruby, node, but does it support chrome, firefox, visual studio code, docker, virtual box ?
I absolutely love the overall objectives here!<p>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.
Ominous's screenshot looks amazing. Does anyone know what (software/gui/manager/idk) is?<p>Even though I've been using Linux (Ubuntu) as my daily driver for the past several years, I really son't know too much about it such as how to ask the right question about desktop manager(?). The install instructions look detailed enough that I could probably figure it out. I will bookmark this, because I want to buy a laptop, amd it might be interesting to try to build/install this as an experiment first.
A 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).
Keep making the biggest problem of Linux bigger, please... Yeah, this problem is "fragmentation", and it is not solved with "simplicity".
I'm always a proponent of simplicity.<p>Some criticism about the site: What a horrible layout. I zoomed out to 25% (the furthest you can go) and the text is still to big.
Seems like an extremely specific minutia to build an entirely new distribution for.
Also if less is more, how do you call less? I always preferred it because it is faster. /jk
"This distribution has no default desktop or window manager environment." - goes to prove that "simple" doesn't mean "easy to use"...
I was looking for something like this actually, I thought I would finally have to warm up to BSD if I wanted an OS that I have some hope of understanding fully.
this looks kind of nice to be honest, and i hardly ever say that about some custom distro. only thing i'd like is to install it from USB instead of some chroot mumbo jumbo. that would require me to instal linux on a box firs before re-rolling into this. kind of annoying. perhaps something on the roadmap, didn't check. but definitely promising as far as i can see.
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)/¯