8 ms·

Morpheus Linux

93 points by vezzy-fnord 11y ago

jordigh 11y ago
"Keep it simple" as their first bullet point. I wonder who has ever had as a goal to make complicated software from the outset.
- adamrt 11y ago
  Probably not many, but stating simplicity as your primary (or at least first) goal is a statement and reminder of priorities.
- swsieber 11y ago
  Your second sentence is a red herring that misses the point of that goal. Of course nobody has that goal (hopefully). But when people don't have that goal, complexity tends to creep in. Simplicity rarely happens by chance in large software.
  - jordigh 11y ago
    Every time I've seen people have the simplicity goal from the outset, they inevitably have to at some point abandon it or their simple software gets replaced by software that has additional complexity. It often happens that the complex replacement then again grows too complex, and someone comes along with a simpler solution and the cycle repeats indefinitely. Firefox was supposed to be a simpler Mozilla, and when it got too complex, Chrome came out. I wouldn't be surprised that now that both of them are too complex, in a few more years someone comes out with a browser that is simpler than both of them and is intended to replace them both. Software development, in a very essentialist sense, is nothing but complexity management. Trying to never have any complexity is a naïve view of what software is.
    - vezzy-fnord 11y ago
      End users don't want simplicity, they want ease of use. Simple beautiful software is out there aplenty with diverse features, you just have to desire to use it.
      - Nomentatus 11y ago
        They don't want simplicity until the app crashes. They don't want simplicity until their supposedly compatible older programs don't run. They don't want simplicity until a security breach takes out their business. They don't want simplicity until their custom software "can't be made portable, realistically. It'll all have to be rewritten." They don't want simplicity until the program's behavior changes, and it's not at all clear why, or how to recover. They don't want simplicity until they've lost or overwritten data for no reason that can be discovered. In other words, it's not the falling that kills ya, it's hitting the ground.
    - semi-extrinsic 11y ago
      http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/Z/Zawinskis-Law.html http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/Z/Zawinskis-Law.html
    - Nomentatus 11y ago
      Very interesting take on things. From this point of view the virtue of the New Jersey Way is that they shorten this cycle, keeping things from getting way out of the ordinary f*ed up before the cycle restarts - after all, why wait 'till your car skids out and crashes before you replace your bald tires; that sort of thing.
- vezzy-fnord 11y ago
  It's one thing to have the intent. It's wholly another to actually execute it like suckless and co. do.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
- agumonkey 11y ago
  Maybe the term is now bloated but there was a time where complex and large was desired.
- vegabook 11y ago
  It starts out simple. Then gets copied. Competition brings feature wars. Features become bloat. Simplicity becomes attractive again.
- rakoo 11y ago
  From this point of view I don't think the opposite of "simple" is "complicated" but rather "full-featured". Softwares who try to follow the KISS philosophy often implement the usual 80% of functionalities that take 20% of the time, and leave the rest to other projects.
- Nomentatus 11y ago
  "Nobody in Hollywood ever sets out to make a bad movie." Often said in that industry, and technically/semantically true - just highly misleading and a thin excuse. A whole lot of people in Hollywood are pretty much indifferent to quality as opposed to flash. What they are, is highly focused on the marketing and star-vehicle issues which will determine their paychecks (at least in the short term.) The result is still all too predictable, and lamentable. They set out to do a great many things - it's just that making a really fine movie that people will want to watch twenty years from now wasn't one of them. Almost all programmers like to solve problems. It's why they took the job. But very few programmers really enjoy to re-solving problems, only better. The results of the latter activity aren't exactly highly visible, so the rewards aren't as obvious. Narcissists don't actively try to do the job badly or to cause future problems, this is just an inevitable and profound side effect of their relentless focus on getting superficially good-looking results now. Their indifference - even to human life - is not praiseworthy, or the absence of a flaw.
mordocai 11y ago
As usual, the project page doesn't actually explain what the project is nor why I should care. I have to infer a bunch. Start writing a good synopsis on the first page of your projects people.
- javert 11y ago
  If what is on that page does not make you care, you are not the intended audience.
  - vezzy-fnord 11y ago
    Correct. The front page is pretty self-explanatory. Obviously it requires you to actually be familiar with what it explains.
    - glibgil 11y ago
      Right, so where is the version that doesn't require familiarity? For example: http://midipix.org/#sec-implementation http://midipix.org/#sec-implementation
      - vezzy-fnord 11y ago
        How is that any different? Right off the bat, it assumes I must know what argv, argp, wide chars and junction points are. Which is to be expected given it's a POSIX layer for Windows, and so you should expect a minimalistic Linux distro blurb would need some prerequisite knowledge. You're on a vendetta for no reason that I can discern. Nothing about Morpheus' front page is hard to understand in the slightest.
        glibgil 11y ago
        Vendetta? Ha, I post one comment with a better example of introducing a project's motivations and I'm on a vendetta? That escalated (in your mind and nowhere else) quickly.
      - 11y ago
icefox 11y ago
What problem does it solve?
- blueflow 11y ago
  Having a system with an big blob that you can't maintain yourself anymore.
- illicium 11y ago
  Having too many features in your operating system.
ticktocktick 11y ago
<joke> Lennart Poettering </joke>
- cv0x 11y ago
  I laughed out loud at that one. Clever.
- jordigh 11y ago
  In all seriousness, Poettering is at least trying to replace complexities with simplicities. He thinks unified config files are simpler than ad-hoc shell scripts for init systems. He thinks a sound system that handles all audio in a uniform way is simpler than having a bunch of different APIs that implement a different and incompatible part of the audio stack. Nobody is trying to make things more complex, or if they are, it's usually a joke like brainfuck.
  - vezzy-fnord 11y ago
    He thinks unified config files are simpler than ad-hoc shell scripts for init systems. That's a gross misrepresentation of the problem. Shell-based rc does not have to be "ad-hoc" if there is a sane process management framework in place. In such cases, the scripts can be extremely terse. [1] [2] In essence, the scripts become mere "callbacks" and have their primary purpose to provide the start command line, optionally with some form of chain loading to compose execution state. One can go further and write a small, special-purpose LL(1) command language for chain loading of programs, e.g. execline. The unit file format, conversely, cannot be composed, the options must be treated as static entries, and implicit state is carried, sometimes making service writers resort to horrifically subverting the systemd model just to escape. [3] [1] http://homepage.ntlworld.com./jonathan.deboynepollard/FGA/run-scripts-and-service-units-side-by-side.html http://homepage.ntlworld.com./jonathan.deboynepollard/FGA/ru... [2] http://www.openbsd.org/faq/faq10.html#rc http://www.openbsd.org/faq/faq10.html#rc [3] http://homepage.ntlworld.com./jonathan.deboynepollard/FGA/systemd-house-of-horror/ http://homepage.ntlworld.com./jonathan.deboynepollard/FGA/sy...
    - jordigh 11y ago
TurboHaskal 11y ago
This is all too familiar. It will end up being yet another r/unixporn anime wallpaper desktop screenshot generator.
- adamrt 11y ago
  Yeah. Fuck projects that people do to learn something and give away for free.
  - TurboHaskal 11y ago
    You said that word, not me. Everyone is free to channel their autism the way they like.
jay-saint 11y ago
The world needs another linux distro like it needs a plague.
- ticktocktick 11y ago
  There are a lot of distros out there. That is what makes Linux so great. You can roll your own formula of kernel and userland for YOUR needs[and then share it]. You aren't forced to just take what Microsoft or Apple or XXXX gives you nor do you have to completely write your own from scratch.
  - n0n 11y ago
    F'kin this! If you don't like it. do it in a differten way.
- glibgil 11y ago
  The world needs a plague.
- anon4 11y ago
  Yeah, I agree. We were ready to ship our AAA game on Windows, Mac and Linux and had tested with all versions, but now that this distro came out we have to spin up the test farm again and re-hire all the testers... Not to mention updating the graphics so it gracefully degrades from playing it on 8 monitors on a couple of the latest nVidias to playing it on the console over ssh. And let me tell you, getting specular reflections to render properly on a braille terminal was a real bitch.
exelius 11y ago
I've often wondered if the Linux world will eventually split into two camps: desktop/mobile/embedded, and servers. With desktop/mobile/embedded applications, you often have to do a lot of hardware-level integration to provide the best customer experience. This requires lots of features to support different use cases like hibernation, cellular radio on/off, power control, realtime device support, drivers that support many different drivers on different platforms, etc. With servers, you actually want the OS to be hardware agnostic. Tight hardware integration is a drawback - not a feature - since it makes it harder to migrate / clone a system. Performance is pretty much the primary driver on a server, so having fewer abstraction layers should improve speed. Simple is better, because there's usually enough complexity in the applications themselves. I don't think these use cases can be served by the same system. The whole systemd schism was a symptom of this core problem - systemd is great for the laptop/mobile/embedded case because it adds a whole lot of control over various system states. The server guys hate it because it adds a lot of complexity and doesn't give them much functionality that makes their lives easier. But the problem isn't systemd, its that these two use cases are very hard to solve with one system.
- kristopolous 11y ago
  I think you need to find a dividing line. There is a certain level of 'abstraction' where the use-cases will part ways. The key is to find what can be agreed on and where the split needs to be. If my foggy memory serves me right, the windows embedded team took action on an analysis like this about 10-15 years ago.
- anonbanker 11y ago
  I'd submit that the adoption of systemd by most of these entities is perfect example of what you are saying being true.
- bbanyc 11y ago
  I figured the break would be between desktop/server and mobile/embedded - you have behemoths driving the development of each (Red Hat and Google respectively) that don't always see eye to eye.
- digi_owl 11y ago
chilicuil 11y ago
For me the most important morpheus feature is the static recipes, most linux distributions compile software dynamically against glibc and then the generated binaries won't run in other distributions. Static builds will run in many linux environments. I used morpheus and other similar distributions recipes to create `static-get`[0] a static linux binary repository. [0] https://github.com/minos-org/minos-static https://github.com/minos-org/minos-static
- fortytw2 11y ago
  This is awesome! I play around a lot/build on little, static linuxes, and this looks like it'll be an invaluable tool in the future :D
80x25 11y ago
Statically linking everything seems to complicate upgrades significantly. If libc is rev'd does that mean every binary on the system needs to be rev'd as well? Static linking is great for simplifying the deployment strategy but can degrade the user/administrator experience.
- sprash 11y ago
  The upcoming http://sta.li http://sta.li distribution tries to solve this problem via git which apparently does reasonable efficient binary diffs out of the box.
- hardcoreluddite 11y ago
  A recent interview with Anselm R Garbe, the founder of suckless.org, on the FLOSS Weekly podcast. They discuss the suckless philosophy and stali linux. https://twit.tv/shows/floss-weekly/episodes/355?autostart=false https://twit.tv/shows/floss-weekly/episodes/355?autostart=fa...
miah_ 11y ago
See also: Alpine Linux; http://wiki.alpinelinux.org/wiki/Alpine_Linux:Overview http://wiki.alpinelinux.org/wiki/Alpine_Linux:Overview
gouggoug 11y ago
My comment is not directly related to Morpheus Linux. The first link on the page "Keep it simple" directs to "http://suckless.org/philosophy" http://suckless.org/philosophy" whose motto is "software that sucks less". I've never contributed any software to the open-source community (I hope I will one day), but I find it fairly unfair to all those devs that spent years making open source tools that are used by every single sysadmin to say that you want to write "software that sucks less". You might want to write software that is "better" but not that "sucks less". Saying a tool sucks in hindsight is way easier than writing a tool that doesn't suck in the first place. After all, you probably learned how to write a tool that "sucks less" thanks to all of those other developers that made those mistakes for you. So, although I do agree with some statements made in the "philosophy" part of the website, like this one: > Most hackers actually don’t care much about code quality. Thus, if they get something working which seems to solve a problem, they stick with it. If this kind of software development is applied to the same source code throughout its entire life-cycle, we’re left with large amounts of code, a totally screwed code structure, and a flawed system design. This is because of a lack of conceptual clarity and integrity in the development process. I do think the domain name and mottos are poorly chosen.
- farhaven 11y ago
  "sucks less" is a nod to the fact that all software sucks in some regard. Yes, also the software written by the suckless people. (It's also the motto of the mutt email client) Acknowledging that there is something wrong is the first step to making better things. Also, IMHO "We aim to do stuff that sucks less" is a bit more humble than saying "We aim to write better software", but in the end, both probably mean the same thing.
  - gouggoug 11y ago
    I see your point of view. "sucks less" has a negative connotation, but I can see the message delivered is not necessarily negative.
  - Avshalom 11y ago
    Maybe, but I'm fairly sure abrasiveness was meant in the case of the suckless community.
anonbanker 11y ago
that package manager looks pretty sexy. I'm pretty much running a similar stack on a laptop in gentoo. took a lot of work to unmask it all, though. would a howto be useful to anyone?
xer0x 11y ago
I love this, but what differentiates it from the others like Alpine or Void?
ilurk 11y ago
Could anyone explain what the goal of this project is? Which audience it is aimed at? Where would I want to use it? Embedded systems? (Despite the small number of packages, the size of some make me think not) Reproducible builds? Unikernels?
- qznc 11y ago
  It is rooted in the Suckless Stali [0] stuff. It is a community trying to build their personal dream Unix. So primarily desktop and server is the goal. [0] http://sta.li/ http://sta.li/

93 points by vezzy-fnord 11y ago

"Keep it simple" as their first bullet point. I wonder who has ever had as a goal to make complicated software from the outset.

adamrt 11y ago
Probably not many, but stating simplicity as your primary (or at least first) goal is a statement and reminder of priorities.
swsieber 11y ago
Your second sentence is a red herring that misses the point of that goal. Of course nobody has that goal (hopefully). But when people don't have that goal, complexity tends to creep in. Simplicity rarely happens by chance in large software.
- jordigh 11y ago
  Every time I've seen people have the simplicity goal from the outset, they inevitably have to at some point abandon it or their simple software gets replaced by software that has additional complexity. It often happens that the complex replacement then again grows too complex, and someone comes along with a simpler solution and the cycle repeats indefinitely. Firefox was supposed to be a simpler Mozilla, and when it got too complex, Chrome came out. I wouldn't be surprised that now that both of them are too complex, in a few more years someone comes out with a browser that is simpler than both of them and is intended to replace them both. Software development, in a very essentialist sense, is nothing but complexity management. Trying to never have any complexity is a naïve view of what software is.
  - vezzy-fnord 11y ago
    End users don't want simplicity, they want ease of use. Simple beautiful software is out there aplenty with diverse features, you just have to desire to use it.
    - Nomentatus 11y ago
      They don't want simplicity until the app crashes. They don't want simplicity until their supposedly compatible older programs don't run. They don't want simplicity until a security breach takes out their business. They don't want simplicity until their custom software "can't be made portable, realistically. It'll all have to be rewritten." They don't want simplicity until the program's behavior changes, and it's not at all clear why, or how to recover. They don't want simplicity until they've lost or overwritten data for no reason that can be discovered. In other words, it's not the falling that kills ya, it's hitting the ground.
  - semi-extrinsic 11y ago
    http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/Z/Zawinskis-Law.html http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/Z/Zawinskis-Law.html
  - Nomentatus 11y ago
    Very interesting take on things. From this point of view the virtue of the New Jersey Way is that they shorten this cycle, keeping things from getting way out of the ordinary f*ed up before the cycle restarts - after all, why wait 'till your car skids out and crashes before you replace your bald tires; that sort of thing.
vezzy-fnord 11y ago
It's one thing to have the intent. It's wholly another to actually execute it like suckless and co. do.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
agumonkey 11y ago
Maybe the term is now bloated but there was a time where complex and large was desired.
vegabook 11y ago
It starts out simple. Then gets copied. Competition brings feature wars. Features become bloat. Simplicity becomes attractive again.
rakoo 11y ago
From this point of view I don't think the opposite of "simple" is "complicated" but rather "full-featured". Softwares who try to follow the KISS philosophy often implement the usual 80% of functionalities that take 20% of the time, and leave the rest to other projects.
Nomentatus 11y ago
"Nobody in Hollywood ever sets out to make a bad movie." Often said in that industry, and technically/semantically true - just highly misleading and a thin excuse. A whole lot of people in Hollywood are pretty much indifferent to quality as opposed to flash. What they are, is highly focused on the marketing and star-vehicle issues which will determine their paychecks (at least in the short term.) The result is still all too predictable, and lamentable. They set out to do a great many things - it's just that making a really fine movie that people will want to watch twenty years from now wasn't one of them. Almost all programmers like to solve problems. It's why they took the job. But very few programmers really enjoy to re-solving problems, only better. The results of the latter activity aren't exactly highly visible, so the rewards aren't as obvious. Narcissists don't actively try to do the job badly or to cause future problems, this is just an inevitable and profound side effect of their relentless focus on getting superficially good-looking results now. Their indifference - even to human life - is not praiseworthy, or the absence of a flaw.

mordocai 11y ago

As usual, the project page doesn't actually explain what the project is nor why I should care. I have to infer a bunch. Start writing a good synopsis on the first page of your projects people.

javert 11y ago
If what is on that page does not make you care, you are not the intended audience.
- vezzy-fnord 11y ago
  Correct. The front page is pretty self-explanatory. Obviously it requires you to actually be familiar with what it explains.
  - glibgil 11y ago
    Right, so where is the version that doesn't require familiarity? For example: http://midipix.org/#sec-implementation http://midipix.org/#sec-implementation
    - vezzy-fnord 11y ago
      How is that any different? Right off the bat, it assumes I must know what argv, argp, wide chars and junction points are. Which is to be expected given it's a POSIX layer for Windows, and so you should expect a minimalistic Linux distro blurb would need some prerequisite knowledge. You're on a vendetta for no reason that I can discern. Nothing about Morpheus' front page is hard to understand in the slightest.
      - glibgil 11y ago
        Vendetta? Ha, I post one comment with a better example of introducing a project's motivations and I'm on a vendetta? That escalated (in your mind and nowhere else) quickly.
    - 11y ago

icefox 11y ago

What problem does it solve?

blueflow 11y ago
Having a system with an big blob that you can't maintain yourself anymore.
illicium 11y ago
Having too many features in your operating system.

ticktocktick 11y ago

<joke> Lennart Poettering </joke>

cv0x 11y ago
I laughed out loud at that one. Clever.
jordigh 11y ago
In all seriousness, Poettering is at least trying to replace complexities with simplicities. He thinks unified config files are simpler than ad-hoc shell scripts for init systems. He thinks a sound system that handles all audio in a uniform way is simpler than having a bunch of different APIs that implement a different and incompatible part of the audio stack. Nobody is trying to make things more complex, or if they are, it's usually a joke like brainfuck.
- vezzy-fnord 11y ago
  He thinks unified config files are simpler than ad-hoc shell scripts for init systems. That's a gross misrepresentation of the problem. Shell-based rc does not have to be "ad-hoc" if there is a sane process management framework in place. In such cases, the scripts can be extremely terse. [1] [2] In essence, the scripts become mere "callbacks" and have their primary purpose to provide the start command line, optionally with some form of chain loading to compose execution state. One can go further and write a small, special-purpose LL(1) command language for chain loading of programs, e.g. execline. The unit file format, conversely, cannot be composed, the options must be treated as static entries, and implicit state is carried, sometimes making service writers resort to horrifically subverting the systemd model just to escape. [3] [1] http://homepage.ntlworld.com./jonathan.deboynepollard/FGA/run-scripts-and-service-units-side-by-side.html http://homepage.ntlworld.com./jonathan.deboynepollard/FGA/ru... [2] http://www.openbsd.org/faq/faq10.html#rc http://www.openbsd.org/faq/faq10.html#rc [3] http://homepage.ntlworld.com./jonathan.deboynepollard/FGA/systemd-house-of-horror/ http://homepage.ntlworld.com./jonathan.deboynepollard/FGA/sy...
  - jordigh 11y ago

TurboHaskal 11y ago

This is all too familiar. It will end up being yet another r/unixporn anime wallpaper desktop screenshot generator.

adamrt 11y ago
Yeah. Fuck projects that people do to learn something and give away for free.
- TurboHaskal 11y ago
  You said that word, not me. Everyone is free to channel their autism the way they like.

jay-saint 11y ago

The world needs another linux distro like it needs a plague.

ticktocktick 11y ago
There are a lot of distros out there. That is what makes Linux so great. You can roll your own formula of kernel and userland for YOUR needs[and then share it]. You aren't forced to just take what Microsoft or Apple or XXXX gives you nor do you have to completely write your own from scratch.
- n0n 11y ago
  F'kin this! If you don't like it. do it in a differten way.
glibgil 11y ago
The world needs a plague.
anon4 11y ago
Yeah, I agree. We were ready to ship our AAA game on Windows, Mac and Linux and had tested with all versions, but now that this distro came out we have to spin up the test farm again and re-hire all the testers... Not to mention updating the graphics so it gracefully degrades from playing it on 8 monitors on a couple of the latest nVidias to playing it on the console over ssh. And let me tell you, getting specular reflections to render properly on a braille terminal was a real bitch.

exelius 11y ago

I've often wondered if the Linux world will eventually split into two camps: desktop/mobile/embedded, and servers. With desktop/mobile/embedded applications, you often have to do a lot of hardware-level integration to provide the best customer experience. This requires lots of features to support different use cases like hibernation, cellular radio on/off, power control, realtime device support, drivers that support many different drivers on different platforms, etc. With servers, you actually want the OS to be hardware agnostic. Tight hardware integration is a drawback - not a feature - since it makes it harder to migrate / clone a system. Performance is pretty much the primary driver on a server, so having fewer abstraction layers should improve speed. Simple is better, because there's usually enough complexity in the applications themselves. I don't think these use cases can be served by the same system. The whole systemd schism was a symptom of this core problem - systemd is great for the laptop/mobile/embedded case because it adds a whole lot of control over various system states. The server guys hate it because it adds a lot of complexity and doesn't give them much functionality that makes their lives easier. But the problem isn't systemd, its that these two use cases are very hard to solve with one system.

kristopolous 11y ago
I think you need to find a dividing line. There is a certain level of 'abstraction' where the use-cases will part ways. The key is to find what can be agreed on and where the split needs to be. If my foggy memory serves me right, the windows embedded team took action on an analysis like this about 10-15 years ago.
anonbanker 11y ago
I'd submit that the adoption of systemd by most of these entities is perfect example of what you are saying being true.
bbanyc 11y ago
I figured the break would be between desktop/server and mobile/embedded - you have behemoths driving the development of each (Red Hat and Google respectively) that don't always see eye to eye.
digi_owl 11y ago

chilicuil 11y ago

For me the most important morpheus feature is the static recipes, most linux distributions compile software dynamically against glibc and then the generated binaries won't run in other distributions. Static builds will run in many linux environments. I used morpheus and other similar distributions recipes to create `static-get`[0] a static linux binary repository. [0] https://github.com/minos-org/minos-static https://github.com/minos-org/minos-static

fortytw2 11y ago
This is awesome! I play around a lot/build on little, static linuxes, and this looks like it'll be an invaluable tool in the future :D

80x25 11y ago

Statically linking everything seems to complicate upgrades significantly. If libc is rev'd does that mean every binary on the system needs to be rev'd as well? Static linking is great for simplifying the deployment strategy but can degrade the user/administrator experience.

sprash 11y ago
The upcoming http://sta.li http://sta.li distribution tries to solve this problem via git which apparently does reasonable efficient binary diffs out of the box.
hardcoreluddite 11y ago
A recent interview with Anselm R Garbe, the founder of suckless.org, on the FLOSS Weekly podcast. They discuss the suckless philosophy and stali linux. https://twit.tv/shows/floss-weekly/episodes/355?autostart=false https://twit.tv/shows/floss-weekly/episodes/355?autostart=fa...

miah_ 11y ago

See also: Alpine Linux; http://wiki.alpinelinux.org/wiki/Alpine_Linux:Overview http://wiki.alpinelinux.org/wiki/Alpine_Linux:Overview

gouggoug 11y ago

My comment is not directly related to Morpheus Linux. The first link on the page "Keep it simple" directs to "http://suckless.org/philosophy" http://suckless.org/philosophy" whose motto is "software that sucks less". I've never contributed any software to the open-source community (I hope I will one day), but I find it fairly unfair to all those devs that spent years making open source tools that are used by every single sysadmin to say that you want to write "software that sucks less". You might want to write software that is "better" but not that "sucks less". Saying a tool sucks in hindsight is way easier than writing a tool that doesn't suck in the first place. After all, you probably learned how to write a tool that "sucks less" thanks to all of those other developers that made those mistakes for you. So, although I do agree with some statements made in the "philosophy" part of the website, like this one: > Most hackers actually don’t care much about code quality. Thus, if they get something working which seems to solve a problem, they stick with it. If this kind of software development is applied to the same source code throughout its entire life-cycle, we’re left with large amounts of code, a totally screwed code structure, and a flawed system design. This is because of a lack of conceptual clarity and integrity in the development process. I do think the domain name and mottos are poorly chosen.

farhaven 11y ago
"sucks less" is a nod to the fact that all software sucks in some regard. Yes, also the software written by the suckless people. (It's also the motto of the mutt email client) Acknowledging that there is something wrong is the first step to making better things. Also, IMHO "We aim to do stuff that sucks less" is a bit more humble than saying "We aim to write better software", but in the end, both probably mean the same thing.
- gouggoug 11y ago
  I see your point of view. "sucks less" has a negative connotation, but I can see the message delivered is not necessarily negative.
- Avshalom 11y ago
  Maybe, but I'm fairly sure abrasiveness was meant in the case of the suckless community.

anonbanker 11y ago

that package manager looks pretty sexy. I'm pretty much running a similar stack on a laptop in gentoo. took a lot of work to unmask it all, though. would a howto be useful to anyone?

xer0x 11y ago

I love this, but what differentiates it from the others like Alpine or Void?

ilurk 11y ago

Could anyone explain what the goal of this project is? Which audience it is aimed at? Where would I want to use it? Embedded systems? (Despite the small number of packages, the size of some make me think not) Reproducible builds? Unikernels?

qznc 11y ago
It is rooted in the Suckless Stali [0] stuff. It is a community trying to build their personal dream Unix. So primarily desktop and server is the goal. [0] http://sta.li/ http://sta.li/