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A Linux distro with a focus on simplicity and the concept of less is more
- mrkrell 5y agofirst comment!
- mrkrell 5y agoHow does this compare with LFS (Linux from Scratch)? Is it an example of the suckless philosophy?(suckless.org) Inquiring minds want to know!
- smitty1e 5y agoLinux From Scratch is precisely that: a bootable kernel and the necessary tools to get you there from raw source. Period. BLFS adds specific desirable bits. But neither LFS nor BLFS offers a yum/apt/emerge package management facility for dropping in large functionality and keeping rhe dependency graphs of the components in check.
- fouc 5y agoWow, I'm really digging that minimal css design! Really tasteful and keeps the site usable while smartly using <pre> tags for the main content area.
- mixmastamyk 5y agoTotally blows on mobile, sadly something basic html would handle. You can change the font without enforcing a width.
- alexwasserman 5y agoLooks interesting, and generally always like to see how someone puts a new distro together, but “simple” here is a very specific definition of simple. This is not a trivial, easy, type of simple. Rather a raw and uncomplex simple. Not going to assume either is better, but somewhat curious which people default to assuming and/or preferring.
- fouc 5y ago"less is more" doesn't imply trivial/easy, instead it implies that tradeoffs were carefully considered and made.
- admax88q 5y ago"Simplicity" does imple trivial or easy though, at least to an extent.
- alexwasserman 5y agoYes, I think that’s how I first read the headline - closer to a basic easy to use distro than an LFS style roll-your-own. If I told someone I’d found a simple distro, I wouldn’t expect them to prep to compile their own kernel
- scbrg 5y agoWell, blame English. It sucks (and so do all other natural languages). In software, I'd say that "simple" has come to mean "lack of complexity" rather than "easy". Presumably, the distribution's target audience is software enthusiasts of some sort.
- admax88q 5y agoI dunno I still disagree. If someone gave me a "simple" API for say networking. I would expect the API to be easy to use. But by your definition, I could give you an API such as "write(byte[])" which just puts bytes on the ethernet wire or into on the wifi radio. It's simple! It's not complex, there's only one API method with only one argument! But in reality, I'm just shifting complexity to the user. I only consider things simple if they truly reduce complexity rather than if they just shift the complexity to someone else.
- mro_name 5y agoI also never thought easy and simple being synonyms – uncomplex resonates well, however.
- na85 5y ago>An independent Linux(R) distribution with a focus on simplicity and the concept of less is more. For me, this niche has always been filled by the venerable Slackware distro.
- beermonster 5y agoSlackware is a complete OS complete with curated set of user land and desktop applications. Although I have a soft spot for Slackware, I’d say arch fills this niche more than Slack: You get the most minimal system as a starting point and build what complexity you need on top - and no more.
- randomluck040 5y agoI didn’t look into Kisslinux but the rather obvious problem with Arch is that the installation process scares people away (regardless whether it is hard or not). The terminal/command line is a scary place for people who didn’t use it before. Otherwise I tend to agree that Arch can be absolutely minimal if you want to. Didn’t use Slackware so I can’t comment on that.
- beermonster 5y ago> but the rather obvious problem with Arch is that the installation process scares people away Nowadays it has an installer [Disclaimer: never used it]
- massysett 5y agoFor the niche audience that these distributions target, the terminal is not a problem.
- beermonster 5y agoAnd for those that it is there's always EndeavourOS or ArcoLinux
- pknflx 5y ago
- makach 5y agoI wish they didn’t just take the well established name of a principle and re use it in their distro-name. As much as I appreciate this initiative I think they should consider the importance of naming and branding. An original product should have an original name.
- cton 5y agoIf I could, I would kiss Linux. I like the name.
- beermonster 5y agoBut it’s a distro that aims to follow the Keep It Simple Stupid principle no?
- johnisgood 5y agoYou should have seen their initial logo, then. ;)
- PoignardAzur 5y agoYeah, distributions often have really crap branding. Eg finding relevant resources for NixOS can be tough because "nix" is often used as a shorthand for the set of all Unix-like systems.
- subsection1h 5y agoAlso, finding relevant resources for Nix can be tough because "Nix" is often used as a shorthand for NixOS.
- saithound 5y ago> BUS FACTOR OF ZERO Bus factor is usually defined as the minimum number of team members that have to be hit by a bus to put the project in jeopardy. The Wikipedia article linked from the site defines it the same way. So a bus factor of zero would mean that the project is in jeopardy even if all the maintainers are alive.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- codethief 5y agoThat same Wikipedia page also states: > There is a rare alternative definition for the bus factor, namely: the number of people who are indispensable for the project.[2] In other words, it is the minimum number of people who are a single point of failure. If using this definition, then a high bus factor is considered a bad thing (since the loss of any person included destroys the project), and zero is considered the ideal bus factor.
- saithound 5y agoThat's true, and in fact I'd prefer it if that was the mainstream definition. Given that it isn't, there may be better replacements for the headline, along the lines of "maintainable by one person".
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- ebingdom 5y agoThat alternative definition seems less useful, because quite often there are two people who can individually maintain a project, and in that scenario the bus factor is 0 even though there is a risk that both of them will leave the project.
- saulrh 5y agoThese two measures are probably ended up conflated because they're two ends of the same metric. "How many people need to be hit by a bus", which for simplicity I'll call the "bus factor", measures unusually high levels of resilience, but it doesn't go lower than 0 so it can't measure how fragile a fragile project is. "How many people are indispensable", which for simplicity I'll call "inverse bus factor", measures unusually low levels of resilience, but it doesn't meaningfully go below 0 so it can't measure how resilient a resilient project is. The thing is, a bus factor >= 2 necessarily indicates an inverse bus factor = 0 (if you need to hit two people with buses to take the project down then nobody is indispensable) while an inverse bus factor >= 1 necessarily indicates a bus factor = 1 (if anyone exists that is indispensable, then hitting exactly them with a bus takes the project down). In other words, bus factor = 1 and inverse bus factor = 1 could be viewed as being the same point in the middle of a line on which all projects fall, same way zero is the center between positive and negative numbers.
- gorgoiler 5y ago> The distribution is designed to be maintainable by a single person. There is no infrastructure and the entire distribution is merely a few Git repositories. A very clever approach, mirroring the way FreeBSD, OpenBSD have traditionally managed their core competencies. I am a lifelong Debian fan but it has always troubled me that I can’t check out a copy of the OS’s metadata — that which is packaged in all of the DSC files or `debian/` directories — in one place. A monorepo containing all of your business logic is a successful tactic to getting things done. There are some great pieces of behind-the-scenes Debian infra to support this — with SVN, and later git, and internal projects like Alioth — but the first class citizen of the project is still a deb-src apt entry. Inherently a one way HTTP link from the vendor to me with only a published Changelog to track changes. A solid and stable technology for a venerable project, but git-log / git-blame it ain’t. (Of course, the success of giant open source projects and especially Debian is often because there is no central coordination. The technical and other committees were social constructs to try to keep everyone on track. Do they still function well?)
- ximm 5y agoWhat I found interesting is that it doesn't use initramfs. Can someone elaborate on that? Is that something other distros should adopt?
- klodolph 5y agoThe initramfs is really only there to mount the root partition. Given the various ways that people want to do that, it makes a lot of sense to have an initramfs for distros that cater to many different use cases. Consider that a root partition may use LFS, disk encryption, or it may even be a network volume! I don't think there’s really much of a reason to abandon initramfs other than “maybe you don’t need it.” As far as I can tell, this distro has you compiling the kernel. If you are compiling kernel for your specific hardware, you can remove the need for kernel modules in initramfs. Distros generally compile the kernel for you, so this won’t work so well, in general. Add weasel words to the above as necessary. Basically, no major advantages to ditching initramfs, and ditching it will leave you with something less flexible. Some use cases (e.g. embedded) there may be no advantage to using initramfs in the first place.
- adrian_b 5y agoinitramfs is very useful if you make a bootable external SSD or USB memory stick, which is intended to be able to boot on any random computer. After you install Linux on a known computer, maybe using a customized kernel that already includes any required modules for the root device and file system, there is absolutely no need for initramfs, which just slows the boot without any benefit.
- rnestler 5y agoThey have an entry in the FAQ about initramfs: https://kisslinux.org/faq#5.2 https://kisslinux.org/faq#5.2 > KISS technically supports booting via an initramfs, it just doesn't require or provide one. As a user you have the means to set this up yourself for your system. > Full disk encryption is also possible without the use of an initramfs in modern kernels (see dm-mod.create). > The initramfs concept is an ugly, complicated and largely optional mess. Thank god it isn't a requirement.
- kissgyorgy 5y agoThe packageformat is entirely static. A series of plain-text files with fields separated by lines and spaces. Easily parseable via any programming language or with basic UNIX utilities. And you have to write parsers for it which is PITA even if it's very simple. Please just stick to well-known formats (even if you don't like them) and make your fellow developers life easier! For example, everyone hates YAML for one reason or another, but if you use it, you are using a format everyone is familiar with it. We know it's terrible quirks, but still well known and every language has parsers for it.
- pritambaral 5y ago1. There is not a single YAML format. Different parsers support varying formats and specs. 2. YAML is a terrible format for everyone. Even if you don't hate it, you can still fall prey to its poor design and not even know about it until it blows up later. A package manager is especially not somewhere you want such latent bugs. 3. Not everybody knows its terrible quirks. I'd used YAML for years, and was still surprised when I read strictyaml.org's (limited) list of documented bugs in YAML. 4. YAML isn't even the first or most-popular well-known format. So, if you're going to advocate for a well-known format that everybody can use, it makes little sense to advocate for YAML.
- IshKebab 5y agoYes YAML is a terrible choice, but his point is still correct. Use a standard format, not some custom nonsense you made up that can't even handle strings with spaces in them. I recommend JSON5 or maybe TOML if your data is very flat.
- pritambaral 5y ago> Yes YAML is a terrible choice, but his point is still correct. Use a standard format ... As I said in point 4 above: So, if you're going to advocate for a well-known format that everybody can use, it makes little sense to advocate for YAML.
- illiliti 5y ago
- rossvor 5y agoTo add some context -- project founder has recently came back after a brief disappearance, and is in the process of making some big changes and improvements (eg. move to Wayland). https://kisslinux.org/blog/20210711a https://kisslinux.org/blog/20210711a
- agumonkey 5y agoI like how frugal everything is from website to ideas
- LAC-Tech 5y agoI'm curious :) Simplicity in my daily tools is becoming more and more important to me.
- sebastian65 5y agoThat depends a lot of what's exactly your idea of simplicity and "less is more". Anyway, check out https://archlinux.org https://archlinux.org.
- mro_name 5y ago> There is no requirement or _need_ for infrastructure of any kind. that's an awesome approach. Here is usually where idiosyncratic complexities arise. Instead focussing on the inevitable that's there anyway – wonderful!
- andix 5y agoWhen I need a simple linux distribution, my first thought is alpine. Any idea what the benefit of KISS linux would be over alpine?
- steinuil 5y ago> The package format is entirely static. ...what does this even mean? Are all the packages linked without dynamic dependencies? That doesn't seem to be the case, since maintaining build rules for enough statically linked packages would have a bus factor of way more than 0, as the project claims. Is it that the package manager's packages are all stored in a git repo? Tons of package managers nowadays do that. Is it that the package manager's package definition use a custom format that is not well specified and has enough features to make parsing non-trivial, just because the author doesn't want to use jq or write their own json parser in shell? How is this pile of files more static than json? If it's none of those things this just seems like a buzzword thrown in for no particular reason.
- yrro 5y agoMaybe/hopefully it means that the package embeds only static data files that are simply unpacked and later removed, with nothing like dpkg's maintainer scripts or rpm's scriptlets.
- PeterWhittaker 5y agoPrevious discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23255642 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23255642
- hawski 5y agoThe testimonials page is a gem: https://kisslinux.org/testimonials https://kisslinux.org/testimonials
- jdblair 5y agoThe description reminds me of Slackware, circa 1996.
- GuB-42 5y agoless is more? Please don't, I understand that "more" is simpler but I like the ability to scroll up.
- giancarlostoro 5y agoI think if a distro replaced less with more I would be confused if it differs slightly. That’s pretty entertaining my first read of your comment I was confused took me a moment to let it sink in.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]