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Adélie Linux
- 8organicbits 3y agoI see Linux + musl, aiming for POSIX certification, not a Gentoo fork, APK package manager, with openrc and s6 for init and process management. I panicked at the first screenshot, which shows Windows 10(?) in a VM. Maybe not the best choice.
- packetlost 3y ago> I panicked at the first screenshot, which shows Windows 10(?) in a VM. Maybe not the best choice. That's clearly KDE Plasma, not Windows. I won't fault you for confusing them based on a glance because Plasma is somewhat intentionally similar in style and appearance to Windows. Edit: oh, you don't mean the screenshot on the front page, but in the screenshot section... that looks like Windows 8(.1) in a VNC session. Yeah, that's maybe not the best choice...
- rany_ 3y agoHe's referring to the screenshots on this page: https://www.adelielinux.org/screenshots/ https://www.adelielinux.org/screenshots/
- packetlost 3y agoYeah, see my edit. I realized that like a minute after responding haha
- hnbear 3y agoQEMU, so I assume it's a VM, not VNC
- agubelu 3y agoI also found it a bit confusing that the first screenshot they choose to present is literally a screenshot of Windows.
- glitchc 3y agoThat threw me off too. I thought it was just a launcher, so I zoomed in. Saw the Windows apps and was confused for a second.
- madspindel 3y ago> Security updates are nearly instant. Are they installed automatically? Or what do they mean?
- zv-io 3y agoNo; at the moment we are in beta and this not yet available. We have been experimenting with various strategies to ensure rapid turnaround on security-related issues.
- KomoD 3y agoThen don't say that on the page, now I don't believe anything else on the site
- glitchc 3y agoThen I suggest not making this claim unless you solve the problem. Security patches are notoriously difficult to implement and test, one needs to recreate the attacking environment. But if you do solve it, kudos to you. Your solution will have companies come knocking at your door day and night. It's going to be worth a lot more than the distro.
- throwaway7356 3y agoAre other claims also not true and just ideas that might or might not be actually be implemented at some time in the future?
- peter_d_sherman 3y agoAdélie vs other musl distros: https://oldwww.adelielinux.org/about/compare.html https://oldwww.adelielinux.org/about/compare.html Non-BusyBox Userland (for me, and me alone!) is a slight minus; OpenRC is a strong plus... The individual Linux user's "mileage" -- will of course vary. Anyway, welcome Adélie Linux, to the potpourri of Linux distributions! (Hey, that's a good idea incidentally -- maybe in the future I'll create a Linux distro called "Potpourri Linux" -- it'll borrow something from every other Linux distribution! <g> :-) <g>)
- arittr 3y ago> Your needs are complex—and that's music to our ears because we're constantly looking for new ways to further refine Adélie. Please note that we do not support inherently broken designs. Idk i probably wouldn’t use this simply because of this text, but that’s just me.
- ForkMeOnTinder 3y agoYeah I hate this spammy marketing speak. > Whether you've taken a few photos with your phone's camera or you're a professional photographer with terabytes of digital negatives, Adélie gives you the tools you need to manage and view all your photos. Translation: > Adélie installs digiKam by default
- timw4mail 3y agoBut I like digiKam.
- Retr0id 3y agoIt seems like they're targeting low-end systems (384MB RAM for the desktop version), but also talk about supercomputers? If they can pull that off, it would make it uniquely versatile. Musl is very lightweight, but it's also not especially fast (for example, compare allocator benchmarks). But maybe supercomputer workloads don't really care about libc performance in the first place? I'd be curious to know what aspects they think make this distro suited to supercomputing.
- zv-io 3y agoOur aim is to offer a non-glibc Linux platform for supercomputing environments. This involves a tremendous amount of work to be taken seriously and we are currently in the earliest stage of this. Follow our blog (https://blog.adelielinux.org/ https://blog.adelielinux.org/) for updates in this space.
- Retr0id 3y agoWhat are the benefits of a non-glibc supercomputing environment?
- zv-io 3y agoDiversity in the ecosystem, possible reduction in memory footprint, ability to discover and fix issues in upstream projects that musl-based distros don't currently package, motivation to support CUDA (and other) runtimes that explicitly target glibc, unlock possible sources of funding to pay developers to work on these areas. The ability to audit a smaller codebase could be compelling for some sensitive environments. There is not an urgent or immediate problem with glibc in the HPC space, per se.
- Retr0id 3y agoDo you have any benchmarks etc. that compare performance of HPC workloads on glibc vs musl?
- 3y ago
- p0w3n3d 3y agoThat's handy, because I am looking for a fast Linux with small memory footprint, but reliable. I've been using Linux Mint Cinnamon for almost a year, in order to play Minecraft on my old computer (i5 3gen but lots of ram) and I managed to achieve +(10-14) FPS for the game Vs Windows. Also I have a spyware detector installed (a noisy fan) and it goes off constantly on my windows 10, while Linux leaving it mostly silent. Lifetime is also twice. I wonder what does the Windows 10 do to make my computer so noisy and slow. However Linux Mint Cinnamon is failing on standard tasks like configuring WiFi, built-in modem or changing system settings
- rmsaksida 3y ago> That's handy, because I am looking for a fast Linux with small memory footprint, but reliable. You might want to look into MX Linux. It's a Debian-based distro that offers a good balance of performance, package selection, administration tools etc. I'm running it on my 10yo Thinkpad right now and it's very speedy without relying on ancient software versions.
- hd4 3y agoBecause there was a real shortage of Linux distros
- palata 3y agoDiversity is good. Not everybody wants systemd with snaps and ElectronJS.
- doublerabbit 3y agoYour going to hate distrowatch.org then.
- agilob 3y ago>We don't attempt to solve every Linux Desktop problem. Because of this, we've already solved 99% of them. What are some distro specific problems? All problems with Linux in the last years I had were related to: HP printer/scanner (I upgraded to Brother) Xorg vs Wayland migration (some manual steps required to get things working OKish) systemctl not working well with recent bluetoothd I can't think of any distro-specific problems that anyone actually would suffer from, unless it's snapd, but that's self inflicted, so doesn't count.
- klysm 3y agoWhat does this mean? > systemctl not working well with recent bluetoothd
- snapplebobapple 3y agoWhy do i use this instead of alpine linux? I wish this used systemd, because thats what i am missing when i use alpine linux.
- dijit 3y agoSystemD was a topic the author talked about in a previous thread yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38889156 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38889156
- yjftsjthsd-h 3y agoI was under the impression that systemd doesn't mix with musl, so that's not really an option
- snapplebobapple 3y agoYou're probably right. I guess what I'm really looking for is something like ubuntu server but an even smaller attack default attack surface and with apk packaging since that just works and apt and rpm automatic update has either been too complex or buggy and lead to bad outcomes where patches I thought were being applied were not being applied. I'm not married to musl. Some of my stuff I would like to use breaks without systemd though.
- jasoneckert 3y agoThe ease at which anyone could create a new Linux distribution is both a good and bad aspect of the operating system in general. There are dozens of larger mainstream distributions in widespread use, as well as dozens of smaller distributions that serve a niche purpose well (e.g., Alpine). Unfortunately, there's also dozens of other distributions that claim to serve a purpose but don't actually do so, or overlap with other distributions that do so better. My initial impression from reading their website is that Adélie falls into the latter category. In other words, it isn't particular clear what niche or purpose Adélie is aimed at solving that other distributions don't already solve.
- palata 3y agoIf there is a community contributing to a distro and those people can daily-drive it, it's perfectly fine for me. A small community is very nice to learn: I tried Adelie in the past and I had to do stuff I never even conceived was necessary on another distro, and the community was helpful. In the meantime, Ubuntu is busy helping newbies run their terminal. Bonus if the distro does not use systemd or is not a copy of Ubuntu. Diversity is good.
- yjftsjthsd-h 3y agoAre there other distros with first class support for 32-bit powerpc? That's the (biggest current) driver for my interest in it
- sidkshatriya 3y agoIf you're interested in something like Adelie Linux, you might be interested in Chimera Linux. Both are musl libc based and both use Alpine's apk. * Chimera Linux uses BSD userland while Adelie uses GNU coreutils * Chimera has the dinit init system / service manager while Adelie uses OpenRC * Adelie uses gcc as far as I can tell while Chimera uses clang as the default system compiler * Chimera uses the scudo memory allocator rather than musl's default memory allocator. Scudo is apparently faster than musl's default allocator. Not aware of what Adelie does. In general, it is not clear to me why Adelie should be preferred over, say, Alpine. The differences don't seem that significant to me to make a switch from Alpine, if you currently use it. Full disclosure: I use Chimera and I like it. In particular, I like (a) clang/llvm usage as default compiler (b) the lovely and elegant cbuild package build system A recent Chimera Linux article: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38667503 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38667503 P.S. It would be great if they listed Chimera on: https://oldwww.adelielinux.org/about/compare.html https://oldwww.adelielinux.org/about/compare.html
- donkeybeer 3y agoWhat are your reasons for preferring clang over gcc?
- sidkshatriya 3y agoClang/LLVM allows a lot of tinkering and compiler software development that is more difficult with gcc. Clang/LLVM is just an easier platform for code instrumentation, cross compilation, code sanitizers, building your own compiler tool/language, understanding the codebase, good documentation to build your own LLVM based tools... It's a bonus that any tools/languages etc. you build using the LLVM infrastructure does not virally become GPL also. Aparently Clang is ~5% faster than GCC (at least on intel's latest chip) -- See https://www.phoronix.com/review/intel-meteorlake-gcc-clang https://www.phoronix.com/review/intel-meteorlake-gcc-clang . Though this is not a big deal for me -- it is just nice to know.
- donkeybeer 3y ago
- imiric 3y agoThey mention focusing on reliability several times, but I don't see what they're specifically doing to make the system reliable. Is the process supervisor (s6) the main thing? If so, how is s6 more reliable than systemd and other process supervisors? When I think of reliability, my main requirement is for my system to not break after an update, which is so common on Linux, unfortunately. This is a solved problem with Nix/Guix or filesystem snapshots, so any new distro that doesn't address this major concern is not worth switching to IMO. We already have a plethora of distros that don't do this right. I'm also not convinced why musl is specifically a selling point. IME some software breaks in strange ways with musl, and the glibc compatibility layer doesn't help. If I want a reliable system, I'd choose one with glibc over musl any day.
- amelius 3y agoProcess supervisors are inherently problematic because they are at the heart of a microservices model.
- awilfox 3y agoDisclosure: Founded the project, still have a somewhat active role in package maintenance. Updates/upgrades are a major area of focus and everyone I know who has tried it out was always impressed that they could just `apk upgrade`, reboot, and it'd all still be working fine. That shouldn't be such a high bar, but there it is, and we manage to clear it. Reliability is not just about updates. Reliability means shipping stable versions of packages, not betas or unmaintained patches/forks. Reliability means testing on physical hardware of different types, and virtual machines/hypervisors of different types, and seeing all packages working across all of them. During beta4, me and two others sat at a desk with a PowerBook G4, Power Mac G5, Pentium 4, Core i5, and RPi4, and beat the living ** out of all available packages. We found seven bugs, four of which were reported upstream, the other three being packaging issues we fixed. That's what reliability means to me.
- imiric 3y agoThanks for your perspective. It would be good to mention some of that on the About page. It's great that you focus on testing and stability, but incompatibilities and bugs will still creep through. There are infinite combinations of hardware, software and configuration, and realistically, you can't guarantee that an `apk upgrade` will be 100% safe every time for all users. It's in those situations that a snapshot-based rollback mechanism saves the day. I'm not trying to diminish the value of the work you and your team are doing. All of that is commendable. I just don't think we can ignore the benefits of atomic upgrades and safe rollbacks that tools like Nix provide. All distros should have some form of this, especially those that advertise reliability as a primary feature.
- Muromec 3y agoFinally something to install on Toshiba AC100 that is collecting dust in the bin of arm laptops.
- wkat4242 3y agoThanks. I still have two of those laying around. Didn't know it supported those!
- Muromec 3y agoI went on and actually did it. Surprisingly everything works on mainline kernel, only the video needed some tinkering. Needs to have pm runtime enable call on gr2d/gr3d devices to run opentegra-video and use new api env to run xorg on it. Nothing compared to where it was last time I checked. The most trouble for me was the block device change somewhere around 6.0 where mmcblk1 became mmcblk0 The ram is only 512M on mine so not especially useful. Some userspace stuff doesn’t run (firefox, thunderbird) due to instruction set being too old, so I guess mutt + some kind of terminal matrix client on i3 will be the thing of the day
- mgaunard 3y agoCan't claim to have solved the desktop when your text rendering looks so blurry even in screenshots.
- Retr0id 3y agoText rendering is almost always mediocre in screenshots, because the subpixel geometry can't be matched.
- nataliste 3y agoNote that Adélie Linux was begun in 2016. This distro is not new and I'm happy to see continued progress on it. I'll be sticking with Void due to muscle memory, but I'm very glad to see more non-Debian distros continue to mature.
- leke 3y agoThat's a beautiful website
- mrbn100ful 3y agoFail to see how this is the "answer" for the Linux desktop. "Compatibility" is the third keyword yet, no Libreoffice, Chromium, Flatpak and a barely up-to-date Firefox ESR 91. Also for the main page, "Security updates are nearly instant" fell like a big lie. I also noted that the KDE GUI doesn't start in Gnome Box, but does in Virtualbox.
- awilfox 3y agoLibreOffice is a known pain point we are trying to resolve. Flatpak is on my list of things to package. Firefox and Thunderbird 102 need Rust toolchain updates that are queued but not yet live. Chromium is a non-starter: it doesn't support musl libc, and even if it did, it doesn't support 3 of our 5 Tier 1 architectures. It also has significant issues regarding reliability, security, portability, and a rapid release schedule that would severely drain our presently limited resources testing all of the patch sets we would need to ship with it to make it work for us. But, when we have Flatpak available, you can always <s>punish yourself with</s> run Chromium via that, I suppose. I'll look in to Gnome Boxes; thanks for the report.
- kazinator 3y ago> We're architecting Adélie in pursuit of POSIX® Certification. That's a distracting waste of effort that has little value in 2024. (Do they need this to bid on some government or other contracts or something?)
- ralphc 3y agoClicking into Download you'll see that it supports PPC and PPC64, meaning it supports your PowerPC Macs, at least the New World Macs.