9 ms·

EasyOS: An experimental Linux distribution

281 points by skilled 2y ago

ChrisArchitect 2y ago
Some previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21023989 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21023989
altbdoor 2y ago
This brings fond memories of my younger days. I had an EEE PC 701SD, and had experimented with PuppyLinux on it. I instantly recognized Barry's name, and hope he is doing well.
jcalvinowens 2y ago
I have fond memories of Puppy Linux. As a teenager, I got a hold of some old scrap servers with arrays of big SCSI drives, but I couldn't figure out how to boot from the SCSI drives. So I just took all the hard drives out and kept a copy of the Puppy Linux CD in it... worked great! One of those servers was a dual-socket Pentium II.
StableAlkyne 2y ago
I love those distro's website! It's so incredibly clean: opens to a table of contents, and each page is mostly text. No dropdowns to go through, no hamburger menus to configure settings, no "can we install spyware cookies?" prompts This is the website the rest of the web should strive to be!
- aquova 2y ago
  I agree, I noticed that as well. It's funny how the whole world moved away from simple text pages because they seemed old fashioned, only for them really to be better than what they replaced. It reminds me a bit of https://thebestmotherfucking.website/ https://thebestmotherfucking.website/
- jakubmazanec 2y ago
  > This is the website the rest of the web should strive to be! Different point of view - this site is poorly designed, hard to navigate, hard to read. Just because it doesn't use any JavaScript doesn't automatically mean it's a good website.
  - fuzzfactor 2y ago
    >Just because it doesn't use any JavaScript doesn't automatically mean it's a good website. So true. All other things being equivalent, it can make the difference though, if only for the user.
  - dinglestepup 2y ago
    +1 the homepage is a wall of blue links a-la mid-90s. Hard to parse visually.
- lghh 2y ago
  I roughly agree with you in enjoying the table of contents.I wouldn't say I love the site though. I find the blue-on-white text difficult to read. Though, surprisingly, it's a bit easier to read on mobile for me. The line height is too short to read easily. I have a lot of trouble with the "How and why EasyOS is different" page. Especially on mobile where it's nearly unreadable for me.
alsetmusic 2y ago
I can’t lie, this link near the top automatically grabbed my interest. Not because I agree or disagree, but because I enjoy seeing strong opinions about software design articulated as core principles. [0] Why the ISO format has to die 0. https://easyos.org/about/why-the-iso-format-has-to-die.html https://easyos.org/about/why-the-iso-format-has-to-die.html
- fuzzfactor 2y ago
  >I enjoy seeing strong opinions about software design articulated as core principles. With you 100% on that. And fully appreciate Kauler's opinion on ISOs too.
eternityforest 2y ago
I spent a while researching and looking into the whole "run in RAM" idea and eventually concluded that preserving the flash write cycles needs to be baked into applications. If you run in RAM and flush periodically, you're probably gonna lose data at some point, what we actually need is software that doesn't rewrite a 6MB every minute for no reason, but still saves user data when it should. I'm not a fan of nonstandard hierarchies, lack of systemd, or running as root, but I do like how they focus on being batteries included and very GUI focused. Not that root is actually a security issue, because everything important is under your user most likely, but it makes it easier to make mistakes that you then can't fix because the system is broken.
lfmunoz4 2y ago
Needs a video demo, showing how to run it and the main features.
jmakov 2y ago
Runs as root. Not sure that's a good idea.
- majkinetor 2y ago
  Easy clearly can't be compared to any other Linux, judged by the page on how it's different [1]. That's why running as root in its case might be a good thing. [1]: https://easyos.org/about/how-and-why-easyos-is-different.html https://easyos.org/about/how-and-why-easyos-is-different.htm...
  - hulitu 2y ago
    [flagged]
    - segasaturn 2y ago
      > Easy runs each non-root app as its own user. For example, by default Firefox runs as user 'firefox', and SeaMonkey as user 'seamonkey'. Installed AppImages and Flatpaks also default to run as their own user. > It is easy to do the same for any app, that is, run it as its own user, isolated from other users. Exploits of apps will still need to escalate it looks like.
- exe34 2y ago
  to be fair, the whole root thing is relevant in multi user or cases where you're mucking about with an installation. if you're always careful to run as a non-privileged user, the most that could happen is that a browser vulnerability allows arbitrary execution of code as your user, allowing deletion, encryption, exfiltration of your personal data. so you're boned anyway.
  - ForHackernews 2y ago
    https://xkcd.com/1200/ https://xkcd.com/1200/
  - majkinetor 2y ago
darkwater 2y ago
https://easyos.org/dev/images/dir2sfs-2.png https://easyos.org/dev/images/dir2sfs-2.png What's "easy" here, exactly?
- deleted 2y ago
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- IshKebab 2y ago
  Honestly I have no idea what this is but the fact that it has a GUI with at least some discoverable fields is way above what I would expect from most Linux distros.
  - lfkdev 2y ago
    Cmon, we're not in 2005 anymore. Linux Desktop is fine for almost everyone even casual user with all big distros.
    - IshKebab 2y ago
      We use RHEL at work, and even though everyone is a programmer we still have regular issues. Two different people managed to accidentally uninstall GNOME and break their entire machine by uninstalling Python2 which it apparently depends on. You're probably thinking "well it will have said it was going to uninstall gnome - they just needed to read it!" and that is exactly why Linux will never really be ready for casual users.
      - logicprog 2y ago
        This is why image based distros are helpful. They still allow the same flexibility, but now you do your very deep system level customization either through overlays so that everything is recorded and reversible, or in the cloud through ci/cd so that if you mess something up it doesn't immediately affect your computer at all, and things can be more repeatable. Combine this with rollbacks and such and it's quite good.
    - 2y ago
FounderBurr 2y ago
[flagged]
yungporko 2y ago
my first thought was literally "this looks cool and useful, i wonder how everybody will shit all over it in the comments" and as usual hn did not disappoint lol
- justinjlynn 2y ago
  Yeah, people - in general - tend to do this with anything novel, sadly - especially novel design. See what Steve Balmer said about the iPhone for a commercial example. For Engineering examples, well, see the controversy around anything by Poettering (Systemd, PulseAudio, etc., etc.).
  - encom 2y ago
    >what Steve Balmer said about the iPhone The first iPhone, running iOS v1, was kinda shit. It's easy to look at what the iPhone is today and laugh at Ballmer, but I don't think what he said was wrong at the time he said it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eywi0h_Y5_U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eywi0h_Y5_U
  - jorvi 2y ago
    > For Engineering examples, well, see the controversy around anything by Poettering (Systemd, PulseAudio, etc., etc.). I love how you can’t get any sense out of them. “So, you can see that software Y is almost unmaintainable in practice due to no maintainers wanting to work on ancient codebases?” Yes. “And you won’t maintain them?” Yes. “And you will not pay someone to maintain them for you?” Yes. “But you will staunchly fight the suitable FOSS alternative?” Yes. “Even if it means a constant relative decline in performance and options, not to mention evermore terrible workarounds?” Yes. Makes my head spin.
    - yjftsjthsd-h 2y ago
      Multiple alternative to systemd are actively maintained.
  - bee_rider 2y ago
    I think it is sort of different, though, Balmer was motivated to minimize the iPhone because they were his competition. It is an attempt to manipulate people. This odd thing where commenters online are never impressed by any tech thing, I’m not sure what the motivation is. They don’t even get a reputation for being so clever and jaded, because they are mostly pseudonymous.
christophilus 2y ago
Huh. I was expecting another bland Debian wrapper, but this is pretty unique. Nicely done!
behnamoh 2y ago
easy ≠ simple. Often times we have: (implementation for programmer, UX for user) = (easy, complicated) | (hard, simple)
InMice 2y ago
Interesting, I think i will give it a try in virtualbox
- lproven 2y ago
  It's really hard, because the author is not only against limited user accounts, he is also against ISO files. https://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/easyos-2-3.html https://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/easyos-2-3.html
  - adamomada 2y ago
    He’s just doing it the Android way, separate user accounts for each application/binary. The one critical thing with running as root in my mind is clobbering some storage in /dev. Elsewhere in this thread the benefits are described , and im really curious if Linux could get a proper SAS/SAK working (your root password would only ever be entered into your trusted system login UI)
    - lproven 2y ago
      Interesting. Got any links to docs on how Android works in this respect, please?
  - InMice 2y ago
    Oh ok, I guess I probably won't give it a try then. I just like the look of the screenshots. Let the Linux GUI fragmentation carry on
    - lproven 2y ago
      Oh, I would, definitely! It's interesting, but it's hard to run in a VM. Easier on bare metal, via a dedicated USB key.
      - InMice 2y ago
        Ok I'll consider that, thanks for the tip.
Projectiboga 2y ago
This is a project by one of the original Puppy Linux guys. Puppy is a collection of Linux distributions that work a certain way. I think that focus is portable and live for them. This is his what he shifted to to better meet his own ideas, since Puppy is a group project.
bee_rider 2y ago
Based on the icon and some of the links, it looks to be connected somehow to PuppyLinux. Anyone know what the link is? PuppyLinux was my first distro, it was great fun to be able to boot directly from a flash drive. IIRC persistence was implemented by just writing to a file which could be located anywhere, even on a Windows system. It was a great way to get familiar without committing.
- deleted 2y ago
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- imabotbeep2937 2y ago
  Most modern distros have this out of box. Lot of Linux forums need to update their assumptions by about 20 years.
  - xwolfi 2y ago
    It's like crypto: you wouldnt attract anyone paying nearly enough if you had to invest to solve current problems without any idea if you even could. Might as well re-solve inefficiently past problems and you might catch a few passer bys.
  - bee_rider 2y ago
    Nowadays I just have a full hard drive in a USB enclosure, but it was nice to have in the CD era.
    - Geezus_42 2y ago
      https://www.ventoy.net/ https://www.ventoy.net/
  - 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 2y ago
    Getting persistence to work is a giant PITA lol I was doing it for work once and kept having problems. We used RUFUS, a Windows-only tool to make the drives. Making a new drive required Windows to format it, then Linux to copy the files, before it was usable. What a dumb process. I didn't use block-level imaging because I wanted to add new files easily or expand them to different drive sizes easily or something.
creata 2y ago
Between this, and Guix, and Nix, and Fedora Silverblue, a lot of distributions are doing atomic upgrades. Is there a reason atomic upgrades so popular now? Not that it's a bad thing. (Edit: The advantages of atomic upgrades are obvious. I'm asking what changed to make it practical.)
- PlutoIsAPlanet 2y ago
  in the case of Silverblue - Pushes the use of containers for apps, /usr is read-only (mostly). in most cases Flatpak and Podman/Docker/Distrobox/Toolbox - Makes reproducible builds, your /usr is the base fedora image + whatever you have explicitly configured to add, the latter part makes it very easy to customise the base OS and undo changes (which are tracked), or share changes with others. - Updates are atomic, you pull the power cord during an update? no bueno will just boot the old deployment. Additionally, because the system is always in a known and immutable state, updates should always work without any kind of dependency/package issue, your swapping one /usr for another. - Makes malware harder as /usr is read only and you can use composefs to make sure content isn't changed, not really that secure though given any malware can just infect the initramfs
  - prmoustache 2y ago
    Aren't malware nowadays targetting the home directory? with so many users installing executables, language interpreters or cloud management binaries in their homedir I wouldn't even bother trying to elevate privileges and/or infect /usr if I was writing a malware. Especially as all the interesting parts that are worth being stolen are also in the homedir.
    - PlutoIsAPlanet 2y ago
      Yeh all you need to really do is just alias sudo in the shell profile and you can steal the users password to elevate to root. Flatpak/Containers can prevent it but permissions are up to the developer/packager.
- yjftsjthsd-h 2y ago
poikroequ 2y ago
> No ISO! ISO for optical media is a legacy format. This comes off as fairly ignorant. Virtual machines? Ventoy? There are lots of tools which can flash an ISO to a thumb drive or similar. ISO files are far more useful than just burning them to optical media.
- PlutoIsAPlanet 2y ago
  Ventoy and flash tools should in theory support img files just fine, if anything for virtual machines img files should be easier to boot than ISOs (don't need to emulate a CD drive) Modern Linux ISOs are a sort of hacked hybrid ISO/IMG, where keeping support for burning to CDs (the ISO part) has some trade offs (such as workarounds needed for persistence storage, multiple partitions).
  - gertop 2y ago
    "In theory" being the key word here. For whatever reason, it's a pita to use raw images with both virtualbox and VMware. You have to resort to third party command line tools to convert the image (qemu-img).
- josephcsible 2y ago
  Exactly. And it's not like they'd need to ship two versions of the installer; a single hybrid ISO that works both ways is what basically every other distro already does.
- rascul 2y ago
  ISOs make little sense over a regular disk or filesystem image for just about every use case except burning to optical media, a use case I understand to be quite rare (but not completely gone) nowadays. I know nothing about Ventoy, though.
  - alganet 2y ago
    Optical media was designed for distribution, ISOs and their use cases evolved around the same goal. A good example is VirtualBox Guest Additions that packs several drivers for multiple OSs in a single ISO and leverages the autorun mechanism to simplify automation for end users.
jvalencia 2y ago
[flagged]
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
allanrbo 2y ago
Refreshing to see such a radically different take on a Linux distro. Probably too experimental for what I need, but I’m glad people are thinking outside the box!
lta 2y ago
I probably wouldn't actually use this distro, as I'm probably not the target audience but they're exploring quite a few novel ideas. Good luck guys
caseyy 2y ago
In theory, this is very exciting. I wonder how much things will crash and burn with so many departures from expected Linux practices like all-apps-one-user (with some exceptions like web servers that would already run under their own users). But I might give it a go on bare metal…
- fuzzfactor 2y ago
  >give it a go on bare metal… Ain't nothin like the real thing baby . . .
gigatexal 2y ago
The user runs as root seems odd from a security point of view.
- 4fterd4rk 2y ago
  It's just an implementation of the Windows model, for better or worse. In most cases, the user can do whatever they want (outside of an enterprise environment) with the restrictions handled on a program by program basis.
  - gigatexal 2y ago
    This is DOA then for me. Even on windows though there are some “administrator” level things that need escalated privileges to do.
sweeter 2y ago
off the rip, where tf is the download? It is hard to find. Outside of that, it seems like a really interesting distro. Running mostly everything as root strikes me as kinda nuts but it seems like there is a lot of containerization and most apps run as their own user so it mitigates some of that risk. Im going to check it out, I like the idea of non-standard linux distros and leveraging containers and squashfs archives.
- ogurechny 2y ago
  It's s gentle hint to read at least something about the system. Helps newbies to learn how something works before complaining that it doesn't, and does not affect experienced users who are more interested in ideas behind the work, and start with documentation. There is no rule that everything should have a giant green download button promising some kind of instant satisfaction.
- ozfive 2y ago
  https://distro.ibiblio.org/easyos/amd64/releases/ https://distro.ibiblio.org/easyos/amd64/releases/
- hnlmorg 2y ago
  I wouldn’t advocate running everything as root either but it is worth noting that most of the valuable information (bank account details, for example) are going to be stored under your current user rather than root. https://xkcd.com/1200/ https://xkcd.com/1200/ What we really need is a better way to segregate sensitive user applications from non-sensitive ones. Like Firefox containers but closer to an application level and something that is easier for the average user to manage than the likes of SELinux. Maybe that’s the point of the containers in EasyOS?
martin293 2y ago
I would appreciate an explicit statement about who this OS is intended for, is it laypeople, some subset of linux users, somebody else entirely? Or is it just a hobby project that has gained traction?
- fuzzfactor 2y ago
  The engineer is making constant progress separately from the well-established main Puppy Linux community that he got going to begin with years ago. Whom are still making progress too, and they have different current versions with some more well-defined user groups in mind. That's the ones that have traction. I like this EasyOS project but I would say the intended users are a lot more of a moving target compared to the regular Pups. And that's good since there are fewer forces that confine the ultimate direction in which it may go.
ozim 2y ago
*The objective is that everything in Easy be configured by simple GUIs, without having to fiddle about on the commandline* Screen with 20 checkboxes is never going to make simple GUI. I can imagine “configuring most common cases should be possible with simple GUIs” but *everything* is going to be challenging.
- epr 2y ago
  I've been daily driving Linux for maybe 10 years, and I see all these pushes for "lets make it easy. no cli!" as counter-productive. The cli is the interface on unix based systems, and the more time you spend learning fundamental knowledge like that instead of some ephemeral, unportable skin for the cli, the better off you'll be.
  - djbusby 2y ago
    For power users. General users want this point and click thing, Windows/Mac got them used to it. It's sorta functional on mobile OS too. Its not like the CLI would (ever) disappear.
    - ozim 2y ago
      Problem is that some things will be hard no matter what. There are people that believe that everything should or can be easy. It is just painful to watch those people. Yes you can build some software that will make FFT useful and you don’t even know you use FFT in an application. But telling if an image is important for you to not compress it lossless way or 1000 of your images is or is not - well you have to sit down and make decisions and go one by one or make some rules that won’t be perfect.
- hnlmorg 2y ago
  Depends if they mean “everything” as in every option, or “everything” as in every service. The latter implies only common needs covered in the GUI. Edit: the complete source paragraph does go on to list services. Which confirms they’re talking about every service rather than every imaginable operation.
soniman 2y ago
How much faster / smaller is this than a minimal Linux distro like Xubuntu?
n2fole00 2y ago
Good to see there are still things being tried out in the linux scene. The author is the creator of Puppy linux, so this should be an exciting development.
Vox_Leone 2y ago
Puppy Linux made me feel the sweet taste of freedom many years ago. It was the one which introduced me to the GNU/Linux ecosystem. I owe B. Kauler big time, and I wish him all the success in this world.
indigodaddy 2y ago
[Reading through the comments,] it’s interesting how a huge swath of new HN tech nerds has never heard of puppy. I feel old. I guess such is life..
- throwaway211 2y ago
  No recall. Everyone used slackware didn't they?
  - fuzzfactor 2y ago
    >Everyone used slackware didn't they? Slightly, I recall. I'm not old, my beard just came out gray while I was waiting for all those USB sticks to boot since USB1 ;) Kauler is brilliant. I couldn't have gotten as far as fast once I found Puppy, because quite simply the fewer megabytes the size of the distribution, the faster the bootup. And there was nothing else as small that booted all the regular Linux ways (including from FAT32 using Syslinux), and was worth being a user after you were booted :) As for ISOs, more perfect images would be great. For one thing they're wonderful for consistency, starting with the fundamental structure of partitioning & formatting which is copied bitwise identically from the master to the target as it overwrites the whole target. Simultaneously with all the user-oriented files within the file system, ideally it's like a forensic copy. Also sometimes the boot files are finicky, or take a while to get right, and once it really works as robustly as possible on the master device, it would be perfect if every target device needed no attention whatsoever even though booting is very important to pay attention to. Not only will the exact user boot files be there on the target's resulting filesystem, the hidden boot records will too whether they are part of the filesystem or not. And further, the boot files in the filesystem will be at the exact same sector locations as the master. So will all the other files & folders. You can't get much more identical than that. With bitwise copying, even the unused space within the filesystem will be copied verbatim from the master to the target, whether it contains zeros or vestiges of previously deleted data. And the filesystem is not even actually completely there until the bitwise image has finished copying to the target. Just like an ISO was when you actually were burning to CDs, maybe at an earlier time than you were writing any USB drives. And images are usually way faster than copying the exact same files by using an OS to copy them to a freshly formatted filesystem the regular filewise way. Whether copy & paste or CLI.[0] I went through images backwards and forwards, have gotten a lot of reliable use out of it. And you really can end up with equivalent performance either way. When you do end up with the same performance that is :\ Turns out identical is not what you want with USB sticks. more background No matter of any "hybrid" approaches (even before UEFI) trying to make an ISO that could be directly copied to USB, modified ISO's are just not very good at copying to USB sticks and having them functionally boot like an ISO is supposed to do. Even when all the files and folders on the target end up fully accessible, performant, and error-free. It can be a frustrating thing. Image files have a problem too, the hardware that the master image was saved from may be so dissimilar to the target media, that performance of that particular target, perhaps when interacting with other supposedly-compatible hardware such as motherboards, will be abysmal compared to the master device, and unpredictable across various motherboards. Not such a big deal with HDDs and barely noticeable with SSDs but can really bring otherwise-satisfying USB devices to their knees. Sometimes yes, sometimes no. All targets within the same SKU as the master but some have slightly different controllers, firmware, or memory chips? Ruh-roh. Differernt SKUs on the USBs? I wouldn't be that confident any more. Depends on how you handle the image file. As long as you treat it like a standard ISO and mount it before copying filewise to a previously-prepared filesystem on a bootable USB stick, you should be fine :\ More or less what Rufus does automagically, he is brilliant too. It does kind of defeat the purpose of having an image that's supposed to be copied bitwise directly to a target though. Using dd or Etcher is so much quicker but then you're just playing the odds. Decades ago for USB booting I used to think images were ideal. But I was wrong. Completely wrong. Wrong about standards and I'm a standardization guy. How much more embarrassing can you get? If it's supposed to be Linux (no matter whether DVDs or USBs become obsolete) ISOs boot using Isolinux, HDDs SSDs & USBs boot equivalently using Syslinux, and you can do it over a network using Pxelinux. These have all been very stable references for very long. ISO files are an even older standard than Isolinux, which makes it even more fundamental so it's always been golden. Now I realize that. Everything that continues to trace back to this standard has a remaining chance to perform at least as reliably over the long term as ISO's have already performed so far. The continuity among Linux distributions using ISOs so far will be unmatched for decades to come no matter what happens. And ISOs were made for direct copying bitwise to their target media. Too bad it's just not right at all for very many USB sticks, so instead you have to first mount the ISO and copy the files & folders to an already-bootable previously-prepared USB drive. I'm not going to be regularly copying ISOs bitwise to optical disk devices any more (if I can avoid it), so in the future (starting quite a while ago) I'm not likely to use an ISO for what it was originally intended to do, if at all. Doesn't seem like anybody's going to be using ISOs to burn directly bitwise to media any more, which is the only reason ISO became the Linux standard for distribution to begin with, so why are ISOs needed going forward at all? Too late, ISO (as the name implies) is now more valuable as a standard than it ever was for burning discs. So now the further you go into the 21st century you really need the ISO's to keep working, more so than ever ! Even if nobody's burning discs. You can't make this up :] And after exhaustively confirming that images are far less reliable for copying bitwise to USB sticks compared to ISOs when using optical, it leaves us back where we started without a worthwhile image file type than can always be overwritten to a USB whole-hog and have it boot. But at least you can still do it with DVD's using ISOs if you really have to, no different than ever. Probably because an IMG (just like an ISO) is a filetype entirely focused on only one thing, writing it to a target device to make a perfect clone of the bitwise data pattern from one drive to another. Or to copy back to the same drive during a restoration event. Can't mistake that, it's either a true copy or not. Even if IMG is way older than ISO, it worked for floppies no different than it does today. The motherboard still just responds to whatever bit pattern it finds on the boot device, regardless of MBR, UEFI, EXTx, NTFS etc. I didn't think too much about it either, but there's a lot more electronics in between the motherboard and the bits residing on the storage medium for a USB than there was for a floppy. And a lot more "chance" for variation. Too bad IMG is not a standard filetype. But as long as it can be overwritten to the same device it came from and result in a perfect restoration from backup, it's job is accomplished with flying colors, and it almost never fails. So if you're worried about the age of the filetype, IMG is so much more elderly than ISO that it was almost repressed bad enough to be forgotten (since not everybody wanted you to make perfect clones), which is probably why nobody came along to extend it for anything beyond everyday floppy use. Floppies worked just fine and were interchangeable without a detailed functional standard IMG filetype at all. But without a standard, IMG is just a filetype in name only which is why it's still the right file extension to use when you are going to be overwriting a whole drive of any kind with it later. That's exactly what it's for, and nothing else. And after a lengthy famine, there are now more brilliant tools that mount and handle wildly diverse IMG files simply because they are known to be a complete drive image. So all an IMG needs to do is behave like a drive image (as long as a particular IMG does that, no standard needed), it can be mounted and people are so much more familiar with VMs which helps a lot for those who've never used a floppy yet. Barry is brilliant but others are too. IMG works about as good on a whole hard drive as it did on a floppy, lots of USB's too when you're getting lucky. Hard drives have so much more in common with each other but they're not perfect either. But it's not ever been expected to work every time when the master and the target are less-than-identical hardware. Remember at one time almost every IMG file was targeted to deploy on floppy media, approximately 1.44mb in size, containing 2880 sectors. Worked fine without a filetype standard then, and anything other than 2880 sectors would trigger the question "exactly what hardware am I supposed to write this file to?" The thing about standards is, lots of people struggle if they aspire to meet a standard. You may or may not quite make it. But nobody says just because you conform, that you have to stop right there. People generate millions by exceeding a standard when others are not. They can match others' work but others can not match theirs. GRUB has got to be able to work too, it's under constant maintenance and has way more modern features. And this Limine bootloader looks really promising. It has nowhere to go but up. They've all got to work on every kind of Linux at least, with any other OS's being icing on the cake ! Less than that could be the result of a bug, maybe even a defect. [0] Which filewise sometimes amount to a mere fraction of the GB actually transferred when done imagewise.

281 points by skilled 2y ago

Some previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21023989 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21023989

This brings fond memories of my younger days. I had an EEE PC 701SD, and had experimented with PuppyLinux on it. I instantly recognized Barry's name, and hope he is doing well.

jcalvinowens 2y ago

I have fond memories of Puppy Linux. As a teenager, I got a hold of some old scrap servers with arrays of big SCSI drives, but I couldn't figure out how to boot from the SCSI drives. So I just took all the hard drives out and kept a copy of the Puppy Linux CD in it... worked great! One of those servers was a dual-socket Pentium II.

StableAlkyne 2y ago

I love those distro's website! It's so incredibly clean: opens to a table of contents, and each page is mostly text. No dropdowns to go through, no hamburger menus to configure settings, no "can we install spyware cookies?" prompts This is the website the rest of the web should strive to be!

aquova 2y ago
I agree, I noticed that as well. It's funny how the whole world moved away from simple text pages because they seemed old fashioned, only for them really to be better than what they replaced. It reminds me a bit of https://thebestmotherfucking.website/ https://thebestmotherfucking.website/
jakubmazanec 2y ago
> This is the website the rest of the web should strive to be! Different point of view - this site is poorly designed, hard to navigate, hard to read. Just because it doesn't use any JavaScript doesn't automatically mean it's a good website.
- fuzzfactor 2y ago
  >Just because it doesn't use any JavaScript doesn't automatically mean it's a good website. So true. All other things being equivalent, it can make the difference though, if only for the user.
- dinglestepup 2y ago
  +1 the homepage is a wall of blue links a-la mid-90s. Hard to parse visually.
lghh 2y ago
I roughly agree with you in enjoying the table of contents.I wouldn't say I love the site though. I find the blue-on-white text difficult to read. Though, surprisingly, it's a bit easier to read on mobile for me. The line height is too short to read easily. I have a lot of trouble with the "How and why EasyOS is different" page. Especially on mobile where it's nearly unreadable for me.

alsetmusic 2y ago

I can’t lie, this link near the top automatically grabbed my interest. Not because I agree or disagree, but because I enjoy seeing strong opinions about software design articulated as core principles. [0] Why the ISO format has to die 0. https://easyos.org/about/why-the-iso-format-has-to-die.html https://easyos.org/about/why-the-iso-format-has-to-die.html

fuzzfactor 2y ago
>I enjoy seeing strong opinions about software design articulated as core principles. With you 100% on that. And fully appreciate Kauler's opinion on ISOs too.

eternityforest 2y ago

I spent a while researching and looking into the whole "run in RAM" idea and eventually concluded that preserving the flash write cycles needs to be baked into applications. If you run in RAM and flush periodically, you're probably gonna lose data at some point, what we actually need is software that doesn't rewrite a 6MB every minute for no reason, but still saves user data when it should. I'm not a fan of nonstandard hierarchies, lack of systemd, or running as root, but I do like how they focus on being batteries included and very GUI focused. Not that root is actually a security issue, because everything important is under your user most likely, but it makes it easier to make mistakes that you then can't fix because the system is broken.

lfmunoz4 2y ago

Needs a video demo, showing how to run it and the main features.

jmakov 2y ago

Runs as root. Not sure that's a good idea.

majkinetor 2y ago
Easy clearly can't be compared to any other Linux, judged by the page on how it's different [1]. That's why running as root in its case might be a good thing. [1]: https://easyos.org/about/how-and-why-easyos-is-different.html https://easyos.org/about/how-and-why-easyos-is-different.htm...
- hulitu 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - segasaturn 2y ago
    > Easy runs each non-root app as its own user. For example, by default Firefox runs as user 'firefox', and SeaMonkey as user 'seamonkey'. Installed AppImages and Flatpaks also default to run as their own user. > It is easy to do the same for any app, that is, run it as its own user, isolated from other users. Exploits of apps will still need to escalate it looks like.
exe34 2y ago
to be fair, the whole root thing is relevant in multi user or cases where you're mucking about with an installation. if you're always careful to run as a non-privileged user, the most that could happen is that a browser vulnerability allows arbitrary execution of code as your user, allowing deletion, encryption, exfiltration of your personal data. so you're boned anyway.
- ForHackernews 2y ago
  https://xkcd.com/1200/ https://xkcd.com/1200/
- majkinetor 2y ago

darkwater 2y ago

https://easyos.org/dev/images/dir2sfs-2.png https://easyos.org/dev/images/dir2sfs-2.png What's "easy" here, exactly?

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IshKebab 2y ago
Honestly I have no idea what this is but the fact that it has a GUI with at least some discoverable fields is way above what I would expect from most Linux distros.
- lfkdev 2y ago
  Cmon, we're not in 2005 anymore. Linux Desktop is fine for almost everyone even casual user with all big distros.
  - IshKebab 2y ago
    We use RHEL at work, and even though everyone is a programmer we still have regular issues. Two different people managed to accidentally uninstall GNOME and break their entire machine by uninstalling Python2 which it apparently depends on. You're probably thinking "well it will have said it was going to uninstall gnome - they just needed to read it!" and that is exactly why Linux will never really be ready for casual users.
    - logicprog 2y ago
      This is why image based distros are helpful. They still allow the same flexibility, but now you do your very deep system level customization either through overlays so that everything is recorded and reversible, or in the cloud through ci/cd so that if you mess something up it doesn't immediately affect your computer at all, and things can be more repeatable. Combine this with rollbacks and such and it's quite good.
  - 2y ago

FounderBurr 2y ago

[flagged]

yungporko 2y ago

my first thought was literally "this looks cool and useful, i wonder how everybody will shit all over it in the comments" and as usual hn did not disappoint lol

justinjlynn 2y ago
Yeah, people - in general - tend to do this with anything novel, sadly - especially novel design. See what Steve Balmer said about the iPhone for a commercial example. For Engineering examples, well, see the controversy around anything by Poettering (Systemd, PulseAudio, etc., etc.).
- encom 2y ago
  >what Steve Balmer said about the iPhone The first iPhone, running iOS v1, was kinda shit. It's easy to look at what the iPhone is today and laugh at Ballmer, but I don't think what he said was wrong at the time he said it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eywi0h_Y5_U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eywi0h_Y5_U
- jorvi 2y ago
  > For Engineering examples, well, see the controversy around anything by Poettering (Systemd, PulseAudio, etc., etc.). I love how you can’t get any sense out of them. “So, you can see that software Y is almost unmaintainable in practice due to no maintainers wanting to work on ancient codebases?” Yes. “And you won’t maintain them?” Yes. “And you will not pay someone to maintain them for you?” Yes. “But you will staunchly fight the suitable FOSS alternative?” Yes. “Even if it means a constant relative decline in performance and options, not to mention evermore terrible workarounds?” Yes. Makes my head spin.
  - yjftsjthsd-h 2y ago
    Multiple alternative to systemd are actively maintained.
- bee_rider 2y ago
  I think it is sort of different, though, Balmer was motivated to minimize the iPhone because they were his competition. It is an attempt to manipulate people. This odd thing where commenters online are never impressed by any tech thing, I’m not sure what the motivation is. They don’t even get a reputation for being so clever and jaded, because they are mostly pseudonymous.

christophilus 2y ago

Huh. I was expecting another bland Debian wrapper, but this is pretty unique. Nicely done!

behnamoh 2y ago

easy ≠ simple. Often times we have: (implementation for programmer, UX for user) = (easy, complicated) | (hard, simple)

InMice 2y ago

Interesting, I think i will give it a try in virtualbox

lproven 2y ago
It's really hard, because the author is not only against limited user accounts, he is also against ISO files. https://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/easyos-2-3.html https://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/easyos-2-3.html
- adamomada 2y ago
  He’s just doing it the Android way, separate user accounts for each application/binary. The one critical thing with running as root in my mind is clobbering some storage in /dev. Elsewhere in this thread the benefits are described , and im really curious if Linux could get a proper SAS/SAK working (your root password would only ever be entered into your trusted system login UI)
  - lproven 2y ago
    Interesting. Got any links to docs on how Android works in this respect, please?
- InMice 2y ago
  Oh ok, I guess I probably won't give it a try then. I just like the look of the screenshots. Let the Linux GUI fragmentation carry on
  - lproven 2y ago
    Oh, I would, definitely! It's interesting, but it's hard to run in a VM. Easier on bare metal, via a dedicated USB key.
    - InMice 2y ago
      Ok I'll consider that, thanks for the tip.

Projectiboga 2y ago

This is a project by one of the original Puppy Linux guys. Puppy is a collection of Linux distributions that work a certain way. I think that focus is portable and live for them. This is his what he shifted to to better meet his own ideas, since Puppy is a group project.

bee_rider 2y ago

Based on the icon and some of the links, it looks to be connected somehow to PuppyLinux. Anyone know what the link is? PuppyLinux was my first distro, it was great fun to be able to boot directly from a flash drive. IIRC persistence was implemented by just writing to a file which could be located anywhere, even on a Windows system. It was a great way to get familiar without committing.

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imabotbeep2937 2y ago
Most modern distros have this out of box. Lot of Linux forums need to update their assumptions by about 20 years.
- xwolfi 2y ago
  It's like crypto: you wouldnt attract anyone paying nearly enough if you had to invest to solve current problems without any idea if you even could. Might as well re-solve inefficiently past problems and you might catch a few passer bys.
- bee_rider 2y ago
  Nowadays I just have a full hard drive in a USB enclosure, but it was nice to have in the CD era.
  - Geezus_42 2y ago
    https://www.ventoy.net/ https://www.ventoy.net/
- 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 2y ago
  Getting persistence to work is a giant PITA lol I was doing it for work once and kept having problems. We used RUFUS, a Windows-only tool to make the drives. Making a new drive required Windows to format it, then Linux to copy the files, before it was usable. What a dumb process. I didn't use block-level imaging because I wanted to add new files easily or expand them to different drive sizes easily or something.

creata 2y ago

Between this, and Guix, and Nix, and Fedora Silverblue, a lot of distributions are doing atomic upgrades. Is there a reason atomic upgrades so popular now? Not that it's a bad thing. (Edit: The advantages of atomic upgrades are obvious. I'm asking what changed to make it practical.)

PlutoIsAPlanet 2y ago
in the case of Silverblue - Pushes the use of containers for apps, /usr is read-only (mostly). in most cases Flatpak and Podman/Docker/Distrobox/Toolbox - Makes reproducible builds, your /usr is the base fedora image + whatever you have explicitly configured to add, the latter part makes it very easy to customise the base OS and undo changes (which are tracked), or share changes with others. - Updates are atomic, you pull the power cord during an update? no bueno will just boot the old deployment. Additionally, because the system is always in a known and immutable state, updates should always work without any kind of dependency/package issue, your swapping one /usr for another. - Makes malware harder as /usr is read only and you can use composefs to make sure content isn't changed, not really that secure though given any malware can just infect the initramfs
- prmoustache 2y ago
  Aren't malware nowadays targetting the home directory? with so many users installing executables, language interpreters or cloud management binaries in their homedir I wouldn't even bother trying to elevate privileges and/or infect /usr if I was writing a malware. Especially as all the interesting parts that are worth being stolen are also in the homedir.
  - PlutoIsAPlanet 2y ago
    Yeh all you need to really do is just alias sudo in the shell profile and you can steal the users password to elevate to root. Flatpak/Containers can prevent it but permissions are up to the developer/packager.
yjftsjthsd-h 2y ago

poikroequ 2y ago

> No ISO! ISO for optical media is a legacy format. This comes off as fairly ignorant. Virtual machines? Ventoy? There are lots of tools which can flash an ISO to a thumb drive or similar. ISO files are far more useful than just burning them to optical media.

PlutoIsAPlanet 2y ago
Ventoy and flash tools should in theory support img files just fine, if anything for virtual machines img files should be easier to boot than ISOs (don't need to emulate a CD drive) Modern Linux ISOs are a sort of hacked hybrid ISO/IMG, where keeping support for burning to CDs (the ISO part) has some trade offs (such as workarounds needed for persistence storage, multiple partitions).
- gertop 2y ago
  "In theory" being the key word here. For whatever reason, it's a pita to use raw images with both virtualbox and VMware. You have to resort to third party command line tools to convert the image (qemu-img).
josephcsible 2y ago
Exactly. And it's not like they'd need to ship two versions of the installer; a single hybrid ISO that works both ways is what basically every other distro already does.
rascul 2y ago
ISOs make little sense over a regular disk or filesystem image for just about every use case except burning to optical media, a use case I understand to be quite rare (but not completely gone) nowadays. I know nothing about Ventoy, though.
- alganet 2y ago
  Optical media was designed for distribution, ISOs and their use cases evolved around the same goal. A good example is VirtualBox Guest Additions that packs several drivers for multiple OSs in a single ISO and leverages the autorun mechanism to simplify automation for end users.

jvalencia 2y ago

[flagged]

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[deleted]

allanrbo 2y ago

Refreshing to see such a radically different take on a Linux distro. Probably too experimental for what I need, but I’m glad people are thinking outside the box!

lta 2y ago

I probably wouldn't actually use this distro, as I'm probably not the target audience but they're exploring quite a few novel ideas. Good luck guys

caseyy 2y ago

In theory, this is very exciting. I wonder how much things will crash and burn with so many departures from expected Linux practices like all-apps-one-user (with some exceptions like web servers that would already run under their own users). But I might give it a go on bare metal…

fuzzfactor 2y ago
>give it a go on bare metal… Ain't nothin like the real thing baby . . .

gigatexal 2y ago

The user runs as root seems odd from a security point of view.

4fterd4rk 2y ago
It's just an implementation of the Windows model, for better or worse. In most cases, the user can do whatever they want (outside of an enterprise environment) with the restrictions handled on a program by program basis.
- gigatexal 2y ago
  This is DOA then for me. Even on windows though there are some “administrator” level things that need escalated privileges to do.

sweeter 2y ago

off the rip, where tf is the download? It is hard to find. Outside of that, it seems like a really interesting distro. Running mostly everything as root strikes me as kinda nuts but it seems like there is a lot of containerization and most apps run as their own user so it mitigates some of that risk. Im going to check it out, I like the idea of non-standard linux distros and leveraging containers and squashfs archives.

ogurechny 2y ago
It's s gentle hint to read at least something about the system. Helps newbies to learn how something works before complaining that it doesn't, and does not affect experienced users who are more interested in ideas behind the work, and start with documentation. There is no rule that everything should have a giant green download button promising some kind of instant satisfaction.
ozfive 2y ago
https://distro.ibiblio.org/easyos/amd64/releases/ https://distro.ibiblio.org/easyos/amd64/releases/
hnlmorg 2y ago
I wouldn’t advocate running everything as root either but it is worth noting that most of the valuable information (bank account details, for example) are going to be stored under your current user rather than root. https://xkcd.com/1200/ https://xkcd.com/1200/ What we really need is a better way to segregate sensitive user applications from non-sensitive ones. Like Firefox containers but closer to an application level and something that is easier for the average user to manage than the likes of SELinux. Maybe that’s the point of the containers in EasyOS?

martin293 2y ago

I would appreciate an explicit statement about who this OS is intended for, is it laypeople, some subset of linux users, somebody else entirely? Or is it just a hobby project that has gained traction?

fuzzfactor 2y ago
The engineer is making constant progress separately from the well-established main Puppy Linux community that he got going to begin with years ago. Whom are still making progress too, and they have different current versions with some more well-defined user groups in mind. That's the ones that have traction. I like this EasyOS project but I would say the intended users are a lot more of a moving target compared to the regular Pups. And that's good since there are fewer forces that confine the ultimate direction in which it may go.

ozim 2y ago

*The objective is that everything in Easy be configured by simple GUIs, without having to fiddle about on the commandline* Screen with 20 checkboxes is never going to make simple GUI. I can imagine “configuring most common cases should be possible with simple GUIs” but *everything* is going to be challenging.

epr 2y ago
I've been daily driving Linux for maybe 10 years, and I see all these pushes for "lets make it easy. no cli!" as counter-productive. The cli is the interface on unix based systems, and the more time you spend learning fundamental knowledge like that instead of some ephemeral, unportable skin for the cli, the better off you'll be.
- djbusby 2y ago
  For power users. General users want this point and click thing, Windows/Mac got them used to it. It's sorta functional on mobile OS too. Its not like the CLI would (ever) disappear.
  - ozim 2y ago
    Problem is that some things will be hard no matter what. There are people that believe that everything should or can be easy. It is just painful to watch those people. Yes you can build some software that will make FFT useful and you don’t even know you use FFT in an application. But telling if an image is important for you to not compress it lossless way or 1000 of your images is or is not - well you have to sit down and make decisions and go one by one or make some rules that won’t be perfect.
hnlmorg 2y ago
Depends if they mean “everything” as in every option, or “everything” as in every service. The latter implies only common needs covered in the GUI. Edit: the complete source paragraph does go on to list services. Which confirms they’re talking about every service rather than every imaginable operation.

soniman 2y ago

How much faster / smaller is this than a minimal Linux distro like Xubuntu?

n2fole00 2y ago

Good to see there are still things being tried out in the linux scene. The author is the creator of Puppy linux, so this should be an exciting development.

Vox_Leone 2y ago

Puppy Linux made me feel the sweet taste of freedom many years ago. It was the one which introduced me to the GNU/Linux ecosystem. I owe B. Kauler big time, and I wish him all the success in this world.

indigodaddy 2y ago

[Reading through the comments,] it’s interesting how a huge swath of new HN tech nerds has never heard of puppy. I feel old. I guess such is life..

throwaway211 2y ago
No recall. Everyone used slackware didn't they?
- fuzzfactor 2y ago
  >Everyone used slackware didn't they? Slightly, I recall. I'm not old, my beard just came out gray while I was waiting for all those USB sticks to boot since USB1 ;) Kauler is brilliant. I couldn't have gotten as far as fast once I found Puppy, because quite simply the fewer megabytes the size of the distribution, the faster the bootup. And there was nothing else as small that booted all the regular Linux ways (including from FAT32 using Syslinux), and was worth being a user after you were booted :) As for ISOs, more perfect images would be great. For one thing they're wonderful for consistency, starting with the fundamental structure of partitioning & formatting which is copied bitwise identically from the master to the target as it overwrites the whole target. Simultaneously with all the user-oriented files within the file system, ideally it's like a forensic copy. Also sometimes the boot files are finicky, or take a while to get right, and once it really works as robustly as possible on the master device, it would be perfect if every target device needed no attention whatsoever even though booting is very important to pay attention to. Not only will the exact user boot files be there on the target's resulting filesystem, the hidden boot records will too whether they are part of the filesystem or not. And further, the boot files in the filesystem will be at the exact same sector locations as the master. So will all the other files & folders. You can't get much more identical than that. With bitwise copying, even the unused space within the filesystem will be copied verbatim from the master to the target, whether it contains zeros or vestiges of previously deleted data. And the filesystem is not even actually completely there until the bitwise image has finished copying to the target. Just like an ISO was when you actually were burning to CDs, maybe at an earlier time than you were writing any USB drives. And images are usually way faster than copying the exact same files by using an OS to copy them to a freshly formatted filesystem the regular filewise way. Whether copy & paste or CLI.[0] I went through images backwards and forwards, have gotten a lot of reliable use out of it. And you really can end up with equivalent performance either way. When you do end up with the same performance that is :\ Turns out identical is not what you want with USB sticks. more background No matter of any "hybrid" approaches (even before UEFI) trying to make an ISO that could be directly copied to USB, modified ISO's are just not very good at copying to USB sticks and having them functionally boot like an ISO is supposed to do. Even when all the files and folders on the target end up fully accessible, performant, and error-free. It can be a frustrating thing. Image files have a problem too, the hardware that the master image was saved from may be so dissimilar to the target media, that performance of that particular target, perhaps when interacting with other supposedly-compatible hardware such as motherboards, will be abysmal compared to the master device, and unpredictable across various motherboards. Not such a big deal with HDDs and barely noticeable with SSDs but can really bring otherwise-satisfying USB devices to their knees. Sometimes yes, sometimes no. All targets within the same SKU as the master but some have slightly different controllers, firmware, or memory chips? Ruh-roh. Differernt SKUs on the USBs? I wouldn't be that confident any more. Depends on how you handle the image file. As long as you treat it like a standard ISO and mount it before copying filewise to a previously-prepared filesystem on a bootable USB stick, you should be fine :\ More or less what Rufus does automagically, he is brilliant too. It does kind of defeat the purpose of having an image that's supposed to be copied bitwise directly to a target though. Using dd or Etcher is so much quicker but then you're just playing the odds. Decades ago for USB booting I used to think images were ideal. But I was wrong. Completely wrong. Wrong about standards and I'm a standardization guy. How much more embarrassing can you get? If it's supposed to be Linux (no matter whether DVDs or USBs become obsolete) ISOs boot using Isolinux, HDDs SSDs & USBs boot equivalently using Syslinux, and you can do it over a network using Pxelinux. These have all been very stable references for very long. ISO files are an even older standard than Isolinux, which makes it even more fundamental so it's always been golden. Now I realize that. Everything that continues to trace back to this standard has a remaining chance to perform at least as reliably over the long term as ISO's have already performed so far. The continuity among Linux distributions using ISOs so far will be unmatched for decades to come no matter what happens. And ISOs were made for direct copying bitwise to their target media. Too bad it's just not right at all for very many USB sticks, so instead you have to first mount the ISO and copy the files & folders to an already-bootable previously-prepared USB drive. I'm not going to be regularly copying ISOs bitwise to optical disk devices any more (if I can avoid it), so in the future (starting quite a while ago) I'm not likely to use an ISO for what it was originally intended to do, if at all. Doesn't seem like anybody's going to be using ISOs to burn directly bitwise to media any more, which is the only reason ISO became the Linux standard for distribution to begin with, so why are ISOs needed going forward at all? Too late, ISO (as the name implies) is now more valuable as a standard than it ever was for burning discs. So now the further you go into the 21st century you really need the ISO's to keep working, more so than ever ! Even if nobody's burning discs. You can't make this up :] And after exhaustively confirming that images are far less reliable for copying bitwise to USB sticks compared to ISOs when using optical, it leaves us back where we started without a worthwhile image file type than can always be overwritten to a USB whole-hog and have it boot. But at least you can still do it with DVD's using ISOs if you really have to, no different than ever. Probably because an IMG (just like an ISO) is a filetype entirely focused on only one thing, writing it to a target device to make a perfect clone of the bitwise data pattern from one drive to another. Or to copy back to the same drive during a restoration event. Can't mistake that, it's either a true copy or not. Even if IMG is way older than ISO, it worked for floppies no different than it does today. The motherboard still just responds to whatever bit pattern it finds on the boot device, regardless of MBR, UEFI, EXTx, NTFS etc. I didn't think too much about it either, but there's a lot more electronics in between the motherboard and the bits residing on the storage medium for a USB than there was for a floppy. And a lot more "chance" for variation. Too bad IMG is not a standard filetype. But as long as it can be overwritten to the same device it came from and result in a perfect restoration from backup, it's job is accomplished with flying colors, and it almost never fails. So if you're worried about the age of the filetype, IMG is so much more elderly than ISO that it was almost repressed bad enough to be forgotten (since not everybody wanted you to make perfect clones), which is probably why nobody came along to extend it for anything beyond everyday floppy use. Floppies worked just fine and were interchangeable without a detailed functional standard IMG filetype at all. But without a standard, IMG is just a filetype in name only which is why it's still the right file extension to use when you are going to be overwriting a whole drive of any kind with it later. That's exactly what it's for, and nothing else. And after a lengthy famine, there are now more brilliant tools that mount and handle wildly diverse IMG files simply because they are known to be a complete drive image. So all an IMG needs to do is behave like a drive image (as long as a particular IMG does that, no standard needed), it can be mounted and people are so much more familiar with VMs which helps a lot for those who've never used a floppy yet. Barry is brilliant but others are too. IMG works about as good on a whole hard drive as it did on a floppy, lots of USB's too when you're getting lucky. Hard drives have so much more in common with each other but they're not perfect either. But it's not ever been expected to work every time when the master and the target are less-than-identical hardware. Remember at one time almost every IMG file was targeted to deploy on floppy media, approximately 1.44mb in size, containing 2880 sectors. Worked fine without a filetype standard then, and anything other than 2880 sectors would trigger the question "exactly what hardware am I supposed to write this file to?" The thing about standards is, lots of people struggle if they aspire to meet a standard. You may or may not quite make it. But nobody says just because you conform, that you have to stop right there. People generate millions by exceeding a standard when others are not. They can match others' work but others can not match theirs. GRUB has got to be able to work too, it's under constant maintenance and has way more modern features. And this Limine bootloader looks really promising. It has nowhere to go but up. They've all got to work on every kind of Linux at least, with any other OS's being icing on the cake ! Less than that could be the result of a bug, maybe even a defect. [0] Which filewise sometimes amount to a mere fraction of the GB actually transferred when done imagewise.