That was a thought-provoking article. Something that interests me is how software systems become more complex over time, gradually deviating from the vision the original developers had. I believe the modern Linux ecosystem (Linux kernel, systemd, dbus, Wayland, GNOME/KDE, etc.) is almost unrecognizable from the Unix ecosystem of 30 years ago, let alone the quintessential classic v6 and v7 Unix systems from Bell Labs. But it’s not just Linux. I think any system that isn’t guided by a “keeper of the vision” eventually becomes huge and complex, especially if it gets widespread use. For example, C++23 is far more than “C with classes.” Common Lisp is quite a beast compared to LISP 1.5. Think of how many features are in Microsoft Office, which has been developed for decades.
I think there’s value in a system that technical users could understand from top to bottom. This is what attracts me to small systems like Minix, Scheme, and Standard ML, just to name a few. However, I’m curious about how the complexity of big systems can be tamed. A system that is hard to reason about even with the source code being accessible is more expensive to maintain and to modify.
> However, I’m curious about how the complexity of big systems can be tamed. A system that is hard to reason about even with the source code being accessible is more expensive to maintain and to modify.
By removing the misfeatures that make layers of abstraction seem necessary. Linux has already gone thru this several times with things like the transition from HAL to udev, or the potential simplifications falling out of well written copy on write file systems (gefs is one I particularly have my eye on here). The main things which dishearten me in this regard are, respectively, the complexity of GPUs (and thus their supporting infrastructure in software), and what is needed to support the OS-within-an-OS that is the modern web browser.
I kinda agree, especially in terms of commercial involvement. There's just too much steering done in Linux by big companies. I think it's lost the grassroots aspect. It's all big business now. And general opinion seems to side with it, I've read a lot of comments siding with RedHat's narrative of CentOS (and recent spinoffs) users as 'freeloaders'. Protecting someone's revenue stream was never the idea behind Linux.
Some people might say Linux has grown up but for me it's off-putting. I don't want my OS to be for everyone because my wishes are pretty different than most people's.
I moved to FreeBSD for my desktop and I'm really happy for it. It's simple and has some unique insights like the ports collection, jails and ZFS as a true first class citizen. Of course to each their own and I'm glad for some Linux-driven initiatives like KDE. I'm happy some people like Linux and I still use it here and there too, like for premade docker containers.
>Some people might say Linux has grown up but for me it's off-putting. I don't want my OS to be for everyone because my wishes are pretty different than most people's.
Linux CAN be for everyone; that's precisely why so many different distros exist, to focus on different groups of users who have different needs and preferences.
It would be nice if ZFS was a true first-class citizen in Linux-land though.
I'm with Andrew Tanenbaum, who said, “It is sometimes said [Unix] Version 7 was not only an improvement over all its predecessors, but also over all its successors.” I got my start with V6, and I understood it thoroughly. There are large parts of my current driver, Debian Bookworm, that I only vaguely understand. Now nobody is trying to prevent me from understanding them (hello, Microsoft and Apple!), but there is no actual roadmap to the system.
So, yes, Debian is far more complicated than I need or want. I have pondered on building my personal Linux system, using say Alpine or Void Linux, but that is work that seems unnecessary to me. Better off just to use Debian as it is.
And, by the way, this bloat isn't just due to the distros. I build Emacs from source, and you should see the bizarre dependency set it needs, many of which have nothing to do with anything I use Emacs for. I have both GTK and Qt libraries on my systems. TeX Live's distribution media would fill up 20 IBM 2314 disk storage devices (circa 1970), each containing 8 washing-machine-sized disk drives (plus a spare). Install an application, and you might find yourself installing (different versions of) Perl, Python, and/or Ruby. It goes on and on.
I have felt for a long time that dependency management is one of the big unsolved problems of software engineering. It's not surprising that the resulting systems have the appearance (and texture) of big balls of mud.
Maybe you don't know everything that happens in your gnu linux system, and I think that's okay (to some degree).
But the difference to windows and macos is that you can know whats going on.
With looking at the documentation, man pages, looking at the configuration files and maybe even reading source code. If you really want to know what exactly happens, you will know on a FOSS linux system.
With the closed source systems like windows and macos, you'll probably never know 100% of whats going on.
With linux you are also free to create an installation from scratch where you exactly know every piece because you wrote every configuration file for it etc. This is much work, but otherwise you will need to use magic (like the author described it) programs, which do most of the heavy lifting for you.
> Maybe you don't know everything that happens in your gnu linux system, and I think that's okay (to some degree).
I think a lot of this is because there's been an effort to provide more QoL functionality out of the box in dsitros and a lot of the features are inherently complex things with complex code. You can understand it, but understanding each individual piece takes a lot more time than it used to because each piece is solving for a wider use case.
The audio stack overhaul is a good example of one that's positive. PipeWire is actually game changing in terms of UX and how well _it just works_ to the point that there's no longer any kludging of asoundrc or any other configs and praying that an audio device you want to use works as expected.
There seems to be a tendency (for better or for worse) in Linux communities to want to deal with these inherently complex things by ignoring the complexity and taking the stance that building your own solution to those problems as they arise is better, but it really feels like a gatekeeping stance. Maybe it's a worse is better situation, or there's some level in the middle, but the current state of Linux is far better than it's ever been imo.
Sometimes I feel like this author, but then consider it may just be me getting older and resisting learning something new. I've never become an initv nor systemd expert but over time I have gotten to a point where I don't think systemd is out to make my life difficult, though I do wish creating a service was easier since I never ever remember how to do it and where the documentation on the options are.
But, I also think that modern OSs have somewhat outgrown their users. I'm not sure I actually need a multi-user OS, nor secure signing of various things. Though if I were to use Haiku and get what I asked for, maybe I'll get exploited and regret it somehow. Yet the likelihood seems so low versus the complexity involved to protect me.
Anyway, for those who think Linux is growing to have more than needed, you'll always have the distros that refuse to change, like Slackware. But, I think saying the old linux was better is nostalgia, since Slackware really isn't fun to use.
An interesting read, I'm sympathetic to this viewpoint but I also feel like it's kind of an inevitable trend.
> Granted there are other Linux distributions like Gentoo, Alpine, Void, NixOS, etc. that are still conservative in some of these regards... However, these are not the popular ones, thus not the ones where the most development effort goes into.
Has this ever not been true of hardcore/transparent "Linux"? Yes Ubuntu is trying to be a free Windows-like, yes Gnome is pretty locked down. But alternatives still exist, it's just they're unpopular (and specifically for the reasons the author prefers them). Yes the big names get most of the development attention, but in terms of overall hours contributed are the smaller names actually getting less as an absolute number? Or just a percentage?
> In fact, the overall dumbed-down and closed-up -- sorry I meant to say "optimized for the enjoyment of our customers" -- Apple OSX seems to be a better alternative...
This seems to be meant as snark, but isn't this kind of the core tradeoff driving this whole dynamic? Sure simple and transparent software can be fun and useful, but much of the modern computing stack is simply too complicated to be genuinely transparent. Simplifying the bootloader won't make WebRTC simpler for an amateur to understand.
We would all do well to remember we make things for users. The system is complex so that the user doesn't have to deal with it, and if we want Linux to get more than its current (pathetic) desktop market share, this is the way things will go. You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it drink, and you can't make users care about this stuff when they just want to do their taxes, manage their businesses, talk to their friends, and look at their photos.
>and you can't make users care about this stuff when they just want to do their taxes, manage their businesses, talk to their friends, and look at their photos.
The thing is, you can easily do all that stuff right now on Linux, even if you're a casual computer user. Unlike 15 years ago, ALL that stuff is now done inside a web browser, so the OS is really nothing more than a platform to run Chrome (or better yet, Firefox). Any idiot who knows how to use a PC can start a web browser, and from there it's no different whether you're on MacOS, Windows, or Linux.
And Linux has the huge advantage that it won't suddenly do a forced update and reboot your computer while you're doing a presentation at work.
Admittedly as a macOS lifer moving to linux I was a bit confused, or at least couldn’t resonate with the criticisms, specifically systemd (openrc), along with other random overhead and cruft.
Then got to the part where they mentioned this is targeting more mainstream distros and thought “ah so this is why I chose gentoo.” I never considered any of the mentioned mainstream distros because I just assumed given the popularity, there’s more fuckery. Less granular control == more “user friendly” which seems like a natural byproduct of something becoming more popular.
I certainly don’t have the historical perspective of the author, and one can can debate the merits of the myriad running processes, but just wanted to share the perspective of someone entirely green to Linux; that what was outlined was what I already assumed
>The main reason I've switched to Linux was because it was an operating system that was so transparent, so (relatively) simple to debug and experiment with…
>However, [Free/Open BSD] have shortcomings of their own, mainly being so conservative that they've almost been left behind by the overall open-source community.
I feel like the author doesn't understand that these are connected…
I wish! It's got a long way to go still before it's as robust and easy to use as Mac and Windows. Systemd has certainly been the biggest improvement in that direction for a while though.
It's a modern Linux, closely follows upstream projects, and when you wonder how to set up some network configuration or something else you just open the script in question and it's mostly obvious.
It's a small community so hasn't got the same amount of eyeballs and might not always be as quick with security fixes as the bigger projects, but it might be a bit of stale, old, yet somehow fresh air for the author.
I am using Linux rn because my Windows computer is busted. On Windows, I was using WSL for development. It was amazing to have a good dev environment as well as a real computer at the same time!
I can't even use my large MSI 1440p monitor with this computer because Linux (also perhaps because of the actual gfx card too, to be fair). I had to manually install Discord's update yesterday and now there are 2 Discord apps on my computer because Linux (and only one works).
From the thread it seems you are on Ubuntu. There are basically two package managers out of the box. One, the traditional combo of dpkg + apt on top is deeply embedded into the system. You can install a Discord .deb package using `$ sudo dpkg -i ~/Downlaods/discord-0.0.28.deb` or whatever because it is not in the operating system's repositories. If it was, it would be `$ sudo apt install discord` or something along those lines.
The Snap packaging system also includes a layer of software that can sandbox the packages it installed. The idea is, a single package is less distro-specific and also is limited in the damage it can do. Ubuntu is the main user of Snap. Many other distributions, especially Fedora and the like seem to lean more towards Flatpak, which is a different take on what Snap does. Yes, it is complicated but the idea is to increase the security and portability of software packages for Linux. To manage Snap packages from the command line, you can use the snap command.
Fam, you probably installed Discord through the package manager or the AUR and then when it said there was an update you said "I'll figure it out" and downloaded the tarball that option offers and built it.
you should remove them by doing `sudo pacman -Rns discord` followed by trying yay -R discord.
Then install it from either the AUR with yay or Arch repo with pacman.
>I can't even use my large MSI 1440p monitor with this computer because Linux (also perhaps because of the actual gfx card too, to be fair)
This part makes no sense. Linux works with any monitor; monitors connect via DP/HDMI and don't need device drivers. I have two 1440p monitors on my system. If you're having a problem here, it's undoubtedly the graphics card, and Linux has long had issues with drivers there (mainly Nvidia), but even here most Nvidia users say it works fine for them.
> I can't even use my large MSI 1440p monitor with this computer because Linux
ridiculous, Is it also fords fault I cant use an f150 because I live on a mountain without roads? You may have purchased hardware that has explicitly chosen to make life difficult for anything but windows, that is hardly "because linux". Nobody is even asking THEM to make drivers, which allthough would be nice, everyone would settle for "tell us how to use the hardware", or at best "dont actively prevent us from making drivers".
And why can you not use the monitor?
Your discord problems are almost certainly caused by you doing it wrong. Linux is not a magic solver of problems, you know your way around windows, but if you invested same time into learning linux as you did windows, you'd know how to do things there aswell.
In 1989, I became a Unix user because I was in college. I had been a DOS user, not much of an Apple fan, Commodore lover with a VIC-20 and C=64, and even an Atari BASIC user before that. I knew systems and I knew architecture, and I easily adapted to the CLI.
I was immediately entranced by the simplicity and elegance of Unix. I got a sense of gigantic systems humming beneath (or above) the terminal room, because this was an OS capable of scaling massively. Yet it allowed the end-user to piece together simple building blocks, in shell scripts, pipelines, and C or Pascal programs.
So I grew and adapted to Unix, and I lived through the heady proprietary days with Sun Microsystems, HP and DEC. Then I saw that bubble burst as Linux and the Wintel architecture supplanted them and dominated the market. I used all sorts of GUIs, from OpenWindows, CDE, Cygwin, etc.
I ran Unix or Linux at home between 1991-2022. I loved to tinker! If a gearhead always has his hotrod up on blocks in the driveway, I always had the cover off my computer and I was poking it in some fashion. I loved to play with software and configuration, and play sysadmin to my home lab. Until a few years ago, this was OK.
However, my days of tinkering came to an end. My days of wanting to self-host services ended. I became even more of an end-user than a Power User, and as of 3 years ago, I needed systems that work and are supported. I would tinker no longer.
So I said farewell to Linux. Now don't get me wrong. I fully support Linux in all its forms, from Android to the data center to hyperscale supercomputers. I just don't find a space for Linux or Unix at home anymore. Thanks for all the lovely years.
If you ever read windows internals, you’ll see that overall windows is surprisingly simple, the hidden-proprietary things like encryption/authentication/ads etc run on top of everything else.
Linux and osx are as well still not complex at all, what have changed the most over the years are firmware/hardware and drivers and security related items like addition of sensors, IcS for encryption and etc that is indeed very opaque by nature.
That was painful. Dude clearly hates systems despite not wanting to be labeled a systemd hater. Wake me up when Linux decides not to work on systems without a TPM and we can talk then.
I believe Lennart explained things well enough - being _end-user_ targeted means much more dynamic things vs servers targeted.
> Hardware and Software Change Dynamically
> Modern systems (especially general purpose OS) are highly dynamic in their configuration and use: they are mobile, different applications are started and stopped, different hardware added and removed again. An init system that is responsible for maintaining services needs to listen to hardware and software changes. It needs to dynamically start (and sometimes stop) services as they are needed to run a program or enable some hardware.
Complex systems are less reliable, so, the author is right that by increasing complexity, Linux is becoming unstable like Windows... prior to Windows 11, which is great, to be honest.
[+] [-] linguae|2 years ago|reply
I think there’s value in a system that technical users could understand from top to bottom. This is what attracts me to small systems like Minix, Scheme, and Standard ML, just to name a few. However, I’m curious about how the complexity of big systems can be tamed. A system that is hard to reason about even with the source code being accessible is more expensive to maintain and to modify.
[+] [-] netdoll|2 years ago|reply
By removing the misfeatures that make layers of abstraction seem necessary. Linux has already gone thru this several times with things like the transition from HAL to udev, or the potential simplifications falling out of well written copy on write file systems (gefs is one I particularly have my eye on here). The main things which dishearten me in this regard are, respectively, the complexity of GPUs (and thus their supporting infrastructure in software), and what is needed to support the OS-within-an-OS that is the modern web browser.
[+] [-] wkat4242|2 years ago|reply
Some people might say Linux has grown up but for me it's off-putting. I don't want my OS to be for everyone because my wishes are pretty different than most people's.
I moved to FreeBSD for my desktop and I'm really happy for it. It's simple and has some unique insights like the ports collection, jails and ZFS as a true first class citizen. Of course to each their own and I'm glad for some Linux-driven initiatives like KDE. I'm happy some people like Linux and I still use it here and there too, like for premade docker containers.
[+] [-] midoridensha|2 years ago|reply
Linux CAN be for everyone; that's precisely why so many different distros exist, to focus on different groups of users who have different needs and preferences.
It would be nice if ZFS was a true first-class citizen in Linux-land though.
[+] [-] vincent-manis|2 years ago|reply
So, yes, Debian is far more complicated than I need or want. I have pondered on building my personal Linux system, using say Alpine or Void Linux, but that is work that seems unnecessary to me. Better off just to use Debian as it is.
And, by the way, this bloat isn't just due to the distros. I build Emacs from source, and you should see the bizarre dependency set it needs, many of which have nothing to do with anything I use Emacs for. I have both GTK and Qt libraries on my systems. TeX Live's distribution media would fill up 20 IBM 2314 disk storage devices (circa 1970), each containing 8 washing-machine-sized disk drives (plus a spare). Install an application, and you might find yourself installing (different versions of) Perl, Python, and/or Ruby. It goes on and on.
I have felt for a long time that dependency management is one of the big unsolved problems of software engineering. It's not surprising that the resulting systems have the appearance (and texture) of big balls of mud.
[+] [-] MichaelZuo|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SushiHippie|2 years ago|reply
But the difference to windows and macos is that you can know whats going on.
With looking at the documentation, man pages, looking at the configuration files and maybe even reading source code. If you really want to know what exactly happens, you will know on a FOSS linux system.
With the closed source systems like windows and macos, you'll probably never know 100% of whats going on.
With linux you are also free to create an installation from scratch where you exactly know every piece because you wrote every configuration file for it etc. This is much work, but otherwise you will need to use magic (like the author described it) programs, which do most of the heavy lifting for you.
[+] [-] conor-|2 years ago|reply
I think a lot of this is because there's been an effort to provide more QoL functionality out of the box in dsitros and a lot of the features are inherently complex things with complex code. You can understand it, but understanding each individual piece takes a lot more time than it used to because each piece is solving for a wider use case.
The audio stack overhaul is a good example of one that's positive. PipeWire is actually game changing in terms of UX and how well _it just works_ to the point that there's no longer any kludging of asoundrc or any other configs and praying that an audio device you want to use works as expected.
There seems to be a tendency (for better or for worse) in Linux communities to want to deal with these inherently complex things by ignoring the complexity and taking the stance that building your own solution to those problems as they arise is better, but it really feels like a gatekeeping stance. Maybe it's a worse is better situation, or there's some level in the middle, but the current state of Linux is far better than it's ever been imo.
[+] [-] Affric|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bitsandboots|2 years ago|reply
But, I also think that modern OSs have somewhat outgrown their users. I'm not sure I actually need a multi-user OS, nor secure signing of various things. Though if I were to use Haiku and get what I asked for, maybe I'll get exploited and regret it somehow. Yet the likelihood seems so low versus the complexity involved to protect me.
Anyway, for those who think Linux is growing to have more than needed, you'll always have the distros that refuse to change, like Slackware. But, I think saying the old linux was better is nostalgia, since Slackware really isn't fun to use.
[+] [-] gilcot|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tech_ken|2 years ago|reply
> Granted there are other Linux distributions like Gentoo, Alpine, Void, NixOS, etc. that are still conservative in some of these regards... However, these are not the popular ones, thus not the ones where the most development effort goes into.
Has this ever not been true of hardcore/transparent "Linux"? Yes Ubuntu is trying to be a free Windows-like, yes Gnome is pretty locked down. But alternatives still exist, it's just they're unpopular (and specifically for the reasons the author prefers them). Yes the big names get most of the development attention, but in terms of overall hours contributed are the smaller names actually getting less as an absolute number? Or just a percentage?
> In fact, the overall dumbed-down and closed-up -- sorry I meant to say "optimized for the enjoyment of our customers" -- Apple OSX seems to be a better alternative...
This seems to be meant as snark, but isn't this kind of the core tradeoff driving this whole dynamic? Sure simple and transparent software can be fun and useful, but much of the modern computing stack is simply too complicated to be genuinely transparent. Simplifying the bootloader won't make WebRTC simpler for an amateur to understand.
[+] [-] zjp|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] midoridensha|2 years ago|reply
The thing is, you can easily do all that stuff right now on Linux, even if you're a casual computer user. Unlike 15 years ago, ALL that stuff is now done inside a web browser, so the OS is really nothing more than a platform to run Chrome (or better yet, Firefox). Any idiot who knows how to use a PC can start a web browser, and from there it's no different whether you're on MacOS, Windows, or Linux.
And Linux has the huge advantage that it won't suddenly do a forced update and reboot your computer while you're doing a presentation at work.
[+] [-] JohnFen|2 years ago|reply
I don't, and have never, wanted this -- exactly because of what doing that means for the direction of development for the OS.
[+] [-] Given_47|2 years ago|reply
Then got to the part where they mentioned this is targeting more mainstream distros and thought “ah so this is why I chose gentoo.” I never considered any of the mentioned mainstream distros because I just assumed given the popularity, there’s more fuckery. Less granular control == more “user friendly” which seems like a natural byproduct of something becoming more popular.
I certainly don’t have the historical perspective of the author, and one can can debate the merits of the myriad running processes, but just wanted to share the perspective of someone entirely green to Linux; that what was outlined was what I already assumed
[+] [-] snitty|2 years ago|reply
>However, [Free/Open BSD] have shortcomings of their own, mainly being so conservative that they've almost been left behind by the overall open-source community.
I feel like the author doesn't understand that these are connected…
[+] [-] jeegsy|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] IshKebab|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xorcist|2 years ago|reply
It's a modern Linux, closely follows upstream projects, and when you wonder how to set up some network configuration or something else you just open the script in question and it's mostly obvious.
It's a small community so hasn't got the same amount of eyeballs and might not always be as quick with security fixes as the bigger projects, but it might be a bit of stale, old, yet somehow fresh air for the author.
[+] [-] catlover76|2 years ago|reply
I can't even use my large MSI 1440p monitor with this computer because Linux (also perhaps because of the actual gfx card too, to be fair). I had to manually install Discord's update yesterday and now there are 2 Discord apps on my computer because Linux (and only one works).
[+] [-] kaliszad|2 years ago|reply
The Snap packaging system also includes a layer of software that can sandbox the packages it installed. The idea is, a single package is less distro-specific and also is limited in the damage it can do. Ubuntu is the main user of Snap. Many other distributions, especially Fedora and the like seem to lean more towards Flatpak, which is a different take on what Snap does. Yes, it is complicated but the idea is to increase the security and portability of software packages for Linux. To manage Snap packages from the command line, you can use the snap command.
[+] [-] xerox13ster|2 years ago|reply
you should remove them by doing `sudo pacman -Rns discord` followed by trying yay -R discord.
Then install it from either the AUR with yay or Arch repo with pacman.
[+] [-] midoridensha|2 years ago|reply
This part makes no sense. Linux works with any monitor; monitors connect via DP/HDMI and don't need device drivers. I have two 1440p monitors on my system. If you're having a problem here, it's undoubtedly the graphics card, and Linux has long had issues with drivers there (mainly Nvidia), but even here most Nvidia users say it works fine for them.
[+] [-] redeeman|2 years ago|reply
ridiculous, Is it also fords fault I cant use an f150 because I live on a mountain without roads? You may have purchased hardware that has explicitly chosen to make life difficult for anything but windows, that is hardly "because linux". Nobody is even asking THEM to make drivers, which allthough would be nice, everyone would settle for "tell us how to use the hardware", or at best "dont actively prevent us from making drivers".
And why can you not use the monitor?
Your discord problems are almost certainly caused by you doing it wrong. Linux is not a magic solver of problems, you know your way around windows, but if you invested same time into learning linux as you did windows, you'd know how to do things there aswell.
[+] [-] NoZebra120vClip|2 years ago|reply
I was immediately entranced by the simplicity and elegance of Unix. I got a sense of gigantic systems humming beneath (or above) the terminal room, because this was an OS capable of scaling massively. Yet it allowed the end-user to piece together simple building blocks, in shell scripts, pipelines, and C or Pascal programs.
So I grew and adapted to Unix, and I lived through the heady proprietary days with Sun Microsystems, HP and DEC. Then I saw that bubble burst as Linux and the Wintel architecture supplanted them and dominated the market. I used all sorts of GUIs, from OpenWindows, CDE, Cygwin, etc.
I ran Unix or Linux at home between 1991-2022. I loved to tinker! If a gearhead always has his hotrod up on blocks in the driveway, I always had the cover off my computer and I was poking it in some fashion. I loved to play with software and configuration, and play sysadmin to my home lab. Until a few years ago, this was OK.
However, my days of tinkering came to an end. My days of wanting to self-host services ended. I became even more of an end-user than a Power User, and as of 3 years ago, I needed systems that work and are supported. I would tinker no longer.
So I said farewell to Linux. Now don't get me wrong. I fully support Linux in all its forms, from Android to the data center to hyperscale supercomputers. I just don't find a space for Linux or Unix at home anymore. Thanks for all the lovely years.
[+] [-] nrivoli|2 years ago|reply
Linux and osx are as well still not complex at all, what have changed the most over the years are firmware/hardware and drivers and security related items like addition of sensors, IcS for encryption and etc that is indeed very opaque by nature.
[+] [-] frizlab|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yjftsjthsd-h|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DerekL|2 years ago|reply
Also, it was never “OSX”, like the article uses, but so many people call it that.
[+] [-] animitronix|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] adamomada|2 years ago|reply
But look which ones are the actual most popular distro as voted by People Who Choose Linux on DW https://distrowatch.com/dwres-mobile.php?resource=ranking
Imho Void Linux is BSD With Linux kernel and the perfect option for the author
[+] [-] CoolCold|2 years ago|reply
> Hardware and Software Change Dynamically
> Modern systems (especially general purpose OS) are highly dynamic in their configuration and use: they are mobile, different applications are started and stopped, different hardware added and removed again. An init system that is responsible for maintaining services needs to listen to hardware and software changes. It needs to dynamically start (and sometimes stop) services as they are needed to run a program or enable some hardware.
http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/systemd.html
[+] [-] cracauer|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nikolay|2 years ago|reply