Re: [dev] Completeness suckless

From: Edward Willis <edward_AT_willisnet.io>
Date: Mon, 12 Apr 2021 08:16:41 -0700

> On Apr 11, 2021, at 11:22 PM, Daniel Cegiełka <daniel.cegielka_AT_gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Choose an OS which has a small kernel and other minimal software
>> that you need. (OpenBSD is the only one I can see here today)
>
> suckless is strongly Linux-oriented - musl, ubase, smdev, nldev, nlmon
>
> I wonder if it would make sense to make a little Linux kernel.
> Everything that is unnecessary could be deleted. And yes, this
> sounds controversial, but for example:
>
> https://github.com/michaelforney/linux-headers/tree/master/scripts
>
> Daniel
>
>
>
>> On 9 Apr 2021, at 14:54, Sagar Acharya <sagaracharya_AT_tutanota.com> wrote:
>>
>> I recently wrote this article
>>
>> https://designman.org/sagaracharya/blog/trusting_no_one
>>
>> being absolutely unaware about suckless and this was brought to my attention.
>>
>> Suckless's philosophy is hands down amazing and crucial wrt computer security. Although I'd like to point out 1 aspect. Why does suckless target very sophisticated users? If it shuns trying to go after elitist users, it can improve computer security of people all around the world and also themselves, since if others are secure, you yourself will become even more secure!
>>
>> For it, there would be few requirements. Free software, minimal, easy to use, beautiful to look at (by default). I guess the latter 2 are lagging a bit.
>>
>> Thanking you
>> --
>> Sagar Acharya
>> https://designman.org
>>
>> P.S. Shifted completely to dwm this week. Can't even think of anything theoretically better than this!
>>
>

I don’t think it makes sense for the suckless guys to try trimming down that bloated mess (Linux kernel).

To be honest I’m wondering if the love they give OpenBSD, as a desktop OS, is misplaced. OpenBSD is 22M lines if you include the entirety of the files, and 16M counting just the lines with code on them. Granted I think that number is across the whole base distribution which makes it smaller than the Linux kernel alone. But OpenBSD is still REALLY fat compared to operating systems of the past. FreeDOS is ~50k lines, and then there are things like KolibriOS to consider.

I don’t know if you guys have seen this, but I’d like to share a video from YT that I think is appropriate for this group:

watch?v=kZRE7HIO3vk

Cheers,
Edward
Received on Mon Apr 12 2021 - 17:16:41 CEST

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