Arch has never been a minimalist distribution. Splitting packages is rare compared to other distributions, and dependencies aren't made optional whenever possible. Arch has *never* been minimalist... a Linux kernel with every module available and every feature enabled at least when there's no non-bloat related cost, feature-packed/complex GNU tools, nearly all optional features enabled across all the packages, etc.
>pacman is fast but not safe, it tends to break shit and config protection is implemented in a terrible way >there is no official process to verify that a package is stable within the distro, in other distros a lot of packages are in a testing repo despite that specific package's developer claiming it to be stable on its own, because it might not be stable within the environment of a specific distro >a lot of AUR packages pull from upstream, which means they could be very unstable >(arch vs gentoo related) arch users complain about muh compile time when it comes to gentoo, while in fact they compile a lot of AUR packages themselves, namely the *-git packages that pull the source from a git repo >but it gets even better: they only compile a handful of packages, and those not being libraries mostly, the self-compiled packages get linked against precompiled libraries from a different setup (e.g. different optimization levels), which can then cause even more instability because it's a clusterfuck of unequal shit >arch uses (((systemd))) and switching to something else is hard >apparently the vim package on arch used to pull in X, so if you wanted to have a fancy terminal text editor on a headless server, you would've had to install a shit ton of GUI stuff you'd never need nor use >maintainer told the guy who complained to just symlink vi to vim (vi is inferior)
TL;DR: Despite its """minimal""" install state, Arch is actually very bloated.
Christian Diaz
Reposting minimalism rant:
The thing for me when it come to this is that I'm kinda disgusted by the amount of bloat in popular applications and environments.
Let's take the picture viewer as an example. What does it do? That's right! It views pictures! We have also seen picture viewers that can run with very tiny amounts of ram, and do their job pretty well. Why then should we be using a picture viewer that does the exact same practical thing as this minimal picture viewer, but is 10+ times heavier?
I've heard this a lot, the whole "lel just get a newer computer grandpa!" I'd like to let you know that I use minimal setups both on a 2012 Fagbook Pro, and a Xeon workstation being used as a desktop. Both of these have 16+ GB of memory. What you have to understand is that just because we have the resources, doesn't mean it's right to use them to the limit. Why should we artificially use more resources for the same tasks just because we have the capability to do it. That's retarded. At that point we should just rewrite the kernel in electron because clearly anyone who has a problem with that just needs to download more wam.
Another key component for me is that achieving a high level of minimalism often involves switching to a vey terminal-heavy lifestyle. This is good as it provides a universal interface. The interface used to shitpost, consume content, and whatnot, is the same interface that would be used when administering a server, when configuring my NAS, when working with Amazon EC2 installations, etc.
Why do you hate keeping things simple? Why do you want things to use more resources than they have to to complete their function?
TL;DR: /minimalism/ is a very logical way of doing things, and provides a universal interface.
Jackson Brooks
no
Lucas Cooper
bumpity
John Campbell
Nobody likes this thread.
Anthony Diaz
But I like you!
Cameron Morris
x86 is not minimal. What's the best replacement?
Nathaniel Cooper
...
Hunter Ramirez
Risc
Luke Reyes
Which one? >ARM >MIPS >POWER >SPARC >RISC-V
Julian Lewis
suck my debian GNOME ass
Caleb Smith
Power and chink-free ARM
Jacob Edwards
OK! Have a wonderful day!
Andrew Turner
>chink-free ARM explan >Power If I had the money for a TALOS, I'd get one asap.
Also while we're on the subject of chinks, what do you think of Lemote? Making MIPS hardware that supports GNU/Linux.
Ryder Foster
>chink-free ARM Mediatek and related cpus
>If I had the money for a TALOS, I'd get one asap. Me too user, me too...
>what do you think of Lemote? Never heard of it
David Campbell
Why'd you get rid of Arch but not Debian? Are you retarded or something? They're equally bloated. Fuck this nonsensical thread, man.
Benjamin Green
RISC-V when it's finally available. For now, i.MX8 looks pretty sweet.
Ayden Smith
Keeping it for now because at least Debian splits packages more often, doesn't include unnecessary optional features on binary packages, and I think still allows you to go back to sysvinit.
Matthew Stewart
>Mediatek I'll give them a look. >Never heard of it They made that little white netbook that stallman used to use. >RISC-V when it's finally available. I hope it happens soon, man. >For now, i.MX8 looks pretty sweet. I think that's the one they're using on the librem phone.
Joseph Reed
Debian splits packages and disables features specifically to satisfy the needs of "server people" who want minimal attack surface
Isaac Clark
Yeah out of all the systemd distros, that's the best one.
Blake Morales
Guys, is there a patch for st that adds blinking support for the cursor?
Jeremiah Reyes
I'm currently running Manjaro. Is there any way to edit and change the ascii art to a custom ascii art for fetch outputs? Like, how do I that?
Zachary Edwards
Blinking support is already built-in AFAIK and it's a setting in the config.h. Pic related. My setup: OS: OpenBSD Window manager: dwm Terminal emulator for X11: st Shell: ksh Music player: mpv for youtube mpd/ncmuhriurhiuerhfrui for local files Browser: Surf with tabbed Editor: VIM File Manger: CLI meanwhile why I try to figure out why ranger is not properly displaying images on st. WIll post pic of my setup replying to this post.Any questions are welcome.
Xavier Hall
couldn't scrot with quality=100 because the file ended up being too big.
Jonathan Campbell
>Blinking support is already built-in AFAIK and it's a setting in the config.h. Pic related. Yeah, I saw that. Unfortunately it doesn't seem to do anything for the cursor - mine was at default settings (800) and I moved around the settings a bit and nothing seemed to change. Also looked around more in the source files for anything on support for a blinking cursor, but nothing.
It's not a big deal, but I would like to have it. st is great otherwise - urxvt was giving me a lot of weird issues with ranger + image previews.
Jayden Cook
Would you mind setting up your setup on ranger and st? Me and a few other people using OpenBSD are not being able to get image previews properly displayed on ranger on st , meanwhile it works flawlessly on xterm. Off course this could be a problem regarding OpenBSD but I'm still not sure.
Zachary Miller
*sharing
Isaiah Hall
As far as my rc.conf goes, it's just the recommended w3 settings from the github page.
And, uh, that's basically it. Everything else is pretty much vanilla at the moment (I only started tackling Linux a week ago).
Hunter Jones
Just use urxvtd/urxvtc. It's the lightest setup for terms that exists.
Austin Sanchez
>9 posters >32 replies original creator here , just stop.... I don't make these threads anymore... You ruined it, just use the fglt thread. I'm also worried about your mental state op. Just talk to someone
Is anyone here running Alpine as their daily driver? I'm looking for a more security focused distribution and was wondering what issues people have had with it. The only thing I've found so far is Swift won't run because no glibc but I'll live without that.
Christian Powell
Oh, hi. Why did you stop making them? I didn't ruin it. I only made like 2 of those. I appreciate the concern, but why are you worried?
Ryan Moore
>no glibc That's the main issue with it. It seems very nice otherwise. The use of busybox for the userland utilities seems really nice, and I really wish more distros did that. I didn't feel hindered by it at all.
Camden Lewis
>Why did you stop making them? It's just pointless. Just use the fglt thread or criticize every bloated fag you meet, redpill them on software /minimalism/. These threads are pointless imo. It was a good run but im done. Keep circlejerking with your 5 buddies in this thread if you want
Ethan Collins
>Just use the fglt thread okey I may do this. But why are you worried though??
Gavin Foster
lastbump
Nathaniel James
I like these threads, keep it up OP!
Levi Johnson
Thanks!
Christian Bell
I've only used gentoo before and am recently trying out debian on my work machine. Installing mpv pulls in avahi, wpa supplicant and other stuff that I don't want, is there any USE flag like functionality in apt to prevent all these optional dependencies ?
Dylan Gutierrez
What happened to that user who was writing their own window manager?
Josiah Martinez
wiki.debian.org/ReduceDebian Read this, especially the part about reconfiguring apt to not install additional packages.
Michael Garcia
oh yeah I remember that! I wonder how that's going?
Carter Perez
>Google'sChrome browserandChrome OSare often cited as examples of minimalist design
Cooper Peterson
Can't we make these threads more on minimalism in general? Would love to talk about writing minimal programs.
>Would love to talk about writing minimal programs. Make an example. What minimal programs have you wrote? I suppose bash scripts does applies.
Adrian Butler
Sure. I'm not a programming expert (just starting to learn it), but how about using shorts instead of ints when shorts would suffice, or using floats instead of doubles when you don't need double?
Jeremiah Gutierrez
I'm kinda faggy I guess
Robert Brooks
>Kinda
Adam Moore
Anyone wanting to read an epic tale of one man's descent into minimalism madness should really look up kmandla's old blog.
Bentley Campbell
Don't read his goodbye post first though, it'll just make you sad.
Carter Jackson
ok, very faggy then...
>kmandla I remember someone linking me to that. Looks like a bunch of lists of commandline programs.
>And that’s it. That’s all I have to say. I’ve come to the end of all the lists and wikis, indexes and repositories, collections and top-10-lists.
>Now I’m afraid our time together must come to a close.
>I don’t have any words of wisdom beyond what I left at the top of the old blog. We had a good decade, and I hope the past 30 months of silly little text-only adventures were as interesting — and maybe educational — for you as they were for me.
>Keep trying new things, keep looking for simpler solutions, and keep using the programs you like best. And remember: Be kind to one another. We’re all we’ve got!
>K.Mandla
Brayden Gutierrez
what would the package count be on a minimalism system? i currently have 960 packages.
Benjamin Miller
One of the older versions of the OP suggested that below 1000 is /minimal/. My void I think has less than 600.
Jackson Nelson
It's okay, I was making an observation. I don't judge you ^_^
It's actually pretty good. It reminds me of Little Prince.
Josiah Stewart
certainly not bad, is there any other good distro that has pacman besides arch linux?
Nicholas Ward
All good. I didn't take it as judging. :) so what wm do you use?
Dylan Rodriguez
Minimalism is not about package numbers. Using one single program that does multiple things might be considered much more bloated than having 100 packages that does their specific jobs.
Robert Sanders
Parabola. It's the 100% Libre version of Arch, and I hear they have an OpenRC iso now.
Blake Richardson
>Looks like a bunch of lists of commandline programs. That's his companion blog probably. You want the kmandla wordpress.
Logan Hughes
I'm with i3 like many others, but I've always considered xmonad for a more powerful alternative. I'm also putting an eye on wayland wms, but I think there's nothing with to use yet. Especially since a good wm is not the only thing wayland is missing.
What do you think?
Jackson Sanders
>Parabola Thank you user
I've pretty much no packages installed besides xfce4-screenshooter and neofetch. I'm mainly using the os to test stuff on my windows server.
Jacob Lee
>I'm with i3 like many others, but I've always considered xmonad for a more powerful alternative. Maybe you should give bspwm and dwm a try. I've used both. bspwm I like because it kinda feels more 'unix philosophy'-like. The WM does one thing and does it well: manages windows. It doesn't manage input, which is handled by a separate daemon that does its one job and does it well. Also, you don't have to rely on some github fork for comfy gaps. ^.^ dwm is what I use now. It's by suckless, so naturally it's gonna be very /minimal/. You really don't need to configure it much at all to have a nice setup.
As for wayland, check out Sway. It's like i3-gaps for wayland. I'm thinking of using it at some point.
Jace Cook
You're welcome!
Colton Rogers
ah, ok there's two. I see.
Thomas Wright
Distro: Debian WM: Stumpwm Text Editor: GNU Emacs File Manager: Dired (Emacs) Music Player: EMMS (Emacs) Web Browser: GNU icecat Email: mu + mu4e (Emacs) Shell: Eshell (Emacs) sometimes I need a POSIX shell so Bash PDF reader: Docview + pdf-tools (Emacs) Image viewer: Emacs Media player: mpv Scientific calculator: Calc mode (Emacs)
Other: QEMU, ffmpeg, GNU octave
Now I rarely use a terminal emulator but I do when using ncurses programs Terminal: St
Ethan Taylor
Why do you prefer emms to mpv as a music player?
Michael Parker
EMMS is just a library where I compose my music just like any other music player you can use any player you like to play things like mpv or mplayer (I do use mpv).
Cooper Richardson
Wow nice emacs setup! Did you ever try using that webkit browser made in emacs?
Julian Martinez
Thanks, I'm quite happy with it, it's not "minimal" though. I don't use webkit it for browsing (it's not very practical) but for doing revealjs presentations (brw Emacs has a webserver built-in)
Joseph Perry
>Thanks, I'm quite happy with it ^.^ >it's not "minimal" though. I wouldn't know. I'm not an emacs person. >don't use webkit it for browsing (it's not very practical) ah, so that emacs browser isn't quite practical for general use?
Josiah Jackson
>it's not "minimal" though. I meant that Emacs is huge people prefer to use simple little programs for everything in this kind of threads. >practical no. I mean you can watch youtube and do every thing you except a webkit browser to do. But it's not really practical if you don't want your Emacs to crash every 20ish minutes. Also Emacs doesn't have multithreading (in 2018!) so the browser can block it.
William Sullivan
This. I don't think Arch is very bloated.
Aaron Powell
Currently on void. I wanna try out gentoo. Should I make a separate /boot partition for it, or will they co-exist peacefully on the same partition ?
Adrian Torres
What are thoughts on qutebrowser?
Jack Ward
Did you read the other two responses to that post? Looks cool. I personally wouldn't use it because I like my privacy extensions (noscript and the like), but if you're looking for a good keyboard-based browser, it's a solid option.
Kayden Myers
also, what're some good image viewers, preferably one that I can setup borderless windows for? like in this screenshot, for instance
and credibility to whoever's that desktop is which obviously isn't mine lol
Landon Jackson
I have no experience, but I love the idea. I would like my future work to be similar to the programs I use. Use low memory, perform better, stable and sastainable.
Matthew Russell
Oh that's Illyaposter! She was very OwO! She doesn't post here anymore though..
I have no idea what viewer, but the main /minimal/ image viewers are feh and sxiv, with sxiv being the more minimal one of the two, and feh being able to set your wallpaper.
Adam Campbell
While I was reading up on warosu in search for image viewers that meet the criteria that I want I read up a small bit on feh and learned that it creates copies of every image that it opens/views... I don't think I'd be a fan, not one bit, at all, of such an unnecessity such as that for instance, just yikes
Camden Roberts
Would love to push for minimalism in technology in general. Starting with programing. There's not a lot of sources on this, but there's a page on suckless that I would check out.
either that or just pick one of the other distros listed. Honestly those other options would be better (no systemd)
Thomas Reed
Meanie!
Cooper Rodriguez
mediatek makes a massive range of chips. lots of them are arm-based, and they mostly end up in appliances, phones, tablets, and smart watches. not a lot of desktop-style systems built around their chips.
Asher Taylor
I don't know, do you like Arch? Why does Debian interest?
Alexander Allen
>all that minimalism >still there's no DE as light and powerful as Win95 DE was Well, in 1995 it was bloat.
