8 Mar
2024
8 Mar
'24
7:15 a.m.
On Thu, 2024-03-07 at 13:08 +0000, Ben Kallus wrote:
What about Linux is too bloated, in your opinion? Is
it the kernel
itself, or the programs that often go with it? If it's the former,
OpenBSD may be a good choice. If it's the latter, I would look into a
minimal distribution (e.g. Alpine, Void, arguably Arch) paired with a
tiling window manager (e.g. Sway, dwm).
-Ben
The bloated part? IMHO I would say systemd, pulseaudio, NetworkManager,
KDE, GNOME, Cinnamon. Even though Cinnamon is the desktop I use. My
wife's laptop finally died ie. Windows got so crudded up with stuff
that Outlook couldn't send mail and I just refused to try and fix it.
I gave her my old PC with Debian and configured Cinnamon to look like
Windows 7. All she does with it is web and email so all I really had
to do was setup Firefox and Evolution and tell her it was Windows.
As far as the kernel goes, I rebuilt the stock kernel that Debian uses
just for kicks. It took 25 minutes on a 16-thread system with SSD
storage, source tree plus build output occupies 26G, pretty bloaty. I
just refreshed most of my infrastructure and in the process switched
from xfs/LVM to ZFS so it may be time to make the switch back to
FreeBSD if I retain enough muscle memory.
Jeff