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