I love it! My own MX-Linux mixture is a "protest" form, free of everything Big Tech and their minions are trying to force on users:
- XLibre instead of Xorg / XWayland
- Runit instead of systemd
- No Rust
- No bloat
Getting there took a bit of research and time, but it's as "ideologically pure" as I can make it. I just wish I would thought of that cool name!
Good to hear of such a project. Noble aims. The post raised some thoughts which may be of interest, so thanks for the stimulation.
On the Rust front, the linux kernel has already embraced the programming language. See here for some comments by the kernel developer Greg Kroah-Hartman:
https://linux.slashdot.org/story/26...ll-save-linux-from-ai-says-greg-kroah-hartman. A brief quote:
"The majority of the bugs in the kernel are this tiny, minor stuff," he explained. "Error conditions aren't checked, locks aren't forgotten, unreleased memories leak, and vulnerabilities add up over time. They crash the kernel. This is what we live with in C. This is why we don't like it." Kroah-Hartman argued that the "best beauty of Rust" is catching those mistakes at build time rather than in review.
<snip>
What ultimately sold a number of core maintainers, including him, on Rust was how it "makes reviewing code easier."
There's already a quota of Rust code in newer drivers in current kernels.
The systemd versus "other init systems" debate continues. Often it's the preference for an init system that uses fewer resources which is attractive to users who reject systemd, especially those interested in minimalistic systems. Without being a shill for systemd, I think it's worth reading about some myths regarding systemd published here:
https://0pointer.de/blog/projects/the-biggest-myths.html. One aspect of interest is the unit nature of systemd which enables a user to use as few or as many of them as they like. Distros that have embraced systemd use a lot of its units. For example this debian machine has heaps of units:
Code:
[~]$ systemctl list-units -all | grep "loaded units"
373 loaded units listed.
There's alternatives for all of them, so choice is available. One can use few, or many. One can be judiciously selective, as it is for so much in the linux world.
On the graphics front, the recent development of xlibre has yet to enter the mainstream repositories, so it's a wait-and-see situation I think. One question that arises is whether it can appeal to enough developers to make a mark in the linux ecosystem. Wayland is still itself in development so the competitive situation is currently live. Most major distros have made a choice at this point to go with wayland, which suggests that the hurdle for xlibre to join the mainstream is higher than if it just had to compete with X11.
On the bloat front, I guess bloat is in the eye of the beholder. What a minimalist might deem to be bloat is likely to be different from what a fully-featured user might see as bloat. As a former minimalist myself, who once deemed anything that didn't run in a virtual console as bloat, things have changed so much, especially hardware, that there is just too much on offer in more fully featured systems to deny myself the pleasures. Living in the text environment with the framebuffer and just using text browsers worked for years, until many websites of interest became inaccessible. As my interests broadened, so the minimalism dissipated over time. That's not to say that I don't think about what might be unnecessary on my systems and not delete packages that the distro maintainers have included.
