OpenBSD 5.1 Released

[fuzz]

My likeness or hatred towards something comes from reality.
Portage is written in Python, this makes it bloated and less reliable (if something is wrong with Python). Also compiling X11 or Firefox ... is not really interesting.

All this means is you don't know anything about Gentoo.

[curaga]

I said userland, because glibc is also bloated not just utils.
I would be very interested to see Linux distribution without GNU which would be usable as desktop os (not only for firewalls ...).

http://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=alpine

Alpine is uclibc/busybox, and can be used as a desktop IIRC. Tiny Core is glibc+busybox. Aboriginal is uclibc+bb, but doesn't do X IIRC. Gentoo can be configured like that. Etc.


I do wonder why, if your target is a desktop, the bloat of glibc and GNU utils even registers; surely the bloat of firefox exceeds their combined bloat 1000-fold? Even the bloat of Xorg is a lot when compared to tinyX, but you still want the acceleration for desktop use.

[brad0]

I think he meant OpenBSD ships with much older versions.

They're not *much* old and he's doing an apples to oranges comparison. Doesn't count.

[LightBit]

Pointing at GNU or the BSDs to say that linux userland is bloated is, well, wrong target. It means that those GNU/BSD utils are.

Everyone's entirely free to use busybox, toybox, plan9 utils, or asmutils, and I bet you can find a distro that defaults to each of those.

I said userland, because glibc is also bloated not just utils.
I would be very interested to see Linux distribution without GNU which would be usable as desktop os (not only for firewalls ...).

[curaga]

Pointing at GNU or the BSDs to say that linux userland is bloated is, well, wrong target. It means that those GNU/BSD utils are.

Everyone's entirely free to use busybox, toybox, plan9 utils, or asmutils, and I bet you can find a distro that defaults to each of those.

[LightBit]

I think you shouldn't judge something just because you don't like it. Your likeness or hatred towards something has no impact on reality. That's why Gentoo remains simple, not bloated distribution.

My likeness or hatred towards something comes from reality.
Portage is written in Python, this makes it bloated and less reliable (if something is wrong with Python). Also compiling X11 or Firefox ... is not really interesting.

[LightBit]

It sounds obvious to me it doesn't overcommit available memory - otherwise this statement will be false, don't you think?

No, I don't think so.

It can be more feature rich which isn't equal to being bloated. There are for sure differences between GNU's cat, echo and not GNU equivalents.

Non-standard functions in utilities are bloat, since portable scripts should not depend on them. Why two parameters for same thing like "-A" and "--show-all"?
cat utility is not IDE.

[kraftman]

Most other distributions are worse.

1. I didn't look size of packages.

2. I like that.

3. Did you look at https://gist.github.com/1091803 and https://gist.github.com/665971 ?

4. I don't like Gentoo. Too much work with LFS.

I think you shouldn't judge something just because you don't like it. Your likeness or hatred towards something has no impact on reality. That's why Gentoo remains simple, not bloated distribution.

[kraftman]

Doesn't overcommit ALL or FREE memory?
They could also say it doesn't overcommit universe.

It sounds obvious to me it doesn't overcommit available memory - otherwise this statement will be false, don't you think?

Userland is definitely more bloated: https://gist.github.com/1091803, https://gist.github.com/665971

It can be more feature rich which isn't equal to being bloated. There are for sure differences between GNU's cat, echo and not GNU equivalents. Here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cat_(Unix)

[LightBit]

If you use Arch, then you have no idea at all how it works (or pacman). Also you cannot rule Linux distributions by looking at how only one distribution do things.

1. Arch packages may look bigger because they include development files which are usually not included by default on other distributions.

2. Also related to #1, Arch has a policy of making things simple, and one of them is splitting packages only when needed and keeping the splitting count as low as possible (no 5-6 packages made from a single source rpm/deb package here, lol)

3. Linux userland bloated. Let me see... Only one default shell "Bash", some (not repeated) commands from coreutils, textutils, sudo, 1 boot loader (grub/grub2/syslinux), usually one desktop environment. I don't see bloatware like you said. And I hope you don't count the desktops cause they bring the same bloatware no matter which NIX system they run on.

4. If your problem is the dependency bloatware some distribution package managers have, then fix it by using Gentoo and define your own flags.

As a related note, here is a link that you can look to see what components make a basic Linux Userland and decide for yourself if there is bloat or not. The project is Linux From Scratch.

Most other distributions are worse.

1. I didn't look size of packages.

2. I like that.

3. Did you look at https://gist.github.com/1091803 and https://gist.github.com/665971 ?

4. I don't like Gentoo. Too much work with LFS.