The elusive goal of Unix – or Linux – simplicity

Or, rediscovering the KISS principle, the long way round

Comment Linux distro wars are nothing new. "Advocacy" (a euphemism for angry argument) about hardware, OSes, programming languages and editors goes back as long as different computers have existed. Computers appeal to geeky folks, and geeky folks readily get a little too attached to things — and then become possessive and defensive about them.

This particular industry commentator is a veteran of far too many flamewars and has come to the conclusion that all the competitors are to some extent awful, and that certain outliers are preferable simply because they remain relatively small and simple, and therefore limit the amount of awfulness they contain. This was the motivation behind our cynic's guide to desktop Linux a few years (and many distros) ago.

Since then, we've encountered some new candidates that have shed some of the bloat and have won our grudging respect, including MX Linux and the even smaller and faster Alpine Linux. Less really is more, if it means less to be irritated by. This old hack finds it reassuring then that other, rather younger, cynics arrive at similar conclusions.

Thus this wonderful summary of the pros and cons of OpenBSD compared to Linux by HackerNews commentator enriquto:

Pros: htop only fills half of your terminal, and you know exactly what each process does because you put them there. A few well-written man pages are the complete documentation of the system. The whole thing is run by a handful of shell scripts.

Cons: exactly the same text, but read with a different tone.

We approve so much that we quoted it before. The trouble is that OpenBSD is so very restrictive that it eschews useful tech such as ZFS; even though there was a port, the person who did the work explained why it was a bad fit. If that's too long to read, consider this shorter and pithier answer to the question Is ZFS the answer?. It's from a presentation which starts:

OpenBSD sucks

[Next slide]

… least.

Sadly, some of us require things like modern filesystems and Bluetooth, and so we're also starting to understand the appeal of FreeBSD.

Thus it's interesting to encounter an account by someone who has tried all the same main contenders that we have, but for radically different purposes… and even so, has come to similar conclusions. They have also come up with a splendidly cynical list of what's wrong with them all. Enter Kalvad's Loic Tosser and his retelling of Our Journey Through Linux Landscapes.

A few of the highlights of the rundown for us:

• Kali: You're a script kiddie.
• Debian… if you love stability so much, why not just use a typewriter?
• Ubuntu… if you wanted to be unique, you wouldn't be using the Linux equivalent of a pumpkin spice latte.
• Fedora: You're a developer who loves bleeding-edge software but hates when things actually work. Because who needs stability when you can have the latest bugs?

They are just as critical of Arch, CentOS, Gentoo, and openSUSE. They even discard Nix for being too much work.

So where do they end up?

FreeBSD, calling out ZFS, the PF firewall, its init system, and its packaging tools, notably poudriere, a "bulk package builder and… tester". As Stefano Marinelli explained the appeal of the BSDs: boring is good.

And Alpine Linux, citing its ease of customization, its diskless mode in which it runs entirely from RAM, its speed, and its minimalism.

It's worth a read, and you will probably get a laugh from it as well as food for thought. It also ends in the right way, by acknowledging that there are many more alternatives out there and they're actively investigating them. Lois calls out Void Linux, with which we've been experimenting occasionally and plan to write about at some point; Chimera Linux, which we looked at in 2023 with an update earlier this year; and eweOS, which is a new one on us, but is now on our radar. ®

Bootnote

Please nobody tell the editor that our "cynic's guide to Linux" article was inspired by one we wrote 15 years earlier with the same general theme.