Recently I got really interested in debloating and hardening my operating systems, cause I’m heavily inspired by Unix and “worse is better” philosophy. As I heard bash is heavy and we have much more lightweight and faster alternatives like these mentioned in title. They must be great alternative for scripting and interpreting but is there any reason to use them on my machines as interactive shell? Anyone are using them? Also is it worth to learn them as bash is standard IT industry?
Web browser are the type of software which I hate the most. They’re main reason why a lot of personal computers aren’t usable anymore. Also browsing web through terminal is impossible, that’s another point for me to hate them 🤣 Of course I’m forced to use them but when I can I’m choosing alternatives like Gemini or Gopher and native apps. If I could I will not leaving terminal but as I need it for few GUI apps I’m using DWM 😊 I’m planning also to learn how to compile my own kernel.
It’s not about disk space but learning, minimalism (which I love), better security and efficient resource usage.
I don’t care how many resources is used by program but how efficient. People are telling me that they see in their resource monitors that they systems are using a lot of RAM, mainly gamers who have 64 GB of ram and complain about 20 GB in usage by Windows. But this why they have RAM, to use it! If they don’t need it system should allocate RAM in proper way to make computer faster. Of course Windows is not good example of efficient resource allocating 😂 but I want to make my point more clear. It’s not about removing critical features to just make it run, but making my system suited for my needs and efficient as much it’s possible. So removing man pages is not related to my case as I’m using them :)
I like to tinker and I’m learning about computers that way. I ask questions and looking for methods to optimize every part of my systems. They don’t have to be the best optimized and if will not have that many time as I have to learn I wouldn’t worry too much about it and just work on computer. I’m just aware that always we can do something better.
Can I entertain you with some minimalistic distros? Alpine is the first thing that comes to mind.
It uses busybox which is some kind of minimalistic all-in-one program that includes everything you need to run an OS such as init system and core utilities. And yes, you guessed it, it includes a shell that is a stripped down version of bash. Even the libc is stripped down here, with musl instead of glibc.
Speaking of busybox and musl, there’s also another distro that centers around compiling tiny embedded rootfs image. With this you can configure what (not) to include in the kernel. You can also do the same with busybox, where you can choose to include or exclude utilities.
But honestly, to have something lean while being able to keep up with modern computing, I’d choose Gentoo where you can choose what (not) to put in your programs at compile time.
I had contact with Alpine on one server. It’s great OS but I don’t think it’s great choice not for desktop. I’m using Gentoo and it gives me much more capabilities ;) Gentoo can’t work with busybox as GNU coreutils are hard dependency. musl is supported by Gentoo but as I heard there’s a lot of issues with it
I guess it’s just that musl and busybox are not fit for desktop use cases
yeah, they’re better for embedded devices