/tech/ - Technology★

oh look its another distro thread

i believe in minimalism but people here take it too far

Rate my setup, reddit.

>OS

OpenBSD and Gentoo

>WM

Ratpoison

>Browser

Links and NetSurf

>shell

mksh/pdksh

>terminal

urxvt on Gentoo, xterm on OpenBSD

>>887108

>OpenBSD

(6/10)

>Gentoo

(10/10)

>Ratpoison

(3/10)

>links

(5/10)

>netsurf

(?/10)

>mksh

(?/10)

>pdksh

(?/10)

>urxvt

(0/10)

>xterm

(0/10)

>>887108

>OpenBSD and Gentoo

Both excellent.

>Ratpoison

dwm

>mksh/pdksh

Great choice!

>urxvt on Gentoo, xterm on OpenBSD

Both absolute garbage. urxvt is a dogshit. Vanilla st or patched st is the only way.

>>887056 (OP)

https://github.com/arsv/minibase

This project looks really interesting. Basically implementation of common used tools to build the base of Linux distro and ditch GNU, systemd and other shitware. Everything is implemented using Linux system calls, not even a specific libc dependency. But as far as I know it is not stable yet.

Another interesting alternative would be ubase & sbase (suckless) + hbase (Morphious project) + sinit. But it doesn't look that well maintained, most stuff stopped being developed in 2014.

>>887149

I know xterm is bloated but it runs way faster than st. What is the point of minimalism if the minimal software is much slower?

>>887149

I actually use st + dash for scripting, the lack of features makes it inferior for interactive use. The reason I use xterm on OpenBSD is that it's already in base. Is there any other terminal besides those 3 that is usable?

>>887157

>the lack of features makes it inferior for interactive use

Anything specific? I can't think of anything really important. But yea in general if you want/need those features than st just isn't good enough.

>xterm on OpenBSD is that it's already in base

Good point. Makes sense in that case.

>Is there any other terminal besides those 3 that is usable?

Not minimalistic.

>>887157

>lack of features

What features do you even need from st that urxvt doesn't have? A scroll bar widget?

>>887159

>>887160

Tab completion/scrolling not working was the big one for me (I don't know if fixing it is trivial, let me know if it is).

>>887156

Personal preference.The performance penalty is minimal on modern hardware. In general I would gladly trade performance for simplicity and correctness. For example OpenBSD has worse performance than Linux in many areas, but still I wouldn't disregard it.

>>887164

Currently I don't have minimalist setup (using xfce), so I can't remember if my st had a tab completion, but I think it has it by default no? I know you have to patch scrollback or just use tmux.

https://st.suckless.org/patches/scrollback/

>>887164

>tab completion

Fish's tab complete works fine

>scrolling

There are patches on the website for it to add scrolling.

What is more minimalism?

>having separate programs for editing text and for viewing text. They will share 80% of code, because you need to view text to edit it

>having one program to do both. Text editor is text viewer by necessity anyway

Second option leads to less code in the system overall but more code being executed at the moment, and I am not sure what's more important.

>minimal = smallest example, size, speed etc.

>minimalism = ideological belief that you must reduce details and features

If people actually thought about whether they wanted a featureless program or a small/fast one the gnu/linux world would be way less retarded.

To give you a perfect example. Kolibri OS is tiny. It has a GUI. GUI = bloat. So it's not minimalist.

>>887170

An even better example of how little these "minimalists" grasp the very concept they're toting, GNU Emacs is a shell, a window manager, a text editor, a desktop environment, a userland--basically bloat incarnate. But because of a technical limitation of elisp, it will only ever use one core. Relatively speaking, it's tiny. Emacs is small, minimal, and light on resources--moreso than even most window managers--despite the fact that it's the antithesis of so-called minimalism.

>>887149

>Both absolute garbage. urxvt is a dogshit. Vanilla st or patched st is the only way.

You think that only because Luke Smith show you st. St is retarded. Scrolling is slower than any other terminal, it don't stop on top, simple color change is a mess and it takes more ram than urxvt.

>>887173

not him but

>Luke Smith

literally who?

>Scrolling is slower than any other terminal

It's faster than uxrvt for me. This is likely due to st running at a higher frame rate.

>it don't stop on top

What does that even mean? Both top and htop work perfectly in st.

>simple color change

What's that? If you are talking about 256 colors, they worked out of the box for me.

>it takes more ram than urxvt

st's RAM usage for me is kind of weird. For example one of them it is only taking 332 KiB, but for another it is taking 14876 KiB. It's kind of weird that when I start a new instance of st is has more than 332 KiB allocated. It probably has something to do with the scrollback or something.

>>887056 (OP)

>This section is for small, usable development libraries, which can be used for writing software that sucks less. These should preferably be under the MIT/X consortium or BSD licenses, WTFPL, or public domain, or alternatively LGPL, because it makes them legally compatible with other suckless projects.

Great more permissive cucks who likes to take corporate cocks up their asses.

Anyone tried using dash as /bin/sh in gentoo?, I hear that gentoo has a lot of bashisms, mainly in the init scripts.

>>887182

>not having scrollback by default

<discarded

What's the point?

If it's not usable by default, then I won't use it.

>>887187

As much as they're cuck autists, mainly MIT/BSD software is minimalist and to some extent still usable.

>>887190

And some "MIT/BSD software" isn't minimalist and bloated to hell. And even among the majority of said software that does fit the criteria, almost none of it is minimalist enough to warrant the titular True Unix category that Macbook-toting elitists will divvy out to anything vaguely Unix-looking that also happens to be convincingly non-GNU enough to let them covertly and conveniently dismiss the ethical dilemmas strong copyleft addresses by conflating them with the technical flaws of GNU bloat--enough to characterize a license with the technical merits of software that coincidentally happens to be distributed under that license in typical shill fashion.

>tfw your obscure minimal distro is so obscure its not in any of OPs lists

Its going to stay that way since anyone who thinks that systemd should stay as far away as possible.

>>887182

>For example one of them it is only taking 332 KiB

Literally what, its using 31K for me. Let me guess, you are one of those retarded larps who claim minimalism but continue to use gbloatc.

>>887201

*systemd is minimal

Why is there debian on the list?

It's like the whole infographic is a mean to shill for debian and against gentoo/bsd/alpine.

How is dwm compared to i3? Is it noticeably lighter? Any features an i3fag would miss with dwm?

>>887257

>Any features an i3fag would miss with dwm?

Screen tearing, disgusting config syntax, meme cred.

I don't think the tiling works the same in dwm though.

If you don't like way dwm does it I would recommend bspwm over i3, though bspwm still has retarded configuration compared to dwm.

>>887178

>muh eceleb

If you really think people here are now using st because their favorite YouTuber told them to, you are delusional. urxvt is basically just slightly cut down version of xterm with unicode support and shitload of anti-features bloat. I hope you enjoy your Perl shit in your terminal.

>b-but it consumes 10 MiB less RAM

I am glad you can now load 1/10 of a new Chrome tab. I bet you use Chrome also because of superior performance, right?

>b-but I can't rice it every 10 seconds

Literally just keep the source code and change the colors, takes less 30 seconds and compilation time takes 1 second.

Minimalism is about simplicity and correctness of code not muh RAM.

>>887190

>If it's not usable by default, then I won't use it.

I agree with you that suckless people are tok autistic, but there is not better alternative to st. Urxvt is shit, if you like bloat and complex codebase might as well use VTE based terminal emulator if you can't patch basic shit.

>>887274

>retarded configuration

I'd agree, but the default config pretty much does all the work for you. It's weird how it uses hjkl instead of jkl; in that config.

>>887284

>if you can't patch basic shit

If it's unusable without teared off feature, then that's packagers work, if the dev himself is autistic fag.

I use st as well, but fuck, point is that it's literal autism, not including feature that is ==ESSENTIAL==.

>>887325

This but add mg to editors and netsurf to browsers.

UNIX and C are the cause of bloat.

*   In another article DB writes:
*   > Unix programmers have a bizzare idea of
*   > efficiency. Emacs misuses pointers to save a few bytes
*   > (while being huge and bloated), XWindows is a pig, but
*   > hey, we saved a JMP! :-)

*   That's not UNIX, that's MITnix. This massive abuse of
*   virtual memory seems to have come in with the MIT "free"
*   software: X, the GNU stuff, and so on...  --

First of all, memory for PCs (and soon for workstations)
runs for about $30/MB, and 8 additional MB take care of both
X and GNU Emacs.

In addition, I won't say much about X, which I dislike,
although if I'm not mistaken most of the bloat has occurred
because of vendor requests.  X 10 was much leaner, and
provided more than sufficient functionality as far as I'm
concerned.

With respect to Emacs, may I remind you that the original
version ran on ITS on a PDP-10, whose address space was 1
moby, i.e. 256 thousand 36-bit words (that's a little over 1
Mbyte).  It had plenty of space to contain many large files,
and the actual program was a not-too-large fraction of that
space.

There are many reasons why GNU Emacs is as big as it is
while its original ITS counterpart was much smaller:

- C is a horrible language in which to implement such things
as a Lisp interpreter and an interactive program.  In
particular any program that wants to be careful not to crash
(and dump core) in the presence of errors has to become
bloated because it has to check everywhere.  A reasonable
condition system would reduce the size of the code.

- Unix is a horrible operating system for which to write an
Emacs-like editor because it does not provide adequate
support for anything except trivial "Hello world" programs.
In particular, there is no standard good way (or even any in
many variants) to control your virtual memory sharing
properties.

- Unix presents such a poor interaction environment to users
(the various shells are pitiful) that GNU Emacs has had to
import a lot of the functionality that a minimally adequate
"shell" would provide.  Many programmers at TLA never
directly interact with the shell, GNU Emacs IS their shell,
because it is the only adequate choice, and isolates them
from the various Unix (and even OS) variants.

Don't complain about TLA programs vs. Unix.  The typical
workstation Unix requires 3 - 6 Mb just for the kernel, and
provides less functionality (at the OS level) than the OSs
of yesteryear.  It is not surprising that programs that ran
on adequate amounts of memory under those OSs have to
reimplement some of the functionality that Unix has never
provided.

What is Unix doing with all that memory?  No, don't answer,
I know, it is all those pre-allocated fixed-sized tables and
buffers in the kernel that I'm hardly ever using on my
workstation but must have allocated at ALL times for the
rare times when I actually need them.  Any non-brain-damaged
OS would have a powerful internal memory manager, but who
ever said that Unix was an OS?

What is Unix doing with all that file space?  No don't
answer.  It is providing all sorts of accounting junk which
is excesive for personal machines, and inadequate for large
systems.  After all, any important file in the system has
been written by root -- terribly informative.  And all that
wonderfully descriptive information after lots of memory
consumed by accounting daemons and megabytes of disk taken
up by the various useless log files.

Just so you won't say that it is only TLA OSs and software
that has such problems, consider everyone's favorite text
formatter, TeX (I'm being sarchastic, although when compared
with troff and relatives...).  The original version ran
under FLA on PDP-10s.  It is also bloated under Unix, and it
also must go through contortions in order to dump a
pre-loaded version of itself, among other things.

>minimalism is better than utilitarianism

you are all edgy redditors who know nothing about computers and think that less is better

>>887360

t. brainlet who doesn't know how to weave larger tools via scripting

>>887359

>Unix is a horrible operating system for which to write an Emacs-like editor because it does not provide adequate support for anything except trivial "Hello world" programs.

You are absolutely retarded

>>887365

OMG, YOU CAN PIPE IO from one bash script into another?

WOW, YOU'RE A GOD,CAN I SUCK YOUR DICK?

>implying I want bloat

bloat no, having to install everything by yourself because idiot who made the distro likes minimalism is a no go for me

>>887365

>le magical shell scripting is neither a language nor a program and therefore doesn't count as bloat

interdasting

>>887360

You are missing the point of minimalism. The point is to reduce vertical bloat. It's not just about less is better, but an idea on how it should be distributed.

An example of vertical bloat is when you have dependencies which have dependencies which have dependencies which have dependencies. Eg. webapp depends on electron which depends on chrome which depends on a bunch of other libraries which depends on other libraries ...

With horizontal bloat, which most people do not consider bloat, your programs and data are spread out horizontally. For example, you could have separate tools for image conversion and video conversion. Why should you load all the resources for converting video when you just want to work on images. In this case of having more programs, you aren't adding more code which is going to take up more memory to run, but rather having them just take up disk space.

>>887056 (OP)

Can't you keep your /g/ shit at /g/

>>887378

>having control is a no go for me

>please rape my face with GNOME so I don't have to spend a day getting everything ready for a lifetime of use

>>887385

Good sh scripting (meaning POSIX compliant and not relying on too much external tools) isn't bloat but it'll take you far.

Bloat is fine as long as it's modular and decentralized.

>>887398

POSIX sh is ass cancer, literally worse than PHP

>>887359

>unix.haters are too busy crying on kazakhstani bas-relief forums to program a new LispOS to fix what's making them cry so hard

>>887325

>no pdksh

>vis instead of vi instead of sam

>systemd is minimal

>webengine is minimal

>python

You disgust me.

>>887337

How is scrollback buffer essential? Its duplicated code. dvtm and tmux both implement that feature. Its is not the job of the _Terminal_ emulator. Terminals didn't have scrollback. Also you could just use less/more etc.

>>887359

Seriously, if you want to know what kitchen-sink bloat and unnecessary abstractions look like, Lisps and family are the way to go.

>Arc is a new Lisp dialect!

>Arc is very minimalist and simple!

>Arc is written in other Lisp dialect called Racket!

>Arc has built-in http-server!

>>887325

Remove Debian (I don't know what you would put in its place, maybe OpenBSD?) swap vis for nvi (nano? really?) change ranger to mc, and add ratpoison to the window managers. Also, switch qutebrowser with netsurf (the framebuffer version).

>>887542

>add ratpoison to the window managers

>tilingwindowmanagersmemoryusage.png

>>887546

My bspwm is currently using 1.3 MiB. It's also very usable and is customized by a shell script.

>>887531

Oddly enough, scrollback doesn't work on my OpenBSD text console when booted in UEFI mode. It only works if I enable the old "legacy" mode, and then the console is also 80x25 instead of some weird mode based on 1366x768.

Anyway, besides those there's screen, less, tee, and script.

>>887557

Are you using it without sxhkd/xbindkeys? If I were being honest, I don't think I could use anything besides ratpoison at this point. The keybinds I've been using for years (and the way it synergizes with tmux) are invaluable. If you want to try it out, the most important thing to do would be to bind the escape key to the grave key.

>>887542

I think if it were AntiX net instead of Debian it would work. AntiX is poettering-free and really good at keeping memory usage low since it's meant for old hardware.

>>887546

I thought I remember ratpoison having really annoying keybinds though it's been a while so I might be misremembering. I didn't realize herbstluftwm was as light as it is. Anybody used it? How is it?

>>887566

I won't deny that, but you can bind the modifier key (default is ctrl-t) to the grave key (only takes one line in the config file), and then everything feels fluid. Binding keys is easy as well.

>>887546

>pic

Has minimalism gone too far? I feel pretty satisfied with my i3 install, how can 5.5M possibly be considered bloat?

>>887589

it's bloated if you want to avoid SMM or Spectre using hardware

>>887721

You know there is a Wayland version called bspwc yeah? Get rid of that xorg cancer

>>887721

Why are you using a compositor?

You should also ditch feh for sxiv, and use hsetroot to set your wallpaper.

>>887725

>>887728

Thanks for the tips guys, now can someone nicely tell me how use wpa_supplicant? I always get errors trying to get on the network and when I scan nothing comes up, yes I have WiFi.

>>887728

>hsetroot

bgs.c

>>887739

You likely need firmware for your wifi-card. I think dmesg should confirm this, but you can just try installing the firmware and seeing if scans work afterwords. You shouldn't need wpa_supplicant unless you are on a university/corporate network with EAP.

>>887562

Yes I do. If you are wondering about the memory usage of sxhkd it's 604 KiB.

>>887056 (OP)

Do SliTaz, antiX, and Tiny Core (especially Microcore) contain any bloat at all?

>>887784

>SliTaz, antiX

>using GNU Software

Bloat.

>Tiny Core

>no gnu software

good.

Note I'm not talking about GCC, as terrible as it is, it is unavoidable.

Note2licensefag I'm not talking about the licenses. Clang is the same cancer as gcc, except it can't even compile the linux kernel.

>>887756

>tfw on a university/corporate network with EAP

or how I learned to stop worrying and love NetworkManager

>>887155

>The Rust coreutils project provided great deal of inspiration, specifically by showing how not to write coreutils.

kekt

"A list of operating systems and distributions that aren't bloat" and it has FUCKING SLACKWARE IN IT. And the "alternatives to bloatware" lists a bunch of shit that shouldn't be used at all, like fucking google drive.

OP's whole post sucks. Honestly it's looking like a troll thread. Well executed in that case.

>>887863

>Google Drive

Note that the line mentioning Google Drive is under the "File Server" category, featuring an arrow-separated list of progressively more minimalist implementations. Therefore one would note that Google Drive is listed leftmost in that category, and thus considered to be most bloated option.

kys

>>887868

>progressively more minimalist implementations

lol it's just some autistic ranking which means fucking nothing.

>>887589

This sounds odd today, but my first PC was a 486 with 4 megs RAM. I installed Slackware on it, and it was very usable at the text console with programs like Lynx and such, or even some games that used svgalib. Normal X was too big, but there was a cut-down distribution called TinyX that came with rxvt and twm. That worked well enough to run a few rxvt's and rclock (smaller than xclock). Netscape was out of the question (it would send machine into swap hell), but Mosaic worked okay.

So yeah, things have gotten bloated these days.

Well, I guess it comes down to the flavor of minimalism. What people in this thread seem to be describing is minimal resource usage, as opposed to suckless minimal LOC.

>>887531

>no pdksh

mksh was forked from pdksh and is actively developed

>vis instead of vi instead of sam

What is wrong with vis? It's small enough

>systemd is minimal

It's not, but it's not entirely my pic. I use void

>webengine is minimal

qutebrowser is the best fully-featured browser without too much bloat

>>887542

>swap vis for nvi

why not ed?

>nano? really?

It was there before I edited it. Still smaller than vim

>ranger to mc

Not really that smaller. I can remove ranger instead of this

>add ratpoison to the window managers

There is no need for listing every wm

>>887546

>>887589

>>887881

I think most of the memory being used by wms and terminal emulators nowadays goes towards font rendering.

It was not a big issue back in the day of low res monitors and ANSI bitmap fonts, but now if you want to put some letters on screen you have to keep several font faces implementing different (and overlapping) parts of Unicode space in your memory, rendered from vector representation in high resolution.

What are some other window managers that are less than 1,000 lines of code? I know that catwm is at around 600 but any other ones like that?

I just finished configuring my Thinkpad:

>installed Gentoo

>no Xorg

>using GNU Screen + Vim

All I need. With Libreboot it boots at blazing speeds.

>>887946

DWM is ~2000 SLOC

>>887967

>>using GNU Screen + Vim

Try abduco + dvtm

>>887984

Not him but aren't those abandoned?

>>887094

This, I don't want to seclude myself to some "everything is a minimal C program" -utopia. That'd mean not having Nextcloud, public transport route planning, no participating in Uni courses which use Netbeans, no making demoscene productions as a one man army with convenient tools like Rocket (needs Qt for editor). Probably lots of more personal examples. I like to keep things reasonably simple, but I have a modern computer with plenty of resources and I'd really like to use it fully. LARPing is stupid.

>>887984

>Try abduco + dvtm

Ehy, thanks man, I'll definitely try them.

dvtm seems particularly interesting!

>>887993

Check the git, they are both non-bloated piece of software, so if you encounter issues you could with some effort maintain them by yourself.

>>887993

You mean finished?

Minimalism is a meme unless you only need computer to do one or few jobs which is okay though.

I prefer KDE and my RAM footprint floats around 470MiB with all of my required sticky notes, widgets, and custom icon pack, cursor, themes, vsync (no tearing) and all that bells and whistles animations or transparent blur wobbly windows and yes, the fonts MATTER a lot more before complaining about 'muh bloat'.

I'd say XFCE and others are "more" bloated in a sense not even sporting all the features I need or even don't need.

Minimalism is only useful if you have a UMPC/PDA or netbook tailored to lower standby consumption and performance bloat to maximize the already low-powered processor it sports.

>performance convenience vs power efficiency

>not both

I bet you fags like identity politics and meme pill.

>>888014

Most people here have a dumb concept of minimalism. For me, it's having what I need and no more. Like having no trash around your house, you know?

>>888015

To contribute more, I will list programs that I consider "minimal".

Distros: Salix mostly - one application per task philosophy. No really good ones exist though (might make one myself).

Desktop environment - Between having essential features, not being too hard to use or looking too ancient, and no bloat - Mate comes out in top, IMO.

Music players - Audacious.

Text editors - Leafpad for simple editing, Geany for programming.

PDF viewers - Atril.

Terminals? Not too important. LilyTerm I like the most.

Drawing - Pinta, I guess. Always felt GIMP has too much shit in it.

Torrents - generally prefer aMule than the usual torrent programs. qBittorrent would be good if not for its qt requirement. IMO, in-built search is just too handy to have.

Browsers - None currently exist that both have essential features (lynx and such fail this criteria) and no bloat (firefox, chrome and such fail this). Ideal browser would have HTTPS everywhere and uMatrix functionality built in, but no shit like firefox sync, pocket integration or other crap that keeps piling up. No PDF readers and probably no in-browser video playing (send it to video playing application). The situation with browsers is just terrible - because we need the main ones for the essential addons (uMatrix, HTTPS everywhere) but they are bloated in other ways. Adblock / uBlock is bloat by the way. They need fat lists to work, and uMatrix is just superior in every single way (though it can use lists too, but I disable them). Pale Moon is the least bad.

>the anti GNU thread reached /tech/

It's all over now.

>>887928

>mksh was forked from pdksh and is actively developed

mksh is pretty bad once you use openbsd's pdksh which is also actively developed.

>What is wrong with vis? It's small enough

Wrong mentality.

>qutebrowser is the best fully-featured browser without too much bloat

Again, its not minimal. Its a semi decent browser but webengine is essentially the antithesis to minimal. That alone makes qutebrowser more bloated than furfox.

The larping in this thread is intense.

>>888073

>mksh is pretty bad once you use openbsd's pdksh which is also actively developed.

could you point out differences?

>Wrong mentality.

Why? It's small and functional at the same time. I'd trade 500KB and 4 more dependencies for features that nvi doesn't have

>Again, its (qutebrowser) not minimal.

Sites are not minimal too. It's good for what it does

>webengine is essentially the antithesis to minimal

I agree, but that's why i said it's the best FULLY-FEATURED browser. There is no working alternative to gecko/blink/webkit and all of them are bloated as hell

firefox as a browser comes with a lot of garbage which qb doesn't have. Engine is not the only layer

Minimalism is dead.

Nobody bothers to actively work on building true minimalistic tools. Suckless people maintain few projects like dwm and st, but those are so autistic they are barely useful. Everything else is a one man's pet project to scratch an itch. Most of them are barely maintained, basically on life support. On other hand you have reddit "minimalisic" memes like urxvt and vim, which are not minimalistic at all (horrible codebases). Hacker culture is long gone.

>>888107

Who could have guess that

>everything sucks and is harmful

Wouldn't lead to

>yeah we could do so much original shit let's make brand new and cool stuff

But instead

>ugh life is terrible nobody understands my drive for minimalist perfection

>ugh Nietzsche was right these cattle will never understand the true void of the urxvt code base

>ugh let's make a terminal with no features to show how empty and barren the world is

>ugh I've killed myself

>>888105

>could you point out differences?

There are a few usability differences, one that I like is that in OpenBSD's ksh you can define an array of command argument completions.

The other differences though are hard to find. Origanally the mksh dev tried to submit some patches to openbsd but they told him to go away since his patches were pajeet quality and full of what they deemed as terrible ideas. So he forked it and applied his patches. If you look at his website he doesn't actually say anywhere what those patches were and instead just whines about openbsd not using mksh, all while spewing fallacies about unamed security bugs that he claims to have fixed.

The main reason I started using openbsd's ksh was because it was in base and didn't require me to install an extra shell, after that I moved all my linux installs as well so that I could share configuration between machines. The fact that mksh dev refuses to have a feature comparison between mksh and openbsd's ksh makes me unlikely to go back in the future especially considering he still applies loads of patches directly from openbsd.

>>888107

Yeah you really figured everyone out, even though you don't know anyone here or what they're running, or what their needs are, and how they're addressing them.

>>888003

wholly shit i just gained some perspective.

>>888003

>>888193

>I don't want to seclude myself to some "everything is a minimal C program" -utopia

I doesn't need to be. People jump to pure C because it is the obvious "solution" in the sea of complex alternatives. It is easiest path to take, to just write as least features as possible with least amount of lines on tools that are proven. There is no reason GUI applications could not be considered minimalistic. You could have all those things if we build our foundation and tools the right way. It is all about the right level of abstraction. It needs to be done right, but nobody is doing the research anymore. We all are just building on decades old computer science research and "improving" it. The technology is not driven by researchers, but by corporate interests and selling shit to the "lowest common denominator".

>>888197

>There is no reason GUI applications could not be considered minimalistic.

The reason is all available GUI toolkits are shit, and shipping your own is a bit too much of work for "one man's pet project to scratch an itch".

Why is screen listed as superior to tmux? I thought it was considered harmful.

>>888356

>firefox as minimal

stop it

>>888356

>i3

>feh

>vim

>nano

>firefox

Delete this image.

>>888356

This is honestly so good. My current setup is i3 (no gaps), mpv, ranger, ncdu, neovim with deoplete and a few lighter extensions, latest Firefox, bash and dash. I know these are great and minimal software compared to say gnome or Windows 10, no matter what delusional autismos who wanna neglect current exciting computer culture say. However, I don't bother switching shell from Bash as many base Gentoo packages depend on it anyway and it has great completion.

>>888494

>and it has great completion

If you think bash has good completion, then you haven't used fish yet.

>>888529

I have used fish, I can't recall why I stopped.

>>888540

It is slow, not POSIX compatible, no bash compatibility mode and majority of scripts can contain bashism so you need to have bash installed anyway. Something like that?

>>888356

Fix “Minimal” to “Featureless”.

>>888529

I mean why would you need anything better than bash.

>>888728

Because bash is bloated, broken pile of shit. And despite claiming standards compliance it is nowhere near there.

>statically linked ksh

>313K

>dynamically linked bash

>838K

>why would you need anything better than bash.

Why are you ok with mediocrity?

>>888728

I was specifically talking about completion and why fish's is ever needed over bash's, jeez, show us in the doll where the bash touched you.

>>888745

Option completion is better in zsh, honestly. You can cycle through them by TABing and you get the option description too. Other nice thing is that you have completion for option arguments (e.g. ls --quoting-style= TAB will help you complete the style).

here's a blogpost about meme tier garbage I've tried.

>ranger

I never use this shit, 99.99% + 0.01% of the time using the shell is faster.

>fzf

Absolute meme, never needed, not that it's usable anyways, at least not until I wait 2 hours for it to be done scanning my wine envs.

>neovim

Placebo autism, 80% of people who use it don't even contribute to it which makes it pointless, and this might just be my imagination but vim feels a lot faster.

Speaking of vim, what do you all think of this https://github.com/martanne/vis. Looks very promising.

>>888745

>show us in the doll where the bash touched you.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shellshock_(software_bug)

>>888734

shit, meant to (you) you here >>888745

>>888728

AFAIK bash's completions only work on tab completing file paths.

Here're some things fish does:

-auto completes command line options (along with a description of what it does)

-auto completes file paths

-auto completes the last part of a path based off a substring (eg. anime/Yuru\ Camp\ 12 can be completed to anime/\[HorribleSubs\]\ Yuru\ Camp\ -\ 12\ \[1080p\].mkv

-auto completes packages for emerge (probably works for other package managers)

-auto completes hostnames for ssh

There's probably more, but that's what I've personally seen it do.

>>888820

>-auto completes command line options (along with a description of what it does)

bash-completion does this

>-auto completes file paths

bash does this

>-auto completes the last part of a path based off a substring (eg. anime/Yuru\ Camp\ 12 can be completed to anime/\[HorribleSubs\]\ Yuru\ Camp\ -\ 12\ \[1080p\].mkv

bash doesn't do exactly this, but you can just use the wildcard character (*)

>-auto completes packages for emerge (probably works for other package managers)

bash-completion does this

>-auto completes hostnames for ssh

bash-completion does this

>>888764

fzf is not what you think it is and ranger is not comparable to the shell. Also weird to call neovim placebo, pretty sure it is fully functional.

>>888835

They must not been built in, because none of those work for me.

>>888835

Kek, this.

Fish and Zsh are the mark of newfags who don't know how to use their shell. I don't use bash, but I certainly don't use shells even more bloated then bash.

>>888847

Does your shell support autocompleting from history based off your current directory?

It's very convenient that I can go to one of my projects and when I start typing the command for compiling and deploying, fish discovers what's the correct one to use.

>>888854

Nope, nor would I want it to. Why would I need it to do such a thing when I can just type 'make install'. When something has become so tedious that you need have the shell autocomplete it rather then you typing it, its probably time to write a shell script/makefile/whatever to handle it for you.

Long time bash user, recently switched from vim to vis. Feel free to correct me if your thoughts differ, but I'm starting to think of shells as:

>vi = sh

>vim = bash

>nvim = zsh

<vis = ?

Following this analogy, what is the vis of shells? I want to throw out the rigidity of POSIX-compatibility, introduce powerful and proven idioms (like vis does with sam), but get rid of the unnecessary and bloaty extensions. I would like fish if it wasn't so heavy.

>>888863

>vis = ?

rc but with readline wrapper and readline wrapper is written in lua

>>888864

No file path completion?

>>888868

Oh, just realized I can use rlwrap completion.

>>888858

Sometimes you don't realize that things are tedious and don't bother making a script for them. Another benefit of having it autocomplete, is that you are able to tweak the command before using it. Sometimes I need to change what file I'm scp'ing over or where it is going.

>>888845

emerge -av bash-completion

you also need to add bash-completion to your USE flags.

If you're not on gentoo it should probably just werk.

>>888356

uhhh, well, I guess it's 50% correct.

>>888863

shell heaviness is retarded. Go make a minimal shell it's like ~100 lines. It will be just as heavy as sh. Go add readline to it. And it will be pretty much bash.

>>889674

>Go add readline to it. And it will be pretty much bash.

bullshit, mksh/oksh is 12x smaller than bash

>minimalism

>craptons of gnu shitware running between programs and linux

Choose one.

>>888863

> I want to throw out the rigidity of POSIX-compatibility

You should.

Stop caring about shit like BSDs and other *nixes from the 80s nobody really cares about and start writing code for Linux directly. Stop worrying about undefined semantics the standards authors forgot about, regain your sanity by programming against stable and documented interfaces and use all the features that Linux has to offer.

>>889760

Fuck off retard. You don't want to throw out PoSix because its a piece of shit, you want to throw it out because you are a contrarian edgelord. Have fun throwing away all your programs in the future when you decide to use something else because you locked yourself down like a retard to one particular subset of linux that will likely be machine dependent. Despite being full of terrible ideas the sole benefit of posix still exists. It allows you to switch computers and even architectures without having to rewrite all of your software.

Speaking of /mg/, does anyone actually use mg and prefer it to emacs (besides Torvalds)? I've been considering changing to a more lightweight text editor.

>>889768

>Linux

>machine dependent

Don't reply to me brainlet.

>>889795

Pretty sure they use libedit.

>>889855

Don't see it.

>>889863

Huh, you're right, only dash uses it.

>>889760

>>889768

You need to calm the fuck down, nobody's talking about changing syscalls or any other part of userspace. I'm literally only talking about POSIX-standardized sh syntax (unbalanced parentheses, case/esac, if/fi, while/do/done). Plan9 rc, as the other anon suggested, throws all of that shit out.

>>889878

Do whatever you want. I'm sure it will be better than whatever POSIX standard crap people insist on using. As far as I'm concerned, everyone is better off following Poettering's advice: read TLPI and ignore eveeything it says about POSIX.

Why is this /g/ thread in /tech/?

>>889878

Pretty much all the shells do this. Even better all the programming languages you can use.

If you want the bizarre hybrid interactive shell vs scripting language then idk. Wrap rc in readline and call yourself a minimalist I guess.

>>889839

You don't have any idea what your talking about. Unportable code can make assumptions about types that are inaccurate: example assuming integer (native c type) is 32 bits . This can vary from architecture to architecture. So, linux, unix, or any OS can have machine dependant code unless standards like posix are used.

>>889970

>implying POSIX has anything to do with physical architecture

If Linux made such assumptions, do you really think it would run on as many platforms as it does?

>>887056 (OP)

>systemd

>minimal

LOL

>sourcemage

>have to manually set use flags for every package

LOLx2

>freebsd

HUE

>>889888

why is this /tech/ anon in /g/

>>890023

The kernel and the user space are written to be posix / SUS compliant which is why they don't make assumptions about hardware. If you outright gutted POSIX, linux would either still follow something like posix, or essentially recreate something else like it.

>>887276

I don't have any perl or perl accessories in my urxvt but you don't have any choise because you are not Gentoo™ user. And chrome is bad because it use more ram and you cannot close tab with letter d.

>Literally just keep the source code and change the colors

You can't because st use hex color names for normal 16 terminal colors and X11 color names for foreground and background. Is shit.

>Minimalism is about simplicity and correctness

I don't feel any simplicity by adding patches only to have slow and broken terminal.

>>887257

Dwm doesn't have tabs and you must apply patches to have better tiling.

Linux is bloat use openbsd

>>890132

>You can't because st use hex color names for normal 16 terminal colors and X11 color names for foreground and background. Is shit.

Wrong. You can either use a hex code for the color OR the X11 color name. This applies to pretty much every virtual terminal out there for X.

>>890114

>>889970

STFU kid. Linux supports what, 80 architectures? It's the most successful operating system in history. The userspace-kernel interface is inherently architecture specific. You put things in specific registers and issue a syscall instruction. That's it.

Linux provides headers for user space that define and export every single C type that could possibly be needed to interface with the kernel.

https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/include/uapi/asm-generic/posix_types.h

Look at that shit. It exports things things like

__kernel_{long,ulong,size_t,ssize,pid}_t

Like every single Unix-like ever, Linux differentiates itself through its non-standard features. Linux does A WHOLE LOT MORE than just follow standards. It defines a LOT of stuff that wasn't standardized and offers a shitload more features unique to Linux itself. Trying to write software that's somehow portable to fucktons of incompatible is the reason we have to use shit like configure scripts, even though GNU itself taught us the virtues of using a portable make rather than writing portable makefiles.

>>887155

>github

ugh

>No package manager / download tool yet

So I need to use another computer or dual boot to get software and then side-load it.

Other than that, it looks good.

>>887155

This is really cool. Thanks for posting it.

For discussing software and hardware minimalism.

>What is computing minimalism?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_philosophy

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimalism_(computing)

>Why software minimalism?

- Fewer bugs

- Better performance

- Lower memory footprint

- Better maintainability

- Higher scalability

- Longer software lifetime

- Smaller attack surface

>List of minimal OSes and distros

>Most minimal

LFS

>Obscure minimal

FreeDOS, Plan 9

>Hipster minimal

Crux, Source Mage, GuixSD, Void, FreeBSD

>Autistic/sane minimal

OpenBSD, Gentoo, Alpine

>Most sane minimal

Debian (netinst)

>Minimal programs lists

Suckless: https://suckless.org/rocks

Cat-v.org: http://harmful.cat-v.org/software/

Window Managers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_X_window_managers

Alternatives to Bloatware: https://github.com/mayfrost/guides/blob/master/ALTERNATIVES.md

Minimalism is not a lack of something. It's simply the perfect amount of something.

>>887155

There's something I don't understand though. Why doesn't the library simply include the kernel user space headers? A LOT of them are reproduced in the repository for no apparent reason. Stuff like linux/input.h was broken down into several separate headers and included in the library. Why?

It'd be better to #include <linux/*.h>, they're part of any normal Linux install. That way it's trivial to stay in sync with kernel. The programs would still be freestanding.

I dunno why Linux doesn't offer a generic syscall wrapper function as part of its userspace API, but that's about the only thing that needs to be written from scratch and even then its only a bunch of inline assembly lines; I see minibase already has great support in that area.

>>890282

Saying LFS is the most minimal distro just portrays how you've never read any further than the preface into LFS

>>890332

You literally build everything yourself, how can a prepackaged distro be any more minimal than that

>>890336

Because you don't know how to optimise the compile of every package, and LFS guides you through building every individual component of a fully-featured GNU/Linux system.

>>890332

LFS is the most minimal iso. I'm pretty sure that's the criteria there.

Rest is just the hipster distro bait list faggots think is funny. Y'know the one where gentoo is not a meme and debian is somehow notable for having a net install.

>>890359

It definitely isn't. What about tiny core for example?

>>890336

Assuming by LFS you mean following the "book", it is not as minimal as you can get. There's still a number of software you do not need to install which LFS has you do anyways.

>>890282

>most minimal

>LFS

>hipster minimal

>GuixSD

>most sane minimal

>Debian

>suckless

>cat -v

It's like you're 14 and this is your first time on /g/.

>>890505

fix it then nig

>>890619

t. Too stupid to install Gentoo

>>890619

>>890674

Too stupid to install CRUX

>>890619

Post that Morrigan.

Manjaro is my favorite minimal operating system.

http://z505.com/cgi-bin/qkcont/qkcont.cgi?p=It%20Requires%203300MHZ%20For%20Back%20Button

>>890691

I did install CRUX, and I didn't like anything about it. I gained nothing by using it, if I wanted to use BSD I would (and do).

I tried this CRUX thing once.

> no man pages because documentation is bloat

> just search google if you need infos

ebin

>>888055

God forbid people having other ideals.

>plan9port depends on harmful software like avahi and gnutls

:'(

dwm masterrace

rizon irc chat #/g/minimal

>>890282

>Minimalism is not a lack of something. It's simply the perfect amount of something.

Bullshit. What language is all the crap software written in? It's not Lisp, Ada, PL/I, or whatever else these UNIX weenies don't like. It's C, C++, JavaScript, and other languages that came out of UNIX culture. C and other UNIX languages are mainly responsible for all the problems with slowness, low productivity, software delays, bloatware, buffer overflows, malloc exploits, and all the other crap that was solved decades ago. UNIX weenies who believe C and UNIX are "the perfect amount of something" will never let software get any better. They don't even want to know it can be better.

    Yes, and they've succeeded.  Hordes of grumpy C hackers
    are complaining about C++ because it's too close to the
    right thing.  Sometimes the world can be a frightening
    place.

    I've been wondering about this.  I fantasize sometimes
about building better programming environments.  It seems
pretty clear that to be commercially viable at this point
you'd have to start with C or C++.  A painful idea, but.
What really worries me is the impression that C hackers
might actively avoid anything that would raise their
productivity.

    I don't quite understand this.  My best guess is that
it's sort of another manifestation of the ``simple
implementation over all other considerations'' philosophy.
Namely, u-weenies have a fixed idea about how much they
should have to know in order to program: the amount they
know about C and unix.  Any additional power would come at
the cost of having to learn something new.  And they aren't
willing to make that investment in order to get greater
productivity later.

    This certainly seems to be a lot of the resistance to
lisp machines.  ``But it's got *all* *those* *manuals*!''
Yeah, but once you know that stuff you can program ten times
as fast.  (Literally, I should think.  I wish people would
do studies to quantify these things.)  If you think of a
programming system as a long-term investment, it's worth
spending 30% of your time for a couple years learning new
stuff if it's going to give you an n-fold speed up later.

>>910961

Man LISP is fucking slow.

>>910965

It's not the sixties.

>>910981

The burden of proof lies with you now.

Show some proof that Lisp is so perfect and as performant as C/C++.

And just for refererence, proof != outdated quotes from some shitty Unix haters book.

Use a modern implementation of Lisp and compare it to, say, C with the latest version of GCC.

>>910985

>>910965

>hurr slow

Kill yourself my man. At least define things before posting your shit opinions. According to faggot ass benchmarks SBCL is an extremely competitive programming language implementation, but really nobody cares about synthetic benchmarks. What matters is throughput and latency. Most languages are good enough at throughput and all languages and systems universally suck at latency.

>>910988

>ETHBTHEEL hath thpeed

LITHP ith not a good programming language. It'th obtholete.

>>912620

also

>Arch/alpine

>urxvt

>>912622

Those are all minimal anon what is your complaint.

>>912622

Arch and urxvt may not be minimal, but how is Alpine not minimal?

>>912656

Why are you replying to me. The post I was referencing was arrowing "Arch/alpine, urxvt". VIM has nothing to do with that.

>>912669

By "Those are all minimal" I thought you included his first post. In any case, urxvt has a terrible codebase, and we all know the Arch copypasta by heart. Firefox and Debian are also not minimal for obvious reasons. He's somewhat wrong about Alpine - it's minimal insofar that it has no GNU bloatware, but it still uses the Linux kernel.

>>912684

Linux is not bloated, peripheral drivers are bloated

>>912722

If you take out the drivers you still end up with a whole lot of bloat.

>>912656

Put your money where your mouth is. Stop using all hardware and software made by people who use QWERTY layout (or derived layout like AZERTY). After all, those people are "beyond saving" so their software must not be useful in any way.

Can someone make a point-counting system for minimalism?

>>912727

Way to miss the point. Even if you're using standard QWERTY, hjkl is a poor means of navigation. I will admit that "beyond saving" was tongue-in-cheek; but, was that not tacitly implied? Many people do *want* to switch, but can't find the time to spare - and I understand that.

A little heads-up for the unknowing who avoid st because it's slow or lacks features.

- The "slowness" idea probably comes from benchmarks like https://lwn.net/Articles/751763/. You can make it faster than all terminals (see https://lwn.net/Articles/752894/) by increasing xfps and actionfps (I put 300, personally).

- A font fallback patch exists (https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ericpruitt/edge/476f260edeea1ad6a91fb8147604e008ef760ddf/patches/st-00-font-array-support.diff)

- A scrollback patch too (https://st.suckless.org/patches/scrollback)

- I've made an ebuild to automate this shit (https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Q3CPMA/portage/master/x11-terms/st/st-0.8.1.ebuild)

>>912742

It makes a huge difference in comfort, typing 80+ WPM (something I assume most people here can do) on QWERTY will lead to RSI.

>Everything modern is inherently botnet and bloated shitware

Tell me about it. The nasty/buggy x86 architecture, centralization of the internet/web, the rise of non-serviceable paper computers, fido and gopher forgotten, crappy flat "modern" UI designs everywhere, abandoning the 4:3 aspect ratio (CRT also had _zero_ latency) - there is no end to the madness.

>But there are also lots more editors than just vi and emacs.

Agreed, I use ed and mg for small edits.

>>912656

Ironic that their editor lacks even syntax highlighting or autocomplete and so wastes more time than they could possibly save from using the mouse.

>>912744

You're using a terminal that is "bloat free" that you then need to waste time patching to have basic functionality. It's a trick anon.

>ebuild

nvm

>>912759

>need

No.

>>912762

You don't need to be able to scrollback? lmfao

just run tmux, putting an entire terminal multiplexer with its own emulation on top of your terminal emulator is an acceptable solution for being able to scroll back

>>912616

>alpine linux

>not bloated

>proprietary software per default

>busybox

>future QT interface

yeah and besides the bad technical reasons there's also the fact that they want on GPLv2 software.

>minimalist thread

>no microkernel

http://www.draketo.de/english/free-software/howto-hurd-140-chars

>>887155

>and ditch GNU

Yeah instead of contributing to this software who's a BBOM who is tightly coupled lets just make our own project form scratch and forget 90% of the features that our predecessors did. Let's also make this project under a lax permissive license because otherwise nobody will want to work with thus and it's not because we lack all the other software features.

This is why the free software and open source world is getting extremely bad, the knowledge gained since the 70s is gone, the ethics and solidarity is gone, people just decide to choose a "side" over who's going to use the shiter next.

Software having tons of feature (aka bloat) doesn't matter when it's concept is loose (and at least documented), meaning when you delete code without having to fear that it won't work.

To avoid Big Ball of Muds you need to understand how Technical debt works and from that you'll see what you need to do.

>>912783

Are you calling HURD minimal?

>>912765

There's tmux and less/more for that. The scrollback isn't the feature I missed the most, actually.

>>912790

Well, the progress made since its inception is certainly minimal.

>>912656

>Vim

Horses for courses anon.

-runs lagless in terminal

-handles large files fast

The only app close to Vim in terms of useful editing features is Sublime.

On big projects I used Emacs, but now Sublime, and for scripts and general editing Vim.

Learning the very minimal ed opens up the power of Vi, Vim.

>>912736

>hjkl is a poor means of navigation

All keys usable with one hand, based around the home key while the other hand holds the coffee cup you're sipping from is

> poor means of navigation

Wut?

>>912877

Mice are actually really good for selecting locations on the screen. It's the single task they're best at.

Failing that, you'd want something semantic. Something that knows how to deal with paragraphs, sentences, words.

Single-character increments are probably the worst reasonable way of moving the cursor.

hjkl may be better than arrow keys under certain circumstances, but not by much.

>>912881

>Mice are actually really good for selecting locations on the screen. It's the single task they're best at.

Assumes a GUI is being used. Not always the case with minimalism.

>Failing that, you'd want something semantic.

That is what b,e, etc are for.

>>912887

>Assumes a GUI is being used. Not always the case with minimalism.

I can get it to work even in tmux, in mosh, in a TTY. There's no excuse.

>That is what b,e, etc are for.

I know. My case is against hjkl. I often see it presented as the core of the vi movement paradigm, and that's awful. You should use them only when you have to.

>>912620

But Debian netinst is pretty minimal (when you select zero software sets from tasksel) just make sure not to install optional dependencies or recommended software.

>>912901

It's minimal in the amount of software it installs, as compared to the usual superset of that selection, but the software it installs tends to be on the bloated side.

If you want a useful compatible system that nevertheless has as few packages as possible it's ok. If you want something truly minimal™ it's not that great.

>>912890

>I often see it presented as the core of the vi movement paradigm, and that's awful. You should use them only when you have to.

True. It is very convenient, but it is underselling the whole package to position it like that.

>>912744

Why did you make a separate ebuild? Just put the patches /etc/portage/patches like you are supposed to.

I hacked up the ebuild because the default one is pretty bad but yours is even worse.

>>912890

Well those 4 keys are in fact the core of moving around in vi. They represent the smallest atomic movement, so you can't get much closer to the core than that. But you can also combine them with a number prefix to move several cells at once. Anyone who actually uses vi for any length of time will be familiar with various other movement keys though. I use HML, be, ^$, and {} a lot. Also of course /pattern.

>nano

That's a kiddie toy, not a text editor.

>>913126

>I hacked up the ebuild because the default one is pretty bad but yours is even worse.

Shut your mouth, faggot. I did it because it makes more sense for them to be fetched, since they're optional and I needed to do this bullshit because it doesn't build with the default config.

>>913158

Arrow keys home end pgup/dn are the core. hjkl are a left over that persists because junk keyboard layout and laptops.

>>913218

Arrow keys just werk, even in programs that don't follow the modal editing scheme. They're reliable.

Vi isn't the way it is because of careful considerations weighed against other options. It's the way it is because Bill Joy hadn't realized modeless text editing was an option.

>>913224

It's that way because it's based on ed, so easy to use for someone that's already fluent with ed.

Anyway I'm rather fond of the modality. It's less strain on my hands than typing chords constantly.

>>913311

That's part of it, but Bill Joy outright admits it's modal because it never occurred to him to make it modeless:

http://www.ahammer.ch/manuals/linux/vi/joy84.html

>I think as mode-based editors go, it pretty good. One of the good things about EMACS, though, is its programmability and the modelessness. Those are two ideas which never occurred to me.

vi and Emacs have similar origins. vi was based on ed, Emacs was (originally) based on TECO. TECO was a Turing-complete monster of an editor, but like ed, you entered commands and sometimes text.

vi's modality wasn't a design choice, it was a historical accident. That doesn't necessarily make it bad, but I get really suspicious when people claim that the way it happened to be done the first time is best.

>>887108

Use StumpWM in place of ratpoison

>>918653

For a tty or for a terminal emulator? I assume tty since you can just use truetype fonts otherwise. The default OpenBSD one is pretty fuckhuge (12x22) its under sys/dev/wsfont/ (filename gallant12x22.h). If that one isn't big enough for you, you may need to find a bitmap you like and convert it yourself. Its a giant pain in the ass but its possible.

is wayland good for minimalism?

I'm slowly giving in to your autisms. I switched to Gentoo (not hardened or minimal, just GNU+systemd multilib). Then I switched to st from urxvt. And now m using dwm instead of i3. And enjoying it all.

>>913328

Stumpwm is not minimal in the slightest (is this thread still about that?). There's an unbelievable amount of extraneous shit floating around in the codebase including functionality that isn't documented or even used anywhere. There's also very little internal consistency, it took me a long time to get to grips with how I should be extending it. I've often considered stripping it down because there is a fantastic WM under there that would greatly benefit from an orthodox set of consistent functions, but it would be a lot of work, and is kind of against Common Lisp's philosophy anyway.

Personally, I don't think there's any reason to use it over Ratpoison if you're not into Lisp.

>>918709

did you make this post in Lynx or Links+, you fucking faggot?

>>918709

Ironically systemd uses less RAM than OpenRC+acpid+consolekit+udev+sysklogd but provides way more things done right out ouf the box.

>>918742

I think it's nice that the ganoo lelux ecosystem is getting software platform standards as long as it's not javascript gnome garbage. But anything else goes for now.

>>918749

True, but most standards today are crap (I'm not even going to deny that *BSD has been left behind). For example, some idiotic programmers build their software using the (idiosyncratic) features glibc has, making it hard to port. Maintainers don't give a rats damn if my software doesn't work with their standardization (They're following Lennart's example, he has set a precedent). I have to follow so many more of these egregious "standards" now than I did just a few years ago; and I don't like the direction they're going. It's a huge problem for me because this means I enjoy programming less - I need to write things to work with standards. It gives me more work and less time to concentrate on the things I'd rather be implementing.

An example: POSIX's locales which have been widely implemented from GNU/Linux all the way to OpenBSD. The funny thing is that the locales are standard, but encodings aren't. Different systems all use different encodings. Dynamic linking has made sure that you need to have specific versions of glibc on your system in order to run a program. Want to run a program from some years ago, but the webpage with the source has disappeared? You're out of luck - that's dynamic linking for you. Package managers routinely screw you over. Most of them are naive, they will suggest things which break your operating system; I remember Gentoo doing this, at least. It's also MY problem if everyone else uses bad standards (example: lots of programs can only handle ASCII or some weird encoding) because I can't use them for certain things (example: writing Japanese). Also, some people completely ignore them, thinking they are following them (but actually not) or revising them to say something different. Do I have a solution? No. Rob Pike was right; these asinine standards killed OS development. Yes, I'm mad.

>>918761

ASCII is the only valid encoding for minimalist software. If you're wanting other languages, you can use another program. There's plenty of them to choose from.

>>912873

Sublime is nagware dogshit. VS Code is far superior in every way.

>>918777

Some people need to actually use their software to do things.

UTF-8 is Thompson/Pike-designed and native in Plan 9. There's no excuse.

>>918810

But it won't be minimalistic. You want UTF-8, and someone else will want a different feature to "do things", and eventually you end up with something that's not minimalistic.

And tbh, even though I'm french, I have never needed UTF-8 anywhere except to do some emails or documents. All the actual system-level stuff should be plain ASCII from my POV. Keep that nasty unicode shit in its containment zone, like the bloat it is.

>>918950

Also fuck Plan 9 tbh. TempleOS ftw.

>>918713

>there are people ITT right now who can't figure out how to post here using Links

>>918950

There are words even in the English language that can't be encoded in ASCII. If you don't want your shit to break the moment someone sends the word "touché" into your IRC logs you need more than ASCII.

Minimalism is not an excuse to write broken software. If I have to pick between software that works and software that's minimalist I'm going to pick the software that works. Your software needs to do both in order to be worth using.

>>918964

That's not English. It's French. Just like sushi isn't English nor is wok.

>>918986

"Pork" comes from French too. Does that mean it's not English?

"Touche" is an alternative English spelling of "Touché". Given that its meaning doesn't match any French word with the same spelling, does that make it English?

>>918992

I don't care from where "pork" is derived. English does not have accented letters.

>>918998

English-speaking words use a word with a é in it while speaking English, whether you like it or not.

Complaining that that doesn't make it an English word is pointless and irrelevant.

>>918998

s/words/people/, sorry.

>>919005

Shut the fuck up.

>>918964

It doesn't break, at most you get some extra bogus characters. I can read UTF-8 encoded french texts on a plain ASCII system, because it's obvious what the accented words are when given context in a sentence. About the only thing that might cause a problem are proper nouns (i.e. capitalized names) if they're unfamiliar to me.

It looks ugly though, and would have been better and simpler to just use Latin-1 encoding. That's pretty much how it was done for many decades before all this unicode shit.

>>919028

It works out in the case of French, but it gets a lot harder if you have to read mathematical symbols, and if you need CJK you might as well give up.

Making your software useless to billions of people is a bold move. It doesn't seem worth it.

>>919037

>usng the system's own encoding for looking at math symbols

>not using LaTeX

>>919041

LaTeX is nice for formal presentation, but just mixing the unicode symbols into plain text is convenient sometimes. Emacs's TeX input mode helps.

https://8ch.net/tech/res/917937.html

https://8ch.net/tech/res/917937.html

https://8ch.net/tech/res/917937.html

systemd is a godsend but it isn't minimal, get debian out of here.

gentoo is also shit compared to funtoo, get that out of here

remove suckless, recommends mpv and nano, not minimal

>>888959

thats basically the list of programs you're smart enough to know how to use.

>>890619

>anything gentoo

fuck off autist. use funtoo if you're retarded enough to go source based

>>919028

>for many decades before all this unicode shit.

You realize that UTF-8 is already 25 years old right? Encodings used before UTF-8 were used at most for the same amount of time UTF-8 has been in use for. Which is not true in the slightest since there was a clusterfuck of inventing new encodings due to the limits of previous systems before UTF-8 came around. Its fine if you want to larp that you were around during this time, but there was a reason why UTF-8 was invented. Everything else at the time was complete shit.

>>919105

>there was a reason why UTF-8 was invented.

Inb4 no other language but english should exist on computers

i3 is bloat

>>919112

Why not? Then people in 3rd world shitholes which, for some reason, have internet would have to learn English to use it.

It would be interesting to see who would've gone the farthest had each sphere of the world had their own way of approaching computing (that is, the west, the east, and Africa/South America).

>>919131

It's your own ideological reason that you think that "Unicode is bloat". You can very well create your own system today that uses nothing but ANSI encoding and completely ignore the Unicode encoding so that when you receive a Unicode document, it spits out garbage on the screen. You simply choose not to do that and that is your own fault.

>>919037

There's plenty of software for doing math in. You don't need your OS to care about those symbols or other such details. It's just another useless code bloat and way to introduce bugs in places there shouldn't be, like firewall or other critical components.

>>919105

Let's see now, 25 years ago was 1993, and ASCII dates back to 1963. Well, 30 > 25, so your statement doesn't add up.

But here's the real deal: unicode was hardly used anywhere in 1993. At the time I had an Amiga, and neither it nor my friend's PCs, or any of the PCs at my workplace had anything unicode-related on them. In fact, even throughout the 90's I hardly heard of unicode despite using the Internet daily. And I did a lot of email correspondence with customers, so I would have noticed right away. Even the programming tools I was using didn't support unicode. Perl itself (which prides itself on being an early unicode adopter) didn't even have any support for it until release 5.6 in 2000 (see perl56delta manpage for details).

>>919112

You can use whatever ISO-8859 encoding you want on a computer. Even my Amiga let me use different encodings and keymaps. Key feature of Workbench 2.1:

> Dynamic Localization of Programs to different languages and locale

Unicode is like the systemd of encodings. It wants to take over all your OS, and every software, even though computers worked fine before it.

>>919266

So tell me, does ISO 8859 allow me to insert text from the writing systems in the single document: Russian, Persian, Hindi. The reason why Unicode exists to support the use case of using multiple writing systems within the single text file.

>>919290

Again, you're just trying to push unicode onto everyone and every device solely to satisfy your special personal requirements. I've been using computers since the early 80's and have never needed this feature, even though I'm bilingual and dual-national. If such an unlikely situation ever comes up, I can use a unicode software, but the rest of my OS doesn't need it, and I don't want it there.

>>919300

Who says I personally need access to bilingual documents? I personally read only English. The world of computing is much bigger than just me and just you. There are completely valid reasons for the use case of more than two arbitrary written languages to be written and displayed within the same context. Just because you don't have a use case doesn't mean that this use case doesn't exist in the rest of the world. This situation is 100% probable when considering the computing use case of seven billion people. Unicode exists for all of the world. You're perfectly able to have systems that only deals with ISO 8859 and completely ignores/mangles Unicode encoding. You are simply unwilling to make it happen.

>>919266

>Even my Amiga let me use different encodings and keymaps

DF0:Devs/Keymaps/ aka DEVS:Keymaps

always remember

ASCII did literally nothing wrong and oughtta be enuff for anybody

>>919305

But that's in fact exactly what this thread is about. We're talking about minimalist software, which by definition does not include non-critical features.

This guy >>918761 is mad because he can't use every single program in the world to write japanese text. My argument is that a minimalist program doesn't need to support japanese, or anything more fancy than ASCII (or at least nothing more fancy than a single byte encoding like ISO-8859).

> You are simply unwilling to make it happen.

Huh? But it already happened! That's exactly how things worked in the 90's and prior. So we can just continue to write minimalist software that doesn't care about unicode. That's exactly how TempleOS is designed, in fact.

So what are some examples of minimalist hardware? ie: computers

>>919683

Old computers? But, so many of them feature extra ports so just buy a MacBook Pro®.

Serious answer? I don't know - but, RISC would make sense.

>>887169

You're making a serious question in the LARP thread, famicom.

>>919091

>gentoo is also shit compared to funtoo

Funtoo fucked up hard with the new way of handling packages, and ended up with a completely broken distro. So much for a supposedly server and stability oriented distro.

>>919749

Samefag? Or else why didn't you just answer his question?

There's probably no definite, universal answer, but since traditional ROM BASIC (on 8-bit computers with tiny resources) would let you both view and edit code, my instinct is to combine both, while keeping the editing part lean (so more like ed or nvi, rather than vim or emacs).

But really it will depend on how the system is designed. Apparently on a Lisp machine, much of the common code would be shared. At least that's what I'm getting from all that blockquote posting.

>>887537

sounds like arc sucks, says nothing of lisp though, retard. this argument is absolute garbage, like saying you a fat asian lady therefore all asian ladies are fat

>>919683

Just use thinkpads lol

Is plain HTML minimal, or is only plaintext documents minimal?

>>925521

Plain HTML is okay.

>>925526

For websites, obviously. Otherwise, minimalism would probably be plaintext (asciidoc is pretty readable by itself) and *roff/eqn/grap/etc... for typesetting.

>>925521

static webpages =plain html = no fucking scripts loading everywhere

>>925546

CGI is okay, m8. Ultra simple standard.

>>925557

I think that post is about client-side staticness, not server-side.

>>925521

Old HTML is fine. Plaintext doesn't let you make your website look pretty with as much ease as oldschool HTML does.

>>925983

A basic HTML renderer is probably nothing in terms of complexity compared to a modern browser, and still pretty readable when viewing the source.

>>925988

Here's the deal though: which version of HTML? And I've never written a parser from scratch, but it seems like it would be a bitch because some tags don't need to be closed. It's like you can do wtf you want and the browser is expected to make it work somehow.

>>887188

You should just run checkbashisms on every script on your computer. I have used dash as /bin/sh in the past and it just worked, but I had a very minimal install for a commandline only toaster. Maybe if you have a more complex setup you could run into a script that didn't like it.

>>925983

HTML doesn't need a website either. You can serve web pages through a ftp server or whatever other file sharing protocol you want.

It's just that HTML is often coupled to HTTP, and HTTP is garbage.

>>926037

Any version of HTML is simple. It is the CSS and Javascript technologies that add significantly more processing requirements to the page.

>>918709

the bsd kernel is far more bloated than the linux kernel you fucking tech illiterate cunt

quit caring about this shit, install a distro, see what works for you and leave it at that

>>926357

Not simple enough for me. I need stuff that can work well on even a 4 MHz Z80 with 64 KB RAM. That's why I prefer plain text. Gopher is acceptable.

>>887056 (OP)

>debian

>minimal

By definition nothing with systemd is minimal.

Replace it with Devuan.

>>887165

>The performance penalty is minimal on modern hardware

lxterminal is so heavy I got a 4.2ghz haswell CPU and it has input lag.

xterm meanwhile is 100% responsive.

Don't underestimate how hard people can fuck up software.

>>926869

have you tried st or urxvt? those are even lighter and faster than xterm.

>>926870

I have but I couldn't figure out how to convert my xterm configuration which I spent a considerable amount of time making while converting from lxterminal.

>>887229

Debian's stable and can be nice and small if you use the netinstall.

>>888011

This, I'm sick of the cancerous faggots who promote bloat and featuritis by insisting that any project without hundreds of commits a week is "dead."

>tfw thttpd is pretty much abandoned with no successor

>>926976

thttpd just got a security release a week and a half ago.

>>926976

You're a fucking lying nigger.

Anybody here use spectrwm formally scrotwm?

How do I make Emacs my window manager?

>>927875

Go to >>>/emacs/ and ask that in the questions thread.

>>887156

>I know xterm is bloated but it runs way faster than st

It's wrong, though.

Why should one use Korn/Mksh over Bash/Zsh?

>>927913

It doesn't matter, because you have to build it all in bash, anyway.

>>926500

Wrong

If you aren't using

Gentoo

Debian

Arch

OR

Ubuntu (shit but good for noobs)

You are doing it WRONG

>>927913

mksh supports most of bash features while being over 10x smaller

>>887325

LXDE is cozy. Where's PCmanFM?

>>925983

hacking a document together with metacharacters is bloat and the same kind of abuse as creating a banking application on top of HTML. HTML supports images and (finally) videos

>>926340

ftp is shit too

>>933983

>Where's PCmanFM?

spacefm is a fork of pcmanfm that can mount without gvfs/udisk

>>933994

>36MiB

>minimal

I get 38MiB on my desktop.

>>934006

It's minimal hardware.

I haven't tried to get the minimal software yet, I was just fucking around with the old EeePC to see if I can revive it.

Now that I know I can, time to file the weight away.

I want a notification solution for my system, and I started to use dbus; what do you think about it? Is there something better?

>>918742

This guy seems to hate it.

I need emacs to be integrated.

>>888055

>not it's all over gnow

are you even trying

>>888003

"Minimal" doesn't mean "I'll become a technohermit and a prisoner of my own retardation", you brain damaged redditor.

If netbeans is the only option for your java studies class then fucking install it retard.

>>933994

Sexy

>>934097

Post pics when you're finished!