/tech/ - Technology★

muh security muh clean code

its great

>>997760 (OP)

>Is the suckless philosophy and modern minimalism a meme

Yes

I'd rather strive for simplicity + user friendly + formally verified

>>997760 (OP)

Minimalism is in general a meme. You deprive yourself of functionality and aesthetics for the single purpose of getting minimalism brownie points.

Depends, are we talking simplicity and efficiency minimalism, or "I'm a pretentious wanker who will throw money at anything that makes me look cultured" minimalism?

>>997760 (OP)

Minimalism rocks, suckless sucks

There's 2 kinds of minimalism. One is about minmaxing how little you can survive with, and the other is about removing what isn't necessary and condensing what can be condensed.

The latter kind is generally (not always) good, but the former is shit 100% of the time.

>>997794

>suckless sucks

Duh. The point is not that suckless software doesn't suck, it just sucks less. It's in the name ffs.

>>997797

It's ironic that it sucks much more than the software it's touting as sucking does.

There has to be a balance between usability and minimalism. For a router/firewall box that doesn't need to do much, the busybox stuff makes sense. Those tools do everything you need in that situation.

OTOH, the general trend these days is totally in the opposite direction and into the realm of massive bloat for no good reason whatsoever, other than "everyone else is doing it". The modern web is a good example of something that has gone very wrong. So then these massive piles of shit code needs huge memory and beefier CPUs, and you end up with the flaws that most modern chips have wrt speculative execution.

>>997760 (OP)

More for less is good. Less for no benefit or less for more are both bad. Less for less depends on your needs. A lot of "minimalist" software is just featureless for no real benefit, so it's all pointless unless your goal is to inconvenience yourself. I like simplicity, efficiency and good design. Not necessarily minimal. A lot of the time, minimalism is just an excuse for mediocrity. Really, a lot of it comes from the misconception that old, good software was minimalistic when it really wasn't, it was just efficient and well made, and did more with less, and it couldn't get away with being bloated like the garbage made today, so that was a natural form of quality control.

>>997800

> t. Windows user

minimalism is autism, so are tiling window managers. just use something that werks and quit wasting your already meaningless life.

>>997760 (OP)

>Is the suckless philosophy and modern minimalism a meme?

Are you an retard? Using less code to accomplish the same goal is always a positive

>>997815

ikr only old grampas want to improve and evolve! XD

>>997816

>use less code

>get less functionality

very positive, anon

>>997815

But tiling WMs just werk, I've never configured a single thing in DWM and have been using it for over a year now. I find tiling WMs have a much more intuitive and simplistic workflow than floating WMs

>>997818

This is the mentality that gave us systemd

>>997820

systemd just werks

>>997820

That's like saying Windows just works.

>>997821

So does openrc

>>997818

"functionality" is a meme

I like minimalism as in minimal effort and minimal overhead.

However that's like the exact opposite of nixxer land.

>>997760 (OP)

>busybox

Speed because of NOEXEC and NOFORK. Well made tools following POSIX closely. menuconfig is cool

>musl

You can actually statically link it, it's less buggy than glibc.

The real good point of suckless and co. is that it's easy to understand and thus modify when the need arise.

>>997760 (OP)

Use it for a bit and decide yourself. I've been using it for years and have yet felt the need to use something more. If anything it has made me angrier at how terrible the rest of linux and unix software is.

>>997828

openrc is quite bad. The last semi passable version was 0.17. When software has a last good version its time to stop using it. I completely disagree with the idea that software needs constant updates to remain relevant but when the software is updated just to add terrible features its time to delete it.

>>997760 (OP)

Suckless minimalism is about shitty "programmers" asserting their inferiority. They don't know how to do something right, so they say that doing it right "sucks" or is "bloated" or some other bullshit. This "minimalist" code always ends up being bloated but is never able to do what good software could do even when it becomes much bigger. Just look at UNIX and JavaScript. Multics is a lot smaller than "modern" UNIX and Linux, but it still does a lot of things Linux doesn't do and it does them properly. 15 million more lines of code will not be enough to turn Linux into Multics or a browser into a Lisp machine-like environment.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genera_(operating_system)

>Genera is written completely in Lisp (using Zeta Lisp and Symbolics Common Lisp)

>Even all the low-level system code is written in Lisp (device drivers, garbage collection, process scheduler, network stacks, etc.)

>The source code is more than a million lines of Lisp and available for the user to be inspected and changed. The source is relatively compact, compared to the provided functionality, due to extensive reuse

>The operating system is mostly written in an object-oriented style using Flavors, New Flavors and CLOS

>>997820

The mentality that gave us systemd is the same mentality that gave us Electron and X. All of those are about misusing existing code for something it wasn't meant for instead of creating something that works better. Adding a GUI to an OS designed for PDP-11s and making the result into a "foundation" for workstations doesn't make any sense. Systemd is the next step in trying to turn a clone of a PDP-11 OS designed for teletypes and tape drives into a desktop OS. Systemd also sucks, but that's because anything that tries to "fix" UNIX is going to be bloated and suck because the problems are in UNIX itself, and Linux and Plan 9 did nothing to fix these problems.

Now, we all know that software has bugs.  On every system.
But Unix and X bugs are somehow different.  Stronger.  More
distressing.  More consistently dumb.  More clearly based on
a programming philosophy that says "oh, no one would ever
want to do that.  After all, *I* never want to do that."

Somehow, these just seem to scream UNIX!  X!  at me.



I had some complaints about IslandWrite/Paint/Draw.  Based
on them I have updated the man pages for both that software
and Wingz, to explain some setup issues.  Please see the man
pages for details.  Here are the issues:

1. Island software causes the X server to exit, when on a
color display.  It turns out that twm (the window manager)
coredumps.  The way X is designed, if you lose the window
manager, X exits.  We are about to start moving from X11R4
to X11R5, a somewhat newer version of X.  The version of twm
in X11R5 does not have this problem.  Thus the man page
recommends that you change you path so that you get the
X11R5 software.  This will not take effect until we have the
X11R5 core distribution on our systems, which should happen
by the middle of next week.

2. Island software, particularly IslandPaint, appears to
hang the machine on startup.  It isn't actually hanging the
machine.  It's just causing it to page very heavily for a
very long period of time.  The problem is most noticable on
color displays with small memory.  It appears the the
software is constructing the file menu for the current
directory.  It does this before putting up the first window.
Unfortunately they are using disasterously slow code to
construct the menu.  It appears to be N**2 in the number of
files.  If you have a very large directory (several hundred
files -- this may be a problem only for staff), you may see
this.  If so, we suggest creating a subdirectory for your
Island files, and cd'ing to it before starting the Island
software.

>>997926

Why would you stop using openrc entirely if there exists a good version and it's small enough you can make changes to it yourself? Easy to fork, easy to fix.

>>997935

You're my hero.

Sometimes for complicated problems there are no simple solutions. Suckless philosophy is pretty good but a lot of their programs kinda suck, especially st which is just slow and badly coded. Even a minimalist program can be bad.

Regarding OpenRC, look into the gentoo drama of the OpenRC maintainter. It's pretty likely that OpenRC is sabotaged on purpose to push systemd. Bug reports get ignored, stuff gets changed around for no reason. It is a huge mess. It's so bad that it's hard to not assume malice at this point, especially considering the maintainers involvement with systemd.

runit is great and all a home desktop ever needs, it's basically autoexec.bat+service supervision+simple logging per service. It's PID 1 is super simple, too. You usually do not need more. s6 is a bit more complicated but has some nice extras. execline from the s6 people is a very nice non-interactive scripting language that basically just chains commands and is much better than any shell for simple launching scripts.

Minimalism is cool if you do it right. Doing it right for me means you literally forget about how some parts of your system work (you have commented your work, right?) because they're so robust and simple that you didn't have to touch them in years, and also most of your shit works with a minimum of processing power. This usually just simply doesn't happen with software or workflows that are too complex. They need permanent attention and interaction. Be it because they're difficult to use, or because they need constant updates that break shit or need you to invest in better hardware. The minimalist approach is invisible, and if possible, also uses the least resources for reaching it's goals. Minimalism doesn't mean nonsense like looking at pictures with mpv though. That's like eating soup with a fork and it does not simplify your life.

There's a balance. Tons of software works well with a minimalist philosophy, and composes well out of fully independent components. Other software works better as a monolithic entity. It really depends what you're doing and the trade-offs you're willing to make.

>>997941

Because even that version is full of needless complexity. There are better alternatives for managing services like runit(excluding the init portion), perp, s6, or even openbsd's rc.

>>998010

>not statically linking your dev nodes with a dummy udev setup to satisfy compile time complaints of programs

why

I dream that all programs are written in assembly or C. It makes a huge performance difference. Most programs not written in assembly or C are a cobbled together piece of shit.

>>998163

adding to this: my philosophy about minimalism is pretty much that get the stuff running that you must have (javascript is a must for many of us even though it's horrible technology), do not waste your time or sanity, but do optimize when you feel like you can and want to.

>>998028

to be painfully basic: it was a small enough deployment of non virtualised hardware that re imaging was way easier than understanding what the fuck you just said.

>>998167

>what is man mknod

>what is man udevadm

>what is not having e/udev on your system at all

>what is statically linking devices under /dev/ with /sys/*

git gud

>>998163

The more code, the more bugs. Some bugs are exploitable. More code means more security holes. You also can't easily audit a bigass hunk of code and refactor it into something safer, comapred to a smaller codebase. So yeah, there's reasons to prefer small and tight code, even if you don't have a 15-year old computer.

>>998163

>how bloated GNU/Linux has gotten

There hasn't been any important additions to GNU in a while. What has gotten "bloated" is systemd (and this can be somewhat lessened by correctly configuring systemd. A feat that nobody's ever managed to do) and desktop environments.

It's no surprise Alpine runs faster on an embedded system though. Busybox was developed for embedded systems.

minimalism = not enough IQ to process all the information

>>998737

Only idiots are impressed by complexity.

>>997944

>especially st which is just slow and badly coded

st is god-tier though

>>997800

aside from st and dmenu i don't use any other suckless programs.

Suckless is the software equivalent of some hipster minimalist faggot that won't shut up about how he lives out of a suitcase and has one beautiful antifragile set of forks and knives that he spent a month deliberating over. Modern OSes and desktop environments are like some retard that has a soda streamer and a smart fridge and a billion other gimmick kitchen appliances that he bought and used once. He can do everything he needs to but he's got like 5 different brands of tupperware bought randomly without thought and he can never find the matching lids because of it.

I want something in between. I want all of the basic appliances and tools that I actually use, and I want them to work well and be finished and not have to buy new ones 4 years from now that work totally differently because that's the fashion. I don't want a smart fridge that can show me tweets and news yet mysteriously rots all the vegetables in the crisper drawer, and I don't want to act all smug about how I don't need a gas stove because I have twigs and some rocks to bang together.

In my opinion, the OS should account for as little overhead as possible while still maintaining maximum software compatibility. Ideally the GUI should not require a dedicated GPU, but I do feel a GUI is necessary. A modern distro with a WM instead of a full DE is in my opinion the most minimalist you can get and still be practical. Although some bloated GNU core utils and libs could probably be swapped without compromising compatibility.

>>999288

>everyone who earnestly follows a philosophy is just a hipster!

t. weakling

>>999378

What do you mean? At my last job I had a minimal arch setup where I ran dwm+st and had no issues. Surf is akward to use, and has a few weird quirks so I used firefox instead of it, but on the whole I don't see how using suckless tools is restrictive at all

I like making stand-alone binaries with 0 dependencies other than the Linux kernel. They run anywhere. It's actually simpler and much easier to understand what's going on when you talk to the kernel directly since there isn't shitloads of complicated user space code in-between. Also, the kernel interfaces are much better designed compared to junk like the C standard library.

Some of it's a meme. Shooting for a system which has stable and (if needs be) maintainable software which you can rebuild from source if necessary is a laudable goal. However some of the software's a meme, some suckless programs force you to make configuration changes to the source code and recompile, while it could be argued that this could be done with dotfiles to maintain easier customization and so on.

We're at the stage where all the major desktop environments are enormous and have very unpredictable behavior after several upgrades. Things like automounting and hotplugging should be taken care of by the OS and not a bunch of layered crap living under the aegis of KDE or GNOME.

>>999477

>automounting at the kernel level

This is how you lose a drive with bad cable.

Not to mention how the entire linux devs forgot turning off write caching for obviously known external drives

>"it's a feature #wontfix"

Why?

performance > stability even if you lose your data (tm)

>there are people using the 'linux kernel' file systems

performance > stability

:^)

>>999378 She wanna get pregnant my baby! ;)

>>999496 If she heard it, she would be happy!

>>999491

>>automounting at the kernel level

Never suggested it. Daemons aren’t the kernel.

>>999681

True but at some point you can't audit a 100K SLoC application.

>>999681

It's a damn good proxy for it you retard.

And one that is easily measurable.

Also, the comparisons happen on a logarithmic scale, not a linear scale, and this should be obvious unless you're stupid enough to post the post you just posted.

Test test test test test. Sorry about this techlads

>>1002935

To be fair, ReactOS is really trying to create another NT type system so what more can you expect than a bloated piece of shit

>>998268

The kernel is extremely bloated to the point where embedded hardware is still favoring DD-WRT's 2.6 series kernel over the new 3 offering.

>>999288

I like you.

>>999317

>the OS should account for as little overhead as possible while still maintaining maximum software compatibility.

Those are almost paradoxical. Your computer only has a subset of components that it needs code for. if you want to be more compatible with more software and hardware, you're going to increase your theoretical 'bloat' by a factor of whatever components need to work with N programs. There are conventions and lots of abstractions to reduce this exact problem. But the core issue will never be solved. (besides being autistic about minimalism)

Software shouldn't have to dictate how hardware solves a type of equation or problem most efficiently. Which means there is a never ending cycle of new hardware obsoleting the old. This is only one reason of many why software tends to grow exponentially once it reaches critical mass much like a black hole or node.js

>Ideally the GUI should not require a dedicated GPU

SHHH, dont let Poettering hear you. someone might get idea's

>>999288 [checked]

>Suckless is the software equivalent of some hipster minimalist faggot that won't shut up about how he lives out of a suitcase

That analogy is highly accurate on the [more] autistic side of minimalism.

POST LARGE, MINIMALIST SOFTWARE:

no, that is not a contradiction

>>1011642

Does OpenBSD count? It is a modern operating system.