I disagree.
I will soon be releasing a distro that is free of systemd, wayland, dbus, and other troublesome software. It is built starting from LFS in 2019, and now consists of over 1,500 packages, cross compiling to x86-32/64, powerpc32/64, and others if I had hardware to test. It's built entirely from shell scripts which are clean, organized, and easy to read.
I need help to get the system ready for release in 60-90 days. In particular, I need a fast build system, as my current 12+ year old workstation is too slow. Alpha/beta testers are welcome too. Anyone who wants to help in some way or hear more details, please get in touch:
domain: killthe.net
user: dave
> I will soon be releasing a distro that is free of systemd, wayland, dbus, and other troublesome software.
What makes you decide that these are troublesome software's? Systemd is usually argued that it is monolithic and breaks the Unix paradigm.
But then you are going for X over Wayland? X is a monolithic application that breaks the Unix paradigms.
Are you just picking things because they are old, or is there a reason you decided to go with this setup?
The difference is that the people who designed X11 were honest in their intentions. The authors of systemd, wayland, etc are not. I'll just leave it at that.
(I recommend staying far away from "X11libre" also, for the same reason, with no further comment.)
Monolithic stuff is OK too, where it makes sense. The kernel is monolithic. ZFS is monolithic.
(Yes, this system has ZFS support. The module is built in to the kernel. In time it will support booting from ZFS also, when I finish the initrd code.)
There is a clear, solid reason for everything this system is or does. I'm not a contrarian or a purist, just someone with opinions gained from long experience who is not happy with the direction mainstream Linux is headed. My system is a zen garden of bliss compared to buggy garbage like Ubuntu.
Really, it's like someone added a turbo button. Ubuntu and friends are so bloated, laggy, and slow. I regularly use this system on 15-20+ year old hardware. The default window manager is Enlightenment e16. It's snappy and responsive everywhere.
KDE, Xfce, etc are supported also and are noticeably peppier than on mainstream distros, just due to the lack of bloat, gazillions of daemons running in the background, etc. Out of the box, nothing runs by default. You enable only what you want.
Another inviolable principle is that no application is allowed to originate or receive network traffic unless the user specifically requests it. There is ZERO network activity going on in the background. None of this steady stream of who knows what contacting who knows where that goes on with other systems. No auto update etc. No internet required or used during the system build. Python module installs do not consult the central repository or download anything. Meson or cmake does not download anything. Etc. All that's patched out and disabled.
It's a distro that is meant to be forked. It's very easily done. It's a blank slate, a vanilla Linux system with subtle and tasteful improvements that is the ideal starting point to customize to your exact specifications. If you want to add in systemd and wayland, fine, I don't care, it's your system and you can build it according to your desires. People can use this platform to build their own custom OS and save themselves a ton of work vs. starting completely from scratch.
It's a system that can be audited. Everything is built with shell scripts, starting with source archives and patches that are applied during the build process. It's all inspectable and the process can be understood step by step.
It's a way to hit the ground running with a full featured, working system, while learning in the process. This distro will teach you what LFS would teach you, but with less of a "sheer cliff face" learning curve, letting you focus more on higher aspects of building the system while still learning the low level details in time.
The build is actually overall simpler than LFS despite being way more featured, with things like Ada support. (Yes, it has GNAT.) I just found a way to do it better, and kept iterating countless times to simplify and improve to the max.
Existing systems did not satisfy my requirements or standards of quality, so I just had to create a new one.
> The difference is that the people who designed X11 were honest in their intentions. The authors of systemd, wayland, etc are not. I'll just leave it at that.
Leave it at what? How is Wayland not honest about it's intentions? It is completely transparent about the motivation behind the project. Whether you agree with the motivations is different, and thats fine to disagree with a project.
However there hasn't been a scenario where Wayland haven't been honest.
Yes, I am ignoring your side comments about systemd because I was asking about Wayland, and mixing the two together implies that you are just complaining about the new, rather than technical/architectural reasons.
(Plus I have to ask as "killthe.net" doesn't come up with anything)
Send me an email and I'll be happy to explain further, to whoever asks. I don't want to clutter up this thread with a bunch of arguing that will surely result, as the focus here is just on "going our separate ways" rather than throwing barbs at anyone, or causing more hard feelings.
People who like software that I don't personally like may continue to use it of course, with this system also even, it's just that it won't be in the official repository is all. But as the whole thing is designed and encouraged to be forked, that shouldn't be too much of a burden if someone likes other aspects of the system and wants to maintain their own 'systemd/wayland' version.
How did you get GTK3/4 to work without dbus?
I got rid of dbus in GTK3 by patching the code so that the "accessibility bridge" (to ATK) can be disabled. GTK4 is beneath contempt and will not be supported.
The system uses GTK2 wherever possible, or GTK3 when not. I will either port everything to GTK2 later or create some kind of shim library. Help wanted here. Porting back to GTK2 isn't hard, I just don't have time to work on any of that at the moment.
I'm running Gentoo without dbus and I'm stuck at gtk 3.24.34. I would love to see those patches. Your site appears to be down.
It's just HTTP only (no SSL) and there's nothing there. ... until now!
Here's some nice GTK3 patches for you:
http://killthe.net/patches/gtk-3.24.43-allow-disabling-atk-b...
http://killthe.net/patches/gtk-3.24.43-allow-transparent-win...
http://killthe.net/patches/gtk-3.24.43-allow-wheel-scrolling...
http://killthe.net/patches/gtk-3.24.43-appearance-tweaks-and...
http://killthe.net/patches/gtk-3.24.43-disable-mnemonics-del...
http://killthe.net/patches/gtk-3.24.43-file-chooser-tweaks.p...
http://killthe.net/patches/gtk-3.24.43-remove-dead-key-under...
http://killthe.net/patches/gtk-3.24.43-restore-old-context-m...
http://killthe.net/patches/gtk-3.24.43-set-default-settings....
http://killthe.net/patches/gtk-3.24.43-show-alternating-row-...
Note that GTK 3.24.43 is the last version of GTK3.
My system is full of patches like this to tweak, improve, and adjust things. The point is to get off the "upgrade" treadmill and focus on making things work right.
Thanks for your work! Getting off the "upgrade" treadmill really resonates with me.
Just to be clear, I did not write these patches, but have collected many like this via scouring the net. I think I did make the ATK one though.
If you'd like to be an alpha/beta/release tester of this system, hit me up via email please. I'll start with an initial closed alpha release here in a month or so, if there's interest.
Now for the donation drive: I have plenty of time and a stable situation to work on this system, but the one drawback is I have little funds--and unfortunately my workstation is getting pretty long in the tooth. (AMD FX. It's been a good system, but I'm getting Left Behind here.) The main thing holding me back is compile speed, especially doing work on Chromium and WebKit. It's 12+ hour compile times for either of those, with the latest C++ standards they're using. The system as a whole builds in about 48 hours on my computer.
So I'm hoping to bump into an "angel investor" who either has some old Xeon (Broadwell or newer?) hardware laying around they would donate, something with lots of cores and memory, or who can make a cash donation for me to buy the gear I'm looking at on Ebay. $400-500 is enough for a nice 5x upgrade. It amazes me how cheap this stuff is. We're talking $5000+ hardware when it was new, for peanuts. Still quite powerful.
(A better video card would be great too, if you're feeling generous. Mine is a GTX570. I'd love to have a GTX7xx or newer, or equivalent AMD. That's more of a want than a need however.)
I'm very interested in ppc64 gear too. I want this system to have first-class PPC support. Anyone got an old POWER8 or POWER9 system laying around, or 32-bit stuff? I've got this system building OK in Qemu for ppc64le but it is SLOW, as you can imagine. Like 5 seconds per line in configure scripts, lol.
If anyone out there is in a position where they can help this project in some way, email me please! Thank you.
By the way--I did not want to disable ATK to get rid of dbus, but only did so temporarily. Ultimately a better solution is to create a UNIX socket just for the ATK<>GTK bridge.
Accessibility should be something that the system fully supports. There is speech synthesis and other useful bits installed so far. Maybe someone would like to work on this project. Email me if interested.
I'm sorry to tell you, but I'm not really interested in a new distribution. I appreciate the effort of what you are trying to do, but I think you are wasting time maintaining a distribution instead of maintaining patches (or a fork). If you have the know-how to patch those cancers out, then do only that and let other people do the packaging. Just make them known and available - a github repo maybe?
So, I'm not going to test your distro or switch from my Gentoo. I like Gentoo a lot, most of all because it's so very-very easy to patch any official package. Just put the patch in /etc/portage/patches/<package> and that's it. It gets automatically applied on the next install.
I'm using a Phenom II x6 1100 on a Gigabyte 880G. Firefox compiles in about 3-4 hours I think, not really sure. I do all Gentoo updates over night and it's usually ready in the morning. I can't say about Chromium or webkit - never used them - but 12h seems waaay too long.
Sorry dude, it's about 7 years too late to tell me to stop.
If you like Gentoo, more power to you! It's not for me.
This isn't just another run of the mill distro. It's like nothing else that's out there.
I forgot to mention that I have PaleMoon on the system also, and it compiles in a much more reasonable time. Like two hours or so, I think.
Chromium and WebKit are ginormous, and worse, they are compiled with the latest C++ standards which are slow as hell to compile. Nothing wrong with my system, it just takes forever to compile this giant bloated crap. I need more CPU cores, to blast my way through the pile of work that needs to be done.
Look of the size of the Chromium source code archives these days. It's fucking outrageous. 15 compressed gb (and growing rapidly!) of third party code vendored inside third party code vendored inside third party code, three or possibly even four levels deep! ("Yo Dawg...") Let's just have 5 complete copies of the LLVM suite in random places in there, because why not? Google has lost its marbles.
Yeah, I'm working to fix Chromium's little red wagon too. I'm on version 3 of my custom Chromium build. The binary of version 2 was slimmed down to 186 mb in size (compare to Google's version), with a 300 mb source tree (same) when I quit on it to start version 3. There was plenty more to take out. This latest version is going to be the best yet.
Personally I've been boycotting all chromium forks for about a decade now. Could consider dropping chromium altogether :P
I guess there are alternative "forks" like QtWebEngine that just try to bring in only the blink engine part.
Who's the guy with Firefox 147 32-bit x86 who downloaded a patch? Nice to see there's still at least a few 32-bit users left out there. My system cross compiles to i686, and builds as multilib (both 32-bit and 64-bit libraries) for x86-64 as well, FYI.
Some of these User Agents have to be fake. Android 6.0.1 with Chrome 144, really? lol
Some wise guy has a "Linux/SystemD" user agent. lol
This fella would like to have a word with you:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XfELJU1mRMg
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=atcqMWqB3hw
So, devuan?
No, not even close. Totally different projects. This one is for experts only, or those who want to become experts. The type of person who has been toying with the idea of building a LFS system but doesn't really want to go through all the work and headache (and it's a ton, to build a full system.) It also supports cross compiling to other architectures, which LFS does not.
This system has many powerful features like built in ccache/distcc support for the build, support for building in QEMU, etc. Eventually it will be fully sandboxed.
There is a heavy emphasis on Doing Things Right according to an old school way of thinking. Everything is kept as simple as possible, yet as full featured as is practical. A major goal is to have everything documented and explained, starting with the shell scripts which build the system step by step in an easy to follow manner.
No package manager currently, though a simple one is in the works which is integrated into the build scripts. It's not really needed. You just build a complete system with all packages you want installed in a single run, with your own configuration pre-loaded. This gets compressed to a tarball. Then to install, create a partition, extract the tarball, edit a few files, install the bootloader, set passwords, and go.