Everyone’s welcome to ask questions about GNU/Linux minimalism and share their experiences, no matter their skill level.

Bloatware slows things down, creates security issues, and makes software harder to use by piling on features most people don’t need. Minimalist software, on the other hand, keeps things simple and efficient — it respects your time and doesn’t waste your device’s resources.

>Operating Systems
nosystemd.org
>Daily driver Software
suckless.org/rocks
harmful.cat-v.org/software
>world wide web
suckless.org/sucks/web
>Great minimalist website examples
garbe.ca
bellard.org
stallman.org

“One of my most productive days was throwing away 1000 lines of code.” – Ken Thompson

>install pipewire as a prank one day
>kinda forget about it
>in a moment of lucidity I wonder just wtf is sucking up 600 MB of ram for no reason
i hate modern software

>>105587690
>>in a moment of lucidity I wonder just wtf is sucking up 600 MB of ram for no reason
what was it? because i've never seen pipewire use even a tenth of that

>>105587733
modern software
i said that

>>105587733
actually fuck off. just pipewire is using 103mb on my system rn. I am now shifting to calling out your pedantry.

>>105587773
then maybe you should look into why

to the left lol
>i am calling out your pedantry

>>105587690
Mine uses like 30MB.
Pipewire is the only Red Hat nonsense that I tolerate. It just werks. To be clear it didn't work that well when it started getting traction, but they ironed out the kinks pretty quickly. Much faster than other stuff Red Hat forced, like pulseaudio, systemd, wayland.

Irrelevant to most people, but from my personal experience and reading online discussions, easyeffects (pulseeffects)'s compatibility comes and goes. Jamesdsp works better usually.

>>105587773
>>105587795
oh and to be clear i'm still not suggesting pipewire is the lightest option, like you go with just alsa if you prefer. me though i like routing my audio through calf studio gear, which is a jack client. so i can either run jack and not have pulse client support, or i can run pipewire and have both jack and pulse client support
i don't use the video features it apparently has, i really just use it for jack support (over pulseaudio)

I installed alpine but then put KDE on it. It feels like I'm doing something really naughty.

i saved your thread. your (sic) welcome.

>>105587690
nigga what
$ ps aux|awk '/pipewire|wireplumber/{print $6/1000"MiB \t"$NF}'
7.188MiB pipewire
21.772MiB pipewire-pulse
13.732MiB wireplumber

total 42MiB
kill yourself

>>105587953
god thats based

>>105587481 (OP)
I've been using Debian since about 1999 and Ubuntu and Ubuntu variants since 2004. I like Ubuntu because I don't enjoy tinkering, and when I have to tinker, 9 times out of 10 there's a copy-pastable solution on AskUbuntu.

But I'm open minded. What's the appeal of Arch for me?

>>105587481 (OP)
why are you using the arch logo on a minimalism thread? it's the opposite of minimalism

>>105588325
Not OP but sometimes it's nice to have latest packages and not packages 6 months out of date. I used Debian forever. Then Gimp started crashing doing 1 specific thing, which is a thing I do often. Couldnt get it fixed. Debian didnt have updated packages. This is why I went to Arch based distro.

Then I saw that the KDE packages on Arch were significantly more updated than Debian repos had.

>>105587690
tf u smokin homie

post the rest of it dawg

>>105587481 (OP)
Arch is not a minimalist distro

>>105587690
why do luddites lie so much? this isn't even a good bait

>>105588744
It’s AI bot. You should ignore nonsensical replies on 4chan.

> minimlism general

Here is how you debloat KDE

# pacman -Qg plasma kde-applications | cut -d' ' -f2 | grep -vE 'plasma-desktop|dolphin|kate|konsole' | sudo pacman -Ru -

# pacman -R plasma kde-applications

# pacman -S plasma-desktop dolphin kate konsole

# pacman -S --asexplicit plasma-desktop dolphin kate konsole

# pacman -Rs plasma-meta kde-applications-meta

>>105587481 (OP)
Do you make your on minimalist tool?
Like re-writing clip manger and such?

>>105587690
stupid nigger cunt. stop lying/being dumb.

>all these faggots defending pipewire
This is why the Linux desktop is doomed. Meanwhile I'm running sndio and OSS and I don't have to deal with 3 layers of crap emulating 3 other layers of crap. Anyone that's okay with pulse/pipewire obviously doesn't work on audio professionally. I understand your sound server relies on garbage like ALSA but at the very least you could be smart and use JACK if you're going to continue using the world's worse UNIX clone. Imagine bragging about a sound server _only_ taking up 40MB of RAM at boot.

Linux and GNU are a disaster. Just re-writing software over and over again because of muh "freedoms". You have the freedom to use whatever Red Hat shits out this week. You have the freedom to constantly rip shit out and replace it with worse software because everything is a half finished project no one wants to touch or refactor. I mean you faggots don't even have a concept of /usr/local/ and you can't even run /usr on another partition anymore because you're sheep forced to follow the whims of the US Government's favorite tech companies IBM and Microsoft. Then you turn around and claim your license is somehow better than any other because people are "forced to share". How is that working out for you fags? Now instead of just taking code and fucking off these companies buy off and weasel their way in using politics. So now you don't have any control over the direction of your beloved OS at all. If you dare speak out and make a distro outside of their control they just run massive shilling campaigns on the internet and since most people are fucking stupid they believe the lies and refuse to contribute to your efforts.

The average "minimalist" faggot is pretty retarded too. Since they thing a VT is actually minimal instead of a garbage heap of bad practice and design. There are plenty of interesting projects like Arcan and Lash#Cat9 out there that you faggots never use or mention. Along with stuff like s6.

>>105593620

>>105594285
>all that
>3 paragraphs
Terminally retarded

>>105594326

>>105594285
Thank you.

>>105593620
You know what is more tragic, we are living in AI era, coding is easier than ever but Linux devs are as inept as before (or even worse), literally nothing has changed.

>>105594395
The worst part is these retards that shit up every thread attempting to turn it into a console war don't even code. They have no idea how these systems work because they do not participate in development. Which is why Linux went to shit. All the serious people started on the BSDs but a lot of them jumped ship to Linux during the lawsuits. But over the years most of them have come back because Linux became so unbearable with the churn and drama.

OP here.
How is my dogshit thread still up?
Oh well.

How do I make the most minimal kernel config? There's like way too many options. I don't know what to disable.

>>105587481 (OP)
Give me one good reason not to use systemd. It just works.

>>105581915
blame GNOME for this. its really hard not to hate their guts when they do shit like this
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Fonts#Bitmap

>>105595843
its been a while since I did kernel tweaking but the gentoo wiki is a great start. I think mental outlaw and denshi had videos on that exact topic too. dont make huge changes straight away though, test ones which are meant to make a big difference and go from there.

>>105593620
can I do audio routing with just OSS and sndio? I currently use ALSA and JACK and its fine but I can't unsee this
https://harmful.cat-v.org/software/operating-systems/linux/alsa
and thats from 2008, imagine the graph with pipewire lmao

>>105595935
I already exhausted those types of resources. Not sure if I should use an older custom kernel instead of gentoo's sources and just start with make allnoconfig and add stuff until it works, then only add stuff as needed.

>>105596033
Yes routing is much better in sndio and OSS. The issues you're using to with ALSA do not exist and there are actual man pages for snido and OSS. For example, in snido/OSS it's possible to do things like allow application X to use the left speaker and application B to use the right speaker at the same time. You can do pretty much whatever you want and you don't have to do voodoo dances and spam random strings of text at the sound server hoping it'll work. No more copy/pasting configurations you found on stack exchange or the arch wiki and hoping it works on your machine.

OSS was the default on Linux for years until they made ALSA due to licensing autism. OSS doesn't have that issue anymore but they refuse to admit defeat and use it like any sane person would. I think it's still supported in the kernel but no distro ships with it by default anymore. Since they were pushing pulseaudio hard for years and now pipewire. Which both suffer from the same problems despite what people say. I personally gave up on pulseaudio early when I noticed it eating 20%+ of my CPU at idle (this was before the multi-core days). Never mind the latency and all the other issues. ALSA is also shit as I'm sure you know.

The BSDs have actual man pages. It isn't like GNU land where nothing is documented. Anything you want to do is easy to achieve

>>105596041
You want vanilla kernel. Gentoo sources is really bad and filled with unneeded patches. No one should ever run it.

I forget what it's called but you can use some application to gather a list of what drivers you need for various hardware on your system (including shit you plug-in to things like usb ports). Then you that as a basis for your own kernel config. Or just do what most people do and disable everything you think you don't need and start enabling stuff one-by-one until you figure out what works. Good luck getting any help from the Gentoo forums these days. Most people on it have no idea what they're doing. They banned all the long time users a long time ago.

>>105596086
Yeah, I enabled everything that was used based on my boot. But I still feel there's too much, that's why I wanted to start with the allnoconfig so I can ensure I only enable what I need. What's the best kernel version to use lately?

>>105587773
huh?

>>105596214
>over 50MB of RAM for a sound server at idle

>>105587481 (OP)
Anyone know what rss reader is he using?

>>105596378
It says right in the screenshot that it's newsboat. But I guess with such a horrible color scheme it's hard to make out.

>>105587690
>>105587832
>>105587826
Pipewire? what's wrong with pulseaudio? And wasn't pipewire about video before sticking audio in it? Why should someone switch to pipewire? Pulseaudio just works.

>>105595903
What’s the use case for FreeType support?

>>105596477
i explained why i use pipewire in my post which you responded to

Anyways, windows and macos looks and sounds better. This harfbuzz, wayland, pipewire, and so on have so many dramas, but the end result is shit.

>>105593620
This. One of the best posts I read describing the state of Linux.
Linux is only usable because of the corporate backing it has: mainstream software and hardware support is much better in Linux than the BSDs, and that's the only reason to use it really. Real UNIX is BSD.

>>105596378
Oh, wait it does lol

What happens if I have to run something bloated, like a qt application? Do I run it in a vm or something?

>>105587481 (OP)
I like it. My 3d wm has less code than i3 but more than dwm.

>>105597186
if you don't want to, or can't in certain cases, install a specific/large program, you could run it in a container instead, though it won't change how much resources it requires/takes up

>>105597614
Yeah, but it's better than having to install dbus and all that shit on my computer. It's isolated to when I'm using the shit application.

>>105597625
isolation is the main reason you'd do it, though it is also possible to isolate a regularly installed program using namespaces without the need for a container with another distro installed in it

>>105597640
Well just isolating with unshare or something isn't enough to magically install the dbus requirement. What's the least offensive most minimal container option?

>>105598142
They're all shit. The least offensive of them are FreeBSD jails. But you're still talking about having an entire OS+dependencies just to run an application. You don't need to run dbus. Whatever you want to use will likely run without it no matter what it claims it needs.

>>105598247
>But you're still talking about having an entire OS+dependencies just to run an application
that's not true, a container need only contain the dependencies for the application, no kernel or other unnecessary software
in practice you do typically have a package manager as well, since it makes installing software in a container easy, though there's nothing stopping you pointing a package manager to a folder to use as a container without putting it in the container as well
a package manager alone doesn't take up much space, especially ones like alpine's apk
an alpine rootfs suitable for a container is 8MiB