Outlining Thin Linux

snydeq writes: Deep End's Paul Venezia follows up his call for splitting Linux distros in two by arguing that the new shape of the Linux server is thin, light, and fine-tuned to a single purpose. "Those of us who build and maintain large-scale Linux infrastructures would be happy to see a highly specific, highly stable mainstream distro that had no desktop package or dependency support whatsoever, so was not beholden to architectural changes made due to desktop package requirements. When you're rolling out a few hundred Linux VMs locally, in the cloud, or both, you won't manually log into them, much less need any type of graphical support. Frankly, you could lose the framebuffer too; it wouldn't matter unless you were running certain tests," Venezia writes. "It's only a matter of time before a Linux distribution that caters solely to these considerations becomes mainstream and is offered alongside more traditional distributions."

Comments

Re:min install

[MightyMartian]

As have I. I have several Debian based routers and KVM servers that are out pure CLI. I have no idea what the writer is taking air. And neither does the writer, methinks.

Re:Yes, just like that.

[MightyMartian]

Windows sysadmins amaze. For fifteen years I listened to them rattle on about how the GUI in Windows NT and its descendants was absolutely necessary, that it opened up servers to people who couldn't or wouldn't learn how to work from a CLI. So a few server distros put the head on their installs, worked like mad dogs to build GUI and web-based management systems like Webmin, and now suddenly all those Windows sysadmin flunkies are declaring Server 2012 is the bestest ever because you can run in headless with a CLI.

Listen you fucking asshole. *nix has been running CLI longer than most people posting here have been alive. It had mature toolsets and script libraries when Windows was a 16-bit cooperative multitasking layer on top of fucking MS-fucking-DOS. Generations of system administrators have lived and fucking died while Windows was forcing a clunky GUI toolset that you couldn't fucking script properly, and that you ended up having to go to REGEDIT and a bazillion GPO entries to fine tune.

Oh no, but Windows is so fucking cutting edge because in the last seven or eight years has developed a fucking shell that you can properly fucking script (even if the scripting language in question is a verbose and unbelievably slow executing piece of shit that is in almost every way the exact opposite of the elegance of *nix).

Well congrat-u-fuck-ulations Mr. "We paid a bazillion dollars to Redmond in licensing fees so we could have a scriptable CLI-based OS in our data center". I bet you even think you did an amazing thing.

Fucking Windows admins. Arrogance, stupidity and a total lack of knowledge of their own fucking operating systems incredibly dubious history as a Server OS.

Meanwhile, in the time it takes you to type out the name of a Powershell scriptlet and its arguments to import a CSV and puke it out as a SQL script, I can do write the code in awk or Perl in a bash wrapper. But hey, I must be stupid and you must the be the super fucking genius.