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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."
I'm sure I've installed minimal gentoo and Debian systems that fit that description.
Nullius in verba
http://www.linuxfromscratch.or... Everything you need, nothing you want.
I see this as a response to the systemd war, and a viable one at that. A server does not need systemd... "It boots faster." Why bother when post takes 20 minutes? "It is tied into udev and network manager." Servers generally don't dhcp or hotplug... Since "the desktop" is going full tilt boogie in one direction and damn everyone who disagrees, it makes sense for the server folks to say "See ya!" And soon after someone posts about how to get lxde running on the server. :)
Linux sucks. Windows isn't much better other than the support.
Computing is not where I thought it would be 25 years ago. Users have continually less power, not more.
Linux gives people power in the wrong places. Places people rather let the system do the work. And it's based on Unix and Unix frankly sucks.
Fuck. I wish Plan 9 or Lisp Machines or something else won other than this half-ass kludge.
Fuck it. I'm going to sell my house tomorrow and build a log cabin in Canadian woods before the winter arrives. Out of here, bitches.
Not trolling... I don't use BSD really, but my understanding is that some of the BSD distros are more server focused. I don't mind being corrected but my understanding is this could be a legit alternative if the idea of splitting Linux is a no go. I don't know why BSD isn't seen or heard of more (I do know it is used and has a strong following, but doesn't seem as prevalent as Linux... Mac doesn't count here). For BSD adherents, maybe this is the break they are looking for?
-- I ignore anonymous replies to my comments and postings.
We used to run linux in the server room because it was lean and easy to admin. Windows was slow, mousy, and dependencies were hellish.
Now we run Windows Server 2012 with no GUI, virtualized, and admin with powershell. We've ripped out tens of thousands of dollars of Red Hat; windows is cheaper.
Basically there aren't any linux server distros that are like Red Hat used to be before the Fedora fiasco. It seems like Red Hat today is doing a bad job of trying to be a GUI laptop distro running on server hardware. And they are letting mature stuff like PADL's LDAP modules go to seed while shipping raw, buggy stuff like SSSD, instead of maintaining the old stuff until the new is reliable enough for real world use.
Slackware indeed. You'll never know it has a GUI if you don't go looking for it, and architecture decisions are made based on Patrick's desire to keep it stable and sane.
See that "Preview" button?
The linked article alone is reason to hate systemd a GUI admin tool. It goes on about .desktop file format again GUI garbage. I've never seen a server do anything with automount, it's frankly a security issue all mounts should be explicit and done by a sysadmin with root privs. Maybe some cheesy backup script? Servers do not need nor should they have a GUI, a VGA port is overkill but windows needs it. VM's again never need a VGA port it's just a waste of ram a serial port works fine for either. The base logic is all things need to be done via CLI first and done well (far to many CLI's were an afterthought to a GUI and it shows). D-Bus again it's mostly a GUI thing, it need not be on a server. DHCP on a server?
I really do not care much about systemd their is nothing not using it in a professional linux right now (something with all the big third party app support) and frankly it's not bothered me enough but I do see anything useful in it either.
No sir I dont like it.
With respect, the above poster is replying to someone that appears to be asserting that. I suggest reading other posts higher up in the thread before wasting time writing such long replies that miss the point.
With respect, the GP of my post never asserted that. For reference this is the entire post:
We used to run linux in the server room because it was lean and easy to admin. Windows was slow, mousy, and dependencies were hellish.
Now we run Windows Server 2012 with no GUI, virtualized, and admin with powershell. We've ripped out tens of thousands of dollars of Red Hat; windows is cheaper.
Basically there aren't any linux server distros that are like Red Hat used to be before the Fedora fiasco. It seems like Red Hat today is doing a bad job of trying to be a GUI laptop distro running on server hardware. And they are letting mature stuff like PADL's LDAP modules go to seed while shipping raw, buggy stuff like SSSD, instead of maintaining the old stuff until the new is reliable enough for real world use.
There is no assertion of "all those Windows sysadmin flunkies are declaring Server 2012 is the bestest ever because you can run in headless with a CLI" in that quote, is there?
There is a certain bias towards Server 2012, but no claim of it being the best ever server OS. Much less a claim that others think it is the best ever server OS.
I suggest reading other posts higher up in the thread before writing short post that you cannot even get right.
Reading slashdot one-liner: (irm http://rss.slashdot.org/Slashdot/slashdot).rdf.item | fl title,desc*
What this guy is looking for is called BSD. In the past, base system was bit less than 30MB. Useless, but still less than base setup of most modern distros.
Among Linuxes, probably only Slackware stayed relatively close to the roots and still can be stripped to the bone. And Debian isn't that far off, really, if you are willing to go on rampage with the rm command (remove man pages, documentation, supplemental files, localizations, etc).
Othereise, this guy has probably missed completely that people are already for years building their own "lean and slim" special-purpose distros using the Gentoo as a factory distro. Because what he asks is really "special-purpose". In most real-world cases, the disk space is cheap and the users want to be able to install new software with just few clicks.
All hope abandon ye who enter here.