I had to learn all of these alone because no one was able to explain how simple it is. A lot of Linux forum tell you a lot of shit about it and we notice a lot of noob users in Linux trying to look like Eduard Snowden and Oppenheimer.
All concepts of minimalism in relation to software go out the window, when software people/coders feel lazy or want to take shortcuts. For those that don't get the joke.... that is always. Because minimalism in everything requires a lot of work and careful consideration. To truly be minimal you need to spend lot of effort, or have very limited resources.
Well, what is meant by "minimalism"? Is it RAM usage, storage size, number of packages installed, or is it just a minimalist user experience? I totally get your point about running all of this graphical 'infrastructure', just to land back in the terminal. However, these are all just layers of abstractions that are required for software modularity. Many of the basic abstraction layers are dated in Linux though; TTY, for example, is from before monitors even existed. As a somewhat related aside, I get annoyed when people introduce a piece of software with the obligatory "it's written in Rust!". So, you rewrote `find` in Rust, who cares? "It's memory safe!!!". Okay, but it's a utility that's making system calls which run kernel code written in C. I just don't get it.
Browsh is... not small. It's probably a fatter setup than X11+Firefox. I actually do launch my window manager from the command line, so my setup looks like Kernel -> VT -> Fish -> Hyprland (Combo Wayland and tiling Window Manager) -> (various hyprland tools, fish, web browsers, foot, kitty, etc.) But my goal isn't really minimalism, more something I can use quickly. When I'm using remote systems or working straight from VTs, I use Tmux or Byobu though. On some very low end computers I'll use X11+Ratpoison, which is almost exactly like tmux, except for X11. The funny part about running things in a Linux VT now is that we've largely gotten away from using actual text mode on the video cards, and those are just running now in a frame buffer as well, so there's not a ton of difference between running something in X11 or Wayland, and from a virtual terminal, in terms of hardware resources used.
What minimalism? GRUB boot loader itself is 9MB. I can fit MSDOS, Win3.1 AND Word 6 within 9MB. A full office work environment within the size of boot loader. Boot loader that merely LOADS OS. I remember days when QNX fitted on one 1.44 MB floppy. With GUI and Browser. No modern linux distro ... even those that orineted to "old" hardware are not even able to install under less than 256MiB. Tho some versions of salix and tiny may run w. 128Mib. What sort of minimalism is this? Mere 30 years old hardware form 1990s are uncapable to run.
have you been living under a rock? there's tons of linux ones that can run on 30 year old hardware, people don't want terminals anymore and they want more and more features all the time. how you people can't understand this is beyond me.
@@agentofenhanced2428 No, they can not. Even i386 or i586 kernel builds fail to install under 128 (mostly 256) MiB of RAM. Tho some of distros CAN make run (crawl) if one installs it on some other machine and moves disk image. And yes, I tested Salix, TinyCore, SmallDamn, Q4OS... on a K6 300, 96 MiB ram. ALL installers faled becuase install initrd just do not fit in memory. How many you have tested?
The trouble people have with software bloat is the only popular opinion that I 100% agree with. Otherwise, minimalism is one extreme end of a false dilemma. The false dilemma is the idea that you can only have great software efficacy when the software is simple, and vice versa, if you make the software simple, it "magically" becomes useful and efficacious - that link between properties literally does not exist. The underlying notion is just as false as to think that complex software is the only "good" software (I find this a very bling-sensitive notion where impulsivity is mistaken for good quality). So what is "good" then, for real? First of all, this Albert guy allegedly once said "Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler" (though it seems he didn't literally say that ever) => Nonethelesas, this principle goes a long way already. It just misses one thing - My notion of great software is that it SHOWS AS simple, but it isn't necessarily that. Great is when the software does not show the long and winding path that it took to make it. Every choice, every bit that it does have, is well thought out, by people who have worked their way to properly understand which choice is appropriate for every situation, and what other choices aren't appropriate. True genius hides the pain that it took to get to a certain place. Then, the software is to the point and is programmed to make the right choices, every time, without you noticing. Simplicity is a poor man's attempt at getting the benefits without the burdens, that's why managers obsess with ideology - the fetish of simplicity is a kin of get-rich-quick scheme that appeals to their sense of wanting the benefits without the burdens - which is a classic trap in dysfunctional leadership that almost nobody dares to challenge. The only valid use of simplicity if you first have, and use, a broad understanding of the subject you're responsible for. Everything else is wishful thinking.
A lot of linux people are young and are prone to extreme jumps in judgement. Linux will always behave like a loud minority until they are not one, which most likely they will remain a loud minority ad infinitum. So this is just Nature and as a Nature Observer I observe it and I enjoy it
I'm sorry but you are all over the place. It seems like you can't clearly express your thoughts. Halfway throught the video and still nothing. Worse you seem to BE a linux minimalist, using only the terminal, prefering imagemagick over gimp, etc. Look it's pretty simple. Programs and systems made by human are imperfect, and reducing complexity (aka minimalism) help improving stability, troubleshooting and performance. Plus it's more efficent, require less ressource. But, less feature and that often mean not as user friendly. There.
Its a bit too wide of a topic to really comment on. As others have pointed out. I will say. From what you have pointed out in the video though. To run these things in a graphical environment you need a whole stack of programs. Wouldn't that itself, be something to push people to want to use more minimal software? Rather than just continuing to compound these giant programs on top of eachother. To me. The lines of code thing, is actually a bit important because i run Gentoo on a couple of my drives. If you havent compiled most of the programs you use, you don't really appreciate just how nice it is to have s bunch of programs that compile in 1 to 3 seconds. Beyond the size though. Being able to easily customize them is really the part that draws me. Along with st feeling a lot less janky to use than xterm and urxvt. At least my patched version. Maybe if i was using plain st I wouldn't feel the same way.
@JamesChampionLinux the only larger things I choose to compile are gcc, because I have a few options I like enabling and also want it optimized for my CPU. And the kernel. Which I cut down the size of a good bit, basically remove everything I don't need from it. And same thing. I have it optimized for my CPU. Besides that. Things like Firefox, I just use binaries. And the vast majority of programs tend to be smaller than the kernel (which with my version takes about 30 minutes at the most I believe it's closer to 20, on an 8 thread CPU). So really it's not that bad overall. But it is more work to set up, and there is definitely a lot you have to learn to effectively run Gentoo. Thr Gentoo way at least.
Before you argue what minimalist is, you should at least define it for yourself. I think it's always going to be a balance between comfort (removing friction) and minimalism. I mean... I can have just one chair in my home, for example, and use that for sitting, getting to high shelves, maybe for temporarily putting boxes on or whatever. You get the idea. Or I could have a chair, a step ladder, and some sort of bench for offloading things. Take that to the software world and you're looking at packages instead of real life objects. Yes, you can have a tool that *CAN* do all the things you want, but suboptimally... or you can have three separate tools that each do their niche thing as good as they can. Whatever path you choose... you still have a choice to make. What tool do you choose for the job? One with bells and whistles, possibly coded in JavaScript, that uses ungodly amounts of RAM to perform its task? Or do you choose a tool that just does its thing and gets out of the way immediately? Regardless of what you choose, you will either have friction, or potential points of failure. Also, you involving the terminal in each setup just to get to the browser is wrong. It's not required to reach the browser, after all, so... yeah. But in any case, there's loads upon loads of shared objects underneath that also adds to whatever tangled mess you (the general 'you') choose to build for yourself. "Pure" minimalism (if anyone can even agree on a definition) is a fools errand, but one can always strive to minimize one's setup.
@@andressepter1984 This is true, if you customize your kernel you can get it down. Even then it's somewhere between 500,000 and 1 million lines of code for the most minimal build
@@isaac_shelton Yes, kernel can probably tuned down by removin all optional hardware support and build static kernel tailor-made for your hardware. Sill, I do not really know how to get memory footprint down to 128 or 64 meg. Tho, openwrt and freinds somehow do that. Maybe someday I have time to actually deep dive in this rabbithole.
I tried to listen and understand your point; which is quite good. It reminds me back with the C64 or Amiga which I enjoyed. Because when you programmed on those you could in assembler just write to the graphic chip registers and do it. But that was back when computer hardware resources were quite scarce and had no choice. I mean around 1992 when I started to learn C programming on the Amiga500 with 2.5 Megs I had a pre-emptive multitasking multimedia computer; nowadays I have 32 GIGS ram, it is insane. With many tabs open on a browser just eats ram quickly. I kind of go with the flow for luxury computing but my instincts tell me something is wrong here, seems rather inefficient. Thank you for explaining about the typical Linux pc configurations that most people used and who think they are minimalists. They are impure minimalists. On RUclips I see tons of Linux videos with these setups. This RUclips video might interest you or others regarding frame buffers, but it is a bit complex. ruclips.net/video/B8xHWwCuxKA/видео.html Just think of the possibilities / potential if you could maximize the power of your PC by getting rid of the inefficiencies; even though we have very powerful modern computer technology.
Thanks for your experienced perspective on computer minimalism, and thanks too for the link regarding the frame buffers. I will look forward to watching it.
@@JamesChampionLinux Hope it helps in some way with your plans. That TTYSH looks interesting; is it written in C or assembly? My experience well in the early 90s lots of Amiga coders especially in the demoscene and gaming industry bitbanged on the framebuffers and custom chips; but almost mid 90s on the Amiga they were talking about RTG (Retargetable Graphics) standard to have different graphics cards and were starting to promote OS friendly philosophy rather than the hacker minimalism philosophy.
I dont believe theres a hard coded definition for minimalism, its rather always "in comparison" to something. For a windows user, something like ubuntu would be a minimal option, for someone on Ubuntu, Arch with say, KDE could be a minimal option, and someone on that system could find dwm+gentoo to be far more minimal. At the end of the day, its somewhat of a pipeline of placebos one goes through to achieve "true minimalism". Which at one point does become completely unnecessary since your configuration does not have to be runnable on a toaster. But, to see their side of things, each level of those previously mentioned configs consume far less memory than the one before it and is still perfectly usable in a modern context (unlike some configuration like "tty+framebuffer" for browsing)
TBH, what happens to you here while using vi/vim happens to every vi user I've seen, especially if you talk to them while they type LOL. Poor caps-lock is innocent. More on topic. Minimalism appears more like a recreational quasi-religion and it seems pretty meaningless in this day and age. I think one should look at it as a hobby.
Hey, there are three of us. Feeling left out :-(
There are 3 of you now?!
I had to learn all of these alone because no one was able to explain how simple it is. A lot of Linux forum tell you a lot of shit about it and we notice a lot of noob users in Linux trying to look like Eduard Snowden and Oppenheimer.
Ironically, the lack of online Linux support in this has forced you and I to do our own learning, and that's probably been a good thing.
All concepts of minimalism in relation to software go out the window, when software people/coders feel lazy or want to take shortcuts.
For those that don't get the joke.... that is always. Because minimalism in everything requires a lot of work and careful consideration. To truly be minimal you need to spend lot of effort, or have very limited resources.
Great take!
Well, what is meant by "minimalism"? Is it RAM usage, storage size, number of packages installed, or is it just a minimalist user experience? I totally get your point about running all of this graphical 'infrastructure', just to land back in the terminal. However, these are all just layers of abstractions that are required for software modularity. Many of the basic abstraction layers are dated in Linux though; TTY, for example, is from before monitors even existed.
As a somewhat related aside, I get annoyed when people introduce a piece of software with the obligatory "it's written in Rust!". So, you rewrote `find` in Rust, who cares? "It's memory safe!!!". Okay, but it's a utility that's making system calls which run kernel code written in C. I just don't get it.
Using KDE on SuSE since 2001, I wonder why others struggle.
Browsh is... not small. It's probably a fatter setup than X11+Firefox.
I actually do launch my window manager from the command line, so my setup looks like Kernel -> VT -> Fish -> Hyprland (Combo Wayland and tiling Window Manager) -> (various hyprland tools, fish, web browsers, foot, kitty, etc.) But my goal isn't really minimalism, more something I can use quickly.
When I'm using remote systems or working straight from VTs, I use Tmux or Byobu though. On some very low end computers I'll use X11+Ratpoison, which is almost exactly like tmux, except for X11.
The funny part about running things in a Linux VT now is that we've largely gotten away from using actual text mode on the video cards, and those are just running now in a frame buffer as well, so there's not a ton of difference between running something in X11 or Wayland, and from a virtual terminal, in terms of hardware resources used.
I will be doing a video on Browsh soon. :)
What minimalism? GRUB boot loader itself is 9MB. I can fit MSDOS, Win3.1 AND Word 6 within 9MB. A full office work environment within the size of boot loader. Boot loader that merely LOADS OS. I remember days when QNX fitted on one 1.44 MB floppy. With GUI and Browser. No modern linux distro ... even those that orineted to "old" hardware are not even able to install under less than 256MiB. Tho some versions of salix and tiny may run w. 128Mib. What sort of minimalism is this? Mere 30 years old hardware form 1990s are uncapable to run.
have you been living under a rock? there's tons of linux ones that can run on 30 year old hardware, people don't want terminals anymore and they want more and more features all the time. how you people can't understand this is beyond me.
:(
@@agentofenhanced2428 No, they can not. Even i386 or i586 kernel builds fail to install under 128 (mostly 256) MiB of RAM. Tho some of distros CAN make run (crawl) if one installs it on some other machine and moves disk image. And yes, I tested Salix, TinyCore, SmallDamn, Q4OS... on a K6 300, 96 MiB ram. ALL installers faled becuase install initrd just do not fit in memory. How many you have tested?
@@andressepter1984 I've installed puppylinux on 64gb of ram
@@agentofenhanced2428 You mean MiB? I can try again. I still have K6
The trouble people have with software bloat is the only popular opinion that I 100% agree with.
Otherwise, minimalism is one extreme end of a false dilemma. The false dilemma is the idea that you can only have great software efficacy when the software is simple, and vice versa, if you make the software simple, it "magically" becomes useful and efficacious - that link between properties literally does not exist.
The underlying notion is just as false as to think that complex software is the only "good" software (I find this a very bling-sensitive notion where impulsivity is mistaken for good quality).
So what is "good" then, for real?
First of all, this Albert guy allegedly once said "Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler" (though it seems he didn't literally say that ever) => Nonethelesas, this principle goes a long way already. It just misses one thing -
My notion of great software is that it SHOWS AS simple, but it isn't necessarily that. Great is when the software does not show the long and winding path that it took to make it. Every choice, every bit that it does have, is well thought out, by people who have worked their way to properly understand which choice is appropriate for every situation, and what other choices aren't appropriate.
True genius hides the pain that it took to get to a certain place. Then, the software is to the point and is programmed to make the right choices, every time, without you noticing.
Simplicity is a poor man's attempt at getting the benefits without the burdens, that's why managers obsess with ideology - the fetish of simplicity is a kin of get-rich-quick scheme that appeals to their sense of wanting the benefits without the burdens - which is a classic trap in dysfunctional leadership that almost nobody dares to challenge.
The only valid use of simplicity if you first have, and use, a broad understanding of the subject you're responsible for. Everything else is wishful thinking.
A great post.
A lot of linux people are young and are prone to extreme jumps in judgement. Linux will always behave like a loud minority until they are not one, which most likely they will remain a loud minority ad infinitum. So this is just Nature and as a Nature Observer I observe it and I enjoy it
Absolutely agree.
I'm sorry but you are all over the place. It seems like you can't clearly express your thoughts. Halfway throught the video and still nothing. Worse you seem to BE a linux minimalist, using only the terminal, prefering imagemagick over gimp, etc.
Look it's pretty simple. Programs and systems made by human are imperfect, and reducing complexity (aka minimalism) help improving stability, troubleshooting and performance. Plus it's more efficent, require less ressource. But, less feature and that often mean not as user friendly. There.
I'm actually agreeing with all of this. Lol.
Its a bit too wide of a topic to really comment on. As others have pointed out.
I will say. From what you have pointed out in the video though. To run these things in a graphical environment you need a whole stack of programs. Wouldn't that itself, be something to push people to want to use more minimal software? Rather than just continuing to compound these giant programs on top of eachother.
To me. The lines of code thing, is actually a bit important because i run Gentoo on a couple of my drives. If you havent compiled most of the programs you use, you don't really appreciate just how nice it is to have s bunch of programs that compile in 1 to 3 seconds. Beyond the size though. Being able to easily customize them is really the part that draws me.
Along with st feeling a lot less janky to use than xterm and urxvt. At least my patched version. Maybe if i was using plain st I wouldn't feel the same way.
I would probably run Gentoo if I didn't need to compile some of these larger programs, even though you can get binaries in Gentoo now.
@JamesChampionLinux the only larger things I choose to compile are gcc, because I have a few options I like enabling and also want it optimized for my CPU. And the kernel. Which I cut down the size of a good bit, basically remove everything I don't need from it. And same thing. I have it optimized for my CPU.
Besides that. Things like Firefox, I just use binaries. And the vast majority of programs tend to be smaller than the kernel (which with my version takes about 30 minutes at the most I believe it's closer to 20, on an 8 thread CPU). So really it's not that bad overall. But it is more work to set up, and there is definitely a lot you have to learn to effectively run Gentoo. Thr Gentoo way at least.
Before you argue what minimalist is, you should at least define it for yourself. I think it's always going to be a balance between comfort (removing friction) and minimalism. I mean... I can have just one chair in my home, for example, and use that for sitting, getting to high shelves, maybe for temporarily putting boxes on or whatever. You get the idea. Or I could have a chair, a step ladder, and some sort of bench for offloading things. Take that to the software world and you're looking at packages instead of real life objects. Yes, you can have a tool that *CAN* do all the things you want, but suboptimally... or you can have three separate tools that each do their niche thing as good as they can.
Whatever path you choose... you still have a choice to make. What tool do you choose for the job? One with bells and whistles, possibly coded in JavaScript, that uses ungodly amounts of RAM to perform its task? Or do you choose a tool that just does its thing and gets out of the way immediately?
Regardless of what you choose, you will either have friction, or potential points of failure.
Also, you involving the terminal in each setup just to get to the browser is wrong. It's not required to reach the browser, after all, so... yeah. But in any case, there's loads upon loads of shared objects underneath that also adds to whatever tangled mess you (the general 'you') choose to build for yourself. "Pure" minimalism (if anyone can even agree on a definition) is a fools errand, but one can always strive to minimize one's setup.
why terminal to open a browser when you can assign hotkeys for everything haha
Hehe, I agree, but I will explain my reasoning for this in a future video. :)
Linux is around ~35 million lines of code. Linux and minimalism do not really make sense together.
Maybe I should go OpenBSD, but I'm scared!
Most of it is support to various hardware. Crafting your own kernel probably still fits in 1.44MB (tho I have not tried).
@@andressepter1984 This is true, if you customize your kernel you can get it down. Even then it's somewhere between 500,000 and 1 million lines of code for the most minimal build
@@isaac_shelton Yes, kernel can probably tuned down by removin all optional hardware support and build static kernel tailor-made for your hardware. Sill, I do not really know how to get memory footprint down to 128 or 64 meg. Tho, openwrt and freinds somehow do that. Maybe someday I have time to actually deep dive in this rabbithole.
linux is minimalism on microshit ,that is good enough for me .
Yes, this is what matters most.
I tried to listen and understand your point; which is quite good. It reminds me back with the C64 or Amiga which I enjoyed. Because when you programmed on those you could in assembler just write to the graphic chip registers and do it. But that was back when computer hardware resources were quite scarce and had no choice. I mean around 1992 when I started to learn C programming on the Amiga500 with 2.5 Megs I had a pre-emptive multitasking multimedia computer; nowadays I have 32 GIGS ram, it is insane. With many tabs open on a browser just eats ram quickly. I kind of go with the flow for luxury computing but my instincts tell me something is wrong here, seems rather inefficient. Thank you for explaining about the typical Linux pc configurations that most people used and who think they are minimalists. They are impure minimalists. On RUclips I see tons of Linux videos with these setups.
This RUclips video might interest you or others regarding frame buffers, but it is a bit complex.
ruclips.net/video/B8xHWwCuxKA/видео.html
Just think of the possibilities / potential if you could maximize the power of your PC by getting rid of the inefficiencies; even though we have very powerful modern computer technology.
Thanks for your experienced perspective on computer minimalism, and thanks too for the link regarding the frame buffers. I will look forward to watching it.
@@JamesChampionLinux Hope it helps in some way with your plans. That TTYSH looks interesting; is it written in C or assembly? My experience well in the early 90s lots of Amiga coders especially in the demoscene and gaming industry bitbanged on the framebuffers and custom chips; but almost mid 90s on the Amiga they were talking about RTG (Retargetable Graphics) standard to have different graphics cards and were starting to promote OS friendly philosophy rather than the hacker minimalism philosophy.
TTYSH is just a 3000+ line bash/sh script I'm afraid. Lol.
Thanks for all this juicy info on computer history!
9p kernel > rio > rc
What is "rc"? Thanks.
@@JamesChampionLinux It is the default shell on Plan 9
Thanks. I am curious to try Plan9 on a video.
I dont believe theres a hard coded definition for minimalism, its rather always "in comparison" to something. For a windows user, something like ubuntu would be a minimal option, for someone on Ubuntu, Arch with say, KDE could be a minimal option, and someone on that system could find dwm+gentoo to be far more minimal. At the end of the day, its somewhat of a pipeline of placebos one goes through to achieve "true minimalism". Which at one point does become completely unnecessary since your configuration does not have to be runnable on a toaster. But, to see their side of things, each level of those previously mentioned configs consume far less memory than the one before it and is still perfectly usable in a modern context (unlike some configuration like "tty+framebuffer" for browsing)
TBH, what happens to you here while using vi/vim happens to every vi user I've seen, especially if you talk to them while they type LOL. Poor caps-lock is innocent.
More on topic. Minimalism appears more like a recreational quasi-religion and it seems pretty meaningless in this day and age. I think one should look at it as a hobby.
I cannot multitask while using Vim.