# From the maker of dwm wm comes...



## Phishfry (Apr 9, 2016)

Interesting take on the OS front.

http://sta.li/

http://www.infoworld.com/article/30...ribution-smashes-assumptions-about-linux.html


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## Phishfry (Apr 9, 2016)

I have been testing Apline Linux which also uses musl-libc. It seems fast and minimalist with a package system. OpenRC inside.


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## drhowarddrfine (Apr 9, 2016)

It's been a couple of hours and ten more Linux distros have been introduced. Yawn. No one here cares. I don't think anyone anywhere else cares either.


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## scottro (Apr 9, 2016)

This one is different though.  Out of those 10 you mention, almost all are simply derivatives of another one, with most differences being in the desktop, packages chosen, and so on.

The creator is the author of dwm, one of my most frequently used window managers, (they also do dmenu, slock, and such. They have proven themselves. 
(And actually, drhowarddrfine, the author shares your dislike of many things Linux.)


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## drhowarddrfine (Apr 9, 2016)

scottro Yeah, I ran dwm or the other one (forgot), many years ago. I found their statement that, if you don't know C, you shouldn't be using it, OK at the time but got irritated when they threw that back at me on irc when I couldn't find one of the config settings, and I'm a very experienced C programmer. I'm holding a grudge.


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## scottro (Apr 9, 2016)

LOL, literally.  Yeah, you should hold a grudge, but these angsty teenagers who no doubt populate their irc channel, are probably still trying to figure out who they are. 

Actually, (I don't know C), when I first saw their site and its comments about you have to do the source code, and this keeps stupid newbies away, I figured they were about 12 years old.   Now, however, there are plenty of tutorials out there, the best one, IMHO, on the Debian forums. 
But I digress.   My only at all serious point here is that the vast majority of Linux distributions are offshoots of one of the existing ones, and in this case, the guy does seem to be doing something different, and does apparently, dislike systemd as well as some other Linux-isms.  Whether this will turn out to be useful or not, I have no idea.  (To be honest, I doubt I'll try it.)


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## Maxnix (Apr 9, 2016)

The pages about the FHS and systemd are funny, however.


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## zirias@ (Apr 10, 2016)

Quoting the linked article:


> The most obvious benefit is that static binaries have a smaller memory and on-disk footprint.


I somehow have _serious_ doubts about _that_ claim 

*edit:* It _might_ be true for the on-disk part when your whole system only uses a handful of binaries ... but as soon as several binaries start sharing more than just libc.so (or the number of binaries gets bigger, so that all these copies of libc.so add up to more than the shared linker infrastructure), this is just ridiculous. Not even talking about memory footprint, see page sharing etc ...


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## Crivens (Apr 10, 2016)

Zirias said:


> Quoting the linked article:
> 
> I somehow have _serious_ doubts about _that_ claim
> 
> *edit:* It _might_ be true for the on-disk part when your whole system only uses a handful of binaries ... but as soon as several binaries start sharing more than just libc.so (or the number of binaries gets bigger, so that all these copies of libc.so add up to more than the shared linker infrastructure), this is just ridiculous. Not even talking about memory footprint, see page sharing etc ...


Not entirely true. The page sharing only works if your code is PIC, which a lot of the shared libs seem not to be. So once you need to patch offsets in the code, your page can no longer be shared. Things like errno come to mind here. But I have fought this fight with some GNU die-hards, who would not care to argue on a fact basis about this.


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## zirias@ (Apr 10, 2016)

Crivens said:


> The page sharing only works if your code is PIC


Obviously true, but so far I thought position independent code was standard for shared libs. At least, I always compile my own with `-fPIC`.


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## kpa (Apr 10, 2016)

Does FreeBSD actually support page sharing with shared libraries? I have a vague memory about reading on the mailing lists that it's still unimplemented.


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## ANOKNUSA (Apr 10, 2016)

I'm a dwm/dmenu/slock user myself, and like the general idea behind the suckless philosophy. I apply patches to my ports and subscribe to their lists and all that. But some of those folks are definitely fanatics, the stali demo doesn't really do anything right now, and Anselm Garbe---the creator of dwm and dmenu---doesn't really serve as the head of the project. He does some work on it, sure, but he doesn't have any ownership of or power over it, and as I recall it wasn't his idea.

stali really serves as a showcase, testing ground, and ultimate goal for their work as they completely rewrite all the GNU core utilities from scratch. Frankly, as admirable as their outlook may be, and as great as some of their software may be, you will not find a finer exapmle of NIH Syndrome than the suckless folks.


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## Crivens (Apr 11, 2016)

kpa said:


> Does FreeBSD actually support page sharing with shared libraries? I have a vague memory about reading on the mailing lists that it's still unimplemented.


It should, as far as I have understood the virtual memory system. And I must have read almost all of it 
Since you map the same vnode into the address space, you use the same memory object for the base of the change list. Private mappings use the lower levels for backing store (read), so yes - page sharing should work.


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