KISS: a new systemd-free distribution that aims to "keep it simple"

Head_on_a_Stick · 2019-11-19 18:32:06

Though this might be of interest to some folks here:

KISS is an independent Linux distribution with a focus on simplicity and the concept of less is more.

https://getkiss.org/

Features:

Uses a plain-text package system which is language agnostic and parseable with basic UNIX utilities.
Uses a package manager written in 500~ lines of POSIX sh (excluding blank lines and comments).
Based on musl libc, busybox and the Linux kernel.
All shell code is linted by and passes shellcheck (including each and every repository package).
All packages are compiled from source by the package manager which automatically handles dependencies, patches, etc.
Explicitly excludes the following software: dbus, systemd, polkit, gettext, intltool, pulseaudio, pam, wayland, logind, ConsoleKit2 and all Desktop Environments. See Philosophy.
Rootless Xorg environment without any additional software.
Repository signing through git and gnupg (based on signed commits and built into git itself).

So it's a source-based distribution but much simpler in concept & execution than Gentoo.

The developer is Dylan Araps, who also wrote neofetch & fff.

GNUser · 2019-11-19 20:03:03

Cool! I love distros like this. Thanks for pointing it out.

Tiny Core Linux, which I have grown to really appreciate, has some similarities: Busybox init, Busybox userland, minimalistic package manager. Differences are that it uses glibc (instead of musl) and--the biggest difference--that it's designed in such a way that, at every boot, the system is rebuilt from a "fresh install" based on the instructions you provide.

There are four places where the user provides instructions:
1. Boot loader "boot codes"
2. List of packages to load
3. A special tarball that holds your configuration files
4. Startup jobs in /opt/bootlocal.sh (root jobs) and in ~/.X.d/ (normal user jobs)

At most, only /opt and home directories are persistent. It's an ingenious design that gives you quite the clean feeling because all changes to the base system are in only one of these four places and can be reverted by simply editing a file or tarball then rebooting.

You can read all about it here: http://distro.ibiblio.org/tinycorelinux/corebook.pdf

Last edited by GNUser (2020-04-01 18:00:44)

Ogis1975 · 2019-11-20 17:27:46

Head_on_a_Stick wrote:

Though this might be of interest to some folks here

Hello. Did you try this distro?

Head_on_a_Stick · 2019-11-20 21:31:19

Ogis1975 wrote:

Did you try this distro?

I've just got it installed tonight, the kernel is compiled and the bootloader configured. I'll try to boot it and install X tomorrow.

Watch this space :-)

EDIT: so far it is *beautiful* to work with.

Last edited by Head_on_a_Stick (2019-11-20 21:33:13)

Head_on_a_Stick · 2019-11-23 14:22:23

OK, been trying it out a bit more. No X yet because it takes so long to compile stuff.

The init system is busybox with it's version of sv providing the service management. The rest of the userland is also provided by the various busybox utilities, including the shell.

It is incredibly minimalist, even more so than Alpine Linux. Here's the ps_mem & pstree output from a bare console login:

 Private  +   Shared  =  RAM used       Program

 24.0 KiB +  47.5 KiB =  71.5 KiB       init
516.0 KiB + 182.5 KiB = 698.5 KiB       udevd
216.0 KiB + 572.0 KiB = 788.0 KiB       busybox (8)
---------------------------------
                          1.5 MiB
=================================

init-+-5*[getty]
     |-runsvdir
     |-sh---sh---pstree
     `-udevd

Nice :-)

Ogis1975 · 2019-11-23 17:40:40

Head_on_a_Stick wrote:

OK, been trying it out a bit more. No X yet because it takes so long to compile stuff.
It is incredibly minimalist, even more so than Alpine Linux.Nice :-)

Thank you Head_on_a_Stick, for testing it. I think it is not my cup of tea. Compiling ALL stuff takes so many time.

HevyDevy · 2019-11-24 06:11:50

Thanks for sharing....I would need some better hardware to be able to give kiss linux a try, maybe oneday when i can afford a 24 core thread ripper a few RTX2080t'si and shiteloads of ram

at the moment im stuck with an old intel celeron quad core machine with 1.5 ghz with a whopping 1 thread per core.

yeti · 2019-11-24 12:09:21

HevyDevy wrote:

Thanks for sharing....I would need some better hardware to be able to give kiss linux a try, maybe oneday when i can afford a 24 core thread ripper a few RTX2080t'si and shiteloads of ram
at the moment im stuck with an old intel celeron quad core machine with 1.5 ghz with a whopping 1 thread per core.

Compiling everything from source yields a QA problem for the maintainers.
Distributions based on delivering the same binaries to everyone are more maintainable.
And abolishing source distributions would stop global warming within months!
Ok... not really... but we should ask whether we really need them...
Do usefull things with your CPUs and for most of us that does not include compiling every binary on your harddisk yourself.

HevyDevy · 2019-11-24 12:32:01

yeti wrote:

HevyDevy wrote:
Thanks for sharing....I would need some better hardware to be able to give kiss linux a try, maybe oneday when i can afford a 24 core thread ripper a few RTX2080t'si and shiteloads of ram
at the moment im stuck with an old intel celeron quad core machine with 1.5 ghz with a whopping 1 thread per core.
Compiling everything from source yields a QA problem for the maintainers.
Distributions based on delivering the same binaries to everyone are more maintainable.
And abolishing source distributions would stop global warming within months!
Ok... not really... but we should ask whether we really need them...
Do usefull things with your CPUs and for most of us that does not include compiling every binary on your harddisk yourself.

Lol, it would save countless unicorns too!

MiyoLinux · 2019-11-24 17:25:49

There are folks who like source-based distros, and they enjoy compiling their packages...so I believe source-based distros have and serve a purpose.

I've been using Venom Linux for about 3 weeks now. It's a rolling source-based distro based on LFS. It also has its own package manager that will download and install the dependencies for each package in the repos. It's probably one of the easiest to use source-based distros that I personally know of. It has performed flawlessly for me so far, but I don't know if I will be able to continue using it...and I hate that. My computer only has 2 CPUs, 4 GBs of RAM, I have a slow internet connection, and I can only devote around 5 hours a day on that computer. Most packages compile and install pretty quickly despite that, but periodically one comes along that takes hours to compile on my system due to all that I mentioned above. I've been waiting to upgrade those packages every Saturday, because I have more time then.

Still, it's a fantastic system and fun to use.

golinux · 2019-11-25 17:22:28

yeti wrote:

And abolishing source distributions would stop global warming within months!

bitcoins are the real energy hogs.

yeti · 2019-11-25 17:59:14

golinux wrote:

yeti wrote:
And abolishing source distributions would stop global warming within months!
bitcoins are the real energy hogs.

Only quoting that line without the one straight after it is not a fair move.

Head_on_a_Stick · 2019-11-25 18:21:20

yeti wrote:

And abolishing source distributions would stop global warming within months!

Lol.

Yes, source-based distributions are certainly an aquired taste but the customisation possibilities are interesting, especially with KISS' language-agnostic packaging system.

I'm tempted to build apk-tools and use that to install large binary packages like FF and possibly the kernel. Or perhaps fork the repositories and try to get GitHub's CI/CD to build them for me.

Anyway, the system itself is gorgeous. Very elegant.

yeti · 2020-02-02 11:08:08

Head_on_a_Stick wrote:

Yes, source-based distributions are certainly an aquired taste but the customisation possibilities are interesting, especially with KISS' language-agnostic packaging system.

Endless possibilities... and only an AMD64 version?
Or am I just overlooking the hidden endless list of architectures and ports?

Head_on_a_Stick · 2020-02-02 12:00:27

yeti wrote:

only an AMD64 version?

That is correct.

getkiss.org wrote:

The distribution targets only the x86-64 architecture and the English language.

HevyDevy · 2020-02-03 11:30:03

The Kiss team seem to be making good progress with their project, i read today they have implemented their own version of alternatives.

https://getkiss.org/blog/20200202a

Really nice website too, definitely "kiss". When i get some better hardware i will definitely give this distro a try.

Last edited by HevyDevy (2020-02-03 11:30:27)

bgstack15 · 2020-02-03 21:17:35

I could see this alternative alternatives thing being adapted by other distros, say, ones that claim to "support exploring alternatives" (no pun intended, haha).

And I think it's cool that he's working on POSIX shell for everything. Portability is great. However, in my own recent experience, shell speed is an order of magnitude slower for certain things like text parsing, than python. There's a reason some things are written in real programming languages...

Does anyone have any experience to share, about if the kiss package manager is faster than yum?

Head_on_a_Stick · 2020-02-04 17:24:56

bgstack15 wrote:

Does anyone have any experience to share, about if the kiss package manager is faster than yum?

KISS is source-based so the package manager is *very* slow indeed.

Having said that I didn't try to install their new binary firefox-bin package, I'm sure it would be quicker for that.

aus9 · 2020-03-31 08:24:48

GNUser wrote:

Cool! I love distros like this. Thanks for pointing it out.
Tiny Core Linux, which I have grown to really appreciate, has some similarities: SNIP

Extra diff to yours in the build that appears to say

# Disable stripping (add this only if needed)

https://k1ss.org/package-system

while TC nearly always requires stripping.

*.a *.h *.la *.m4 *.pc -> dev extension (after --strip-debug)
*.so* -> main extension (after --strip-unneeded)

The TC official wiki appears down ATM.
http://wiki.tinycorelinux.net/

IMHO, stripping is better if binaries are uploaded to a server and the user downloads it.
Saving data is important too. And I am in Australia with not so great internet. YMMV

BTW I think I can guess why stripping is disabled, they prefer to get members to run their own debugger which is not possible if binaries are stripped.

GNUser · 2020-04-01 17:40:44

The official Tiny Core Linux wiki is down. Developers are aware and working on it. In the meantime, wiki can be accessed via this mirror:
https://www.linuxsecrets.com/tinycoreli … start.html

Their forum is alive and well:
http://forum.tinycorelinux.net

Main reason to strip binaries is to make them smaller (I've sometimes seen them shrink to 50-75% of original size). TCL packages contain stripped binaries in the interest of keeping everything as tiny as possible.

The officially official Devuan Forum!

#1 2019-11-19 18:32:06

KISS: a new systemd-free distribution that aims to "keep it simple"

#2 2019-11-19 20:03:03

Re: KISS: a new systemd-free distribution that aims to "keep it simple"

#3 2019-11-20 17:27:46

Re: KISS: a new systemd-free distribution that aims to "keep it simple"

#4 2019-11-20 21:31:19

Re: KISS: a new systemd-free distribution that aims to "keep it simple"

#5 2019-11-23 14:22:23

Re: KISS: a new systemd-free distribution that aims to "keep it simple"

#6 2019-11-23 17:40:40

Re: KISS: a new systemd-free distribution that aims to "keep it simple"

#7 2019-11-24 06:11:50

Re: KISS: a new systemd-free distribution that aims to "keep it simple"

#8 2019-11-24 12:09:21

Re: KISS: a new systemd-free distribution that aims to "keep it simple"

#9 2019-11-24 12:32:01

Re: KISS: a new systemd-free distribution that aims to "keep it simple"

#10 2019-11-24 17:25:49

Re: KISS: a new systemd-free distribution that aims to "keep it simple"

#11 2019-11-25 17:22:28

Re: KISS: a new systemd-free distribution that aims to "keep it simple"

#12 2019-11-25 17:59:14

Re: KISS: a new systemd-free distribution that aims to "keep it simple"

#13 2019-11-25 18:21:20

Re: KISS: a new systemd-free distribution that aims to "keep it simple"

#14 2020-02-02 11:08:08

Re: KISS: a new systemd-free distribution that aims to "keep it simple"

#15 2020-02-02 12:00:27

Re: KISS: a new systemd-free distribution that aims to "keep it simple"

#16 2020-02-03 11:30:03

Re: KISS: a new systemd-free distribution that aims to "keep it simple"

#17 2020-02-03 21:17:35

Re: KISS: a new systemd-free distribution that aims to "keep it simple"

#18 2020-02-04 17:24:56

Re: KISS: a new systemd-free distribution that aims to "keep it simple"

#19 2020-03-31 08:24:48

Re: KISS: a new systemd-free distribution that aims to "keep it simple"

#20 2020-04-01 17:40:44

Re: KISS: a new systemd-free distribution that aims to "keep it simple"

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