I am surprised, 87 comments and so far nobody has mentioned X11Libre.
They claim 30 developers right now. Don't know if true and if they are any good, but when the time comes to update my xserver, I will have a look at them - just to show my support.
Ah aeh, Wayland, it too got pitched to me recently. But I don't see it improves on any use case I have, but actively disables functionality I need. So a big no go and pass. Why should I change anything in my single-user distro - thank you.
Some of us thought to ourselves in the 90s, I don't have to use Windows. There is something called Linux. I remember installing SUSe from 5 1/4 floppies (A LOT of them) and configuring scanlines and hoping my CRT survives the first startx command. I gave no one authority to say what get's deprecated and what not to me. The only person who can do this I am myself.
I use Linux because of people back then as Linux Torvalds and today Jordan Sissel, who do the right thing out of passion and not expectation of financial or other reward. Just for themselves and then share it, because it might be useful for others too. It's not a 9 to 5 job to them.
People like Lennart Poettering or some other kids who want to coax me into accepting their toys are a reason for me to run away as fast as possible from such shenanigans. I survived editing the scan lines, I don't need software from IBM.
Regarding Wayland and GUIs: GUIs have been much worse than command line and batch environments for automation. xdotool is kind of the best we have (basically just creating macros like in an editor for the whole system), but neither X11 nor the applications are really designed for automation. AppleScript and d-bus all kind of never really worked out. What will happen now with text based gen-AI models, we will go back to good old text (plus speach) interfaces. We will just tell (e.g. in a text box) the AI what we want and they find a way to deliver whatever it is we asked for. Then finally the AI properly controls a web browser for us, but we don't need to see any of that.
It is interesting to read what you wrote. Some points as a reaction:
"I know that one day I'm going to die". Yes, and most people ignore it and push this insight away. You know who deals with this topic over and over, that is Buddhism. You might be open to investigate what they have to say. The rest of what you wrote also reminds me of what Buddhism has to say.
"I'm completely clueless what I could potentially change while there's still time. And the worst part is, compared to most of humanity, I'm very privileged."
Again, as I understand it, the buddhists think our live as a human is like a very fine boat, very precious. The Buddhists think we needed many lives to get to this point in the Karma circle. Sounds stupid, but just think how long evolution took to create you, how many of your parents and anchestors had to have how much luck, and voila, here you are! Bummer, not? And you know, just for a short time, and then what for. So the Buddhists think, you have kind of an obligation and responsibility, to make good use of this precious boat. They say, yes, it is urgent, not much time left.
For you it is meaning (maybe). For other it is happiness. For others yet something else. What is wrong to spend a whole life about what would or could be meaningful, or maybe there is nothing, or maybe there does not need to be something, or maybe there is something. Nothing to loose, not. Btw, here is a story I heard from Ken McLeod online in a talk:
It goes like this, a sage is sitting on the side of the street, and Alexander the Great comes along with his army. He sees the sage, and asks him, what do you do the whole day? And the Sage says I am contemplating/meditating/do nothing (I forgot the detail), and Alexander shakes his head and says, what's the point of that. And then the sage asks Alexander, and what do you do the whole day? And Alexander says, I am building an empire! And the sage says, but what for?
So if you haven't found meaning for yourself, at least you are honest about it, and maybe you know already what you are looking for.
The above mentioned Ken McLeod has written a book about Buddhism, that puts it into the context of our Western culture. I once gave a copy to a Chinese, and she said after reading it, the concepts are easy to understand, but hard to remember. For me it is the other way around, very counter intuitive to understand. I gave the book someone else too, and when she saw the book she said, "ah, you are a searcher". Maybe I am, and so far I haven't found anything better or a contradiction in it. So that is my best lead so far, maybe you would find it worthwhile to look into this area too (the book is BTW "Wake Up To Your Life", there is also a web site with lot's of transcribed talks: https://unfetteredmind.org/).
(disclaimer: meditation can be also potentially harmfull, as e.g. "terrifying" thoughts could be even more amplified and leading to a real or deeper crisis.)
You are correct, I ignored the "static" point. My nvi size was dynamically
linked. I want to learn static builds, even thought my distro of choice LFS is
not very forthcoming in this respect.
I got nvi for Linux build and working using the patched source code from Debian for nvi version 1.81.6-17-debian. It is 39768 bytes on my amd64 machine (I don't remember if I used some extra flags to make it smaller).
I replaced vim for the vi binary with nvi in my Linux From Scratch fork, thought vim is still left. Yes, my vim is similar in size to yours, good idea for an upgr... - down shift!
I just bootstrapped Rustc 1.58 using only GCC and mrustc sources on an 8 core 16 thread machine with 32 GB memory and lot's of disk space. It took 20 hours.
Yes, and some are even intended only for the X terminal, not the real TTY.
What is missing is a nice library for high level languages, as ncurses is famous and all that, but who, unless they are coding in C, can interface with it and even understand the documentation.
So nine distros.. I thought there is some fundamental flaw common about all Linux distros.. Distrowatch has what, 160 distros? So way to go.. Either finish that list or report back if you found something that suits your needs.. lazy bastard..
If you want to test the water, here is a mega script who does it all in one go in a qemu virtual machine (granted, still some standard manual install of some debian based bootstrap iso):
Output is X Org and a falkon (chromium based) browser. But need some memory, diskspace and time.. Still a lot faster than doing it all by hand the first time around..
They claim 30 developers right now. Don't know if true and if they are any good, but when the time comes to update my xserver, I will have a look at them - just to show my support.
Ah aeh, Wayland, it too got pitched to me recently. But I don't see it improves on any use case I have, but actively disables functionality I need. So a big no go and pass. Why should I change anything in my single-user distro - thank you.
Some of us thought to ourselves in the 90s, I don't have to use Windows. There is something called Linux. I remember installing SUSe from 5 1/4 floppies (A LOT of them) and configuring scanlines and hoping my CRT survives the first startx command. I gave no one authority to say what get's deprecated and what not to me. The only person who can do this I am myself.
I use Linux because of people back then as Linux Torvalds and today Jordan Sissel, who do the right thing out of passion and not expectation of financial or other reward. Just for themselves and then share it, because it might be useful for others too. It's not a 9 to 5 job to them.
People like Lennart Poettering or some other kids who want to coax me into accepting their toys are a reason for me to run away as fast as possible from such shenanigans. I survived editing the scan lines, I don't need software from IBM.
Regarding Wayland and GUIs: GUIs have been much worse than command line and batch environments for automation. xdotool is kind of the best we have (basically just creating macros like in an editor for the whole system), but neither X11 nor the applications are really designed for automation. AppleScript and d-bus all kind of never really worked out. What will happen now with text based gen-AI models, we will go back to good old text (plus speach) interfaces. We will just tell (e.g. in a text box) the AI what we want and they find a way to deliver whatever it is we asked for. Then finally the AI properly controls a web browser for us, but we don't need to see any of that.