The Absolute Linux project, a lightweight remix of the Slackware distribution, has been discontinued by its developer, Paul Sherman. He cited time constraints and financial needs as the primary reasons for the closure.
On December 15th 2024, developer Paul Sherman announced the end of the Absolute Linux project. This year, its website has already gone, but the Internet Archive'sAge, expense, but mostly LACK OF TIME leave me no choice but to give it up.
I won't bore you with the crybaby details, but I gotta make ends meet. If someone wants to take the distro over, I would be happy to freely pass it on. I enjoyed tinkering all those years!is still there, complete with downloads, if you want to give it a try. Absolute Linux was a cut-down lightweight remix of theyears old is the oldest surviving distro. As we said in that story, Slackware itself is anything but lightweight – it nearly filled our 16GB test root partition. That would seem to leave room for a lightweight remix, and we like the sound of some of its choices – the We're always sad to see a project close down – although if any fans of Absolute Linux read this, it may be worth contacting Mr Sherman and offering to take it over. If that sounds over your pay grade but you want a lighter-weight Slackware, thendifferent distros out there, even if we restrict the criteria to, say,"cut-down versions of Slackware" – and there used to be And yet, some of the more radically experimental distros are sadly neglected, and there are established ideas in filesystems, packaging, desktop design and more that have yet to be adequately explored., discards the traditional Unix filesystem hierarchy and replaces it with a much simpler and more readable one modelled on macOS. Throwing out the hierarchy isn't unique: for instance, bothdo that too. What their developers failed to do, though, was realise that replacing it with a hash-based machine-generated index does not make it appealing to most people, whatever the technological merits may be. We feel thatGobo uses the filesystem to keep programs, and all their libraries and dependencies, isolated in their own folders. This is also what macOS does with itsThere is an obvious synergy between these directory-based apps and the GoboLinux design. A distro that combined the Gobo OS layout with either GNUstep and its app bundles, or ROX and its AppDirs – or both! – could work very well.Our philosophy is about keeping things simple, minimal and usable. We believe this should become the mainstream philosophy in the IT sector."all hardware sucks, all software sucks." Our interpretation is that project's name intentionally has a double meaning: by trying to make something which is"suckless" – that is without, if it were an abstract noun – the overall the project can help Linux to incrementally improve: to suck a little. In other words, by trying to make software that's as good as it can possibly be, make the whole system less bad – you improve it. There's merit in the idea of striving toward perfection by optimization.is short for Static Linux – all its programs are statically linked: in other words, any library functions an executable needs are compiled into the binary.Over half of your libraries are used by fewer than 0.1 percent of your executables. When dynamic linking was proposed, part of the idea was that if a vulnerability was discovered and fixed, the system administrator would only have to update a single library, and all programs would thereby receive the fix. Of course, in real life, the result wasis still maintained. One extreme end result of this line of research is to link the entire OS into a single file, as done by both: the message left on a terminal saying"I'm going to a commune in Vermont and will deal with no unit of time shorter than a season."There is another approach to simplicity that's less extreme than the Suckless project's ruthlessness, but nonetheless productive: try to find the simplest existing alternatives, and assemble them in the simplest way., and we're not alone in this. Yes, millions of Docker users run Alpine, but most of them never see it, so they barely count except as testament to its fitness for use. One thing that struck us, though, was that Drew DeVault wrote about it more than once:own programming language Alpine takes many of the ideas from the dedicated miniaturized distributions designed for routers and other embedded roles, but expands and generalizes them enough so that you can use it as a general-purpose desktop or server. If you're willing and able to do the manual configuration, anyway. Which seems to us to open up a whole area that's potentially ripe for exploration: a desktop-focused distro based on Alpine. (Just for clarity, neitherwas Crunchbang Linux. That started out based on Ubuntu, then switched to Debian, before"Corenomial" threw in the towel. Since then, there's been both a community-led continuation, BunsenLabs, and, we said that they remain quite similar and we'd love to see more difference, such as a systemd-free version based on Devuan." lines of code. Neither BunsenLabs nor CrunchBang++ is massively smaller. The Debian derivative with the smallest footprint we've seen is the. Sadly, it's not been updated since 2022 and it uses the now-dead Debian 11. All three of these distros are downloads of between 3-5 gigabytes, though, and the two CrunchBang derivatives take 4-6 gigs of disk and half a gig of RAM.Open source's totally non-secret weapon big tech dares not use: Staying relevantwas once a combination of the Crunchbang UI on top of Arch Linux. Over time, though, it has mutated, and now it's an Arch-based live medium with the Xfce desktop. We feel that the most interesting space for innovation in Linux and distros is in the area of the smallest, simplest, lightest-weight distros. Leave the big corporate vendors to experiment with theirThere are many more experimental distributions out there than we had the space to mention here. One that looks quite interesting issystemd begrudgingly drops a safety net while a challenger appears, GNU Shepherd 1.0
Open Source Linux Absolute Linux Slackware Open Source Distro
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