Absolute Linux has reached the end – where to next?

Analysis In an overcrowded field full of distributions, there are still many empty gaps. The Register would like to point in the direction of a few.

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's final snapshot says:

The project had been going since 2007, as the oldest snapshot's copyright message shows. Its project page on Sourceforge is still there, complete with downloads, if you want to give it a try. Absolute Linux was a cut-down lightweight remix of the venerable Slackware Linux, which at 2⁵ years old (or 0x20, in old money) 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 nearly as venerable IceWM and a Reg FOSS desk favourite, the ROX Filer.

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, then SLAX is still around, as are Salix OS and Zenwalk.

Which illustrates our core point here: there's a great deal of overlap between the many different distros out there, even if we restrict the criteria to, say, "cut-down versions of Slackware" – and there used to be a dozen more.

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.

Directories and desktops

One of this vulture's favourites is GoboLinux, which as we've described before, 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, both NixOS and GNU Guix do 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 that it must be easily human-readable as well.

Gobo uses the filesystem to keep programs, and all their libraries and dependencies, isolated in their own folders. This is also what macOS does with its .app bundles. The GNUstep Desktop Environment, GSDE, uses the same .app format: both take the design from NeXTstep.

The ROX Filer that Absolute Linux used is part of a complete environment, the ROX Desktop. ROX has its own form of application bundles, too – indeed, AppImage uses the same structure, which is called the AppDir format.

There 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.

The 'minimize how much it sucks' approach

Since 2006, the suckless project has been creating, in its own words, "software that sucks less". It even has a page explaining its philosophy; in brief,

It's hard to fault that position, or indeed, that ambition.

The project's name is a nod to the computing proverb: "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 "suck", if it were an abstract noun – the overall the project can help Linux to incrementally improve: to suck a little less. 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.

The suckless approach has led to some entire distributions with especially ruthless approaches to keeping things simple. Sta.li 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.

The alternative, shared libraries, goes all the way back to MULTICS in 1965 [PDF] – but it was standardized in UNIX later than you might expect: Sun proposed a method [PDF] as late as 1987, and it was still controversial in 1991.

Today, it's ubiquitous, but mainly in a theoretical way. Drew DeVault tested this in 2020, concluding:

Plan 9 from Bell Labs was the successor to UNIX, and its designers chose static linking instead of dynamic linking.

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 was dependency hell, best known from its Windows form – DLL hell.

In these days of continuous integration and continuous delivery, recompiling everything to incorporate a fix sounds like standard operating procedure. Done right, it would barely be noticeable.

Stali wasn't the only attempt at an entirely statically-linked Linux distro; for instance, Oasis Linux is 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 Monolinux and GaryOS. We suggest that something like this could fit well with the concept of OneFileLinux.

Another ultra-minimalist distro that broadly followed Suckless principles, KISS Linux, is officially dormant now, although the user community are updating its repositories. It wasn't completely statically-linked, but there has been research in that direction.

Its creator Dylan Araps – whose best known work is surely neofetch – retired, saying: "Have taken up farming." We're reminded of our favorite burned-out engineer story, quoted in the Pulitzer-winning The Soul of a New Machine: 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."

Find giants whose shoulders you can stand on

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.

This is one of the reasons that we admire Alpine Linux, 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 (yes, him again) wrote about it more than once: in praise of Alpine Linux, and later, on why Alpine Linux does not make the news. Perhaps the line that speaks to us the most is:

For additional context, it's worth knowning that DeVault earlier built his own distro, and more recently, wrote his own Unix-like OS in his own programming language. For us, this means his seal of approval on Alpine carries some weight.

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, neither Adélie Linux nor Chimera Linux are based on Alpine – they just share some components.)

An earlier lightweight distro on whose shutdown the Register reported back in 2015 was 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 Ben Young's one-man rebuild, CrunchBang++. When we compared the two a year ago, we said that they remain quite similar and we'd love to see more difference, such as a systemd-free version based on Devuan.

But Devuan isn't significantly lighter-weight than Debian itself, which is a huge distro these days. As we noted in "Drowning in Code" last year, Debian's own materials say that version 12 contains "one and a third billion" lines of code. Neither BunsenLabs nor CrunchBang++ is massively smaller. The Debian derivative with the smallest footprint we've seen is the x86-based Raspberry Pi Desktop. 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.

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With the same OpenBox window manager, Alpine uses half a gig of disk and about 90 MB of RAM. We would love to see someone combine Alpine with the CrunchBang config of OpenBox and perhaps the Calamares installer to create a seriously lightweight desktop Linux.

There is some precedent: the ArchBang Linux was 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 their signed, sealed boot images and huge cross-distro packaging systems.

As Richard Feynman said, "There's plenty of room at the bottom" [PDF]. ®

Bootnote

There are many more experimental distributions out there than we had the space to mention here. One that looks quite interesting is Glaucus, and we found maintainer Firas Khalil Khana's "curated list of awesome projects" fascinating reading.