Minimalism
(this post has been written by someone who was a hardcore minimalist and who used Hyperbola in the past but is now content with "non-minimalist" tools such as Emacs and systemd)
Least minimalist Hyperbola user: has no graphical environment, does everything through command-line, uninstalls the package manager because it's unnecessary bloat, no dbus, no systemd, no background processes running, asynchronous execution of processes is disabled because it is unnecessary bloat, programs are compiled directly as part of the shell because having separate programs is bloat, no multitasking, no zstd because it's corporate Faceb00k bloat, laptop levitates due to lightweightness in operating system,
Most minimalist Trisquel user: computer constantly swapping, installs 300 extra Emacs Lisp packages into Emacs because default Emacs isn't a feature-rich-enough operating system, 99% of the system packages are provided by systemd, user never has to get out of bed because computer has become sentient and does the user's laundry, user unironically uses a Desktop Environment rather than a window manager, switches away from LXDE after learning that KDE is more bloated, has both KDE and GNOME installed so that perse can have all the programs from both desktop environments, uses algorithm to automatically upscale all images viewed in the web browser to 4K, smoke comes out of computer and computer is used for warmth in winter
I still use Hyperbola on a few of my computers. I have four main ones, one of which is not in great shape that uses Hyperbola.
My t430 which kind of feels like its not as sturdy as it used to be.
And my X230 which I still use pretty regularly.
The other two each use a different distro, one is devuan and one debian.
I admit, systemd isn't as shitty as I thought. It still makes me nervous due to the code size and the concept of doing one thing and doing it right, sounding more sane to me. but I am surprised how fast it works on ARM64 devices even in boot.
I guess x86 is more borked than ARM64 with systemd.
Like literally, it booted in 2 seconds. Although, it could also be that I had no full disk encryption minus boot. I prefer to do this usually.
Btw, you don't need to be that minimalist on Hyperbola.
I use JWM, JWMKIT and that's frankly good enough for me.
I'm working on a new version of the Libre-antiX respin. The system boots into tty using just 16.4MB of memory, and loads a DWM instance using just 98MB of memory.
Not quite as low as the 76MB of memory we were seeing with Hyperbola and JWM a couple of years ago. But a lot less than Libre-antiX used to use for DWM, which I think the minimum was about 144MB back then. Might have to do with the fact that Libre-antiX no longer uses elogind, but uses seatd now instead.
To boot Libre-antiX into JWM now takes more - 104MB. Not sure why - JWM used to use less memory than DWM. Has JWM gotten bloated the last few years?
I did a net-install of Trisquel, and with minimal xserver-xorg and dwm I'm using 161mb, so not bad at all. Various systemd processes are using up 89mb of that amount, so with a lighter init manager you could instantly get Trisquel down near 100mb with a window manager. If I could just get rid of systemd-journald and replace it with the functionality of rsyslog I would save 22.5mb and be very happy, but unfortunately no one that I can find has written a full how-to of doing that.
Update: Oh my goodness, I did it! (sort of)
I followed this how-to from RedHat - " Configuring system logging without journald ": https://access.redhat.com/articles/4058681
I've got my minimal Trisquel net-install with dwm using rsyslog instead of systemd-journald. journald is still a process using 1.8mb in the background, but now I'm saving over 20mb! The system booted up using 68mb of memory, and I'm logged into dwm using 138mb.
Progress!!! I might write a how-to today.
Edit: useful background info from the rsyslog project is here: https://rsyslog.adiscon.narkive.com/Xggqr6TJ/can-replace-and-eliminate-journald
I am a translator!
Is your goal to make a GNU/Linux distro work on hardware that has very limited memory? Any specific device in mind? Also, would it be feasible to load the entire file system in memory and then run without any disk?
>"Is your goal to make a GNU/Linux distro work on hardware that has very limited memory?"
Yes, but also to learn how to control systemd in general.
>"Any specific device in mind?"
Not any one in particular, although I do have a rather large collection of old systems. But I would also like to exert a great deal more control over systemd on the newer systems.
>"Also, would it be feasible to load the entire file system in memory and then run without any disk?"
I know how to do this easily with Libre-antiX. I don't know the procedure for Trisquel, although it's probably some simple combination of config hacks or commands.
@Kiki_the_Cyber_Squarrel "... smoke comes out of computer and computer is used for warmth in winter" that sure made me laugh, I appreciate your humour!
(Myself am not good with tech at all, have not figured out yet how to install Hyperbola.)
To you and the OP, this guide worked for me:
I am a member!
>smoke comes out of computer
That happened to mine once. While it was running, the place where the power cable goes into the tower started sparking, hissing and smoking when – in another room of my flat! – I plugged in an electric device.
According to an electrician who had a look at this flat's power lines because of an unrelated problem, my lines or outlets have a weird layout, something about half of them being in a single chain instead of in separate branches I think. I guess that's what also caused the smoke event.
I'm glad that quickly unplugging the computer stopped the sparking and it didn't cause a fire in my flat, but after that, the desktop computer would no longer start. I had to use a half-broken laptop as replacement, then another one, and when all of them had become unusable, I tried to buy a new computer at a time when that was difficult because of a pandemic-induced spike in the demand for remote-working hardware, exacerbating any pre-existing supply issues.
Hyperbola has very minimum requirements though so I very much doubt you would have that problem unless you were using ultra ancient hardware.