My concern here is with the idea that there is an "average user" and
that this near fictional individual needs a system that's under 200MB in
size. When the "average user" goes to Best Buy, Circuit City, Dell,
etc. TODAY what do they buy? Where's the need for such a tiny system?
At least where in this country?
Now I haven't done the d/l, and don't have the time to play with
something like this. But I do agree with Mike B. that it doesn't take a
kernel hacker to strip out unneeded drivers. One of my students is
looking into tiny Linux distributions and has found MANY that are in the
50-100MB range... usable and extendable too! If you want minimalist
then get minimalist, but don't say that it'd be a crippled Linux system
without doing the research, don't claim that only a micro-kernel will
get you there, and please, don't claim that you have to be a kernel
hacker when you don't.
Chuck
Henry Keultjes wrote:
nor thern wrote:
what is the smallest debian replacement for minix?
That's like asking which apple is the best to replace a specific type of orange like a Jaffa.
If you are a kernel hacker you can cut Linux down significantly, probably close to the size of Minix3, but you would probably have to remove about 95% of the drivers to do so and that would severely limit its use to the specific drivers that were left. A regular use would not be able to add or remove drivers.
As all of you know, I am *not* a hacker and I have used loadable device drivers, possible with a micro-kernel architecture like Minix3, for fifteen years. So *as a user* I am used to having a very small core system and being able to customize it for my own needs.
Is it fair to say that the average user cannot do that with Linux?
Therein lies Linux' biggest problem. The fact that hackers, as most of you are, are capapble of doing with Linux whatever you need to get done and all of you love that. The average user, however, has absolutely no interest in going there. They just want to run their applications. They just want to drive a car without having to know how to engineer and build one.
To that you may give the argument that learning Linux is no more difficult than learning windoze. That may be true. All I know is that both of them are way more complex than they should be, way more complex than I am willing to comprehend so I keep looking for seemingly better solutions . . . like Minix3.
If Open Source is going to gain serious market share on windoze, the offering has to be greatly simplified. You can do that by feeling sorry for dumb asses like me and figuring out how to do what needs to be done far simpler. As a sort of proof of that, look at Linux' huge server market share, and the fact that servers are the domain of the experts, versus Linux' puny desktop market share which is the domain of average Joe's like me.
That also works against Linux from a perception standpoint. Things like Google run almost exclusively on Linux but that never enters the mind of the average Joe. All they see is all those desktops running windoze.
Henry
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