EasyOS kirkstone 2.0 release – lightweight Linux from the guy behind Puppy Linux

https://bkhome.org/news/202302/easyos-kirkstone-series-version-50.html

by jandeboevrie • 3 years ago

95 32 3 years ago

mysterydip• 3 years ago

Webpage says 5.0? Either way, really excited about this. I've been a fan of puppy linux for a long time.

Every time I see "lightweight Linux", my first thought is, "Will it run better/faster/smaller on RPi compared to its default distro?"

There's no mention of Raspberry Pi in the website. I think if it's indeed more lightweight, they should mention it.

spyremeown2• 3 years ago

Easy will work on an old computer, as long as it has a 64-bit x86 CPU

laweijfmvo• 3 years ago

different interpretation of "old" than what I had in mind haha

e12e3• 3 years ago

A fine criteria except for the fact that the rpis have some special problems - the combination of low(ish) ram and unreliable storage? So you can't (shouldn't) expand ram via disk (eats the SD card) - and need to fit everything in ram. This is different from a typical low end netbook/laptop - which might have more ram, and reliable, fast (compared to mechanical hdds) reliable storage (cheap ssd).

In principle I agree - rpis are small/lightweight - but I'm afraid distros would do better targeting rpi or typical "small pc".

Ed: that said, this is (like puppy) designed to run from USB stick, in ram, with a section for user data:

https://forum.puppylinux.com/viewtopic.php?t=2535

I'm not sure if it has the option to limit writes, like puppy?:

https://forum.puppylinux.com/viewtopic.php?t=6526

rom-antics2• 3 years ago

I'm not sure if it has the option to limit writes, like puppy?

From https://easyos.org/about/how-and-why-easyos-is-different.htm...:

Flash drive will last "forever"
The default mode is to have a "save" icon on the desktop, to flush RAM to drive whenever you want, or not at all, or at shutdown. Thus, writes to the drive are severely constrained.

trynewideas• 3 years ago

There's no mention of Raspberry Pi in the website

https://bkhome.org/news/202101/easyos-dunfell-26-released-fo...

even a Pi3B with 1GB RAM will work, or rather "just work" -- I recommend at least a Pi4 with 2GB RAM -- I have the 8GB RAM board.

EasyOS is a container-focused OS with its own in-house containerization mechanism,[2] and it's seemingly not designed for or aimed at Pis specifically.

2: https://bkhome.org/news/202204/some-handy-tricks-with-easy-c...

fffrantz• 3 years ago

Apparently, it requires a 64-bit CPU but I wonder if really early 64-bit CPUs (e.g. 1st gen Intel Core) would work. x64 has evolved quite dramatically since its inception.

Eisenstein• 3 years ago

x64 has evolved quite dramatically since its inception

Can you expound on this? Besides AES acceleration and virtualization support, I don't know of any features on modern x64 CPUs that would be a limiting factor in an OS that doesn't 'require' TPM support.

e12e3• 3 years ago

One thing that comes to mind is 32bit efi w/64bit kernel for older netbooks and laptops.

Narishma• 3 years ago

The article says it's running fine on a Core 2 Duo.

spyremeown2• 3 years ago

As a professional Yocto-guy-developer-maintainer-dude, I've always wanted a lightweight distro built with Yocto for the desktop. This seems to fit the requirements pretty well! I'd love to pair this with some light and portable notebook.

rom-antics2• 3 years ago

https://easyos.org/about/how-and-why-easyos-is-different.htm...

In a traditional "full" installation, the filesystem occupies an entire partition, with the usual /etc, /bin, /usr, /proc, /sys, /tmp, etc. Easy does not install like this.
Easy installs to hard drive in what we call frugal mode, which occupies just one folder in a partition, allowing to co-exist with whatever else the partition is used for.

Honestly, this is huge. I wish all distros supported this out of the box. It would be a lot less daunting to reinstall your system or try out a new distro if you could preserve your current working system in another directory.

capableweb• 3 years ago

That'd be really cool, one disk with:

    - os/
      - archlinux/
      - ubuntu/
      - nixos/
      - fedora/
      - windows/
    - home/

And everything shared between every OS, specially $HOME

commandnotfound• 3 years ago

btrfs already supports this using subvolumes but you have to install the OSes manually (no installer supports this OOTB afaik)

however Fedora uses btrfs with two subvolumes (root and home) by default but I haven't found a way to install it without formatting the root filesystem though.

snvzz• 3 years ago

I do this with Gentoo+Arch.

Complete with enough mount --bind/rbind I can chroot the other system and launch anything I need, as if it was the one I booted from.

cosmojg• 3 years ago

Bedrock Linux[1] enables something very similar to what you're describing, although it's lacking support for NixOS and Windows.

[1] https://bedrocklinux.org/

pkulak• 3 years ago

This is basically distrobox.

tomkarho• 3 years ago

I wonder if systemd-homed tried to solve this particular problem?

Frenchgeek• 3 years ago

A UMSDOS linux revival then?

indigodaddy• 3 years ago

Barry and Puppy have been doing this for years upon years. But yeah it’s surprising the idea hasn’t been picked up more in the Linux mainstream..

sidpatil• 3 years ago

Wubi [1] did something similar for Ubuntu, if I recall correctly.

For live booting, there's Ventoy [2], which boots directly from ISOs. Very convenient.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wubi_(software)

[2] https://www.ventoy.net/en/index.html

dang• 3 years ago

Why I stopped releasing EasyOS as an ISO file - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29490679 - Dec 2021 (110 comments)

EasyOS: An experimental Linux distribution designed from scratch for containers - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21023989 - Sept 2019 (86 comments)

gandalfff• 3 years ago

Is it still running everything as root?

tepitoperrito• 3 years ago

Not firefox/seamonkey (and presumably others)

"This is controversial, however, it is just a different philosophy. The user runs as administrator (root), apps may optionally run as a non-root user or in containers as a "crippled root". The practical outcome is that you never have to type "sudo" or "su" to run anything, nor get hung up with file permissions. Note, current releases of Easy default to running Firefox as user 'firefox', and SeaMonkey as user 'seamonkey'. It is easy to do the same for any app, that is, run it as its own user, isolated from other users."

EasyOS kirkstone 2.0 release – lightweight Linux from the guy behind Puppy Linux

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