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  • From: Remko van der Vossen <wich AT yuugen.jp>
  • To: sm-discuss AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [SM-Discuss] Future plans on the progress
  • Date: Mon, 2 Feb 2015 18:39:23 +0100

On Thu, Jan 29, 2015 at 10:01:44PM -0300, Ismael Luceno wrote:
>
> We can become popular.

To be perfectly honest, I don't want SMGL to become popular.

Now, you might think I'm some kind of hipster that scoffs at anything
valued by more than a fraction of the population but you'd be sorely
amiss. What I want is something that does what I tell it to, nothing
less, nothing more. SMGL is the closest thing I have been able to find
for a reasonable amount of effort.

LFS does the same thing, but takes way too much effort to maintain, I
ran a home server/router on LFS for nearly two years and while it indeed
did exactly what I told it to, nothing more and nothing less, it took a
horrendous amount of effort. Now, I'm not saying this was a waste, it
was a valuable learning experience. I learned a lot about GNU Linux, I
learned a lot about software packages, I learned a lot about getting
efficient and I learned a lot about system adminning. As for the time,
well, I was still a student, so who cares.

All the other distros always try to be smart, which I hate. Everybody
always seems to think source based distros are about performance,
"because you can optimize everything for your machine." Biggest load of
crap I ever heard. Maybe there was a single grain of truth to this back
when distros were built for generic i386, (as in still working on a 386
without even an FPU,) but these days, and even for the last 10 to 15
years it's crap. If you want to optimize for anything you optimize for
usage, not for the machine. That is, you leave out all the crap that you
don't need. But anyway, what source distros are really about, in my view
at least, is as Jeremy already mentioned, the principle of least
surprise. Whenever I am forced to use some brain dead Linux distro I
always end up running into some kind of trouble because I want something
slightly different from default and then have to spend hours, if not
days or weeks trying to understand what the fsck is going on and which
stupid feature is trying to be too smart for its own good ruining my day
in the process.

On SMGL I don't have that problem. Yes of course stuff still breaks, it
breaks way more than it should, but it's understandable that it does so
given the amount of hours we can collectively put into it. However, when
it does break, most of the time I can solve it easily by knowing the
toolchain, knowing what is supposed to happen and just attacking the
problem logically. This is why I am still running SMGL on a multitude of
systems, why I am still hanging around in the SMGL community and why I
will not give up on SMGL even though we've been in a downward spiral for
way too long now. With other distros this wouldn't be possible, when you
run into a problem there nine times out of ten the only recourse you
have is to just wipe the system, reinstall and pray to the digital gods
that this time it'll just magically work. If it doesn't you'll just have
to choose between giving up and hoping that someone someday will fix it
or giving up and jumping ship and try some other distro. Now, I don't
know about you guys, but I'm not the giving up sorta guy which means
I'll start digging and digging until I know way, way more about the
details of some insane system thought up by a too clever for him/herself
nitwit than I care for, driving my to the edge of the cliff of insanity
myself. I've done it a couple of times in the past and have had enough
of that, it gives me migraines and pisses me the fsck off, so I tend to
not let myself get put into that position anymore. This is why I choose
SMGL.

So, now, why wouldn't I want SMGL to become popular? Wouldn't it be
marvellous if everybody thought the same way about these kinds of things
and wouldn't create these stupid systems anymore? Why yes, yes that
would be great, but the simple fact of the matter is that that will
never ever happen. Joe public wants a lot of bang for their buck, even
if they aren't paying for anything they still don't want to do anything.
They want to have everything served to them on a silver platter. Of
course this isn't possible to do for everyone; different strokes for
different folks. People do not all want the same thing, some people want
vi, some people want emacs, other people are wondering what the hell
those guys are doing with a text editor. It's the same with everything,
people want different stuff, but people don't want to put in any effort.
So what are popular distros? They are distros that cater to the largest
possible group of people that make do with a certain subset of features.
Doing this allows them to make certain assumptions when they need to be
clever so that everything can be handed to people on a silver platter.
Though woe be unto they that dare veer from the yellow brick road.

SMGL should, and hopefully never will, fit this pattern. Yes, there is
still a lot of work to be done, and there always will be, the world
isn't sitting still, but that doesn't mean that we should just throw
everything overboard and try to be popular, if we did that, then what
are we still doing here? We'd be better off joining the teams of already
popular distros. No, instead I see SMGL always being a niche distro,
some more people than we have kicking around now, that's for sure, but
we'll never be taking over the world.

So let's just try and be the best distro we can be and not the most
popular distro we can be.

Thanks,
Remko




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