Recently I got really interested in debloating and hardening my operating systems, cause I’m heavily inspired by Unix and “worse is better” philosophy. As I heard bash is heavy and we have much more lightweight and faster alternatives like these mentioned in title. They must be great alternative for scripting and interpreting but is there any reason to use them on my machines as interactive shell? Anyone are using them? Also is it worth to learn them as bash is standard IT industry?
I don’t have any answers, just my own experiences. Last year I decided to use Alpine Linux as my Operating System for a couple of self-hosted things running on a Raspberry Pi. I chose it because it’s super minimal and used less common tools (for example
doasinstead ofsudo). That unintentionally forced me to learn how to use Linux using more basic commands that are more likely to be available on other Linux systems.Alpine Linux uses Busybox-Ash which is a POSIX compliant shell that’s very small and very basic. The scripts I ended up writing tend to be POSIX portable meaning that they should work on a wider variety of systems. That comes at the cost of script simplicity and readability as well as missing out on many features that make Bash scripts more complex, robust and easier to work with.
I have a working example POSIX portable script. I’ve been adding to it all the things I’ve learned. You can check it out here if you’re interested.
I use Alpine Linux with Sway as my daily driver but still keep a copy of Linux Mint DE ready to use because it’s nice to have a fully featured work environment for the days I don’t want to think.
Thank you for sharing with your experience! Alpine Linux as daily driver… that’s interesting. How is it in daily usage as desktop OS?
It’s been a learning experience. I am pretty much building it specifically for my use so it’s missing lots of stuff that’s standard on other fully featured OS’s. I’m mostly using a browser, Konsole terminal and KDE Kate as my editor.
I found an unexpected hobby in writing POSIX scripts because it’s teaching me the inner workings of Linux. In the future I’d like to expand that to including the
sedandawkcommands but I haven’t really found a project to use them with yet.Alpine Linux does offer a
setup-desktopcommand/script which will easily setup a few desktop environments such as Gnome, Plasma, Xfce, Mate, Sway and Lxqt. That only sets up the basic desktop environment so a lot of other work is needed to set up things like sound, graphics and a few other things.As I mentioned before, I still have Linux Mint DE installed. I mostly use it for Steam games but it has everything else I need for when I don’t feel like working out a problem because I wanted to simply open a .pdf file. However, it’s still really satisfying for me setting up a very specific work environment with the mininal tools I have available.
I think there is value in learning to work within a mininal environment to help give more life out of lower spec technology that’s currently available. Especially now with all the ram supply issues because of the AI rush.