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?

  • pastermil@sh.itjust.works
    4·
    8 hours ago

    You do not want to use dash interactively! It is created solely for scripting and not for creature comfort. This means all the stuff you’re probably used to such as line editing and command history will not be available.

    At some point, you’d want to ask yourself how heavy is “heavy” and how much stuff are you willing to shed? Do you not need tools such as web browser, media player, or office suite? Are you willing to get rid of desktop environment?

    In the extreme, you can remove all the documentations, all the manpages to save space. You can even remove all the localization files, without which stuff would look weird, but would still run.

    Further than that, you can even customize your kernel, opting out all the drivers you don’t need, or even some that you could use (e.g. wifi, audio, hardware monitoring). Next, some kernel features that are less essential such as statistics, logging, and debugging, as well as the handling for some network protocols. If you wanna go crazy, you can enable the expert/embedded options and with that you can disable stuff that can be critical (e.g. error reporting, certain IPC feature).

    It’s a rabbit hole, really.

    • mlody@lemmy.worldOP
      2·
      5 hours ago

      Web browser are the type of software which I hate the most. They’re main reason why a lot of personal computers aren’t usable anymore. Also browsing web through terminal is impossible, that’s another point for me to hate them 🤣 Of course I’m forced to use them but when I can I’m choosing alternatives like Gemini or Gopher and native apps. If I could I will not leaving terminal but as I need it for few GUI apps I’m using DWM 😊 I’m planning also to learn how to compile my own kernel.

      It’s not about disk space but learning, minimalism (which I love), better security and efficient resource usage.

      I don’t care how many resources is used by program but how efficient. People are telling me that they see in their resource monitors that they systems are using a lot of RAM, mainly gamers who have 64 GB of ram and complain about 20 GB in usage by Windows. But this why they have RAM, to use it! If they don’t need it system should allocate RAM in proper way to make computer faster. Of course Windows is not good example of efficient resource allocating 😂 but I want to make my point more clear. It’s not about removing critical features to just make it run, but making my system suited for my needs and efficient as much it’s possible. So removing man pages is not related to my case as I’m using them :)

      I like to tinker and I’m learning about computers that way. I ask questions and looking for methods to optimize every part of my systems. They don’t have to be the best optimized and if will not have that many time as I have to learn I wouldn’t worry too much about it and just work on computer. I’m just aware that always we can do something better.