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June 19th, 2024

EasyOS: An experimental Linux distribution

The EasyOS website is a comprehensive guide covering the unique operating system. It includes advantages, development guidelines, application details, installation tutorials, technical workings, and troubleshooting insights, serving as a valuable resource.

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EasyOS: An experimental Linux distribution

The EasyOS website provides a comprehensive guide on various aspects of EasyOS, a unique operating system. It covers topics such as the differences and advantages of EasyOS, the need to move away from the ISO format, and guidelines for development and programming. The site offers information on applications available in EasyOS, including EasyShare for network file sharing and BluePup for Bluetooth management. Installation tutorials are provided for different scenarios, such as frugal installation, SSD installation, and using the Limine bootloader. Users can find technical details on how EasyOS works, package manager concepts, and guidelines for updating the system. Additionally, the site offers insights into using Easy Containers for secure web browsing and troubleshooting broken video issues. Overall, the EasyOS website serves as a valuable resource for users looking to understand, install, and utilize EasyOS effectively.

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Link Icon 30 comments
By @allanrbo - 5 months
Refreshing to see such a radically different take on a Linux distro. Probably too experimental for what I need, but I’m glad people are thinking outside the box!
By @bee_rider - 5 months
Based on the icon and some of the links, it looks to be connected somehow to PuppyLinux. Anyone know what the link is?

PuppyLinux was my first distro, it was great fun to be able to boot directly from a flash drive. IIRC persistence was implemented by just writing to a file which could be located anywhere, even on a Windows system. It was a great way to get familiar without committing.

By @StableAlkyne - 5 months
I love those distro's website! It's so incredibly clean: opens to a table of contents, and each page is mostly text. No dropdowns to go through, no hamburger menus to configure settings, no "can we install spyware cookies?" prompts

This is the website the rest of the web should strive to be!

By @indigodaddy - 5 months
[Reading through the comments,] it’s interesting how a huge swath of new HN tech nerds has never heard of puppy. I feel old. I guess such is life..
By @caseyy - 5 months
In theory, this is very exciting. I wonder how much things will crash and burn with so many departures from expected Linux practices like all-apps-one-user (with some exceptions like web servers that would already run under their own users). But I might give it a go on bare metal…
By @sweeter - 5 months
off the rip, where tf is the download? It is hard to find. Outside of that, it seems like a really interesting distro. Running mostly everything as root strikes me as kinda nuts but it seems like there is a lot of containerization and most apps run as their own user so it mitigates some of that risk. Im going to check it out, I like the idea of non-standard linux distros and leveraging containers and squashfs archives.
By @n2fole00 - 5 months
Good to see there are still things being tried out in the linux scene. The author is the creator of Puppy linux, so this should be an exciting development.
By @creata - 5 months
Between this, and Guix, and Nix, and Fedora Silverblue, a lot of distributions are doing atomic upgrades.

Is there a reason atomic upgrades so popular now? Not that it's a bad thing. (Edit: The advantages of atomic upgrades are obvious. I'm asking what changed to make it practical.)

By @ozim - 5 months
*The objective is that everything in Easy be configured by simple GUIs, without having to fiddle about on the commandline*

Screen with 20 checkboxes is never going to make simple GUI. I can imagine “configuring most common cases should be possible with simple GUIs” but *everything* is going to be challenging.

By @Projectiboga - 5 months
This is a project by one of the original Puppy Linux guys. Puppy is a collection of Linux distributions that work a certain way. I think that focus is portable and live for them. This is his what he shifted to to better meet his own ideas, since Puppy is a group project.
By @ChrisArchitect - 5 months
Some previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21023989
By @eternityforest - 5 months
I spent a while researching and looking into the whole "run in RAM" idea and eventually concluded that preserving the flash write cycles needs to be baked into applications.

If you run in RAM and flush periodically, you're probably gonna lose data at some point, what we actually need is software that doesn't rewrite a 6MB every minute for no reason, but still saves user data when it should.

I'm not a fan of nonstandard hierarchies, lack of systemd, or running as root, but I do like how they focus on being batteries included and very GUI focused.

Not that root is actually a security issue, because everything important is under your user most likely, but it makes it easier to make mistakes that you then can't fix because the system is broken.

By @Vox_Leone - 5 months
Puppy Linux made me feel the sweet taste of freedom many years ago. It was the one which introduced me to the GNU/Linux ecosystem. I owe B. Kauler big time, and I wish him all the success in this world.
By @gigatexal - 5 months
The user runs as root seems odd from a security point of view.
By @alsetmusic - 5 months
I can’t lie, this link near the top automatically grabbed my interest. Not because I agree or disagree, but because I enjoy seeing strong opinions about software design articulated as core principles.

[0] Why the ISO format has to die

0. https://easyos.org/about/why-the-iso-format-has-to-die.html

By @jcalvinowens - 5 months
I have fond memories of Puppy Linux. As a teenager, I got a hold of some old scrap servers with arrays of big SCSI drives, but I couldn't figure out how to boot from the SCSI drives. So I just took all the hard drives out and kept a copy of the Puppy Linux CD in it... worked great! One of those servers was a dual-socket Pentium II.
By @martin293 - 5 months
I would appreciate an explicit statement about who this OS is intended for, is it laypeople, some subset of linux users, somebody else entirely? Or is it just a hobby project that has gained traction?
By @altbdoor - 5 months
This brings fond memories of my younger days. I had an EEE PC 701SD, and had experimented with PuppyLinux on it. I instantly recognized Barry's name, and hope he is doing well.
By @christophilus - 5 months
Huh. I was expecting another bland Debian wrapper, but this is pretty unique. Nicely done!
By @soniman - 5 months
How much faster / smaller is this than a minimal Linux distro like Xubuntu?
By @InMice - 5 months
Interesting, I think i will give it a try in virtualbox
By @lta - 5 months
I probably wouldn't actually use this distro, as I'm probably not the target audience but they're exploring quite a few novel ideas.

Good luck guys

By @poikroequ - 5 months
> No ISO! ISO for optical media is a legacy format.

This comes off as fairly ignorant. Virtual machines? Ventoy? There are lots of tools which can flash an ISO to a thumb drive or similar. ISO files are far more useful than just burning them to optical media.

By @yungporko - 5 months
my first thought was literally "this looks cool and useful, i wonder how everybody will shit all over it in the comments" and as usual hn did not disappoint lol
By @darkwater - 5 months
https://easyos.org/dev/images/dir2sfs-2.png

What's "easy" here, exactly?

By @jmakov - 5 months
Runs as root. Not sure that's a good idea.
By @lfmunoz4 - 5 months
Needs a video demo, showing how to run it and the main features.
By @behnamoh - 5 months
easy ≠ simple.

Often times we have:

    (implementation for programmer, UX for user) = (easy, complicated) | (hard, simple)