KISS Linux

I've switched to KISS Linux, a simple distro focused on the concept of "less is more". It's basically a musl-based version of CRUX Linux.

Several things I like:

• nice package format.
• incredibly easy to switch out system components (except musl).
• very minimal base install.

Most distros make it very hard to switch out system components for others.

Take Void Linux, for instance.

Try uninstalling sudo and using doas instead. You'll notice that the package manager prevents you from doing that, since it's required for the base packages. KISS, on the other hand, does nothing of the sort.

I've been following KISS Linux since it first came out -- in fact, I was probably one of the first people to use it. At the time, though, the package manager was rather incomplete and buggy, so I deleted the partition with KISS on it and decided to come back to it another day.

IIRC, that was in August 2019, so in January of this year, I created another partition on my failing hard drive, formatted it, and installed KISS Linux.

The installation process is fairly simple -- if, of course, you've done that sort of thing before. I think the only problem I ran into was when it came time to install GRUB, and I had to figure out how to properly mount my efivars and boot partition.

Post-install setup was even easier. Because KISS installs a minimal set of packages by default, I needed to do a minimal set of trimming afterwards, unlike Arch Linux or Void. ¹ I think the only tools I replaced was busybox => GNU coreutils, and installing GNU patch to replace the default patch utility.

I now maintain several packages in the community repo, including exa, fd, hexyl, hyperfine, rage, ripgrep, tokei, and xmodmap. Due to how simple the package system is, it was incredibly easy to get started submitting packages. I would even go so far as to say it was enjoyable.

Huge thanks to the #kisslinux IRC channel, and the Discord channel before it. Both were an immense help during this round of distro hopping.

Kiëd Llaentenn © 2019-2022 —