stali prereleased

Saturday, 2016-04-23

No, this post is not about the radical dictator whose regime is responsible for the death of millions of people. If you’re like me, that idea pops directly into your head when you read about stali.

The only connection from the above to what I’m writing about today may be the word radical. It’s suckless.org’s very own Linux distribution: stali, which stands for static linux. They link everything statically, and besides that, do everything you would expect from their philosopy (which is ideogically not far away from my own as you may have noticed): No systemd, musl libc, better security and relieability through minimalism and what not. What really stands out in 2016 is using git as binary package manager. Here is their version of pacman -Syu:

; sudo su
# cd /
# git pull

Stali is quite old actually, from their front page it looks like they have revised their goals in 2010 (so it is even older) – and for a very long time they have had nothing to show from the distribution, except for their interesting ideas. In the meantime, sabotage appeared with similar goals (that’s the operating system running on this very webserver) and I thought stali would have more or less set the ideas for sabotage and that’s it – they would not go anywhere.

But I was wrong, there has finally been a release of stali this month (reddit, infoworld)! This distro is certainly not for averange Ubuntu Joe, but if you’re either looking for a minimal Linux kernel based operating system or want to learn about interesting design decisions in order to create one yourself, go check it out!