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Comment by spijdar | Hacker News Reader

As someone who finds this a bit appealing and perhaps speaking for others with similar "taste", it's a mixture of this, but also the sense that the BSD userland is smaller and less bloated than the GNU userland. It's the flipside of what another commenter mentioned, GNU tools tend to be more feature filled, but at the expense of code size and complexity.

Similar to why some people want to use a musl libc userland. For some people, it's the licensing, for others it's about the design and simplicity of implementation.

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I use the Alpine userland and so totally understand the reasoning of having less bloated tooling and the like. However, personally I prefer to apply this philosophy to stuff I have running in the background. If I'm using initscripts, I'd rather they be written using execline (and ideally running with s6) rather than bash, if it has to be a version of sh then I prefer dash over bash, builtins over external tools, nginx over apache, and so on.

But having used busybox utils on a daily basis I truly do not understand how people can use them daily and not go insane. The GNU utils are so much faster and more feature-filled. To me, reducing bloat makes sense for something running forever in the background. Interactive stuff ought to be as feature-filled as possible, stuff in the background as lean it can.

I realise others have different views about this, but I think I hew fairly closely to the mainstream thought about bloat.

> But having used busybox utils on a daily basis I truly do not understand how people can use them daily and not go insane.

There's a continuum here, and that's what makes this project interesting to me. Busybox is very minimal, because of its purpose of having "all that you need" in the smallest single statically linked executable possible.

The BSD userland is different, though. It isn't trying to be small for the sake of being small, but simply being simple. BSD utilities aren't nearly as spartan (in my experience) as, say, busybox, but they remain simple.

I'm not sure if I'd try to run this distribution "in anger" on anything, but I'm definitely gonna give it a spin, since I prefer the BSD userland, and am "stuck" with Linux because of device drivers. That's probably just my own bad tastes, though ;)

> But having used busybox utils on a daily basis I truly do not understand how people can use them daily and not go insane.

Busybox is meant to be used in embedded Linux systems, often found in routers, printers, cameras and etc. In those systems every megabyte of flash memory counts and every cost counts. Busybox (GPL license) encapsulates the whole non graphics userland in a single binary. An non-GPL alternative to it is Toybox which is used on Android since this tool has BSD license. Alpine distro was also designed for embedded systems, but it is now being used in containers due to the distro small footprint.

> "The rest of the userland comes mostly from FreeBSD (no busybox)."

From a strictly licensing perspective, why though? As a user, what difference does it make unless you plan on somehow integrating `cp` et al into your source code?

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