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Comment by tartoran | Hacker News Reader

Im itching for a simple OS that is user friendly and just simple, something that would instant boot and would be functional offline. Linux is great and all but sometimes it feels too bloated for a simple limited purpose machine..

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Aside from maybe three years in the late '00s when Ubuntu was basically just Debian with much better defaults and that turned out to be a very good thing, I've always kinda disliked Linux unless I start from something very minimal and build it up, carefully curating everything. It doesn't feel bloated if you do that. It still breaks in weird and/or stupid ways but at least you know how everything fits together so you can fix it. But, it's also a ton of work, so I just run macOS these days.

If you want a near-instant-boot appliance with Linux, try Librelec. I think it's made for Kodi but you can use it for other things. Lakka (Retroarch) uses it and gets me to a GUI, ready to interact with, rendering under DRM (so, no X or Wayland) in like 3 seconds flat on a Raspberry Pi. Or, FreeDOS isn't a crazy option for appliance-type machines, depending on what you want to run.

Perhaps Serenity OS is right for you

Raspberry Pi distros are nice for this

Also RISC OS

My Pi4 is a good minute to the login prompt, I would not call it "instant boot" in any way!

Haiku OS

ArchLinux + Xfce would probably fit your bill.

The era of these type of "simple" OSes has come to an end. Linux is now the king of hardware support and nothing out there can even try to compete, not even Windows. And "consumer" hardware support is getting harder and harder; we did not really improve the situation at all from the 90s. Linux drivers, while some of them are not proprietary (before you ask: Android drivers are mostly proprietary), are still inseparably linked to Linux itself, which means that for any non-Linux OS to succeed you first have to reimplement Linux.

Yep, spot on!

In the next decade I see even Microsoft moving way more towards Linux.

Still unclear on whether they’d ditch the windows kernel for Windows, and adapt the UI for it.

While on a practical level I think you're 100% correct, the irony is that there does seem to be a growing appetite for simpler OS projects, which go hand-in-hand with a growing sense of frustration and disappointment with what Linux has become. (In some ways it now represents a lot of what I was trying to escape by moving to it in the first place!)

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