PiCore - Raspberry Pi Port of Tiny Core Linux
tinycorelinux.net
tinycorelinux.net
After reading https://askubuntu.com/questions/1416758/remote-full-system-b... I’ve been debating whether to try this out on some of my live headless pi’s that I manage remotely, but have been worried to try it without a test system first.
Seems like booting into PiCore could be perfect for this scenario. You could even use some of the A/B try-boot functionality that rpi have introduced into the bootloader over the past year, and basically have a kind of live recovery os. Would love to know if that could be possible.
Been mulling this over for the past couple weeks and then this HN post about PiCore pops-up literally day I was going over that askubuntu post again! I’m taking it as a sign…..
It's a gratuitously overcomplex implementation of a relatively simple concept which uses opaque complex tooling to fake a filesystem, lying to the user about what's on their disk, in ways that are so baroque only because its primary corporate sponsor does not have a COW-snapshot filesystem in its flagship distro.
There are alternative tools that do all it does in simpler, cleaner, more understandable ways, with better tools that are also smaller and simpler. openSUSE, ChromeOS, Nix, Guix, and indeed, TinyCore all achieve the same goal with tooling that is about 1% of the size or complexity.
Unix is about being small and simple and clean. This is its core design principle. Ostree is none of these.
Those make very specific tradeoffs to do what they do.
OpenSUSE needs a snapshotting filesystem, and uses btrfs. ChromeOS needs doubled up partitions and can only keep 2 versions. I profoundly disagree that nix and guix are simpler than... almost anything, actually. They're great, but they turn the entire world inside out to do it. Not familiar with TinyCore so can't comment.
This shouldn't be read as a strong defense of ostree, mind, just that every single option appears to have significant tradeoffs thus far.
It's all tradeoffs all the way down, like the rest of 21st century computing.
The thing is that there is a widespread mindset of "hey look, this family of distros has been offering immutable distros for quite a while and it has multiple flavours and it's from a well-known vendor, therefore it must be the best and most mature, right?"
(Obviously I caricature but I think it's a valid one.)
RH makes a lot of noise and does a lot of promotion and FOSS folks are even worse than the general audience at distinguishing hype from fact, because (1) they're not used to being marketed at and (b) much of the entire Unix world runs on familial loyalty and tribalism and it has done since the 1970s. Compare Vi vs Emacs, or C vs C++, or RPM vs DEB, or GNOME vs KDE, and a thousand other examples.
I worked for both RH and SUSE. I've directly personally seen the company mindsets from the inside. RH is akin to a religion and has a profound entrenched culture of disdain for all other vendors' offerings. I've rarely seen anything else quite like it except for the more rabid of Apple (and to a degree Microsoft) fanboys. It is, incidentally, a characteristic of the company culture to deny this to outsiders, but I went through the training and the acculturation.
It's all about compromise. As such it is important to acknowledge that different sets of compromises are possible.
ChromeOS works and for all its perceived flaws, it's out there on hundreds of millions of user-facing PCs. It started to outsell Macs in the USA in 2017 and by the COVID pandemic did so worldwide. By sales value, not unit sales. IOW multiply the differential by at least 5x.
Sure it sounds limited, but limited and extremely robust with massive field-proven resilience is more important than a tiny but loud niche.
Of course, when one says this, the tiny but loud niche will be enraged.
Tough.
https://forum.tinycorelinux.net/index.php/topic,27681.0.html
But I don't see a comparable overview.