> In a traditional "full" installation, the filesystem occupies an entire partition, with the usual /etc, /bin, /usr, /proc, /sys, /tmp, etc. Easy does not install like this.
> Easy installs to hard drive in what we call frugal
mode, which occupies just one folder in a partition, allowing to co-exist with whatever else the partition is used for.
Honestly, this is huge. I wish all distros supported this out of the box. It would be a lot less daunting to reinstall your system or try out a new distro if you could preserve your current working system in another directory.
With a gparted liveCD and a big enough spare disk / USB drive you can move unmounted partitions around to your liking. If your filesystem supports shrinking then you may not even need a spare disk. And have a phone or another computer that you can use to read man pages, ArchWiki, etc for help.
Practice in a VM if you need to.
I once moved a system that had one unencrypted partition for everything and booted in BIOS mode, to two encrypted partitions for `/` and `/home` that booted in UEFI mode, all from a gparted live CD plus a live CD of the actual distro I use (useful for chrooting to be sure I was using the same kernel and filesystem packages, and because I needed to update the packages and configs in `/` itself). Didn't lose any data or need to do any backup-restores. Just do everything carefully, one step at a time.
> I once moved a system that had one unencrypted partition for everything and booted in BIOS mode, to two encrypted partitions for `/` and `/home` that booted in UEFI mode [...]
I've done this a bunch of times. First from a single partition on a spinning disk 7 years ago to slowly migrating more and more parts onto SSD's as they became affordable, then converting the root to GPT, and finally merging it all back when I finally had an SSD big enough to store all of it. You just make your new partitions and rsync it all on there. The most important part is keeping all of the file attributes, but the correct rsync flags take care of that. Then you just need to update your fstab and bootloader and you're basically golden. It's been quite simple.
The key for me has been to keep the old stuff in place for a first boot so that I could easily recover if I fucked it up. I've never needed it, but it was a nice feeling of safety.
btrfs already supports this using subvolumes but you have to install the OSes manually (no installer supports this OOTB afaik)
however Fedora uses btrfs with two subvolumes (root and home) by default but I haven't found a way to install it without formatting the root filesystem though.
As a professional Yocto-guy-developer-maintainer-dude, I've always wanted a lightweight distro built with Yocto for the desktop. This seems to fit the requirements pretty well! I'd love to pair this with some light and portable notebook.
> even a Pi3B with 1GB RAM will work, or rather "just work" -- I recommend at least a Pi4 with 2GB RAM -- I have the 8GB RAM board.
EasyOS is a container-focused OS with its own in-house containerization mechanism,[2] and it's seemingly not designed for or aimed at Pis specifically.
A fine criteria except for the fact that the rpis have some special problems - the combination of low(ish) ram and unreliable storage? So you can't (shouldn't) expand ram via disk (eats the SD card) - and need to fit everything in ram. This is different from a typical low end netbook/laptop - which might have more ram, and reliable, fast (compared to mechanical hdds) reliable storage (cheap ssd).
In principle I agree - rpis are small/lightweight - but I'm afraid distros would do better targeting rpi or typical "small pc".
Ed: that said, this is (like puppy) designed to run from USB stick, in ram, with a section for user data:
> The default mode is to have a "save" icon on the desktop, to flush RAM to drive whenever you want, or not at all, or at shutdown. Thus, writes to the drive are severely constrained.
Apparently, it requires a 64-bit CPU but I wonder if really early 64-bit CPUs (e.g. 1st gen Intel Core) would work.
x64 has evolved quite dramatically since its inception.
> x64 has evolved quite dramatically since its inception
Can you expound on this? Besides AES acceleration and virtualization support, I don't know of any features on modern x64 CPUs that would be a limiting factor in an OS that doesn't 'require' TPM support.
I thought some newer distros dropped 32 bit uefi support - i certainly seem to recall an old thinkpad that wouldn't boot latest Ubuntu lts - but maybe I was wrong and it was old enough to be 32bit (don't think so...).
"This is controversial, however, it is just a different philosophy. The user runs as administrator (root), apps may optionally run as a non-root user or in containers as a "crippled root". The practical outcome is that you never have to type "sudo" or "su" to run anything, nor get hung up with file permissions.
Note, current releases of Easy default to running Firefox as user 'firefox', and SeaMonkey as user 'seamonkey'. It is easy to do the same for any app, that is, run it as its own user, isolated from other users."
> In a traditional "full" installation, the filesystem occupies an entire partition, with the usual /etc, /bin, /usr, /proc, /sys, /tmp, etc. Easy does not install like this.
> Easy installs to hard drive in what we call frugal mode, which occupies just one folder in a partition, allowing to co-exist with whatever else the partition is used for.
Honestly, this is huge. I wish all distros supported this out of the box. It would be a lot less daunting to reinstall your system or try out a new distro if you could preserve your current working system in another directory.