For example, I’m using Debian, and I think we could learn a thing or two from Mint about how to make it “friendlier” for new users. I often see Mint recommended to new users, but rarely Debian, which has a goal to be “the universal operating system”.
I also think we could learn website design from… looks at notes …everyone else.
I have no comparisons as I think all distros ship the complete monolithic kernel. Of course specific IOT devices or Android ship a very much smaller kernel.
Building the kernel is not that hard, as you have
kernel-develwhich has all the sources.You can use
make menuconfigand see what all is enabled (as far as I understood this) and change stuff before compiling.Monolithic kernels are pretty bad, see this excerpt of the interview with Jeremy Soller on RedoxOS.
So I dont mind memory or even less storage space, as the kernel poorly is not relevant at all here. I just care about keeping the root binary with access to all my stuff as small as possible.
I would love a system that detects the used hardware and then builds the correct small kernel for it. There are experiments making the CentOS LTS kernel work on Fedora, which would prevent many recompilations.
Yeah. Some myth that it’s hard to do is not why we end up with monolithic kernels. Like any case where you find yourself thinking “it doesn’t look that hard; I could do that easily”, it’s either harder than it looks or it’s done a certain way for an entirely different reason you haven’t figured out.
You should learn that reason.
If you don’t mind me asking, then how do you know the kernel they use is bloated compared to any other kernel? A vast majority of the device-list stuff is loaded only when that device is detected with kernel modules. You aren’t actually running everything from the entire kernel, it just has support for the devices if it does detect them. which is basically the functionality you are asking for, ad-hoc device modules.
Monolithic kernels aren’t “bad”. That’s subjective. Monolithic kernels have measurable and significant performance benefits, over micro kernels. You also gain a massive complexity reduction. Micro kernels, historically, have not been very successful, e.g. Hurd, because that complexity management is extremely difficult. Not impossible, but so far kernel development has favored monolithic kernels not without reason.
If what you say is actually that easy, why wouldn’t all distro’s just do that during the install, and during updates with their package managers? I believe you could do this in Gentoo, but I don’t know if it has measurable benefits beyond what performance tuning for your specific CPU arch would give you. Since none of those devices you aren’t running are consuming any resources beyond the storage space of the kernel.