Rootdo Takes Linux Minimalism Way Too Far

[@thingsiplay]

This program is not approved by suckless, as it uses a config file. A more minimal version would be to recompile the program with the options builtin. rdo is way too bloated.

[@fossware]

You got a point

[@Shadyisslm]

🤓😂

[@pdote]

A already made a fork and fixed that. Removed 28 SLOC or about 15% of the total project.

[@sirgodricenwardsaier9074]

You forgot to specify that the code has to be written in C and cannot have any documentation or comments, lest the C preprocessor take add an extra 42μs to the compile time.

[@worldhello1234]

That's running gag here. :D Everything is "too bloated" with an extremist mindset. ^^

[@mrsansiverius2083]

Having users on your system is bloat. Just do everything as root

[@dorukayhanwastaken]

Ah yes, the Windows XP grindset.

[@JayCeeCreates]

Accessing root is dangerous enough but I'm willing to nuke my system

[@generallyunimportant]

so.. uhh.. puppy linux?

[@everyhandletaken]

MS users have been doing this for years.. what could go wrong ? ☺️

[@dorukayhanwastaken]

@@everyhandletaken Literally everything. I'm so glad people don't whine about UAC and C:\Windows being somewhat immutable anymore. Anti-update retardry is more than infuriating enough.

[@gardenapple]

I looked at the repo as well as its creator (just lurking, as you do...), the developer is 17 years old at the time of writing, so I'd say this is very impressive for a high-schooler's hobby project

[@Noukkis]

non-root users are bloat

[@tordjarv3802]

It is not minimal enough, the for-loop in runprog at line 37 and 38 is unnecessary. Instead line 45 and 46 should change to if (execvp(argv[1], argv+1) != 0) perror(argv[1]); That will achieve the same goal, to only pass the command and its arguments to execvp, without unnecessarily move the data in memory first. Also, the parsing of the config file every time is a waste of CPU cycles, like others pointed out, the config file should be a header file and the users should have to recompile the program every time a setting is changed. On a security point; the entered password is not cleared from memory immediately after the password is check on line 99 and can be trailing in memory as clear text for an unspecified time afterwards. If the password is correct it could stay in system memory after the process has ended for some time, at least if you are using a real-time kernel, which could mean that some malware can have time to read it. If the password is incorrect, but possibly close to correct, it will stay in memory until the user re enters the password, which means that it will stay in memory through out the the usleep which can sleep for several seconds, giving any evil malware plenty of time to steal it. I would not use this program as is.

[@yash1152]

have you submitted these feedbacks up to the author of that??

[@tordjarv3802]

@@yash1152 Yes, or at least the security problem. The for-loop i don't think is really a problem.

[@yash1152]

@@tordjarv3802 suggestions for improvements can also be suggested ;)

[@davydorynbaev]

I was just about to say most of that. Good comment.

[@notuxnobux]

the if-statement is also unecessary. execvp always returns -1, because it only returns on error

[@gx1tar1er]

sudo is enough for me 😂

[@sahilbaori9052]

Yup... for beginners and the new not know hows people, sudo does the job just fine. Once you get a little more advanced and understand whats going on then you can consider switching or something.

[@sahilbaori9052]

@@the-youtube-enjoyer even mental outlaw made a video saying sudo is a bloated mess. By "advanced users" Im talking about the people who like to optimize every part of the system. And i never claimed im that "advanced user" that uses something else.

[@skeilnet]

Sudo is bloated. Use doas instead.

[@mrfluffy9273]

Computers are bloated use an abacus.

[@dakata2416]

"I know there are some people out there who really care about optimizing every single little bit of their system" As a Gentoo user I can confirm. We exist.

[@member5003]

Gentoo: where optimizing computer time is more important than human time

[@dakata2416]

@@member5003 indeed

[@tireseas]

If you're not manually optimizing in assembly for machine specific quirks you're not going hardcore enough.

[@augustintacquet488]

You should have phrased it like "I use Gentoo, by the way" 😁

[@everyhandletaken]

@@augustintacquet488 I think Gentoo is more brb than the Arch btw.. as in, brb.. I need to go check the progress of compiling vim..

[@everyhandletaken]

I’m most pleased that you raised a benefit of projects that might otherwise seem fairly unnecessary, but, inspire the work of others. I think that is why I keep coming back to watch your video, concise unbiased opinion (and not trying to sell me a vpn)🤘🏻

[@marcello4258]

Bloat has nothing to do with your 10ms it is: More code -> more potential for vulnerability

[@animegamer3336]

And less code which is full of bugs and unclean code = 10x more potential for vulnerability then Bloated structured and constantly reviewed code Edit : Fixed a typo :-)

[@marcello4258]

@@animegamer3336 yep.. but considering both projects are equal like doas and sudo.. btw doas has proofen to be saver

[@LeSqueed]

Guess I will have to remove all the sanity checks and error checks from my code now. Since more code is more vulnerabilities and those things are adding to my lines of code.

[@marcello4258]

@@LeSqueed well at least you are not good at reading. please read my 2nd. comment again.. thanks

[@colbyboucher6391]

@@LeSqueed That's not the point. The point is that Sudo includes a ton if *features* that the vast majority of users never touch, many of which are buggy l, hence **8mb** for the "I want to run as a different user" program.

[@marioschroers7318]

sudo is actually bloat for what 99% of desktop users do. Most of the time, we use sudo to escalate privileges for system updates or software install, and nothing else. sudo offers many functions including ssh-capabilities that are most relevant for sys admins, but total nonsense for desktop users. sudo used to be 3 MB in size; last time I checked the sizes of my installed packages, it was close to 8 MB. 8 MB for a privilege escalation tool. Please. In comparison, doas is 42 kb in size. I don't see why sudo is still considered a standard for most Linux distributions. It might sound like a nitpick, but at the end of the day, this kind of resource waste is a major problem.

[@colbyboucher6391]

Yeah, this video misses the point entirely. 90% of Linux videos are just the dunning-kreuger effect in action.

[@AcidiFy574]

How about an LFS stream where you build a system consisting of ONLY suckless utils??? & BedRock linux when ???

[@BrodieRobertson]

Is there a suckless c library?

[@jondoe6608]

Musl can be used instead of the gnu lib c

[@mskiptr]

Possible security risk: Does anything stop you from running multiple instances in parallel? If not then wrong_pw_sleep can easily be worked around

[@michaelheimbrand5424]

Reducing "bloat" when most systems come in multi-GB-sized ISO´s. It´s a brave new world... Doas is in OpenBSD base. That´s all we needed to know.

[@jjbailey01]

Reducing bloat has nothing to do with storage. It has everything thing to do with code maintenance and auditing. End users benefit from using programs from a less bloated code base because they are less likely to deal with a buggy user experience.

[@michaelheimbrand5424]

@@jjbailey01 Reducing bloat should be on all levels. And not filling the file system with hundreds of thousands of files is a big part of it. Try out OpenBSD and you see what I mean. Unbloating has to be in the heart and soul of the developers. Debloating some small commands is also good, but I find it a bit pointless if you do it on a mainstream systemd GNU system with thousands of dependencies installed from the box.

[@marioschroers7318]

I'm not a developer, but from my perspective, debloating code and optimizing execution times should in fact become more important the more capable the available hardware is. Oftentimes, we hear that optimization be futile given the performance on the hardware level. That's possibly not quite true, since if all software be designed following this primitive, it's no surprise that we will never perceive gains in application performance and memory efficiency. Edit: I agree with the statement about file systems and numbers of files. Last year, 16 GB of data accumulated in my database from one full year of work. I've since taken measures to constantly deduplicate my working files folder as much as possible. Since CW1 2022, I was able to reduce the amount of data accumulating to just about 100 MB (and even that is quite a lot), which otherwise would likely approach about 2 GB already.

[@mk72v2oq]

Yeah, sometimes minimalism goes too far. For me even doas is unusable because it lacks essential features. Like rootpw/targetpw sudo option. Or sudo -E flag, some apps require it just to work properly.

[@AshtonSnapp]

Then for you, sudo is what you need. However, some people simply don’t need everything that sudo offers. So it makes sense to have an alternative like doas. Rootdo is too minimalist though, I agree.

[@john-vince5311]

I get there is people out there that want to deblote to the extreme but I think the idolizing of light weight programs has gone a bit far. Just because a program is large doesn't mean it's bad. There is a middle ground.

[@AshtonSnapp]

I agree. Sometimes there is a reason for a program to be large in size. Although, if it’s something that’s going to be running in the background all the time on my system, I would rather it be lightweight so it leaves more RAM for the programs I want to run.

[@alexestefan7521]

On a raspberry pi 1B, sudo takes between 0.9 and 1 seconds to run once. A program I wrote as an alternative to sudo takes between 0.01 and 0.02 seconds to run. That's a 45x improvement at worst and a 100x improvement at best. On average, I see 0.013 from my program and a bit over 0.91 for sudo, which is a 70x improvement. This is huge, as waiting almost a second to run a program as root is insane, while 0.13 is barely noticeable.

[@Kr33gola]

this adds up and we will never know if human can develop faster reactions

[@kvngn]

One thing to consider as far as the benchmarks are concerned: sudo and doas can both be built to use shadow authentication rather than PAM authentication. Building against shadow cuts down the runtime considerably, to the point where shadow-sudo is faster than PAM-doas. I'm guessing rdo can't use PAM, so it isn't really a fair test in the first place. Granted, none of the differences are remotely perceptible to humans. It's poor practice to put things like sudo and doas in scripts anyway, so I don't think there's a realistic use case for running any of these programs so many times in succession.

[@0x007A]

If rootdo was truly in the suckless spirit the configuration options would be in the header file. Back to the drawing board Willie E. Coyote. < meep meep >

[@generallyunimportant]

i love how you include the outro blunders lol

[@keyboardwarrior6296]

Actually seems pretty neat.

[@provakar5496]

I actually use a typewriter my grandfather gave me to code, and I use openCV image reading to compile it into a txt file.

[@jort93z]

Config file is bloat.

[@notuxnobux]

I think its a cool program. Its only around 200 lines of code and it does everything I need, while sudo does way too much and is more than 100 000 lines of code

[@alexestefan7521]

Su from gnu is way too bloated for what it does. It also depends on things like pam. I wrote my own su in 1/3 the lines of gnu su and without a dependency on pam.

[@tehklevster]

More eyes do not lead to things being more secure. If all those eyes are looking at the wrong things then game over.

[@worldhello1234]

@7:53 That's not "bloat." That's having an extra application that does something useful.

[@Tn5421Me]

The human reaction time can reach as quickly as around 80ms after great effort

[@spikerz1572]

You gotta understand, we have to avenge the trillions of poor bytes that have fallen victim to sudo.

[@killistan]

My system doesn't have su on it, just doas ;)

[@matcraftou]

I would not use Rdo but Rodo as a command, just personnal advice!

[@altrogeruvah]

Honestly, if I could write "pacman -Syu" or "apt upgrade" on my terminal without writing anything before it, on my single-user PC, that would be great really... I find writing _sudo_ every time you want to do something locally really redundant.

[@andreihabalau]

You can do that. Edit your .bashrc/.zshrc file in your home directory (depending on the shell used) and add alias update="sudo pacman -Syu" somewhere in the file and then you can use the "update" command without writing sudo before it. Or you can alias pacman="sudo pacman" (but I'm not sure if that's feasible/recommended or if it would work)

[@altrogeruvah]

@@andreihabalau That's so sick! Thank you so much!!

[@colbyboucher6391]

It's for security.

[@avetis2377]

I'unno, Brodie. Saving myself a solid one keypress every time I need root access has an appeal. :^)

[@codebitcookie8053]

I mean, aliasing? alias s="sudo"

[@realGBx64]

@@codebitcookie8053 I mean make your password one character shorter :'D

[@mechnymph]

I only understood the words bloat, tool, and use, but I'm already totally on team #rdonotpog edit: writing this from my Blackberry pi integrated tablet. Thumbed and shared

[@spicynoodle7419]

I used to use doas and it was great until I started working from home. For some reason Valet had some issues with it. Tried patching it for doas and still no dice.

[@uuu12343]

Sudo: Errors out Linux Community: "Fine, I'll do it myself..."

[@logangraham2956]

I like optimization but that that much. your probably going to run sudo like 1 or 2 times a day maybe, i highly doubt those the small amount of time taken up is a huge lose. optimizing these 1 time delays doesn't seem very necessary to me, now if this delay was a constant one like a runtime thing then that is something that should be optimized.

[@colbyboucher6391]

It's not time, it's the size of the program and security. More code = more bugs (there ARE bugs in sudo) and more wasted space.

[@logangraham2956]

@@colbyboucher6391 optimization and debugging are 2 different things. you can have incredibly in-optimized code and have no bugs. and you can have incredibly optimized code with plenty of bugs.

[@colbyboucher6391]

@@logangraham2956 You can have incredibly optimized code thst's still bloated, too. I'm saying that you"ll usually end up with about one bug for every 1,000 lines of code, and the longer that program gets the more opportunity there is for something to go very wrong.

[@maximus6884]

Can you review Linux tablets?

[@worldhello1234]

@6:42 Exactly, screw those extremists who cry about "bloat." They are just a sub-group of the Arch elitists. :)

[@HoboVibingToMusic]

I dare you to make a (linux/bsd based) OS that uses under 50mb of ram :P AND Has a Window manager or desktop environment, choice is yours

[@BrodieRobertson]

Doesn't the kernel use more than that

[@f1aziz]

Running Java Eclipse on my Linux box, minimalism is far from my thought process right now.

[@BrodieRobertson]

Why would you put yourself though Eclipse

[@f1aziz]

@@BrodieRobertson work.

[@BrodieRobertson]

@@f1aziz is your build system somehow tied to eclipse?

[@charlubermensch2395]

3:12 The last feature is bloat. One should be suckless til the end!

[@westlyward2504]

I want to see a video on the please command

[@BrodieRobertson]

Is that actually a thing

[@kyuthefox]

... or you have tty2 opend with the root account that is faster by having less to type because "sudo" is to much to type if you can login into a root shell. why previlegie elevation if you can have the previlige in the first place? lul

[@CMDRSweeper]

I guess my Linux use is very simple in that regard. I use sudo or whatever to get the root prompt / user and then I need to do my commands. When I am done I close the terminal as I do not need the root access anymore, so to me it doesn't matter much.

[@codebitcookie8053]

Sudo is created so that you don't login as root. Better for security.

[@colbyboucher6391]

I mean, that's the point of stuff like this. Sudo actually has a *lot* of features that basically no one ever touches so some of us look for something that *just* does what we actually use Sudo for rather than being, y'know, bloated.

[@exciting-burp]

At least it doesn't have that obnoxious holier-than-thou nag message when you first run it.

[@0x1337feed]

that's just a random dude's w-e project

[@jeffsadowski]

I'll stay with sudo for now.

[@lemonsh]

i'll stick to doas

[@user-dc9zo7ek5j]

The explanation that the performance so small that it does not matter is the reason I have 2 python programs and 1 electron program, take up a gigabyte, crash every few clicks, and are slower than booting up the whole computer.

[@user-ux2kk5vp7m]

No, not at all

[@rkvkydqf]

While including a Chromium instance in each app is absurd, optimizing every millisecond of CPU time any cost is unproductive at best.

[@BrodieRobertson]

There are gradients of importance, spending time optimizing out an extra gigabyte of RAM might be valuable, optimizing out a megabyte may not be but there are situations where it is for example on a low powered embedded system.

[@andljoy]

3 lines of config is bloat.

[@YannMetalhead]

Good video.

[@colbyboucher6391]

Sorry but this video misses the point. Bloat isn't about speed or even directly about how much storage space something takes up. It's about bugs and security. Big programs are more difficult to maintain than small programs. One bug for every thousand lines of code, roughly. If there was a sudo "alternative" also called sudo, that does everything you *actually* need sudo for while cutting out the other 70% no one cares about, no one would notice and the project would be less likely to introduce vulnerabilities in the future. This specific program ain't it but sudo being the default IS silly.

[@bgone5520]

Got to wonder how many libraries it depends on vs doas or sudo

[@0x007A]

Look at the #include directives.

[@notuxnobux]

It only depends on libbsd and it's around 200 lines long. Sudo depends on libldap, openssl, pam and zlib. And some of libraries depend on many other libraries. Sudo is more than 120 000 lines long. Doas depends on pam. Doas is around 2000 lines long.

[@BrodieRobertson]

Sudo and doas both have their place, sudo is considerably more powerful then doas ever aims to be and for some users particuarly server users that can be valuable.

[@ulfnic]

TTY1 for X, TTY2 for root. No sudo, no su.

[@member5003]

This is not suckless at all, it’s too bloated when you can just “su - root”

[@BrodieRobertson]

Su is the most portable solution without a doubt.

[@generallyunimportant]

"su -c" is the best (:

[@johnanth]

Great video with a much needed reality check lol. I do find the whole suckless thing quite ridiculous when the average suckless user is a well-paid software developer with 32GB RAM and a top of the line processor.

[@rizkyadiyanto7922]

that mindset is how you get 500mb electron app just for playing music, etc.

[@0x007A]

@@rizkyadiyanto7922 ...and hoe the world got Microsoft Windows when Microsoft Xenix would have and could have been the dominant personal computer operating system on IBM PCs and compatibles.

[@colbyboucher6391]

This video entirely misses the point, actually. Big programs are harder to maintain. You're less likely to catch bugs, and it's more likely for there to be security vulnerabilities. (And sudo *is* actually buggy). The vast majority of users will never use 30% of what sudo does. They'll just sudo apt and get on with their lives. So a less bloated alternative that doesn't take up 8mb just makes sense (even if this specific program ain't it). If a distro made a sudo "alternative" that was half the size, still called sudo and didn't drop the bits that 80% of users care about, no one would notice and the distro would be slightly better for it.

[@zizzleplix]

I understand the desire for lightweight programs and optimizing things as much as possible when one is running a resource constrained system. I don't understand those who have decent to very beefy systems yet are just as if not more hyper-focused on being as lightweight/optimized as possible as those on resource constrained systems (Note: I'm not referring to those who just like the lightweight/minimalist aesthetic and/or those who use the software because it genuinely helps their workflow). At that point the gains in performance/responsiveness are going to be so minimal that it's almost entirely placebo effect. I think this group of computer users are doing it for purely ideological/political reasons, they worship Richard Stallman/the Suckless devs, or simply for bragging rights.

[@0x007A]

Stallman created GNU Emacs, hardly the poster child for minimalism. It is a freaking operating system and window management system plus run-time environment. ;-)

[@D00000T]

Usability also goes down by a lot if you keep up the minimalism mindset. It’s fun and all when you see your beefy system using only 500mb of memory and 10 gb of storage for all your needs until you realize that you aren’t some highly paid and valued software developer who has been approved by their superiors to do this shit. You now can’t do your school or job related work as your system is not even slightly compatible with any of your organization’s apps anymore. And if anyone says that this is the fault of the normie employers/school administration for using heretical programs like sudo, “bloated” apps like latex and nano, or the forbidden desktop environment; you know that those people are the ones paying or supplying you with your education in the end? They’re not the ones that are going to be at a loss

[@colbyboucher6391]

It's not about what your PC can run, it's about reliability and security. Code auditing. A program that just *does what you need* in like 200 lines of code is way more secure / less buggy than 8mb sudo with a billion features you'll never, ever use. More potential security flaws.

[@SkyFly19853]

the problem is that if we keep changing things rather than improving them. Why not focus on a single thing and make it better without changing it so much. Let's say we got rid of Sudo, then another thing comes, that new thing gets bloated again, then what?...

[@motoryzen]

I COULDN'T ...agree more. That's why I stick to Linux Mint Cinnamon and STILL to this day ( about 11 years later) I still couldn't be happier.

[@SkyFly19853]

@@motoryzen Linux and FOSS divide itself with those tiny little details. Why not they coordinate their efforts on a single goal and make the things better? Because of relying on volunteers and donations, their coordination sucks...

[@notuxnobux]

Sudo and this program has different goals. Sudo has a lot of different functionality that most people dont need and is more than 100 000 lines of code. This program is around 200 lines of code and works fine for most users

[@SkyFly19853]

@@notuxnobux I understand, but why not focusing on a single thing to coordinate the efforts.

[@notuxnobux]

@@SkyFly19853 because as I said, the programs have different goals. this rootdo doesn't want all those features but sudo does. having choices for what is best for you personally is a good thing. Its impossible to make sudo that small and less complex while having all the features

[@michaelsanchez1361]

Just use Puppy Linux. It's already in root

[@metatechnologist]

If there's no man page maybe you should write it and contribute to the open source project??

[@TheEnde124]

su -c "command"

[@Rmly]

cool

[@ericmackrodt9441]

All files and folders were last updated 5 months ago. It seems like they developed it, put it on github and never maintained it. That in itself is a huge red flag for me. It looks like an unfinished proof of concept.

[@kajoma1782]

Its feature complete there's nothing to maintain unless exploit is found

[@pieter-yt]

Bruh must go faster