Thanks for the feedback, y'all. Nice to see a post from you again, Marziano.
I've not looked into Manjaro again, by the way, but I believe I did download the latest ISO. I'm unable to get into VirtualBox VMs until they fix a bug with kernel 4.13.0-26-generic.
Remember, simplify-ubuntu is a work in progress.
Just getting the core stuff done, and once that's finished or I'm happy with it, I'll start fleshing it out. The reason for the warnings dotted around the project is that things
can somewhat break, for just the reason that someone mentioned (getting tripped up over dependencies), so in a way I've covered that. I'll do what I can to mitigate those issues later on, though.
As for Mint, I know it's one of those distros that like to have everything, but I don't see why a user shouldn't have the option to go a different route, per the Linux spirit, but still keep what they love about Mint, such as the ease to configure the visuals.
As it is though, it's pretty useful. Hope some people will find a use out of it as well.
That's a great idea, but there's always some trade-off between getting too much stuff and hassling with set-ups.
I get you, but it's not an issue with me. I prefer to go the extra mile to get a setup I like, and have been doing that a lot. Once it's all down and you know what you're doing, it doesn't take long to get it up and running again. GitHub helps, too.
What I find interesting is how you determine what to remove by looking for an executable. However, there is to dependency tracking going on.
Did you mean there is
no dependency tracking going on? I've checked for actual dependencies (for the shell program itself) at the very start, as per the usual for all of my stuff. The check for executables is just a way to see if it's there. I should probably add a note somewhere that this isn't for those who compile.
It doesn't determine what to remove, by the by, so much as determine what is an option
to remove. When you install GIMP in Ubuntu, for example, you're going to get the executable /usr/bin/gimp, so it's a good way to check for things.
I've found that it's a lot easier to start with something like Mint or Ubuntu and remove stuff, rather than start with a minimal Arch or Debian installation and add stuff.
That's my approach, too. I used to use the mini.iso (Ubuntu), start with the CLI, without even man installed, then work my way up. (not a fan of rolling distrubutions, so Arch isn't for me) In the end, I found it easier to just, as you said, start with a standard Ubuntu installation, then strip it down. It's something I've done a bazillion times, so I thought maybe I could turn that process (or part thereof) into something useful for others. Here's hoping.