> Philosophy

Tribblix is not a derivative or clone of any other distribution. It stands apart and has a distinct character of its own. The following are characteristic features of Tribblix:

• Retro - Tribblix might do many things in ways that might be considered old, avoiding change for the sake of change.
• Modern - while the style may be retro, individual components are kept up to date as much as possible.
• Lightweight - Tribblix has lower footprint and system resource requirements than alternative distributions. Sometimes much lower.
• Fast - performance is not optional nor an afterthought, although being lightweight helps immensely here.
• Simple - operating systems should be easy to use and not require complex and error-prone procedures to perform routine tasks.
• Flexible - the system should be adaptable to a wide range of uses, without imposing artificial constraints on its users.

These philosophies directly lead to the rejection of IPS packaging - it is complex, brittle, has significant dependencies, is rigid and inflexible, is slow, and has significant resource requirements.

As you may gather, Tribblix is opinionated. It will, however, give you as much freedom as you need if you wish to use the system in other ways.

Tribblix is also the most universal and flexible illumos distribution. It runs on both SPARC and x86 hardware; retained 32-bit hardware support longer than other distributions; runs on desktops and servers; small configurations as well as large. It supports installation from media, from the network, on hardware and in the cloud.

Tribblix also has opinions on the software that is included in the distribution:

• As far as possible, it is shipped as the original author intended, avoiding any modifications other than those required to make it compile and function.
• Bugs are fixed by updating to a newer version, rather than by applying patches to an older version; in this way, other improvements in the newer version get picked up automatically.
• The software should be kept up to date, or as up to date as is consistent with not shipping broken software by breaking compatibility or dependent packages.

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