What I found interesting is that it doesn't use initramfs. Can someone elaborate on that? Is that something other distros should adopt?
> KISS technically supports booting via an initramfs, it just doesn't require or provide one. As a user you have the means to set this up yourself for your system.
> Full disk encryption is also possible without the use of an initramfs in modern kernels (see dm-mod.create).
> The initramfs concept is an ugly, complicated and largely optional mess. Thank god it isn't a requirement.
I don't think there’s really much of a reason to abandon initramfs other than “maybe you don’t need it.” As far as I can tell, this distro has you compiling the kernel. If you are compiling kernel for your specific hardware, you can remove the need for kernel modules in initramfs. Distros generally compile the kernel for you, so this won’t work so well, in general.
Add weasel words to the above as necessary. Basically, no major advantages to ditching initramfs, and ditching it will leave you with something less flexible. Some use cases (e.g. embedded) there may be no advantage to using initramfs in the first place.
After you install Linux on a known computer, maybe using a customized kernel that already includes any required modules for the root device and file system, there is absolutely no need for initramfs, which just slows the boot without any benefit.