Share your preferred bsd or linux distribution which is not FreeBSD.

Ubuntu is what i always install because it has the best hardware support for old macs

Im not a big fan of Gnome but its the best Wayland Desktop,
and Ubuntu has a minimal install option for Gnome

If you install Gnome on Debian it installs a bunch of crap,
dozen of games and every single Gnome app and even a Thai Terminal
 
rbranco said:
openSUSE Tumbleweed and Fedora. I only use Debian on the Raspberry Pi. I never use the same distro/OS on more than one computer.

I would use OpenBSD only for firewall but the one provided by my ISP is enough.
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Same here. I love Tumbleweed and for situations where it is not available I use Fedora instead.
 
taiwan740 said:
Yeah I also disagree with this. 20 years of Debian use and experience has told me the first thing you do after installing Debian is compile a vanilla kernel because the packaged ones are trash.
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I wouldn't say they're "trash", but they're usually always LTS, which are maintained for enterprise, and usually have unfixed bugs, may lack support for certain hardware, etc - even though they get security patches. I had quite a few experiences with these, especially with graphics hardware support where I was fighting with a problem long since fixed in the latest stable kernel, so I got used to just building a newer kernel. I quickly stopped using Debian's kernel packaging tools, as there's no point if you're not distributing, and just maintained the kernel independently.
taiwan740 said:
apt, as much as I appreciate it, has destroyed every installation I've ever had, but I consider this a feature/occupational hazard of package managers in general.

apt-get upgrade is a big no-no for me. That's new hard drive + installation time.
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I don't share your experiences there. It looks like you were doing something wrong. Debian flags certain packages as essential, so it's very difficult to break unless you're mixing and matching repositories or upgrading without reading the release notes.
 
NapoleonWils0n said:
Ubuntu is what i always install because it has the best hardware support for old macs
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The kernel is what supports the hardware. I assume you mean old Intel macs? I don't think Ubuntu support powepc.


NapoleonWils0n said:
Im not a big fan of Gnome but its the best Wayland Desktop,
and Ubuntu has a minimal install option for Gnome

If you install Gnome on Debian it installs a bunch of crap,
dozen of games and every single Gnome app and even a Thai Terminal
Click to expand...
What you're referring to is the gnome meta package - which installs a complete gnome desktop and associated applications. It's possible to install gnome minimally in Debian but you would have to run expert install, deselect the debian desktop environment and gnome, finish the install and then just install only the bits you want. To be honest, anyone who knows what they're doing installs Debian like that. Disabling reccomends, as already covered in this thread is also good practice to avoid installing all the extra stuff you'll never need. Ubuntu is actually based on Debian by the way.

(No idea why anyone would want gnome - worse than Windows UI)
 
I decided that my preferred Linux distribution is Debian. => no more switching to anything else.
I used to use Arch and even was a package maintainer there. But I don't like this any more.
On the servers I use FreeBSD.
On single board computers Debian and NetBSD.
For my own software projects I take care of systemd and rc-scripts. This is a little bit double work but I am not against systemd. But I also don't want for something like
systemd to show up on FreeBSD. I like FreeBSD conservative/reliable way of doing things.
 
Linux: I used to run slackware for many years, but in recent years it has just been updated too infrequently. I liked the slackware approach, it was the most unix-like out of the linux distros. And slackware was my first linux, back around 93-94. Rather sadly I believe Pat Volkerding has been suffering from some serious illness over the years, and hence understandably the frequency of new releases of slackware has slowed down.

Nowadays I just grab debian if I want linux. Perhaps/probably there are better things, but I can't be bothered to spend time looking, and debian isn't as crap as ubuntu or fedora. And they still support windowmaker which is my desktop of choice. Yeah, like someone else said, apt upgrade makes me nervous. Whereas pkg upgrade on freebsd works remarkably well; when I upgraded from 13.2 to 14.0 it was perhaps the smoothest OS upgrade I've ever seen, very impressive work.

Something I used to have a soft spot for years ago was frenzy https://frenzy.org.ua which was a live usb distro of freebsd, from ukraine. It could load itself entirely into RAM using squashfs, like knoppix and DSL. Sadly the developers stopped updating it many years ago. I keep meaning to find the time try out nanobsd or similar things to see if they can work the same way.

I use freebsd quite a lot. Occasionally I try out openbsd and/or netbsd, but so far I've found freebsd better overall.
 
blackhole said:
"Fastest" is also rather ambiguous. I always found Slackware to be much more responsive for example, but with no reliable measure of performance, it's all pure conjecture. It used to be with Debian that the kernel was configured for servers with a lower tick rate.
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sorry, something was cut off ... that should have been "Debian is the fastest to fix security vulnerabilities", at least with the software I regularly use ("classic" web/mail/db stack, java)
 
I have one slackware box here that I boot into for one or two applications that I can't run under FreeBSD.

I started with Slackware 3 running the 1.2.13 kernel around '96, mostly because I didn't know any better. It was on a set of CDROMs I bought from infoworld. There were multiple distributions on the 6 CD set. I think I tried one other distribution but couldn't get it to work, so I tried copying the Slackware disk images to 3.5" floppies and managed to get that working. This was on an Am5x86 running at 133 MHz. I was pleasantly surprised when I got X running, too. Manually tweaking video settings in XFree86 was... interesting.

When it came time to upgrade over the years I just stuck with Slackware. It was my daily driver until about 2020-21 when I made the switch to FreeBSD.
 
Daily Driver: OpenSuse tumbleweed and dual boot windows :-/
I need stuff to work, any webcam, cheap usb devices, docker stuff, visual studio code, codecs, all messenger/video conferencing tools, office documents! ... no room for evangelism and dreams!

Servers and infrastruture: Open-, FreeBSD !

Personal stuff :
PineTab2 [1]: Arch linux. I would love to put FreeBSD on that, but the strange WiFi+BT-LE Chip (BES2600) and the touch screen, the cameras, the custom keyboard. I didn't get the wifi+camera to work :-/
So .... if someone has some extra energy left, and has the technical expertise to work on that level. Let's head over to the pinetab forum and make it work :)
Currentliy it runs Arch linux + KDE plasma. Thats a BIG&SLOW setup for a smalish CPU and Hardware. But ... it works.
I is a very cool device, espacially for this price range!

Old Mac book Pro (2012): FresBSD, works somewhat, not using it a lot.


[1]: https://pine64.com/product/pinetab2-10-1-8gb-128gb-linux-tablet-with-detached-backlit-keyboard/
 
I used Arch for years before getting real pissed off by the nastiness that surrounds it. I switched to FreeBSD and I hope to never look back. Speaking about work, I manage a few hundreds RHEL VMs (most of them are terabyte-sized databases) but I wouldn't recommend it as a workstation.
 
malaizhichun said:
Linux has many more apps than freebsd.
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You don't use all the apps and FreeBSD probably runs the ones you want.

malaizhichun said:
linux supports more hardware than freebsd.
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It probably supports the hardware you have or you can get it easily enough. I've built many systems this way and didn't lose anything in performance.
malaizhichun said:
it didn't have systemd
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Because systemd is a Linux thing. Can we complain that Linux can't run bhyve?
 
Tried openSUSE including Tumbleweed, Debian,Arch ... stuck with Arch due to my likeness of DYI. Using Arch 10+ Years , sometimes on and off .. past 3-4 years using less and less Arch as my main and FreeBSD as my main. Running Debian on the WS side but today swapping back to Arch.So FreeBSD and Arch lol..
 
Archlinux was my daily driver for almost 20 years but you know… systemd shenanigans convinced me to quit.
If I have to use again GNU/Linux I would probably go for Alpine or Void.
 
Cath O'Deray said:
Manjaro, Plasma … I can't recall what made me choose Manjaro, but I was very pleased with it.

I stopped using it only because I accidentally ran a dd command over part of its VirtualBox virtual disk image. I'm inspired to reinstall. Thanks, Alain.
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daridro said:
Archlinux … you know… systemd shenanigans convinced me to quit. …
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I don't know. I never needed to think about systemd, because Manjaro just worked. I'm in no rush to reinstall.

Liam Proven wrote:

Manjaro 24 is Arch Linux for the rest of us

Because not everyone has time to be a tech guru

… GNOME 46.1, KDE Plasma 6.0.4, and LXQt 2.0. …

… community-maintained Cinnamon, i3, and Sway editions. There's also an Arm edition, which supports 18 different Arm-based boards and devices, including several from Pine64 and Raspberry Pi. ®
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1724751514615.pngI installed Sparky in April. The three most recent runs before today (logged in VirtualBox) were on 4th May, 5th May, and 3rd June – I'm an infrequent user of Linux.

There's a prompt to upgrade, hopefully it'll work. A past upgrade failed, partly because I overlooked something like a release note about known issues with a previously recommended, somewhat peculiar, upgrade method. Past comments about Sparky:


forums.freebsd.org

Unable to watch Max with linux chrome (under FreeBSD 14 current).

https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/744795/how-are-some-websites-able-to-detect-on-which-os-i-am-running-the-tor-browser
forums.freebsd.org forums.freebsd.org

forums.freebsd.org

How does FreeBSD accomplish such minimalism?

When I boot into a default FreeBSD installation, I only get very few processes. It's very nice and refreshing. In Linux, the default install has a million processes. How does FreeBSD accomplish this? Are all basic tasks packed into one process? Or is Linux doing a lot of things by default that...
forums.freebsd.org forums.freebsd.org

 
Cath O'Deray said:
There's a prompt to upgrade, hopefully it'll work. A past upgrade failed, …
Click to expand...

I entered a root password, the dialogue closed without error, from which I assumed that the password was correct. Nothing more happened, after a long wait, so I restarted Sparky and (again) entered the password. Nothing more happened, after a long wait, so I found a wiki that suggested sparky-upgrade.

1724755012370.pngsudo sparky-upgrade succeeded, then in a separate tab I discovered that the previously entered root password was wrong.

The sparky-aptus-upgrade routine had not alerted me to the wrongness. Silent failure ?
 
Oh boy, tough luck. Linux distributions on FreeBSD hosts are good work but can throw systems. Fedora Silverblue is my choice for desktop, thanks to its immutable base. Linux distributions trying to fix a lot of problems *BSDs fixed long ago (they have all the money and power to do so). The difference is *BSD tries to improve it's existing tools whereas in Linux distributions try to improve it's tools by changing them.

Mainstream mutable Linux distributions are the only reason I use FreeBSD in my main laptop (T480). I can adapt to binary logs and iproute2, but I struggle with the unpredictable outcomes of package manager upgrade. There's no clear separation between critical system components and desktop applications. If you install a desktop from a minimal CD, essential components like GTK libraries depend on text editors like Emacs-GTK. Removing the latter unintentionally remove the entire GTK library and takes your DE with it (not common, but it happened to me back then). You need to install packages in a very organized order so that removing one doesn't take out the others or have to pin packages. Upgrades are also a mess, as it's difficult to run and maintain multiple versions of the same tool. It's just gets into your nerves and you feel something is wrong by design.

There's no easy way to roll back a system while it's running. Btrfs requires booting into a chroot environment for rollback. Btrfs rollback is not straight (without using 3rd party wrappers like snapper), involving the creation and deletion of multiple snapshots because it doesn't have the idea of datasets. Btrfs uses subvolume concept. This process is time-consuming and inconvenient to do a simple rollback.

Note: No, Gentoo is nothing sort of FreeBSD. The closest one is Void Linux (musl edition) and sysvinit is not similar to BSD init.
 
taiwan740 said:
first thing you do after installing Debian is compile a vanilla kernel because the packaged ones are trash
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What's worse on the packaged kernel?
kpedersen said:
recommend debootstrap'ping an *actual* minbase rather than whatever random bargain bin of default userland any Debian install gives
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I always found it confusing the amount of duplicated commands there are on debian and ubuntu.
 
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