Linux is UNIX made by people who hate Windows.
FreeBSD is UNIX made by people who love UNIX.
Give FreeBSD a shot.
this post was submitted on 10 Aug 2023
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I'm sorry what
I'm not opposed to trying out FreeBSD but 1. Both aren't Unix 2. Linux's development has no more relation to Windows than BSD, I don't see why you think FreeBSD loves Unix more. In fact you could fully say that macOS loves Unix more.
Relax buddy, it’s just a very old joke.
FreeBSD absolutely is UNIX, it is descended from Berkeley Software Distribution, itself a descendant of UNIX 5.
But the joke isn’t so much about the lineage of these operating systems, rather their design philosophy.
Personally I am excited for immutable distributions, so my suggestion would be Fedora Silverblue or Kinoite. It may be a spin of Fedora, but it works completely differently than regular Fedora. I am using it as my daily driver for over a year already and I am quite happy with it (apart from reoccurring breakages caused by kernel updates, e. g. my AMD desktop currently does not work with kernel 6.4 or newer, but this doesn't have anything to do with Silverblue).
There are other immutable distributions out there, e. g. Vanilla OS or openSUSE microOS, so if you really want to avoid Fedora, you could also choose trying out one of these. In the case of Vanilla OS I would wait until version 2 is out, because version 2 will be radically different from the first release.
Oh, that's a great idea. The whole concept of immutable OSes passed me by - I've read the terms before at some point, but I have no idea how they work and which problems they solve. Definitely ideal candidates for my experiment.
I have been running NixOS for a fair amount of time by now, and I can confirm, its a rad concept. Though I find NixOS the most comfy, becuase can run ZFS, and certain things, much more easily.
But yea, Silverblue, Kinote, and others, are nice as well.
Silverblue is very "traditional" as far as immutable distros go. The main difference from regular Fedora I've noticed are the side effects of using rpm-ostree instead of dnf, which is that by using a base image, it is easier to track how an install deviates from the base image, and easy to swap out for another base set of packages by changing the image.
I use mint on my PC , for its stability , and since all ubuntu software are supported , it is pretty great software selection wise too !
I'm a windows user, but I did play around when I built my media PC. Mint had problems right away with monitor drivers (AMD iGPU) and connecting to the home network (all SMB windows drives).
Before giving up, I tried Ubuntu, and with Ubuntu i DID experience the "it just works" and no problems getting everything running. That said, I still eventually went to windows, because I just dont have the free time to learn/adjust to another environment. But I did really like it. (Ubuntu)
OpenBSD
Try Haiku, it's the current open source version of BeOs (currently on it's 4th Beta release) and it runs on x86 hardware.
Or what about just using a bare bones Linux as a wrapper for an emulator? Then you could try running something like Workbench 3.9 or MacOS 9, which makes browsing the web an interesting experience ... plus, cute icons :-)
Go with your instincts on trying Haiku and come back and tell us all what it's like :)
I think something like alpine or void with a wayland based tiling window manager could be fun.
For true freedom and to challenge yourself, try OpenBSD. For something easier, try GhistBSD since it comes with a GUI desktop.
@agrammatic
I really love to test FreeBSD. But I have been advised not to do this. Because #FreeBSD hardware support is not as good as #Linux.
Please tel us more about your experience with FreeBSD.
I used to run FreeBSD on my laptop on high school, worked pretty good - even stuff like wifi and bluetooth with a bit of effort - but the battery life was atrocious compared to Linux or Windows.
@vahid @agrammatic For me hardware support on my Dell Latitude has been (almost) plug and play. It probably depends on (the #FOSS ness of) your hardware. But I wouldn't recommend it if you don't like fixing things. Funny story though, the video driver for my #nvidia quadro atm (470) is not supported by #archLinux where #freebsd has a prebuilt package ready to go.
If you're looking to try something a little different, I recommend Guix.
It's based around a nyx-style package manager written in scheme, which is also called guix. There's an EDSL for writing package definitions. One interesting result about this is that the package manager has a REPL and a dedicated emacs mode
Instead of systemd, the PID1 process is called GNU Shepherd, and is also written in scheme.
Guix also has a strong emphasis on bootstrapping. You can build almost the entire system from source, relying on only a few binaries to start with.
Plain debian testing with the desktop of your choice (I like xfce). Rolling release, slightly newer packages than ubuntu, very stable and reliable, as minimalist and light weight as you want (depends on installation method).
Xubuntu. Ubuntu because most of the time, I just want a plug and play experience with a huge community. And XFCE because it's lightweight and has all the tiling features I like.
I really enjoyed tinkering Arch, I learned a lot of stuff, but it's too much effort for my usual laziness.
MX23 would work great on this
Did you check the opensuse community repos? Search here: https://software.opensuse.org/ - lots of stuff that isn't included in the core / official.
Looking again, it seems like more packages are available for the Tumbleweed stream, compared to Leap. I was testing Leap.
Tumbleweed is generally the place to be. I think it is easier to target for packagers and is the basis for most of the interesting stuff going on in the distro. The immutable versions (now named Aeon and Kalpa) use something like a stripped down Tumbleweed at the core, with applications mostly containerized. Think tight rolling core that has strong automated tests and rather safe, with applications mostly isolated in Flatpak to prevent library conflicts and such.
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I have really enjoyed OpenSUSE. solid, snapshots built in, GUI Yast admin tools. My other machine is NixOS