this post was submitted on 01 Aug 2023
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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
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I've spent over 25 years with Linux. With multiple distros and a lot of that with Gentoo and Arch. At work I specify Ubuntu or Debian, for simplicity and stability. I always used to use the minimal Ubuntu, because it was tiny with no frills. For quite a few years I managed a fleet of Gentoo systems across multiple customers - with Puppet. Those have quietly gone away. I've dallied with SuSE (all varieties), Mandrake, Mandriva, RedHat, Slackware, Yggdrassil and more.
Arch is surprisingly stable and being a rolling job there are no big jumps. When I replace one of our laptops, I simply clone the old one to it and crack on. I used to do the same with Gentoo - my Gentoo laptops went from an OpenRC job with dual Nokia N95 ppp connections around 2007 to through to around 2018 with systemd and decent wifi when I switched to Arch to allow the burns on my lap to heal. I still have a Gentoo VM running (amongst friends) on the esxi in my attic.
It was installed in 2006 according to some of the kernel config files. I left it for way too long and had to use git to make Portage advance forwards in time and fix around a decade of neglect. It would have been too easy to wipe and start again. It took about a fortnight to sort out. At one point I even fixed an issue following a forum post I made myself years ago.
Anyway, Arch is pretty stable.
I love when that happens lmao, it's the best. Thank you past me.
I dunno what the point of the gentoo desktop story was but all I'm gonna say is fuck use flags.
USE please.
Each to their own.
The story was divine retribution for blasphemy against arch
I know this was a long comment and I'm only reacting to 1 word, so, I'm sorry in advance... But man, your mention of Mandrake really brought me back... I couldn't for the life of me remember the distro I used to use all the time and this just clicked it all back into place. So much nostalgia, switching from like red hat 5 or 6 (not rhel, old plain red hat) to mandrake and being so happy.
Red Hat was a torture device. I do not understand how things shook out the way they did.
Hell, all of Linux was so crude. I don't understand why we didn't all just use BSD, like me!
I tried FreeBSD for awhile about 15 years ago. it was great, a lot of things I liked better than most Linux distros. But what drew me to Linux in the late '90s was the politics of the license and I just was never as comfortable with the BSD licensing. Honestly, it's one of the things that worries me about the way Linux is going these days. Seems to be getting way more popular, yet a lot of the people showing up are just blind consumers.
It is great to have choice. I remember buying a CD with OpenBSD (the one with a yellow pufferfish logo) back in the late 90s/00s and giving it a whirl. I broke my work PC somewhat with it but at the time I worked on a help desk and we used VT200 emulators to access "RMS". I still had a term but graphics was out of the question! I could never get the modes right. I worked like that for six months. Everyone else had DOS and Win 3.114WG and they thought I was being deliberately edgy. I had a hell of a time working out how to map PF1-4 (DEC Vax) to local keys.
I now run around 30 odd pfSense boxes across the UK. They run FreeBSD, with a frisson of PHP n that on top. My office cluster has six internets - two at 1Gbs-1. The two boxes are Dell servers with a lot of NICs (12 each) I will shortly be swapping out a few for 10Gb NICs. They are rock solid and just crack on and do the job. There are several packages that make life so easy: ACME - SSL certs; HA Proxy - proxy lots of sites with one IP; OpenVPN - we run a lot of them.
However, pppd on BSD is single threaded which means that on an APU2 you max out at around 300MBs-1. Linux pppd is multi-threaded and does better (about 400Mbs-1 on the same hardware. Not exactly the end of the world. The real problem was sticking to APU2!
Anyway. Run what you like - you have choice and choice is good.
Mmmm .... RedHat with KDE = Mandrake. I still mostly exclusively use KDE.