What Linux Distro do the Linux users of GH use?

[dndlmx]

I question whether there's any point to using FreeBSD. OpenBSD I have avoided due to lack of features and general oddness. But it's a pretty niche thing. Why couldn't I "just use Linux"? I dunno. FreeBSD has a certain charm. Debian is probably the most similar distro.

[romevi]

I question whether there's any point to using FreeBSD. OpenBSD I have avoided due to lack of features and general oddness. But it's a pretty niche thing. Why couldn't I "just use Linux"? I dunno. FreeBSD has a certain charm. Debian is probably the most similar distro.

Install Gentoo.

[danwomansan]

freebsd has a much better and faster userspace, fairly much better security, a cleaner codebase, and better x86 usage than linux.

on the other hand, linux has more support and drivers, and is far superior in usage on non-x86 platforms to any other modern OS

I run openBSD on my old x86 computers (comfier than freebsd), linux on my gaming/work desktop (though possibly soon to be freebsd), and linux on my arm machines (currently a server, two phones, and possibly soon to be a laptop)

[xtrafrood]

I question whether there's any point to using FreeBSD. OpenBSD I have avoided due to lack of features and general oddness. But it's a pretty niche thing. Why couldn't I "just use Linux"? I dunno. FreeBSD has a certain charm. Debian is probably the most similar distro.

You know, I had some issues with how the new FreeBSD code of conduct was handled. But after installing NetBSD to a usb drive and using that for a while I was kinda pulled into BSDs, so I had to give FreeBSD some love. The short answer: user ports (firmware support) and full out OpenZFS support (UFS is neat too--though NetBSDs FFS just sounds cool). Go with OpenBSD if you avoid bluetooth (thinkpad for wifi), and want a system with the least amount of security vulnerabilities. Go with TrueOS, GhostBSD, or MidnightBSD if you want GUI stuff without the fuss (can't confirm). Or just avoid Unix altogether and use Linux if that's what you want to do. I guess one could say that the stable FreeBSD ISO is somewhat similiar to the Debian net install ISO. Although, good luck with trying to integrate systemd into FreeBSD (BSD init is built-in). With all that said, the FreeBSD team releases a free to the public definitive handbook. The handbook is updated with every new release, and it's available as a PDF (728 pages atm). So that's pretty dang neat when you don't want to wade through wiki(s) to set up a server. Also, there's a decent chance that FreeBSD scripts will work with OSX boxes. Maybe not binaries, though from what I understand OSX utilizes a lot of opensource tools from FreeBSD like sed, awk, etc.. However, there is a joke about porting a shell from linux to make a linux script work in FreeBSD. Even though my startx wrapper bash script is only ~250 lines, it took me a few hours to port it from Arch to FreeBSD (still not done with debugging lol). Someone please shout out if I'm wrong about something. I'm triple booting Arch Linux, Lubuntu, and FreeBSD (UFS) atm--so obviously I'm still new to FreeBSD.

Sorry for the long winded post--if Netflix loads appliances with FreeBSD then the FreeBSD team must be doing something unique.

edit - Correction regarding the 'joke'. I was thinking of this quote: "It is easier to port a shell than a shell script." -Larry Wall

[no, the other guy]

Why couldn't I "just use Linux"?

Because Linux lacks the QA which all of the BSDs have. I replaced my FreeBSD server by a Solaris server though. Their politics (mirrored in the Code of Conduct) are not mine.

[dndlmx]

Why couldn't I "just use Linux"?

Because Linux lacks the QA which all of the BSDs have. I replaced my FreeBSD server by a Solaris server though. Their politics (mirrored in the Code of Conduct) are not mine.

Politics and COC aside, they are both monolithic OS's with a large following.

[no, the other guy]

With Solaris being incredibly more reliable, especially after upgrades.

[dndlmx]

You mean like Illumos.. or the one that Oracle bought from Sun?

[no, the other guy]

More like illumos, but I truly prefer the Solaris utilities on it to the GNU ones.

[xtrafrood]

I have no idea what I wasted my own time--clearly, Gentoo was the correct answer.

[dndlmx]

Gentoo is probably the distro that most resembles FreeBSD.

[xtrafrood]

Someone must be having a bad week.

In other news: I checked out Antix (introductory video.. interesting) recently to see if I can find a distro that could perhaps replace arch/bspwm on the laptop. I think I ended up using wicd for wifi which was fine, but I'm not about to jump ship just yet.  Though it is compelling to switch to something with a full blown DE like experience that takes up less than 200MB of RAM. I have no idea how it works with multiple displays though, didn't check that out. Antix definitely presents lots of settings options; one could get lost in those for several minutes. My bswpm has been set it and forget it in regards to multiple monitors. So it goes.

[ShawnMeg]

Over the years, I've used Puppy Linux (incredibly fast as it runs from RAM) but I found some of the newer releases to be fussy and unpolished.  For the past couple of years, I've used Linux Lite 3.X (based on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS) on one of my other secondary boxes.  It's a lightweight distro, very stable and fast.  My main home computer is a little HP Pavilion Mini that ran OK with Windows 10, but one day, the wireless suddenly started giving me problems despite me changing to another wireless card.  I tried reinstalling Win 10, had problems and got fed up.  I installed Linux Lite 3.8 64-bit, which took < 10 minutes, and it's running unbelievably smoothly.  I'm very happy with this distro.  I may eventually upgrade to Lite 4.X soon.

Anyways, I'm pretty much 100% Linux at home with Linux Lite and a Chromebook obviously on Chrome OS and Crouton.  I still have some Puppy Linux distros with frugal installs to USB drives.  I may try some of those again.

[xtrafrood]

Over the years, I've used Puppy Linux (incredibly fast as it runs from RAM) but I found some of the newer releases to be fussy and unpolished.  For the past couple of years, I've used Linux Lite 3.X (based on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS) on one of my other secondary boxes.  It's a lightweight distro, very stable and fast.  My main home computer is a little HP Pavilion Mini that ran OK with Windows 10, but one day, the wireless suddenly started giving me problems despite me changing to another wireless card.  I tried reinstalling Win 10, had problems and got fed up.  I installed Linux Lite 3.8 64-bit, which took < 10 minutes, and it's running unbelievably smoothly.  I'm very happy with this distro.  I may eventually upgrade to Lite 4.X soon.

Anyways, I'm pretty much 100% Linux at home with Linux Lite and a Chromebook obviously on Chrome OS.  I still have some Puppy Linux distros with frugal installs to USB drives.  I may try some of those again.

I wish Slacko had the same amount of pets as the Ubuntu based Puppy distros (I know--completely different bases). Slacko is still my #1. Sure Puppy might take a few more seconds to boot and shutdown while it shifts information to or from RAM but the system is fantastic for portable media drives of practically any speed. And yea, I can totally understand wanting to shift over to Linux Lite. Puppy GUI can be a bit polarizing.

[no, the other guy]

I can totally understand wanting to shift over to Linux Lite. Puppy GUI can be a bit polarizing.

I thought one of the "advantages" of Linux is that you can have 83534796 desktops without changing the distribution?

[xtrafrood]

I can totally understand wanting to shift over to Linux Lite. Puppy GUI can be a bit polarizing.

I thought one of the "advantages" of Linux is that you can have 83534796 desktops without changing the distribution?

Correct, there are literally 83534796 different window managers to choose from.

[Findecanor]

Correct, there are literally 83534796 different window managers to choose from.

As there should be.

(Wayland can go F itself)

[dndlmx]

This is a pretty good thread btw, as far as shooting the s*** about unix. Plenty of info, insights, and even just general blabber about operating systems.   )

[no, the other guy]

I wish people would talk about Unix more.

[xtrafrood]

I wish people would talk about Unix more.

I've heard that the BSD conferences are a bit more intimate when compared to linux conferences. Sounds like fun either way.

[dndlmx]

I wish people would talk about Unix more.

You mean ones that trace back to AT&T and/or UC Berkeley? I consider Linux a variant of "Unix", despite it not having any connection to UNIX development-wise.

[no, the other guy]

Linux is not a variant of Unix.

[dndlmx]

Yeah well you're arguing semantics, it's heavily inspired by it. It sure looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck.

[Findecanor]

Linux is not a variant of Unix.

I would argue that Linux is more Unix than MacOS is.

[no, the other guy]

It probably is. But they deliberately don't try to. Actually, even GNU/Hurd is more Unix than Linux is.

[xtrafrood]

Sucks that OSX has support for OpenZFS yet Linux is some years behind before full support for OpenZFS becomes a thing (Antergos?). I'm close to halfway through FreeBSD Mastery: ZFS, and damn near sold that the future is literally OpenZFS.

[no, the other guy]

OpenZFS's CDDL is still incompatible with the GPL. Canonical is still violating its own license. Well...

[xtrafrood]

Makes me wonder how Antergos gets away with including ZFS as a filesystem option.

[no, the other guy]

Probably this is another case of "nobody cares enough".

[dndlmx]

I would argue that Linux is more Unix than MacOS is.

There's some pretty "legit" Unix pieces involved in Darwin though. A kernel largely developed at CMU, for Unix. Bunch of stuff lifted from FreeBSD, and then there's the NeXT OS which was it's own legit variant.

Sucks that OSX has support for OpenZFS yet Linux is some years behind before full support for OpenZFS becomes a thing (Antergos?). I'm close to halfway through FreeBSD Mastery: ZFS, and damn near sold that the future is literally OpenZFS.

Maybe for mission-critical servers with terabytes upon terabytes of data. I plan to ditch my multi-mechanical drive ZFS for a single large SSD and just use UFS2. With backups of course. Although the check summing, and "scrubs" are cool. With 10G ethernet becoming more accessible, I might actually stand to benefit from an SSD on the network.

[xtrafrood]

I would argue that Linux is more Unix than MacOS is.

There's some pretty "legit" Unix pieces involved in Darwin though. A kernel largely developed at CMU, for Unix. Bunch of stuff lifted from FreeBSD, and then there's the NeXT OS which was it's own legit variant.

Sucks that OSX has support for OpenZFS yet Linux is some years behind before full support for OpenZFS becomes a thing (Antergos?). I'm close to halfway through FreeBSD Mastery: ZFS, and damn near sold that the future is literally OpenZFS.

Maybe for mission-critical servers with terabytes upon terabytes of data. I plan to ditch my multi-mechanical drive ZFS for a single large SSD and just use UFS2. With backups of course. Although the check summing, and "scrubs" are cool. With 10G ethernet becoming more accessible, I might actually stand to benefit from an SSD on the network.

I'm already benefiting from dedeplication via nightly borgbackup snapshots so in my eyes it would be lovely to have that functionality just built-in to the filesystem. I understand it's not a perfect situation but it would be nice not to need to install an Arch Linux base and borgbackup in order to restore via borgbackup (caveat: I've restored a ~15GB usb install of Arch Linux using borgbackup.. not exactly a sure thing--the Arch migration from HDD to SSD was done with gparted). Really as of pg ~100 of FreeBSD Mastery: ZFS dedupe is barely the tip of the iceberg for OpenZFS. Like not needing raid hardware because the functionality is already built-in to the filesystem? How is that not awesome? Couple these thoughts with like you said, a filesystem that checks itself and if you script for it will alert the user on a binary level of WHAT FILE IS AFFECTED. Not like, oh gee, there's an error but rather oh gee file X is corrupted. But yea, my FreeBSD installation is UFS because installing a new grub just to satisfy the needs of a single ATA FreeBSD/OpenZFS drive seems kinda obsessive. Blah, blah, etc., etc..



tonights backup is complete (7 days worth of backups for a ~35GB filesystem == 18.5GB)

[JP]

I am not a regular Linux user but I have dabbled mostly with Centos and Ubuntu. Interests are more home lab related. I am in desperate need to redo my NAS setup. I had a hacked Synology setup running their DSM software on my own hardware with Raid 10 and btrfs. It worked great until I decided to install an update on an impulse. No data loss just not a robust solution. I am thinking I should implement my storage backend with Ubuntu server and ZFS. I have the proper hardware for this setup (server grade hardware with ECC memory and a HBA). I am thinking I could setup later the Synology software again or use FreeNas to connect to shares I setup in Ubuntu server.

[Flame]

I mostly use Ubuntu and Raspbian (on my Pis). Many people have recommended I use Gentoo though, but I've been hesitant to switch.

[menuhin]

I guess I am the only one Devuan (Debian fork) user here. Currently at 2.0

[no, the other guy]

I guess I am the only one Devuan (Debian fork) user

FTFY

[xtrafrood]

I guess I am the only one Devuan (Debian fork) user here. Currently at 2.0

I'm currently downloading an ISO. Default XFCE and sysinit should be interesting

[iri]

I tried Devuan but the kernel that it shipped with didn't work with my laptop. So I installed MX Linux in the end, another Debian derivative without systemd.

[xtrafrood]

That's strange. Devuan XFCE LiveISO worked fine with my rando 2007 Acer laptop. Wifi wasn't a problem, actually the only issue I had is damn XFCE and tap to click. Even the Frickin Linux Mint team enables tap to click by default for their XFCE variant. It's beyond me why distro teams (Fedora XFCE spin too) don't enable tap to click by default for XFCE. I wasn't able to poke around with sysinit but what I saw of Devuan is decent.

edit - Nuked and paved Lubuntu 18.04 for Lubuntu 18.10

The process was fairly quick. Picking a partition to nuke and pave is pretty neat (same as Lubuntu 18.04 installer), though I was able to uninstall grub without built in update software reinstalling grub seconds later (I use multiple Linux OSs--one grub to rule them all). So from what I can tell the move from LXDE to LXQT seems to have nudged Lubuntu more into tinkerer territory.  I mostly use it for gaming and the occasional Windows 7 VM. Basically I just I drop in some dotfiles, install steam, enable proton for all the things, install a few games and login whenever I'm ready to relax.

[Eldr1tch]

Slackware for the longest time, currently giving Void Linux a try after all the /g/ shills.

[Little4Real]

Ubuntu for home, and CentOS+FreePBX at work

[fossilcodger]

Hi, formerly, I used GoboLinux, for years, actually, I have translated even their webpage from English to Hungarian... But in the last years (approx. in the last 4 years) I'm using my OWN "distro". It is based on LFS, but with a very, very modified filesystem-hierarchy. This hierarchy is similar to GoboLinux, but not perfectly the same, so I'm not "compatible" with it. I use in my "distro" my own scripts of course for installing/uninstalling programs (from source naturally), and generally for all works.

As the desktop environment, I use DWM window manager, with my own statusbar-program, and I use even the XBindKeys prog. So I do no need any real "DE". I do not like bloatware stuffs... no, not at all... I have enough memory (16GB), so the reason is not as if I wouldn't have enough, but simple I like simplicity!

I do not even have any filemanager prog, except MC. (In mostly cases even it is superfluous...)

[Leslieann]

Switched over to Antergos with KDE the other day, been a while since I've been happy using something other than Cinnamon.

Cinnamon doesn't scale well on 1440p monitors (either too large or too small), and tends to dislike dual screens (needs work arounds). KDE is kind of a hassle to get setup but once done seems to be fine. It's certainly a bit heavier on boot times (3 more seconds OMG!), but offers a nice experience otherwise.

[user 18]

Switched over to Antergos with KDE the other day, been a while since I've been happy using something other than Cinnamon.

Cinnamon doesn't scale well on 1440p monitors (either too large or too small), and tends to dislike dual screens (needs work arounds). KDE is kind of a hassle to get setup but once done seems to be fine. It's certainly a bit heavier on boot times (3 more seconds OMG!), but offers a nice experience otherwise.

What problems were you having with Cinnamon and multiple monitors? I've been running 3x 1080p screens on Mint 18 with Cinnamon for the past couple years, and I've had next to no trouble in that time.

[Leslieann]

What problems were you having with Cinnamon and multiple monitors? I've been running 3x 1080p screens on Mint 18 with Cinnamon for the past couple years, and I've had next to no trouble in that time.

There is a bug, confirmed by a few people now, that if you have two monitors and the primary is on the left, then the left screen will not always come on, regardless of video system you have. A work around is to manually start an instance of Nemo on Cinnamon startup which triggers the screen to come on, then you simply close the window manually. It's very specific to this layout apparently and seems the developers have largely ignored the issue as it's been around a while, probably because it's inconsistent and hard to catch. Doesn't happen on single or triple screens or if your primary screen is on the right. Also, Cinnamon, since it's not using Wayland (sp?), has limited scaling ability, so if you switch to a 1440p monitor (which I did recently), you end up with a choice or very small taskbars (around 30% smaller) or very large ones (about 70% larger), this has to do with xorg or GTK or something so it can't be fixed by Cinnamon itself.

These may seem minor, but but it can also be a bit buggy here and there at times, usually after a major Gnome 3 update gets pushed and they try to integrate it. Mostly though I just wanted to try something new, particularly Wayland based in hopes of fixing the scaling issue.

[user 18]

There is a bug, confirmed by a few people now, that if you have two monitors and the primary is on the left, then the left screen will not always come on, regardless of video system you have. A work around is to manually start an instance of Nemo on Cinnamon startup which triggers the screen to come on, then you simply close the window manually. It's very specific to this layout apparently and seems the developers have largely ignored the issue as it's been around a while, probably because it's inconsistent and hard to catch. Doesn't happen on single or triple screens or if your primary screen is on the right. Also, Cinnamon, since it's not using Wayland (sp?), has limited scaling ability, so if you switch to a 1440p monitor (which I did recently), you end up with a choice or very small taskbars (around 30% smaller) or very large ones (about 70% larger), this has to do with xorg or GTK or something so it can't be fixed by Cinnamon itself.

These may seem minor, but but it can also be a bit buggy here and there at times, usually after a major Gnome 3 update gets pushed and they try to integrate it. Mostly though I just wanted to try something new, particularly Wayland based in hopes of fixing the scaling issue.

Ah, that sounds like a bit of a mess, glad I haven't run across that then. Interesting that it's only on that particular layout though, I wonder what would cause that.

[Leslieann]

Ah, that sounds like a bit of a mess, glad I haven't run across that then. Interesting that it's only on that particular layout though, I wonder what would cause that.

Probably just a bad default config, I may even have an idea on how to fix it, but I only found a potential fix while tweaking KDE so I haven't had a chance to test it.

With the workaround, it wasn't a big deal.

[Kango_V]

I've been using Ubuntu since 5.04  . Before that i used to distro hop between Red Hat, Suse, Mandrake etc. I now get lost on Windows having used Linux at home and at work for the past 13 years.

[impaktor]

started on Debian, now 10 years deep into Arch.

Thinking about testing the *BSDs next.

[xtrafrood]

Alright. Here's the thing. I installed Pop!_OS because I had an extra PATA HDD laying around and wanted to check out Retropie.  After a few days it stopped booting (HDD is fine), so I installed vanilla Ubuntu 18.10.  And well damn, < 700MB at startup with Gnome 3 + dash2dock. That's pretty neat.  Ubuntu has come a long way even in the six years since the last time I installed it to metal.  I still wouldn't use Gnome 3 as my daily because I like crash-less desktops but still, not bad Canonical (and ofc previous Ubuntu Gnome team). Well done.

edit - Also Kubuntu is totally not unusable.  Around 400MB at startup on my system, looks gorgeous (Plasma 5.13 == yum disc), and does oddly well via 7.2k rpm PATA HDD.  Damn.

[iri]

what is 'yum disc'?