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OpenBSD Alpine Linux Void Linux (+ Nix package manager) 9front (militant esoterica) I use OpenBSD on my Thinkpad T410i and Void on an older AMD box. You can

OpenBSD Alpine Linux Void Linux (+ Nix package manager) 9front (militant esoterica) I use OpenBSD on my Thinkpad T410i and Void on an older AMD box. You can use vmm to run alpine images to run docker apps or Linux stuff. My only gripe is firefox runs slowish on OpenBSD though chrome doesn't suffer as such. I use both and only chrome if FF cant handle the site im on. 9front's vmx is mature enough to run an alpine VM and then native x client so the vm runs without an x server and the linux applications run in individual windows giving you a seamless 9front/linux desktop that can run a full browser. This route is only for the truly enlightened ones. Unix philosophy isn't about keeping the cruft around but building useful systems using simple tools. The idea is do not duplicate functionality if it already exists. I see so many programs attempt to sidestep dependency hell by baking in functionality. This is the overall communities fault and the fault of modern software development which somehow lost the art of pragmatism. The simple part has been long lost in a sea of complexity driven by ignorance and fueled by greed.

jakeogh 7y ago
and Gentoo.
- cameronbrown 7y ago
  Would Gentoo not be subject to the effects of dodgy upstream patches too?
  - p_l 7y ago
    Unless you are trying to run software that explicitly depends on some of the brokenness from upstream (Gnome3) you can just setup a classic system that will behave the same way you're used to and honestly, I didn't encounter problems with software in that configuration
  - jakeogh 7y ago
    Gentoo tends to maintain out of tree patches (possibly to remove upstream changes), or complete replacements (like eudev/elogind).
  - nwallin 7y ago
    Gentoo doesn't use systemd by default, it has its own init system called OpenRC that's kinda sorta like a framework for sysv. Despite being shell based, it's very fast, my system can get from GRUB to Firefox in less than ten seconds if you enable autologin and add Firefox to your.Xsession. Gentoo maintains forks of udev and logind, imaginatively named eudev and elogind. I use eudev, but elogind is unnecessary for me because I don't use Gnome3. But if that's your thing I'm not stopping you. Pulseaudio is easy to remove by virtue of Gentoo's source based package model. Dbus less so; many applications have a hard dependency on it. I think it's possible to use a BSD kernel, but you will very likely deal with a lot of breakage. Gentoo is just so much easier to administrate that other distros it's unreal.
- djsumdog 7y ago
  I love Gentoo. It's a great developer distribution. I've been using it since 2003 I think, and the current Gentoo install I use I have continually updated since 2012. When I get a new machine, I just copy the existing install over and build a new kernel.
  - donio 7y ago
    Same, been using it since 2002, my current image has been rolling since 2008, that's when I switched to amd64. Never cared about the performance tuning aspect, it's all about flexibility and control.
peatmoss 7y ago
OpenBSD is a modern, innovative Operating System that has retained classic Unix sensibilities. I also think that, even as a lover of Linux, a Linux monoculture is bad for the world. The simplicity of OpenBSD makes it much easier to learn deeply than Linux. Where Linux has tended to create magical veneers over complexity, OpenBSD has tended to simplify the underlying systems. Also, the OpenBSD project is shouldering the weight of the world and deserves more credit for this. So much of OpenBSD has made it into other parts of the Internet ecosystem.
- pjmlp 7y ago
  > OpenBSD is a modern, innovative Operating System that has retained classic Unix sensibilities. Like being quite bad for graphics programming and game development.
  - peatmoss 7y ago
    I don’t know enough about these domains to know whether there is anything intrinsic to the design of OpenBSD that makes it better or worse in this regard, but I suspect that if you are correct, it’s more a function of mindshare and number of people doing the work. I think some of us feel that portions of the Linux world have made some wrong or at least undesirable turns for some things. It seems the choice is to either go along with those choices or improve other paths. Also, not sure what issues you see, but there appear to be a bunch of the standard open source games in OpenBSD as you’d see in Linux. Obviously not the commercial games that have Linux ports, but that strikes me more as an issue of popularity than technical limitations.
    - fluffything 7y ago
      > intrinsic to the design of OpenBSD Design and implementation are two different things. I can imagine an OS perfect for game programming, but I can't use it, because it's not implemented. I tried OpenBSD for 2 months, and went back to MacOSX. First, package repositories were meh (either pay, or recompile from source, or never update). Second, OpenBSD graphic driver support was just very bad - no drivers for GPGPUs. Third, lack of drivers, applications / services for interfacing with the real world and external devices. I come home, open my laptop, click on select monitor, and I see 3 monitors available in the WiFi network (two TVs, and a desktop monitor). I can just click one, and my display is mirrored in real time to them - I can play a video, and it is mirrored perfectly, and with audio. Same at work, want to show a video in the presentation room? Connect to the beamer per wifi with a single click, display mirrored, great. Phone detects wifi, laptop backs it up to network storage, synchronizes media, updates software, Smart watch synchronized, etc. None of that worked with OpenBSD. I had to find a HDMI cable in the basement to connect the laptop to the TV, monitor, beamer,... I had to use a USB cable to connect the phone to the laptop, which I then couldn't back up or synchronize without a gazillion brittle workarounds, etc. Losing support for all modern devices felt like going back to the stone age. Linux isn't really much better, but while I like OpenBSD design, philosophy, and parts of the implementation. The current implementation doesn't work for me.
na85 7y ago
OpenBSD isn't performant enough to be a daily driver on a laptop, unless your laptop spends all its time plugged in. The battery life on my X220 was a solid hour less under OpenBSD than under Debian, and it ran some 10 degrees hotter. Yes, this is post-apmd improvements. I want to like OpenBSD but code correctness just isn't enough for me.
- djsumdog 7y ago
  OpenBSD (and the other BSDs too) are also pretty far behind on things like wireless hardware. There just aren't enough active developers to get a lot of the 802.11ac stack implemented (and ax or Wi-Fi 6 is coming around the corner too). If there was a current port of Docker for FreeBSD and Wi-Fi ac support, it would totally be my daily driver right now. Currently I still use Gentoo on my laptops.
  - earenndil 7y ago
    Does docker do anything for you that a jail couldn't?
    - eropple 7y ago
      It has been a long time since I used a BSD in anger, but aren't jails pretty much a take-it-or-leave-it system? Docker containers are an aggregate of Linux namespaces and cgroups and can be manipulated in a pretty granular way. I can, for example, share a networking namespace between two containers to have one inspect the traffic of the other (and do so easily). Not saying you'd want to do that, but my understanding is that this is part of a lot of the clever networking you see in orchestration systems.
      - toast0 7y ago
        FreeBSD jails have some flexibility. You can choose to pass through the host networking as-is, or pass a limited selection of ips; I think there's a way to have a more separated stack that that too, but I haven't used it. You can allow raw sockets or not, you can shield the processes or not, same with IPC. I haven't had a need to have a jail inspect traffic of another, I suspect that might be tricky. However I've used them successfully as a lightweight alternative to a vm for QA/dev environments -- use hard links for the base OS to save space, and give each jail its own ip and you get fairly cheap multiple boxes. I've also used it them to contain statically compiled binaries -- TLS terminator runs without access to much of anything, if the next vulnerability after Heartbleed was worse, it would be a lot harder to escalate vs common deployment with OpenSSL linked into a webserver; similar with an environment running ffmpeg.

jakeogh 7y ago

and Gentoo.

cameronbrown 7y ago
Would Gentoo not be subject to the effects of dodgy upstream patches too?
- p_l 7y ago
  Unless you are trying to run software that explicitly depends on some of the brokenness from upstream (Gnome3) you can just setup a classic system that will behave the same way you're used to and honestly, I didn't encounter problems with software in that configuration
- jakeogh 7y ago
  Gentoo tends to maintain out of tree patches (possibly to remove upstream changes), or complete replacements (like eudev/elogind).
- nwallin 7y ago
  Gentoo doesn't use systemd by default, it has its own init system called OpenRC that's kinda sorta like a framework for sysv. Despite being shell based, it's very fast, my system can get from GRUB to Firefox in less than ten seconds if you enable autologin and add Firefox to your.Xsession. Gentoo maintains forks of udev and logind, imaginatively named eudev and elogind. I use eudev, but elogind is unnecessary for me because I don't use Gnome3. But if that's your thing I'm not stopping you. Pulseaudio is easy to remove by virtue of Gentoo's source based package model. Dbus less so; many applications have a hard dependency on it. I think it's possible to use a BSD kernel, but you will very likely deal with a lot of breakage. Gentoo is just so much easier to administrate that other distros it's unreal.
djsumdog 7y ago
I love Gentoo. It's a great developer distribution. I've been using it since 2003 I think, and the current Gentoo install I use I have continually updated since 2012. When I get a new machine, I just copy the existing install over and build a new kernel.
- donio 7y ago
  Same, been using it since 2002, my current image has been rolling since 2008, that's when I switched to amd64. Never cared about the performance tuning aspect, it's all about flexibility and control.

peatmoss 7y ago

OpenBSD is a modern, innovative Operating System that has retained classic Unix sensibilities. I also think that, even as a lover of Linux, a Linux monoculture is bad for the world. The simplicity of OpenBSD makes it much easier to learn deeply than Linux. Where Linux has tended to create magical veneers over complexity, OpenBSD has tended to simplify the underlying systems. Also, the OpenBSD project is shouldering the weight of the world and deserves more credit for this. So much of OpenBSD has made it into other parts of the Internet ecosystem.

pjmlp 7y ago
> OpenBSD is a modern, innovative Operating System that has retained classic Unix sensibilities. Like being quite bad for graphics programming and game development.
- peatmoss 7y ago
  I don’t know enough about these domains to know whether there is anything intrinsic to the design of OpenBSD that makes it better or worse in this regard, but I suspect that if you are correct, it’s more a function of mindshare and number of people doing the work. I think some of us feel that portions of the Linux world have made some wrong or at least undesirable turns for some things. It seems the choice is to either go along with those choices or improve other paths. Also, not sure what issues you see, but there appear to be a bunch of the standard open source games in OpenBSD as you’d see in Linux. Obviously not the commercial games that have Linux ports, but that strikes me more as an issue of popularity than technical limitations.
  - fluffything 7y ago
    > intrinsic to the design of OpenBSD Design and implementation are two different things. I can imagine an OS perfect for game programming, but I can't use it, because it's not implemented. I tried OpenBSD for 2 months, and went back to MacOSX. First, package repositories were meh (either pay, or recompile from source, or never update). Second, OpenBSD graphic driver support was just very bad - no drivers for GPGPUs. Third, lack of drivers, applications / services for interfacing with the real world and external devices. I come home, open my laptop, click on select monitor, and I see 3 monitors available in the WiFi network (two TVs, and a desktop monitor). I can just click one, and my display is mirrored in real time to them - I can play a video, and it is mirrored perfectly, and with audio. Same at work, want to show a video in the presentation room? Connect to the beamer per wifi with a single click, display mirrored, great. Phone detects wifi, laptop backs it up to network storage, synchronizes media, updates software, Smart watch synchronized, etc. None of that worked with OpenBSD. I had to find a HDMI cable in the basement to connect the laptop to the TV, monitor, beamer,... I had to use a USB cable to connect the phone to the laptop, which I then couldn't back up or synchronize without a gazillion brittle workarounds, etc. Losing support for all modern devices felt like going back to the stone age. Linux isn't really much better, but while I like OpenBSD design, philosophy, and parts of the implementation. The current implementation doesn't work for me.

na85 7y ago

OpenBSD isn't performant enough to be a daily driver on a laptop, unless your laptop spends all its time plugged in. The battery life on my X220 was a solid hour less under OpenBSD than under Debian, and it ran some 10 degrees hotter. Yes, this is post-apmd improvements. I want to like OpenBSD but code correctness just isn't enough for me.

djsumdog 7y ago
OpenBSD (and the other BSDs too) are also pretty far behind on things like wireless hardware. There just aren't enough active developers to get a lot of the 802.11ac stack implemented (and ax or Wi-Fi 6 is coming around the corner too). If there was a current port of Docker for FreeBSD and Wi-Fi ac support, it would totally be my daily driver right now. Currently I still use Gentoo on my laptops.
- earenndil 7y ago
  Does docker do anything for you that a jail couldn't?
  - eropple 7y ago
    It has been a long time since I used a BSD in anger, but aren't jails pretty much a take-it-or-leave-it system? Docker containers are an aggregate of Linux namespaces and cgroups and can be manipulated in a pretty granular way. I can, for example, share a networking namespace between two containers to have one inspect the traffic of the other (and do so easily). Not saying you'd want to do that, but my understanding is that this is part of a lot of the clever networking you see in orchestration systems.
    - toast0 7y ago
      FreeBSD jails have some flexibility. You can choose to pass through the host networking as-is, or pass a limited selection of ips; I think there's a way to have a more separated stack that that too, but I haven't used it. You can allow raw sockets or not, you can shield the processes or not, same with IPC. I haven't had a need to have a jail inspect traffic of another, I suspect that might be tricky. However I've used them successfully as a lightweight alternative to a vm for QA/dev environments -- use hard links for the base OS to save space, and give each jail its own ip and you get fairly cheap multiple boxes. I've also used it them to contain statically compiled binaries -- TLS terminator runs without access to much of anything, if the next vulnerability after Heartbleed was worse, it would be a lot harder to escalate vs common deployment with OpenSSL linked into a webserver; similar with an environment running ffmpeg.