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Our Journey Through Linux/Unix Landscapes

20 points by alekq 1y ago

jmclnx 1y ago
Funny, but no Slackware :) But FreeBSD is a good choice, but its pf seems a bit outdated. Or should we consider FreeBSD's pf a fork of OpenBSD's and a different product ?
- nesarkvechnep 1y ago
  The latter.
rbanffy 1y ago
Bashing Linux distros gets old very quickly.
- exiguus 1y ago
  I believe the humor in the article's introduction lies in its playful critique of every Linux distribution.
  - rbanffy 1y ago
    These jokes didn’t age well
  - kstenerud 1y ago
    Except that they continue bashing as the article continues, using facile "patches bad!" mantras. It comes across very poorly, especially since so many of these patches are advance fixes of issues upstream.
mvanveen 1y ago
I thought it was funny they spent so much time bashing choice of distro and highlighting various performance considerations only to pick Alpine? Alpine linux uses musl as its libc, which contrary to the articles' claims (unless I'm missing new information?) can have severe performance implications in many production settings. update: I found this April 2025 blog post where someone performed some benchmarks and found that musl runtime performance is still pretty far behind glibc: https://edu.chainguard.dev/chainguard/chainguard-images/about/images-compiled-programs/glibc-vs-musl/ https://edu.chainguard.dev/chainguard/chainguard-images/abou...
- LargoLasskhyfv 1y ago
  That link may show the current state of Musl on Alpine, but Musl can be built with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mimalloc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mimalloc https://github.com/microsoft/mimalloc https://github.com/microsoft/mimalloc as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chimera_Linux https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chimera_Linux / https://chimera-linux.org/ https://chimera-linux.org/ does. Which btw. can be done in Alpine, too: https://wiki.alpinelinux.org/wiki/Mimalloc https://wiki.alpinelinux.org/wiki/Mimalloc
exiguus 1y ago
With 50% fewer operations and 25% less storage, it appears they made the right choice to address their issues.
vincent-manis 1y ago
If I were asked this question, except as a piece of trivia exchange, I wouldn't want to work for them. There are arguments in favour of many OSes (including those that I used in the long-ago past on long-forgotten iron), and many against those same systems. Using any OS is generally a trade-off; so if asked `what OS do you use?', I would answer `whatever is suitable for the problem and equipment at hand'. If asked `what is the best-designed OS you have ever seen', I'd instantly respond `Plan 9', which I have never actually used. As it so happens, I recently transitioned my daily driver laptop from Debian to Debian running under WSL2 on Windows. I had good reason for doing it. But I guess running that makes me a double loser.
- BrouteMinou 1y ago
  Enjoying both worlds without having a tribal mindset... That's more like a triple win to me!
  - bandie91 1y ago
    …said some Trojans when accepted the Greek's gift horse
throwawaygimp 1y ago
Alpine has been my daily driver on all my desktops for a few years now. So happy with it. Try making a package - it's one big repo and really easy to use another package as a starting point. I built a package for KiCad in a trivial amount of time.
chrisdalke 1y ago
No mention of NixOS, which is miles ahead of every other operating system in terms of developer time spent tweaking endless configuration...
- npodbielski 1y ago
  Pretty sure they mentioned it: > NixOS is the only one that we didn't hate. Technically, it's a marvel, but the learning curve is too high. Because who has time to learn a new system when you can just stick with what you know and complain about it?
  - chrisdalke 1y ago
    Oh my bad, I missed that! That's well said. NixOS really does solve a lot of this but with the steepest learning curve I've ever seen.
LargoLasskhyfv 1y ago
Lamers. https://cachyos.org https://cachyos.org is Arch without the masochism, and 'riced' to the max, without being fragile. But yeah, depending on the task Alpine, or some BSD is ok, too. Regarding ZFS, I couldn't care less. BTFRS has caused me no stress, doesn't need Solaris Portability Layers, and doesn't work against otherwise established memory systems. Feels much smoother and less wasteful for me.

20 points by alekq 1y ago

Funny, but no Slackware :) But FreeBSD is a good choice, but its pf seems a bit outdated. Or should we consider FreeBSD's pf a fork of OpenBSD's and a different product ?

nesarkvechnep 1y ago
The latter.

rbanffy 1y ago

Bashing Linux distros gets old very quickly.

exiguus 1y ago
I believe the humor in the article's introduction lies in its playful critique of every Linux distribution.
- rbanffy 1y ago
  These jokes didn’t age well
- kstenerud 1y ago
  Except that they continue bashing as the article continues, using facile "patches bad!" mantras. It comes across very poorly, especially since so many of these patches are advance fixes of issues upstream.

mvanveen 1y ago

I thought it was funny they spent so much time bashing choice of distro and highlighting various performance considerations only to pick Alpine? Alpine linux uses musl as its libc, which contrary to the articles' claims (unless I'm missing new information?) can have severe performance implications in many production settings. update: I found this April 2025 blog post where someone performed some benchmarks and found that musl runtime performance is still pretty far behind glibc: https://edu.chainguard.dev/chainguard/chainguard-images/about/images-compiled-programs/glibc-vs-musl/ https://edu.chainguard.dev/chainguard/chainguard-images/abou...

LargoLasskhyfv 1y ago
That link may show the current state of Musl on Alpine, but Musl can be built with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mimalloc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mimalloc https://github.com/microsoft/mimalloc https://github.com/microsoft/mimalloc as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chimera_Linux https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chimera_Linux / https://chimera-linux.org/ https://chimera-linux.org/ does. Which btw. can be done in Alpine, too: https://wiki.alpinelinux.org/wiki/Mimalloc https://wiki.alpinelinux.org/wiki/Mimalloc

exiguus 1y ago

With 50% fewer operations and 25% less storage, it appears they made the right choice to address their issues.

vincent-manis 1y ago

If I were asked this question, except as a piece of trivia exchange, I wouldn't want to work for them. There are arguments in favour of many OSes (including those that I used in the long-ago past on long-forgotten iron), and many against those same systems. Using any OS is generally a trade-off; so if asked `what OS do you use?', I would answer `whatever is suitable for the problem and equipment at hand'. If asked `what is the best-designed OS you have ever seen', I'd instantly respond `Plan 9', which I have never actually used. As it so happens, I recently transitioned my daily driver laptop from Debian to Debian running under WSL2 on Windows. I had good reason for doing it. But I guess running that makes me a double loser.

BrouteMinou 1y ago
Enjoying both worlds without having a tribal mindset... That's more like a triple win to me!
- bandie91 1y ago
  …said some Trojans when accepted the Greek's gift horse

throwawaygimp 1y ago

Alpine has been my daily driver on all my desktops for a few years now. So happy with it. Try making a package - it's one big repo and really easy to use another package as a starting point. I built a package for KiCad in a trivial amount of time.

chrisdalke 1y ago

No mention of NixOS, which is miles ahead of every other operating system in terms of developer time spent tweaking endless configuration...

npodbielski 1y ago
Pretty sure they mentioned it: > NixOS is the only one that we didn't hate. Technically, it's a marvel, but the learning curve is too high. Because who has time to learn a new system when you can just stick with what you know and complain about it?
- chrisdalke 1y ago
  Oh my bad, I missed that! That's well said. NixOS really does solve a lot of this but with the steepest learning curve I've ever seen.

LargoLasskhyfv 1y ago

Lamers. https://cachyos.org https://cachyos.org is Arch without the masochism, and 'riced' to the max, without being fragile. But yeah, depending on the task Alpine, or some BSD is ok, too. Regarding ZFS, I couldn't care less. BTFRS has caused me no stress, doesn't need Solaris Portability Layers, and doesn't work against otherwise established memory systems. Feels much smoother and less wasteful for me.