It is like linux if Canonical never happened, so like linux 20 years ago. The ports system is nice. FreeBSD is my fallback in case Patrick gives in to the changing linux world and I have to abandon Slackware or start learning OS stuff again. Biggest thing to know about it as a desktop, drivers get into the kernel much slower than with linux and some never get in, so like linux was 20 years ago.
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OMG - this is so true. Home sweet home. A few additional points:
- The hard separation between the base OS and user-installed packages that go in /usr/local - you can wipe the /usr/local and get back to the pristine state. Things don't get mixed.
- Better documentation, better man pages.
Whenever I log in to a Linux distro it feels like things are all in the wrong places. Hardware support is bad though, I wish hardware vendors would open source their drivers.
Have a look at void Linux. I was a long time freebsd user until I really needed some proprietary software (zoom) in the pandemic.
Switched to void and it is the same freebsd feeling, but with much better hardware support. And with my beloved ZFS!
I believe it runs fine in any browser with WebRTC support.
Been using the webcam with my FreeBSD desktop for job interviews over the past couple of months. Unfortunately Zoom eats up a ton of CPU and then crashes when I open it in a browser tab, and there isn't a packaged binary that I've given a try yet. On Google Meet the browser also doesn't support blurring out the background. So, while it's not totally broken or anything, I don't rely on it for important video meetings.
Assuming you have a good webcam?
Or, just, arch.
I used Arch for a number of years before switching to a Mac when I went back to school. At some point I may go back to Linux or FreeBSD (I've used both!) but I'll never go back to rolling releases. The whole reason I switched to Mac was that I got tired of things breaking constantly due to the never-ending updates. And if you put things off then you end up getting a whole lot of breakage all at once. No, I would prefer taking things slow and getting tested releases way less often. I have no need to be on the bleeding edge of everything.
In my experience doing the frequent small upgrade steps is better. It's valuable to know what the update actually does because the list of changes is so small. At the same time it's possible that small updates degrade the system stability so slowly that it's difficult to notice at first.
Right now I'm running Fedora on my old laptop and I was positively surprised in how many details it got better in terms of user-friendliness and predictable behaviour in general, I hope it'll break the curse of "stable" distros constantly falling apart on my PCs.
This is why I run Debian everywhere. Even my desktops.
My hardware is usually a little older anyway, so the latest stable release is good enough.
Flatpaks are finally to a point where if I need up to date apps I can just install it from Flathub.
Similarly I found Arch particularly badly suited for multiboot systems where one might spend extended periods of time not booted into Arch. Too often I'd reboot into Arch and run updates which would break the install somehow.
Fedora has been a decent in-between in my experience. Packages are reasonably up to date and updates are frequent, but I've never had a few weeks of accumulated updates break things which is nice.
I do this with Ubuntu. Snap is annoying yes. And I don’t like some of the changes, at least how they are implementing them (ie: systemd, netplan) during upgrades etc. but it’s serviceable.
I only use windows to play games. But frankly, my personal laptop is used mostly for that, if at all. I have a work laptop provided to me for work stuff.
I still tend to use Ubuntu for the occasional freelance, research or teaching work I do though.
I’m not an evangelist on OS. I’ve used centos, fedora, Debian, mint, elementaryos and even for a time was swapping out DEs for window manager things like awesomeWM.
But at this stage in the game I’m too lazy to tinker with making the OS work. And Ubuntu tends to do well with mixed hardware such as having iris xe and nvidia chips on a single board. So I went with that.
The only sane Linux setup for a workstation is an immutable distro like Silverblue/Kinoite, and an Arch Linux toolbox (or any distro you prefer).
I will die on this hill, and whoever disagrees has never tried what honestly feels like the future. My Linux PC is as stable and reproducible as my iPhone.
One day I will finish my Fedora Silverblue master guide that has been a draft for months...
(No, sorry, NixOS ain't better.)
I can't figure out a decent workflow for Kinoite. It's probably a little bit too much work for me to change my habits right here right now. But I agree that this is a great setup and ultimately, what I want to aim to. Complete separation of user and OS, containerized apps everywhere, and so forth. But my quick trial of a few hours was too short to adapt. Also I love excel too much unfortunately.
NixOS is "better" in the sense that you can get pretty close to something like Silverblue with it if you tinker around.
But I agree with you that for the average user Silverblue surely is the the better platform, NixOS is for people how like to hack around and customize their environment.
immutable distro like Silverblue
I had never even heard these before! This sounds exactly like what I want!
One day I will finish my Fedora Silverblue master guide that has been a draft for months...
I would love to read it!
> Canonical
Canonical/Red Hat.
The changes have largely been the two of them warring for control of key projects, such that other distros are forced to fall in line and become second-class to theirs (why risk the knock-off when you can go straight to the source?). Red Hat's won every one of these battles so far.
>It is like linux if Canonical never happened,
Really? from what I read BSD complaints they hate RedHat related stuff like systemd and GNOME code was Linux only for w hile, not sure if this was fixed in GJPME or downstream.
Canonical adopting systemd is what made it a standard, community went from being very divided on systemd to resigned and accepting it almost overnight after Canonical announced they were going systemd. This is a fairly common trend, they have a fair amount of influence although that seems to be waning after their push for snap.
Canonical only settled on systemd when Debian decided to adopt it, though.
That is nice historical revisionism, considering Canonical was all in on upstart.
No, the parent you are replying to meant that Canonical only gave up on upstart and accepted defeat (and thus went with systemd) when Debian made that decision.
Correct - that was what I meant. I remember the init system debates all too well.
Dude, that is historical true, Upstart was there before systemd , Redhat used upstart too. Then an RH dev created systemd and Arch,Fedora,Debian moved to systemd , Ubuntu followed Debian decision since Ubuntu is based on Debian and they share maintainers/developers.
Ubuntu held out for quite a bit with upstart, but.
Like UNIX you mean.