*or distribution
Having been a (GNU-)Linux user since 2006 (desktop only), I have done what many Linux users have also done: hop around from one thing to another.
That all stopped a few years ago when I decided that I would just stick with Debian. I was happy and comfortable. It worked. I used Stable, Testing, Unstable… no issues.
That is until about 4 months ago I was cleaning and found an older laptop and decided to try something different on it: Alpine Linux.
I even wrote about it on my blog. It was such a nice installation and process that I decided to put it on my main personal laptop.
Since April I have been using Alpine and I must say I am pleased. Differences from one Linux to the next aren’t much to write about. With Alpine however, I finally experienced another part of Linux that I hadn’t had the opportunity to enjoy: the community.
Package requesting? Easy. Asking for help? No shame. Patience and help provided? Excellent.
None of those comments are to disparage other OS communities. It is simply that I had only ever used popular distros (Debian- and Arch-based) so I never needed to ask for help. Either way, I am still using Alpine.
So, just to repeat the titular question: what have you tried out this year? What are your impressions?
i normally wouldn’t consider distributions to be a diffrent OS , but i think fedora silverblue has been diffrent enough to be worth a mention.
immutable distros seem like a rather drastic change, but it hasn’t been as jaring as i would have expected.
my biggest takeaway sofar has been, that flatpacks aren’t as bad & slow as i thought.
the only issue i encountered with them has been the terminal in vscode,
which (understandably) starts in the flatpack env.
i found a workarround that immediatly enters my toolbox, but unfortunatly, that broke just now.
im still unsure about the tradeoffs that immutable distros bring, (imo thats hard to judge)
but so far nothing has steered me away from it.
if i where to stop using immutable distros,
id surely continue to rely on tool/distro boxes and flatpacks
I do not think of distros as a different OS either. Even Windows has different versions with different features and defaults.
If you are going to say GNU / Linux though, they cannot all be GNU. Chimera is Linux but not GNU. Even Alpine is MUSL instead of Glibc and Busybox instead of GNU Core Utils. So, Alpine is not very GNU either. But it is still Linux.
Personally, I think this illustrates the problem with trying to pretend that Linux is a GNU OS. Especially if you admit that very little GPL software ( starting with the kernel ) is GNU either. Most Linux installs are dominated by MIT licensed software but even the majority of the GPL stuff is not GNU.