*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?
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I feel like I’m the only one who doesn’t consider different Linux distros to be different OSes. I was expecting to read people trying out Haiku, ReactOS, Solaris, any of the *BSDs, or something I’ve never heard of.
Good point. I should have worded my question differently.
I mean even Solaris and the BSDs are just different flavors of Unix
… and Linux is not Unix. BSD and Solaris are, in my opinion, much better than any Linux. The problem is that BSD suffers from hardware incompatibility, and there are very few application programs for the current Solaris.
I remember how much I loved using Solaris in the 1990s in the computer lab at college. People still use Solaris? I never saw something as elegant and intuitive as Solaris in those old days.
You are not the only one. Haiku is getting close to daily driver capability.
You cannot practically use it on real hardware yet but one to watch is SaerenityOS.
It is unfinished enough to be a pipe dream but RavynOS is cool.
I am not sure there is anything outside the POSIX space that is really usable as a desktop on current hardware.
If you want something obscure barely anyone heard about try eComStation. Unfortunately you’ll have to pirate it, but its really easy to find.
If you’re not the pirating type, you can buy a license for ArcaOS to get something still supported.
It’s a bit pricey though.
it’s 130 bucks for a kinda useless, novelty OS.
Wow, I am definitely getting old if OS/2 is “obscure”
That’s a good find. I’d never heard of it. I always thought OS/2 was pretty great, although I only got to mess around with it a few decades again. Looking up eComStation led me to ArcaOS, which seems like a more updated eComStation. OS/2, Amiga, BeOS and NeXT should have been more popular.
I think MorphOS is considered the up to date Amiga.
For BeOS, Haiku is pretty great.
ArcaOS is literally OS/2.
There is no modern NeXT OS but there is a recent DE effort if all you want is the user experience.
OpenSUSE Tumbleweed because i really like that its rolling release, new software and stable. Im using it as a main distro now. It has everything i need.
OpenSUSE is one of the distros that I have never tried. If Alpine ever fails me, I think I’ll give it a try.
I distro hopped a lot and i always had a reason to switch. With OpenSUSE i still didnt find a reason.
GrapheneOS and Arch Linux. Both amazing. I’m staying indefinitely.
I gotta get into Arch someday. How’s your experience so far? Easy to use? (I’m sure it is, the wiki is very detailed) Glad to see you like GOS
I finally got fed up with Windows 11 when an update broke itself during an update. Apparently it was a pretty widespread issue. Defender got disabled because the update renamed several files.
I moved to PopOS and have been happy ever since. I couldn’t believe that almost everything on my Lenovo Flex 5 just worked, including the touchscreen, pen, and 360 degree hinge. The only thing that doesn’t work is the finger print sensor apparently due to lack of available drivers.
I really like how modern PopOS feels.
Windows 11. Once you remove the ads and restore the old Taskbar/Start Menu, It’s a decent modern OS. AutoHDR is so good. I never have to worry about toggling it on/off, nor calibrating it for each and every game. Just set it once and forget it.
If you care about HDR, then there’s no better OS ATM.
The only Windows computer I ever use is a company-managed work laptop. Every time I turn it on the wallpaper and start menu reset to whatever the admins decide. I did manage to change some aspects to make it more comfortable… Windows is actually pretty snappy.
I’m not particularly militant about Linux distros, but Alpine is one distro I disapprove of in particular. The reason is that it isn’t GNU/Linux – it strips out (copyleft) GNU libc and coreutils and replaces them with permissively-licensed alternatives. I think that (whether intentional or not) it caters too much to corporate interests that exploit “open source” without truly respecting the users’ freedom, and therefore its popularity is potentially harmful to the Free Software movement in the long run.
But alpine license isn’t that bad right? I mean musl is okaish?
Can you elaborate more?
Thank you
Considered in and of themselves, permissive licenses are “fine.” They confer all four of the freedoms the FSF lists here, so there’s nothing wrong with them from the perspective of the person receiving the code as an end-user.
The problem is that, unlike copyleft, they fail to bind that recipient to the same conditions and guarantee those freedoms will be maintained for all downstream users who receive the code in the future. They are thus exploitable by those who would take without giving back in return. This makes permissively-licensed code popular with the exploiters, but is bad for the users in the long run.
See, for example, MacOS and iOS: in theory, they’re just BSDs with fancy proprietary UIs, but in practice they can be made so locked-down and user-hostile there’s an entire movement devoted to creating new laws to force Apple to stop bricking people’s property because they needed to replace a bad hardware component. Those four freedoms I referenced earlier are definitely no longer being upheld by Apple, even though Apple itself benefited from them to make the software in the first place.
There’s a reason why copyleft-licensed Linux is so much more popular than permissively-licensed BSD, and resistance to selfish bad actors (even as flawed as it is, what with the “tivoization” exploit of the GPLv2 and all) fragmenting the community with proprietary features is undoubtedly part of it.
There are some opinions mascaraing as fact here and some not very evidence driven at that.
Linux is a beneficiary of great timing. The pre-cursor to FreeBSD, BSD 386, already existed and was much more mature when Linux appeared. The reason that Linux became popular was primarily that AT&T launched a lawsuit against BSD which made its legal status questionable during a critical few years. This was at the dawn of the Internet and the distribution and collaboration that enabled. By the time the lawsuit was resolved, Linux was massively more popular and BSD was left behind. Ironically, early Linux never faced early legal trouble as it was not taken seriously by UNIX players. The Linux lawsuits came later but, by then, Linux had major corporate backers ( see SCO vs IBM with IBM being the on the Linux side ).
Hell, Linus himself has said that he would never even have created Linux is Minix had been free ( meaning explicitly free as in beer, not as in freedom at the time ). In fact, Linus did not want to adopt the GPL at first because it allowed charging for the software.
One reason that Linux was able to advance so quickly ( or exist at all ) was the existence of GNU and especially GCC. I hate the amount of credit GNU tries to take for moderns Linux distros but there is no denying its importance in making Linux viable early on.
Today, Linux succeeds over BSD primarily because of the greater corporate interest. Apple does not really use the BSD kernel either.
These days, the most popular license used in typical Linux installs is MIT and permissively licensed software is more common than GPL. Some MIT communities, like the X Window Project, are decades old and represent strong trends away from corporate dominance and exploration over time. The vibrancy of all the Open Source communities cannot be explained in terms of the world-view expressed in the comment above. I do not have the numbers in front of me to support this but it is my own impression that permissively licensed software generally succeeds more often at creating sustainable communities. Or maybe it is just the FSF. While there are many successful GPL programs, fewer than 500 of them are GNU and there are almost as many abandoned GNU projects as there are active ones.
In my view, the most important GNU program by far is GCC. That evil Apple company you cite created LLVM / Clang and licensed it permissively. They did by far the most work on it and yet have it away. Today, other evil companies like Microsoft contribute to Clang / LLVM as well. LLVM is of course the basis for the Rust language, another corporate contribution. The lack of GPL here does not seem to have prevented any of this innovation, the massive contributions to the community, or collaboration between these giant corporate interests. This is just one example.
People do not like “permissive” licenses because they offer 5 freedoms instead of just the 4 that the GPL does.
The 5th freedom is to do whatever you want with code that you write. “Free as in Freedom” purists hate that freedom.
I tried PopOS finally after many glowing reviews… and it was beautiful, snappy and had lots of unique features. But while it was very friendly, I had trouble finding my way around. I think still aimed at linux users who are a little more knowledgable. (Not me.)
Ultimately I am too basic and went back to Mint.
Interesting. I haven’t used Pop, but I had always been under the impression that it was meant to be as easy as Mint.
Oh I think it is! You should definitely give it a try, I think it’s just me. I tend to do pretty poorly with OS that aren’t extremely windows-like.
That’s a very valid opinion. I started out with Kubuntu, and after a bit of distro hopping I’m on Pop!_OS now for my laptop and desktop. I love it, but I doubt I would’ve at the start of my journey
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Hmm, I was just about to nuke my danctnix install and try some of that latest ubuntu touch. It felt the most like a phone when i tried it a couple years ago, it just had a bare selection of apps and couldn’t run any x11 application to supplement the gap. I haven’t tried plasma mobile.
Have EndeavourOS installed on a secondary disk and loving it so far.
EndevourOS is for people that value Arch and the AUR but also have other uses for their time. It is my primary OS on multiple machines.
Been messing around with it for the past few days. Getting some of the software that I use on Windows, it replacements for it, has been the only trouble. The rest is just fun learning. It’s a bit nicer to learn with than trying to get everything it has base than normal Arch.
I played with plan 9. It was pretty neat, and was able to setup a remote drawterm session.
Fedora workstation. Had been on Silverblue for years, but got a machine with Nvidia and didn’t want the extra headaches of SB
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 flatpacksI 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.
Could I get some recommendations? I’m building a server with spare parts from an old gaming PC and I’m trying to decide the best OS for my use case.
Currently my gaming PC is Windows and it’s a bit ridiculous to have it be a VR PC and a Plex Server, but due to the WMR VR device it’ll be staying on Windows. However, the server I’m leaning towards Linux due to the sheer number of services I want the server to be running, I’ll be needing to set up docker and portainer to get it nicely organized. Plus it will just be easier to install each service.
Anyway, I’m asking for recs because I don’t want to learn windows server, I’m slightly familiar with DietPi OS (a very minimal GUI Raspbian-lite) and minimal other Linux distros like Mint and Ubuntu, but my server will be with an NVIDIA 1660 GPU which I know have some driver issues. Will that be the case for pretty much any non-Windows OS? If I want hardware transcoding with Plex will it be more difficult than it should be?
Tomahawk B450, GTX 1660, R5 3600 leaning towards Linux Mint for Plex, radicale, a lem/kbin/libre/piped server, and then of course just regular cloud backups for my phone.
Is there any OS that I’d be better off using that’s still mostly a simple regular experience?
Will that be the case for pretty much any non-Windows OS? If I want hardware transcoding with Plex will it be more difficult than it should be? Is there any OS that I’d be better off using that’s still mostly a simple regular experience?
Sounds like questions for threads of their own…
Quite positive you will find something non-Windows that works smoothly.
Oh most definitely, this is just the third time I came across this thread and the actual build of the server came closer than I thought and I was already here :%
I like Debian for a server OS and in fact use it for plex as well. The astute observer might go through my posts and notice I don’t use Debian as a daily driver because of it’s relatively slow release cycle, but that’s part of what makes it a great server. It’s stable and well vetted. As you may be aware it’s what Raspbian is based off of, so you’ll have some familiarity too.
I agree with the other poster that your Nvidia hardware transcoding question might be better as it’s own post. But I’ll say what little I know and gleaned from a low effort search just now.
If you use the proprietary drivers, you’ll probably be fine? Aforementioned search tells me you need nvenc for that, which seems to be a part of their proprietary stuff. Be sure to install from the Debian repo, not the Nvidia website. Their drivers are problematic as you pointed out. I’ve personally had issues with them and wayland, but ymmv for your purposes.
Appreciate the response! I’ll probably go with Debian then since I don’t want to have to make major adjustments to my limited linux memory :D And yeah regarding the NVIDIA drivers, I did do some searching before commenting but a lot of what I found was “oh yeah it works great” and no “here’s how I got it” lol. Mostly just needed the direction of use OS not manufacturer since I knew Linux had some issues with NVIDIA but there’s little differences.
Thank you again! Just waiting on the CPU to make the switch and we will be rolling :D
Oh that wasn’t meant as any kind of call out to you searching or not. Just indicating that I didn’t put much effort into mine, so don’t treat it as any kind of knowledgeable response.
Sounds good, hope it all works out well!
Haha no worries at all none taken :)
Tried Windows 11. Ran back to Win 10 a few days later.
I’m usually an Arch person (btw) but I’ve been playing around with NixOS in a VM and I’m tempted to try daily driving it…
I was tempted to give NixOS a try as well. It seems to be highly recommended on the fediverse.
Well, I’ll put it this way:
I’ve been away from Linux for a few years (several reasons), but this year I heard of NixOS and decided to give it a try, and I had a blast playing around with it. With how easy* and quick to configure it is, and how stable it also is, it encouraged to tinker with it more than I ever have with Linux, and I never had any really frustrating issues like I had with some other distros that I barely tinkered with.
At the very least, I think you should play around with it for a while just to see if it’s something you like.
*PS: For anyone who does not have experience with Linux, NixOS is probably not a good first distro. I meant easy more so for people already familiar with Linux.
I’ve been daily driving it on my personal projects computer. The biggest issue for me is the promise of the project shell stops just before the application config files, meaning that you still have a shared environment for projects using the same software.
The idea for me was to have all my projects create their development environment and associated tools so that moving to a different instance was easy. Unfortunately VSCode doesn’t install extensions in the project nor does it understand which to enable/disable based on inputs.
