Hey guys, I've been thinking of installing a Linux distribution on my laptop, mostly for gaming and Steam support, plus some writing. I'm trying to find a distro that would be a good fit, taking into account that I've been running exclusively FreeBSD for over 5 years now, coming straight from Windows with zero experience on Linux. I've noticed at least a few users here run Linux on a laptop/workstation and FreeBSD on servers and would like some input on the general experience of running a Linux distro and having it play nice with a FreeBSD server.
I understand a few peculiarities of GNU/Linux systems and different design philosophies of some distros and am in the process of installing Debian Jessie and taking it for a test run, since it seems to be very stable and most likely to play nice with Steam, without some of the caveats of SteamOS.
What I would most likely miss from FreeBSD is the ease of installing and updating. Right now, I just have my home server compile everything I use: ports via poudriere, base and kernel from /usr/src updated via subversion. This is extremely flexible and easy, keeping track of configuration options, dependencies and everything really well, also being able to deploy a running system extremely fast, as you all know. Linux package mangers seem to be a little weird about this, varying wildly between distros, and the threat of dependency hell makes me unsure of those lacking dependency resolution, like Slackware, for long term usability, at least at first. Maybe it's just a matter of getting used to a different way of doing things? Any opinion on the differences and use cases would be great.
Another important feature is ZFS, but that seems to be easy enough to setup and keep being able to send/receive snapshots to the FreeBSD home server, specially since OpenZFS unifying development. There are also other good filesystems, like XFS, maybe. Again, this is just from reading a few articles; actual experience is greatly appreciated.
Lastly, a nice compartmentalization via some jail-like system, to prevent some catastrophic data loss like https://github.com/ValveSoftware/steam-for-linux/issues/3671 from happening is a must. I've looked into AppArmor, SE Linux, Docker and LXC. This seems to be the most controversial issue, but since this particular use case doesn't have the same demand as a server running many internet facing services, maybe the differences won't be so great. I can't even make a good guess on this one, though. The threat model includes programs leaking information, containing adware, messing with system settings and files, installing files in weird places etc., Typical game stuff; it won't be running suspicious untrusted software or anything too complex.
In the end I looked mostly at Debian, Slackware, Arch Linux, Gentoo and Linux From Scratch. I may try them in that order, until I have more information. LFS seems a bit too demanding, though, specially for a non-coder.
Thanks in advance for your opinions on the matter, even slight impressions help.
PS: Virtualization is not really an option because this is an ancient laptop that simply can't take the overhead with most games, or do PCI passthrough.
I understand a few peculiarities of GNU/Linux systems and different design philosophies of some distros and am in the process of installing Debian Jessie and taking it for a test run, since it seems to be very stable and most likely to play nice with Steam, without some of the caveats of SteamOS.
What I would most likely miss from FreeBSD is the ease of installing and updating. Right now, I just have my home server compile everything I use: ports via poudriere, base and kernel from /usr/src updated via subversion. This is extremely flexible and easy, keeping track of configuration options, dependencies and everything really well, also being able to deploy a running system extremely fast, as you all know. Linux package mangers seem to be a little weird about this, varying wildly between distros, and the threat of dependency hell makes me unsure of those lacking dependency resolution, like Slackware, for long term usability, at least at first. Maybe it's just a matter of getting used to a different way of doing things? Any opinion on the differences and use cases would be great.
Another important feature is ZFS, but that seems to be easy enough to setup and keep being able to send/receive snapshots to the FreeBSD home server, specially since OpenZFS unifying development. There are also other good filesystems, like XFS, maybe. Again, this is just from reading a few articles; actual experience is greatly appreciated.
Lastly, a nice compartmentalization via some jail-like system, to prevent some catastrophic data loss like https://github.com/ValveSoftware/steam-for-linux/issues/3671 from happening is a must. I've looked into AppArmor, SE Linux, Docker and LXC. This seems to be the most controversial issue, but since this particular use case doesn't have the same demand as a server running many internet facing services, maybe the differences won't be so great. I can't even make a good guess on this one, though. The threat model includes programs leaking information, containing adware, messing with system settings and files, installing files in weird places etc., Typical game stuff; it won't be running suspicious untrusted software or anything too complex.
In the end I looked mostly at Debian, Slackware, Arch Linux, Gentoo and Linux From Scratch. I may try them in that order, until I have more information. LFS seems a bit too demanding, though, specially for a non-coder.
Thanks in advance for your opinions on the matter, even slight impressions help.
PS: Virtualization is not really an option because this is an ancient laptop that simply can't take the overhead with most games, or do PCI passthrough.
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