Share your preferred bsd or linux distribution which is not FreeBSD.

Ubuntu is what i always install because it has the best hardware support for old macs

Im not a big fan of Gnome but its the best Wayland Desktop,
and Ubuntu has a minimal install option for Gnome

If you install Gnome on Debian it installs a bunch of crap,
dozen of games and every single Gnome app and even a Thai Terminal
 
rbranco said:
openSUSE Tumbleweed and Fedora. I only use Debian on the Raspberry Pi. I never use the same distro/OS on more than one computer.

I would use OpenBSD only for firewall but the one provided by my ISP is enough.
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Same here. I love Tumbleweed and for situations where it is not available I use Fedora instead.
 
taiwan740 said:
Yeah I also disagree with this. 20 years of Debian use and experience has told me the first thing you do after installing Debian is compile a vanilla kernel because the packaged ones are trash.
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I wouldn't say they're "trash", but they're usually always LTS, which are maintained for enterprise, and usually have unfixed bugs, may lack support for certain hardware, etc - even though they get security patches. I had quite a few experiences with these, especially with graphics hardware support where I was fighting with a problem long since fixed in the latest stable kernel, so I got used to just building a newer kernel. I quickly stopped using Debian's kernel packaging tools, as there's no point if you're not distributing, and just maintained the kernel independently.
taiwan740 said:
apt, as much as I appreciate it, has destroyed every installation I've ever had, but I consider this a feature/occupational hazard of package managers in general.

apt-get upgrade is a big no-no for me. That's new hard drive + installation time.
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I don't share your experiences there. It looks like you were doing something wrong. Debian flags certain packages as essential, so it's very difficult to break unless you're mixing and matching repositories or upgrading without reading the release notes.
 
NapoleonWils0n said:
Ubuntu is what i always install because it has the best hardware support for old macs
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The kernel is what supports the hardware. I assume you mean old Intel macs? I don't think Ubuntu support powepc.


NapoleonWils0n said:
Im not a big fan of Gnome but its the best Wayland Desktop,
and Ubuntu has a minimal install option for Gnome

If you install Gnome on Debian it installs a bunch of crap,
dozen of games and every single Gnome app and even a Thai Terminal
Click to expand...
What you're referring to is the gnome meta package - which installs a complete gnome desktop and associated applications. It's possible to install gnome minimally in Debian but you would have to run expert install, deselect the debian desktop environment and gnome, finish the install and then just install only the bits you want. To be honest, anyone who knows what they're doing installs Debian like that. Disabling reccomends, as already covered in this thread is also good practice to avoid installing all the extra stuff you'll never need. Ubuntu is actually based on Debian by the way.

(No idea why anyone would want gnome - worse than Windows UI)
 
I decided that my preferred Linux distribution is Debian. => no more switching to anything else.
I used to use Arch and even was a package maintainer there. But I don't like this any more.
On the servers I use FreeBSD.
On single board computers Debian and NetBSD.
For my own software projects I take care of systemd and rc-scripts. This is a little bit double work but I am not against systemd. But I also don't want for something like
systemd to show up on FreeBSD. I like FreeBSD conservative/reliable way of doing things.
 
Linux: I used to run slackware for many years, but in recent years it has just been updated too infrequently. I liked the slackware approach, it was the most unix-like out of the linux distros. And slackware was my first linux, back around 93-94. Rather sadly I believe Pat Volkerding has been suffering from some serious illness over the years, and hence understandably the frequency of new releases of slackware has slowed down.

Nowadays I just grab debian if I want linux. Perhaps/probably there are better things, but I can't be bothered to spend time looking, and debian isn't as crap as ubuntu or fedora. And they still support windowmaker which is my desktop of choice. Yeah, like someone else said, apt upgrade makes me nervous. Whereas pkg upgrade on freebsd works remarkably well; when I upgraded from 13.2 to 14.0 it was perhaps the smoothest OS upgrade I've ever seen, very impressive work.

Something I used to have a soft spot for years ago was frenzy https://frenzy.org.ua which was a live usb distro of freebsd, from ukraine. It could load itself entirely into RAM using squashfs, like knoppix and DSL. Sadly the developers stopped updating it many years ago. I keep meaning to find the time try out nanobsd or similar things to see if they can work the same way.

I use freebsd quite a lot. Occasionally I try out openbsd and/or netbsd, but so far I've found freebsd better overall.
 
blackhole said:
"Fastest" is also rather ambiguous. I always found Slackware to be much more responsive for example, but with no reliable measure of performance, it's all pure conjecture. It used to be with Debian that the kernel was configured for servers with a lower tick rate.
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sorry, something was cut off ... that should have been "Debian is the fastest to fix security vulnerabilities", at least with the software I regularly use ("classic" web/mail/db stack, java)
 
I have one slackware box here that I boot into for one or two applications that I can't run under FreeBSD.

I started with Slackware 3 running the 1.2.13 kernel around '96, mostly because I didn't know any better. It was on a set of CDROMs I bought from infoworld. There were multiple distributions on the 6 CD set. I think I tried one other distribution but couldn't get it to work, so I tried copying the Slackware disk images to 3.5" floppies and managed to get that working. This was on an Am5x86 running at 133 MHz. I was pleasantly surprised when I got X running, too. Manually tweaking video settings in XFree86 was... interesting.

When it came time to upgrade over the years I just stuck with Slackware. It was my daily driver until about 2020-21 when I made the switch to FreeBSD.
 
Daily Driver: OpenSuse tumbleweed and dual boot windows :-/
I need stuff to work, any webcam, cheap usb devices, docker stuff, visual studio code, codecs, all messenger/video conferencing tools, office documents! ... no room for evangelism and dreams!

Servers and infrastruture: Open-, FreeBSD !

Personal stuff :
PineTab2 [1]: Arch linux. I would love to put FreeBSD on that, but the strange WiFi+BT-LE Chip (BES2600) and the touch screen, the cameras, the custom keyboard. I didn't get the wifi+camera to work :-/
So .... if someone has some extra energy left, and has the technical expertise to work on that level. Let's head over to the pinetab forum and make it work :)
Currentliy it runs Arch linux + KDE plasma. Thats a BIG&SLOW setup for a smalish CPU and Hardware. But ... it works.
I is a very cool device, espacially for this price range!

Old Mac book Pro (2012): FresBSD, works somewhat, not using it a lot.


[1]: https://pine64.com/product/pinetab2-10-1-8gb-128gb-linux-tablet-with-detached-backlit-keyboard/
 
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