Having a "reflective" afternoon.

On the topic of free operating systems, I have been playing with these lately, and recommend if it suits usage (alpha order).

- Alpine Linux (my daily driver)
- Chimera Linux
- Elementary Linux
- FreeBSD
- OpenBSD
- Solus Linux

Not "mainstream" suggestions per se, and that's kinda the point. Caveats re: glibc/musl, nvidia support, etc. apply.

If I had to have nvidia support for my primary workstation I'd probably go with Solus (KDE), or at least try it, in spite of systemd.

I'm starting to scratch the surface on

- CachyOS

for my son's gaming rig. Pretty much what it says on the tin. I like it. Arch could use a bit of polish. We'll see how it goes on real hardware.

Others that I haven't run much beyond playing with the iso, but am intrigued by, mostly by intended use case tbh:

- Mint
- Zorin

I used to run these for years and years and years but don't nowadays:

- Arch
- Gentoo

Excellent, but the time intensity ...

~20 years ago I used to run Gentoo in a government research agency data centre. Even came up with an "ansible-like" set of deployment scripts/framework and whatnot in /bin/bash+openssh to manage them (pre-dates Ansible).

Fun times... the time... the time.

Gentoo was bracketed by RHEL in the past and CentOS as the successor. CentOS was fine but gave up a lot of performance way back then. Shifting priorities, server hardware was still following Moore's, and all that.

I flirted with Ubuntu a bit over the years. Could never really get into it back when it was decent. I won't touch it now.

Today, I think I'm done with Debian. Too static for my tastes - stuff gets too stale. Sure, there's Testing/Sid but there's also other options at that point.

Now that I'm a sysadmin just for myself I can embrace using whatever I want. Ha.

I'm all about community projects nowadays.

Corporate software will eventually disappoint you so it pays to just not go there in the first place.

Deep thoughts.

#Linux #RunBSD #HomeLab #SelfHosted #SelfHosting #AlpineLinux #ChimeraLinux #Elementary #ElementaryOS #FreeBSD
#OpenBSD #SolusLinux #Solus #LinuxMint #ZorinLinux #Gentoo #ArchLinux #CachyOS

I "installed" a second copy of #ChimeraLinux into a folder on my main install so I can chroot into it for compiling source code and stuff. But we don't have QT5, so I guess I'll have to wait for the official release of #KeePassChi
Just Enough Chimera Linux ☯ Daniel Wayne Armstrong

Libre all the things

Just Enough Chimera Linux ☯ Daniel Wayne Armstrong

Libre all the things

Fresh #ChimeraLinux install with #niri. I like it.

@ptribble thank you for the reply.

My error re nfs... probably getting Tribblix confused with Open/NetBSD.

The emcryption would be interesting. Perhaps even if it was only data partitions encrypted for now and auto unlockable then root/FDE later. Not sure if #alpinelinux or #ChimeraLinux would be a useful starting point as both do native encrypted zfs.

Updated post!

Chimera Linux is a delightful community-driven distribution built from scratch that does things differently: `musl` instead of the typical `glibc` for C library, `dinit` over `systemd` for system init, and a userland derived from FreeBSD core tools.

I show the choices I make to create an encrypted, minimal system with "just enough" to provide a solid foundation to build upon further:

https://www.dwarmstrong.org/chimera-install-zfs/

#ChimeraLinux #ZFS #ZFSBootMenu

Just Enough Chimera Linux ☯ Daniel Wayne Armstrong

Libre all the things

After the story with #systemd, I decided to ditch #Arch. Very liked #chimeralinux, but was scared of finding software outside package manager.
So I ended up with #Alpinelinux. Had a few struggles at first(couldn't configure WIFI and #Wayland compositor), but with second install I started to getting used to it.
Still couldn't launch #riverwm window managers, but found #mango! Hosted on GitHub, unlike river, but looks pretty and has many layouts, including scrolling.
Had to use Flatpak for Steam and #Heroic, but everything else I need is in repos.
I can now finally continue to learn gamedev in peace(until my damned dictatorship eventually block all internet...)

Chimera Linux does things differently: the distro is built from scratch, musl instead of glibc, init is dinit, FreeBSD userland, ...

Fresh install on my Thinkpad using OpenZFS and ZFSBootMenu. Curious to explore further. I'm thinking of a setup where Chimera is my desktop and FreeBSD on a home server.

#ChimeraLinux #musl #dinit #FreeBSD #ZFS #ZFSBootMenu

Chimera Linux ( @chimera ) running KDE ( @kde ) Plasma 6.6.1 on an Asus V1Jp Notebook from 2006
CPU: Intel Core 2 T5600
GPU: AMD Mobility Radeon X1700
RAM: 3 GB DDR2 667 MHz / PC2-5300
HDD: Western Digital WD5000BEVT Scorpio Blue 500GB 5400 RPM*

*Note: Can't justify to waste a SSD on this old machine with the current market pricing

#screenshot #chimeraLinux #kde #kdeplasma #linux #asus #notebook