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

Kinda related to https://social.treehouse.systems/@ariadne/116418712432034431

People are sometimes like "${BigCompany} uses #Gentoo, so cool" or "they stopped using it, so sad". And I'm like, "why should we care?"

Do they donate money to Gentoo? They don't. And if they did, it would probably come with obligations making this not worth it.

Do they contribute back? Rarely, and if they do, they are unreliable. They benefit more than we do. They just want to dump the packages they need, quickly duct taped together, so that we would maintain them going forward. Their employees rarely reveal that they're paid to do this, and if they do, it's not so they'd be held to higher standards, but to emphasize their importance: "you must placate us."

Well, sometimes they hire Gentoo developers. It's nice that these developers get some gratification for their work, especially if they're able to continue contributing on work time. But in the end, company priorities win. We are either left with loads of new packages with no maintainer and unclear significance, or a Google employee who appeared every once in a while to dump a bunch of ChromeOS patches and never bothered handling the fallout.

So, sorry, but I'd rather care for volunteers who want to make Gentoo better, than companies who see some profit incentive in it.

PS. I'm probably focusing too much on the negative aspects, and we likely had some positive interactions that are far less known and usually don't meet with such fanfare.

#FreeSoftware

If your `emerge --pretend --depclean` lists more than a handful of packages, it's time for a manual #timeshift...

(In other news, I just devised a patch to get #obs-studio 32.1.0 compile with #vlc 4.x again... damn running ~arch 😂 )

#gentoo #linux

So it seems that I'm going to become a #Gentoo user. I didn't mean to, but I just designed the most airtight, silent, AMD ITX PC ever and am ordering the parts over the next few weeks.

I have used Gentoo once and decided to slack off and use #slackware instead. But, after running everything past an AI [yes, I know... insane of me], I realized that I need to build a custom kernel and integrate the ability to monitor and manage my solar array and battery bank into the computer as a core function.

The corporate hijacking of open source is complete. We’ve watched a masterclass in parasitism: companies build an ecosystem on a decade of free community labor, and once it's standard... they pull the rug.

From the IBM/Red Hat betrayal and the Redis "Source-Available" disaster, to Canonical turning Ubuntu into a walled garden.

I just published my full analysis on the corporate bait-and-switch playbook, and why moving to source-based distros like Gentoo is our last defense. It's time to take back our silicon. 👇

🔗 https://youtu.be/m6QDgFrgLUA

#Linux #OpenSource #Sysadmin #Gentoo #Ubuntu #RedHat #TechNews #RationalTech #SelfHosted