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Comment by qwerty456127 | Hacker News Reader

I wish there were a Linux with GNU userland but structured and configured like FreeBSD and it wasn't a marginal retrograde sandbox with weak community and no support from app authors. Essentially I want a Manjaro or an Ubuntu but with BSD init and config. Because in FreeBSD (as I remember it, it has been a while) you just have some plain-text configs in well-established places and can easily understand when and what does run and it's more classic unixway. SysVinit was not bad but everything depends on systemd nowadays which I find a sacrifice fast booting isn't worth.

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I'm getting a lot of mileage out of Void Linux. It's more like Arch than Ubuntu, but otherwise it fits your description. It's very easy to configure and administrate, mostly by virtue of doing nothing "weird" - just a simple init system, a powerful package manager, and utterly standard everything else (the Arch wiki works well for it).

Sounds like arch with extra steps. Why use it and not arch?

What extra steps? Arch is missing debug packages, a package manager that can detect bad partial updates, different architectures etc.

void pkg manager is also way way faster than pacman, lack of systemd is nice a feature too (personally)

Why use Arch and not Void? I am aware of several points of superiority - a better package manager, larger repos, wider architecture support and multiple libcs - and no points of inferiority. Well okay, one - Void's commitment to supporting musl occasionally leads to feature lags, since they won't push updates that break musl. The general feel of the system is more stable than Arch.

I wonder if you’ve run across the Slackware distro? It was my distro of choice in the late 90s / early 00’s but it’s still around.

It’s basically a linux kernel but a bsd userland & filesystem layout. That’s not strictly true in practice but close enough. Their other guiding ethos was to minimise package maintainer patches so you’d get more vanilla software than in other distros.

Having said that, i run FreeBSD 13 for a nas / firewall at home (only really so i don’t lose the muscle memory) but the bsd init system feels distinctly utilitarian to me in comparison to systemd / launchd (macos) or even smf (solaris - RIP).

As a developer systemd is very attractive, you get so much useful functionality for free, socket management, privs, capability management - stuff that you usually want to use but would rather outsource than write yourself.

Slackware was my first distro (and The first distro AFAIK) but it always felt rather exotic and unpolished. I use Manjaro now - it feels very compatible with everything out of the box, very polished and reasonably fresh, kind of a luxury var that has everything you would imagine and everything works almost flawlessly. Yet it doesn't give the satisfactory feeling of actually groking your system and having it under almost full control which I had with DOS while FreeBSD was very close to that.

It's been a very, very long time (~17-18 years) since I last touched it, but as I recall, Slackware had an init system back then that was similar to FreeBSD's.

Arch Linux circa 2011 had the text-based configuration aspect with an rc.conf file similar to the BSDs[1] but the folder structure was still very Linux.

[1] https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php?title=Initscripts/rc.co...

https://artixlinux.org ?

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