Our Journey Through Linux/Unix Landscapes | Hacker News Reader

Our Journey Through Linux/Unix Landscapes

blog.kalvad.com

20 pointsalekq17 comments

If I were asked this question, except as a piece of trivia exchange, I wouldn't want to work for them. There are arguments in favour of many OSes (including those that I used in the long-ago past on long-forgotten iron), and many against those same systems. Using any OS is generally a trade-off; so if asked `what OS do you use?', I would answer `whatever is suitable for the problem and equipment at hand'. If asked `what is the best-designed OS you have ever seen', I'd instantly respond `Plan 9', which I have never actually used.

As it so happens, I recently transitioned my daily driver laptop from Debian to Debian running under WSL2 on Windows. I had good reason for doing it. But I guess running that makes me a double loser.

Enjoying both worlds without having a tribal mindset... That's more like a triple win to me!

…said some Trojans when accepted the Greek's gift horse

I thought it was funny they spent so much time bashing choice of distro and highlighting various performance considerations only to pick Alpine?

Alpine linux uses musl as its libc, which contrary to the articles' claims (unless I'm missing new information?) can have severe performance implications in many production settings.

update: I found this April 2025 blog post where someone performed some benchmarks and found that musl runtime performance is still pretty far behind glibc: https://edu.chainguard.dev/chainguard/chainguard-images/abou...

That link may show the current state of Musl on Alpine, but Musl can be built with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mimalloc

https://github.com/microsoft/mimalloc

as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chimera_Linux / https://chimera-linux.org/ does.

Which btw. can be done in Alpine, too:

https://wiki.alpinelinux.org/wiki/Mimalloc

Bashing Linux distros gets old very quickly.

I believe the humor in the article's introduction lies in its playful critique of every Linux distribution.

Except that they continue bashing as the article continues, using facile "patches bad!" mantras. It comes across very poorly, especially since so many of these patches are advance fixes of issues upstream.

These jokes didn’t age well

Lamers.

https://cachyos.org is Arch without the masochism, and 'riced' to the max, without being fragile.

But yeah, depending on the task Alpine, or some BSD is ok, too.

Regarding ZFS, I couldn't care less. BTFRS has caused me no stress, doesn't need Solaris Portability Layers, and doesn't work against otherwise established memory systems. Feels much smoother and less wasteful for me.

Funny, but no Slackware :)

But FreeBSD is a good choice, but its pf seems a bit outdated. Or should we consider FreeBSD's pf a fork of OpenBSD's and a different product ?

The latter.

Alpine has been my daily driver on all my desktops for a few years now. So happy with it.

Try making a package - it's one big repo and really easy to use another package as a starting point. I built a package for KiCad in a trivial amount of time.

No mention of NixOS, which is miles ahead of every other operating system in terms of developer time spent tweaking endless configuration...

Pretty sure they mentioned it:

> NixOS is the only one that we didn't hate. Technically, it's a marvel, but the learning curve is too high. Because who has time to learn a new system when you can just stick with what you know and complain about it?

Oh my bad, I missed that! That's well said. NixOS really does solve a lot of this but with the steepest learning curve I've ever seen.

With 50% fewer operations and 25% less storage, it appears they made the right choice to address their issues.

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