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0 pointsbinaryturtle1mo ago0 comments

I have no idea which distro to choose actually. Too much choices and it's not clear why one should be better than the other. For some distros it feels more like it's one-man projects for bragging rights. It's also a bit hard to put trust in that.

I want to resurrect an older Mac mini with an installation of a Linux distribution, but choosing a suitable distro is the first step I struggle with. Only thing I know is that it won't be an Ubuntu setup. :-)

I do run Linux-based systems in various forms already: OpenWRT on the router, an older Debian VM —which I just messed up a few days ago by trying to uninstall a wallpaper package which took down the whole desktop environment for some reason— and Raspbian on the PI.

But on some days I feel maybe I just should go for FreeBSD. But it may have similar (to a lesser extend) issues like Haiku with proper up-to-date software, especially in the web browser department? I previously dabbled with Haiku and this was its main issue. The OS itself is pretty nice though.

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5 comments · 3 top-level

aniviacat1mo ago· 2 in thread

I've tried a few distros in the past and have now settled (on NixOS for servers and tinkering, and Fedora for just-working). But I've never tried a BSD and would also be curious how using one would turn out.

Maybe getting into FreeBSD for a bit would be a fun little project.

mghackerlady1mo ago

FreeBSD is infinitely better than any flavour of Linux if you can do what you need to on it. Great performance, superb documentation, the software just works for the most part (an update in the libc isn't going to break any of the base packages, for example). It takes a while to get it set up, and it can be picky about hardware, but I totally recommend

gatane1mo ago

The BSDs still cannot run docker

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jonhohle1mo ago

You should just go FreeBSD, but expect to have to learn along the way. My FreeBSD install is about 20 years old and still going well. It started as an Athlon 80GB NAS and has grown into 16-core and 12TB with Linux VMs for LLMs on a dedicated NVME. It would be nice if more worked natively on FreeBSD, but the things that work work great.

unethical_ban1mo ago

One of the good uses of AI is having a reasonable tutor if you know how to ask the right questions. Surely you can name 2-3 major distros with large user bases. Debian, Fedora, Opensuse.

Fedora KDE is a great distro. Then lookup its network configuration backend, systemd basics, package manager basic commands and you're off to the races.

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