The lament of an OS nomad
I switched to Ubuntu around about April last year, migrating from Debian (and a little bit of Windows). Too many brain-dead decisions* by Canonical since then mean I am looking for a new OS.
I’ve used a number of different systems while testing Rakudo and while choice is a Good ThingTM it is also making this decision a bit difficult.
The first thing to decide is if I will stick with Linux (change distros) or move to a completely different operating system. The Linux field looks like this:
Debian: Easy to use and is stable. I used to think apt was the one-true package management system but after having Ubuntu demonstrate how terrible it is as if you want a package update you have to rely on a third-party for it (just one example: not upgrading Firefox-3.0 to Firefox-3.5 — instead they had to be installed parallel, 3.5 having no branding and a modified user-agent) I am not going to an apt-based system. And there is still the reasons I left Debian for Ubuntu to begin with (long release cycle, software re-branding, SSH-key vulnerability fail, etcetera, etcetera).
Fedora: Never used it, not sure what to expect other than it uses yum instead of APT.
Gentoo: I think if I stick with Linux I will be going to a distribution that is vastly different from Debian/Ubuntu and Gentoo fits the bill quite nicely; everything is compiled. That said, I’ve done a Gentoo installation three times now; once on VirtualBox, once in a chroot to an external harddrive from Ubuntu and once on a spare machine. The problem is it takes too long; getting all my machines using it will be a chore and when it eventually breaks reinstalling will be another chore. Each time I’ve given up trawling through kernel config menus and used genkernel but that defeats the purpose but I am sure that if I used the config menu I will miss options that I need.
GoboLinux: Gobo is an interesting distro; it doesn’t use the normal directory structure but rather turns it on its head and uses paths like /Users/Username, /Applications/Firefox/3.5/ etc. Their package management philosophy is that the filesystem is the package manger; you install from source using a portage-like program called ‘Compile’ (they really should have given it a different name) and to uninstall you do rm -r /Applications/Foo/. In among their good idea are some bad ideas, one that really stands out is that the root user (which is called ‘gobo’) has their home directory on /Users/Gobo (rather than /root) :-/ And as interesting as it sounds I can’t help but think of Henry Spencer: “Those who don’t understand UNIX are condemned to reinvent it, poorly.”
Arch: Arch is a fun distro. It’s minimalist, pacman is nice, has a ports-like system (abs) which makes it like Gentoo without the painful installation procedure, and a rolling-release system (like Gentoo) which eliminates the apt-problem of being tied to third-party for updates. If I stick with Linux Arch will the be distro I use.
Outside of Linux, there is:
OpenSolaris: OpenSolaris has had a place on my harddrive for a while now. ZFS, TimeSlider, DTrace … it even looks amazing thanks to the Nimbus theme. However, it has its problems. The command differences are a bit of a barrier; pfexec (sudo), prstat (top), vmstat (free) but learning them won’t be too difficult and most of the tools are available with their original commands anyway (to increase/make adoption easier the GNU tools are shipped along with the Sun tools). It’s also slow, not detrimentally slower but still slower than Ubuntu. One of the major barriers is the driver support; neither sound or wireless work for me (although that isn’t a surprise). Wireless is a huge pain with alternative operating systems so I hope to get some rewiring done so I don’t have to use wireless but for now it makes OSOL unusable as a main operating system. That said, the truly great thing about OpenSolaris is Sun Studio. On OSOL, SS becomes a viable compiler set; on a platform where GCC has left its grubby marks, ie. Linux, SS binaries are slower. On an SS-compiled platform, GCC binaries are slower but SS binaries on an SS platform are faster than GCC binaries on a GCC platform. Which is a major win for OSOL to me. Definitely a contender of my new OS. (And no, Oracle are not going to kill it).
Haiku: Haiku is a fantastic BeOS clone. It’s a nice OS but I don’t think its for me full-time.
FreeBSD: The competition is between OpenSolaris and FreeBSD. Thanks to its licensing, FBSD is able to offer ZFS and DTrace (but still needs GCC). A major attraction is the Ports collection which is Gentoo’s system done right in my opinion (well, it was done right and then Gentoo copied it and got it wrong). Want a package fast? pkg_add -vr foobar. Want that package but compiled from source? cd /usr/ports/something/foobar && make. Great system.
So it’s between Arch Linux, OpenSolaris and FreeBSD.
Decisions, decisions.
June 29th, 2010 at 8:11 am -
From one OS nomad to another, may I ask where you ended up?
I’m traditionally a Mac user with UNIX programming background, so I’ve used OS X as my primary for some time. I’m gradually shifting away from it, as I use FreeBSD, Linux, and OpenSolaris on servers and dev stations, and Apple has been ticking me off. I’m using Ubuntu 10.04 right now, and I desperately would like to use FreeBSD — except for the atrocious power management.
Where are you at now?
June 29th, 2010 at 3:32 pm -
I stuck with Ubuntu for a few months before I built a new box. Put Windows 7 on it and took a break from development for a while. Recently I tried OpenSolaris on it and remarkably it runs flawlessly (OSOL doesn’t have the best hardware support). So I’m now primarily using OpenSolaris. FreeBSD has been on my radar for a while though, by all accounts it’s a very nice OS but the horror stories regarding its ZFS support have put me off.