Alpine Linux

Void Linux (+ Nix package manager)

9front (militant esoterica)

I use OpenBSD on my Thinkpad T410i and Void on an older AMD box. You can use vmm to run alpine images to run docker apps or Linux stuff. My only gripe is firefox runs slowish on OpenBSD though chrome doesn't suffer as such. I use both and only chrome if FF cant handle the site im on.

9front's vmx is mature enough to run an alpine VM and then native x client so the vm runs without an x server and the linux applications run in individual windows giving you a seamless 9front/linux desktop that can run a full browser. This route is only for the truly enlightened ones.

Unix philosophy isn't about keeping the cruft around but building useful systems using simple tools. The idea is do not duplicate functionality if it already exists. I see so many programs attempt to sidestep dependency hell by baking in functionality. This is the overall communities fault and the fault of modern software development which somehow lost the art of pragmatism. The simple part has been long lost in a sea of complexity driven by ignorance and fueled by greed.

The simplicity of OpenBSD makes it much easier to learn deeply than Linux. Where Linux has tended to create magical veneers over complexity, OpenBSD has tended to simplify the underlying systems.

Also, the OpenBSD project is shouldering the weight of the world and deserves more credit for this. So much of OpenBSD has made it into other parts of the Internet ecosystem.

Like being quite bad for graphics programming and game development.

I think some of us feel that portions of the Linux world have made some wrong or at least undesirable turns for some things. It seems the choice is to either go along with those choices or improve other paths.

Also, not sure what issues you see, but there appear to be a bunch of the standard open source games in OpenBSD as you’d see in Linux. Obviously not the commercial games that have Linux ports, but that strikes me more as an issue of popularity than technical limitations.

Design and implementation are two different things. I can imagine an OS perfect for game programming, but I can't use it, because it's not implemented.

I tried OpenBSD for 2 months, and went back to MacOSX. First, package repositories were meh (either pay, or recompile from source, or never update).

Second, OpenBSD graphic driver support was just very bad - no drivers for GPGPUs.

Third, lack of drivers, applications / services for interfacing with the real world and external devices.

I come home, open my laptop, click on select monitor, and I see 3 monitors available in the WiFi network (two TVs, and a desktop monitor). I can just click one, and my display is mirrored in real time to them - I can play a video, and it is mirrored perfectly, and with audio. Same at work, want to show a video in the presentation room? Connect to the beamer per wifi with a single click, display mirrored, great. Phone detects wifi, laptop backs it up to network storage, synchronizes media, updates software, Smart watch synchronized, etc.

None of that worked with OpenBSD. I had to find a HDMI cable in the basement to connect the laptop to the TV, monitor, beamer,... I had to use a USB cable to connect the phone to the laptop, which I then couldn't back up or synchronize without a gazillion brittle workarounds, etc.

Losing support for all modern devices felt like going back to the stone age. Linux isn't really much better, but while I like OpenBSD design, philosophy, and parts of the implementation. The current implementation doesn't work for me.

Why would OpenBSD be worthy of that expenditure of effort? Because it does some other things very well—perhaps better than Linux (Unix simplicity) and macOS (fully open). Not to mention security.

It sounds like you want a feature set that isn’t in OpenBSD. Fine, use macOS if those features are must-haves for you. Or, if OpenBSD’s feature set is compelling to you, start hacking! As I said elsewhere, I think it’s an easier path to make OpenBSD into what I want than it is to make macOS / Windows into what I want.

As for hardware support, I selected hardware that is well supported by OpenBSD, and it works great. Is there hardware I wish was better supported? You bet. But I’ve felt that way since I started using Linux and BSDs (and OS/2 and BeOS) in the 90s.

In todays world of "throw-away" electronics, there are a lot of devices that I just want to "just work". By the time these are supported on OpenBSD (if I were to implement it), I'll probably be owning a different device.

This is sad, because while I can select the hardware for my laptop, I can't really select the hardware and devices I need to interface with.

Mac, on the other hand... oh boy. It's pretty much a disaster. There is no end of bugs in Apple's graphics stack, and no, Metal doesn't solve them all. The first time I ran the Metal port of my library, my MacBook Pro instantly kernel panicked. I have never had that happen on Linux.

I'm a professional graphics developer and I prefer the tooling on Linux to that of macOS.

Most professional graphics developer I know rather user better tooling than only bare bones graphics drivers and RenderDoc.

I guess that is the same point of view that gave us OpenGL and Vulkan without any kind of tooling beyond drawing framebuffers with hardware support.

I does appeal to some, but not the majority, otherwise Linux adoption would have moved beyond 1% by now.

Linux desktop market share, or lack thereof, has nothing to do with graphics tooling.

While anyone on Apple and Windows platforms can enjoy Metal Frameworks, DirectTK, Unreal, Unity, CryEngine, PIX, Poser3D, Photoshop, Houdini, Cinema 4D, AfterEffects,...

On Linux, I guess having the freedom to use half baked copies of them, or hunting for libraries that should come out of the box with any graphics stack like 3D math, mesh handling and loading materials, is more important.

I don't know them all, but FYI Unreal, Unity, CryEngine, PIX,Houdini, and Cinema 4D have native Linux versions.

I don't know about Metal Frameworks, DirectTK, Photoshop, and AfterEffects though, you might want to look into that.

In your first comment, when you said "Like being quite bad for graphics programming and game development", you were implicitly forming the larger sentence: "[Retaining] classic Unix sensibilities ... like being quite bad for graphics programming and game development."

And—since the topic of the thread was "OSes that are better because they avoid going down the road of RedHat-like 'modern' Unix sensibilities"—you were implicitly forming a larger assertion: "[OpenBSD, because it retains] classic Unix sensibilities [unlike RedHat] ... [is] quite bad for graphics programming and game development[, unlike RedHat, which is okay at those.]"

And so that's what people tried to argue with you about, which I hope makes people's rebuttals to your first comment make more sense to you.

But then, in your second comment, you went ahead and said that modern Linux is equally bad at doing these things. So clearly the expanded form of your assertion isn't what you meant.

So... what were you actually trying to argue?

I was arguing that only NeXT and SGI had a graphics workstation culture, where having UNIX underneath was more of a detail than anything else.

No one cared that much of writing POSIX daemon and CLI tooling, the whole point was making the best use of the GUI frameworks, IDEs and their GPUs.

Even when SGI offered IrisGL as the basis for OpenGL, they kept the best parts for them.

Either you're talking about high-end gaming, in which case Apple isn't in the game at all - the only players are Microsoft and Sony, though Google is making a bid now as well with Stadia.

Or you're talking about low-end gaming, in which case Google probably matters most because of Android.

The battery life on my X220 was a solid hour less under OpenBSD than under Debian, and it ran some 10 degrees hotter. Yes, this is post-apmd improvements.

I want to like OpenBSD but code correctness just isn't enough for me.

If there was a current port of Docker for FreeBSD and Wi-Fi ac support, it would totally be my daily driver right now. Currently I still use Gentoo on my laptops.

Not saying you'd want to do that, but my understanding is that this is part of a lot of the clever networking you see in orchestration systems.

I haven't had a need to have a jail inspect traffic of another, I suspect that might be tricky. However I've used them successfully as a lightweight alternative to a vm for QA/dev environments -- use hard links for the base OS to save space, and give each jail its own ip and you get fairly cheap multiple boxes. I've also used it them to contain statically compiled binaries -- TLS terminator runs without access to much of anything, if the next vulnerability after Heartbleed was worse, it would be a lot harder to escalate vs common deployment with OpenSSL linked into a webserver; similar with an environment running ffmpeg.

Gentoo maintains forks of udev and logind, imaginatively named eudev and elogind. I use eudev, but elogind is unnecessary for me because I don't use Gnome3. But if that's your thing I'm not stopping you.

Pulseaudio is easy to remove by virtue of Gentoo's source based package model. Dbus less so; many applications have a hard dependency on it.

I think it's possible to use a BSD kernel, but you will very likely deal with a lot of breakage.

Gentoo is just so much easier to administrate that other distros it's unreal.

This is probably controversial but my guess here is this; The bulk of the developer cohort doing most of the work in Linux userland these days cut their teeth on Windows, it is their internal standard of a "good developer OS experience" so when they build new things, they have that model as "good" in their mind.

The challenge continues to be software. If you are using the packages in FreeBSD (or other xBSD derivatives) it is not uncommon to see "package xyz does not have an active maintainer so it may break, if you're interested in becoming the maintainer go here ..." Not enough people to cover all the things that are pumped into the Linux ecosystem everyday.

And it is a bit too much work to re-create the old Sun Microsystems of old where the kernel and the core UNIX user land tools from BSD were combined with a bespoke window system, compiler suite, and hardware specific system libraries to make a product. Granted it was fewer than 1200 software people all told, when SunOS 4.x came out but they were all working for market salaries on the project full time. That's like 10 - 20 million dollars a year, not something you're going to do "for free in your spare time."

I'm not really sure how it resolves over time.

Not so much controversial as I don't understand what it means. Maybe you could give an example of what that would be?

I've found the recent P and X models underwhelming as far as hardware goes, and support in Linux hasn't been great in my experience. While I'd like to give BSD a try, I fear I'll have to deal with even more driver issues.

For example, all video out ports on my X1 Extreme are wired to the dedicated NVIDIA card, which forces me to either use Nouveau which causes kernel panics, or use huge binary blobs from NVIDIA, which I'm reluctant to do for several reasons, one of which is breaking my initramfs image and making the system unbootable.

I'm quite tired of the amount of these types of issues in the Linux ecosystem, so I'm very interested in trying something simpler and better thought out, as long as the hardware support is decent.

OpenBSD is suited for simple workstations or as a tablet substitute, but I don't think the OpenBSD desktop will quite take off, unless driver developers will return to releasing obfuscated code.

Not an expert though, might be wrong but the text makes it pretty clear

It wouldn’t fly at work for me at the moment, and I don’t do much computing at home, so I played around with it a bit on a laptop, but didn’t switch. The results were encouraging, though.

My biggest beef with it right now is the upgrade story, but that’s because I need to update my router (through a serial console!) and am afraid of what happens if I brick it.

OBSD works fine on a laptop

I enjoy using arch linux.

But looking at it in relation to init systems it clearly says systemd was chosen.

That said, arch still lets you make decisions, unlike most distributions, where you become a consumer of other people's decisions.

I get that it doesn’t make business sense for RedHat to maintain parts of the open source ecosystem that will never drive consulting or support revenue, but that doesn’t change the fact that I want a computing environment that just works (including software that’s been stable for a decade, and isn’t constantly ported to the new shiny).

For example: we have 4K monitors now, and 8K monitors soon. OSes before ~2010 didn't really support DPI scaling (with mixed-DPI display layouts, etc.), because we didn't have those monitors; but now we do. OSes had to add DPI scaling support throughout the whole stack to support these monitors in the way people expected.

This required a nontrivial rearchitecting of the components of some OSes, because they had been built in a world where you rendered e.g. fonts by caching fixed bitmap tile-handles with the (non-DPI-aware) pixel size of the font as the key. In the case where you have two monitors of differing DPI plugged in, that cache spits out wrong tiles for at least one of your monitors.

So, what would you expect this "stable" OS to do when you plug an 8K monitor into it?

Or, another example: touchscreen tablet support, implemented by pen and gesture input events becoming the lower-level input-event stream, and pointer events being reimplemented on top of them. What would you expect your stable OS to do if you installed it on a tablet?

Sometimes, OSes have to rearchitect things. The reason is not always "FEATURE: now written in a cool new language!"; sometimes it's "BUG: it just doesn't got-dang work to do things this way any more."

Out of curiosity, why would you associate it with atheism? Since many (most?) Christian denominations believe it's forbidden to curse in God's name, it's actually more likely to have theistic origins.

I don't think it's a signal either way as to belief or nonbelief, though. It's more likely to just be a part of their vernacular.

Finally, as an atheist I can tell you that I have no need to avoid using the word "god". What's it going to do, cause a god to pop into existence if I say the name thrice? :) That would certainly be interesting.

Also, I don't understand why does it ship with KDE4 instead of Plasma 5. Even in -current it's still the case.

As someone who's used OpenBSD for more than a decade.. no, I do not find Slackware to be BSD-like at all.

I agree things are getting way less modular, and lots of the components you mention are becoming hard dependencies, which is not good.