this post was submitted on 20 Feb 2024
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Linux

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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.

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Which one(s) and why?

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

I think GNU Guix System scratches all my itches:

  • Committed to being 100% free software even at the kernel level (I know this is controversial)
  • Focus on reproducible builds
  • Atomic updates that can be rolled back if something breaks
  • A package manager that makes it relatively easy to package software (there are importer commands that can import from language-specific package managers such as pip and cargo) and makes it possible, as a user, to apply transforms to packages (i.e. build with X commit or with Y patch)
  • Per-user profiles (in addition to the root profile and the system profile) allowing user to install software without requiring root. Users can even create separate profiles as well as throwaway profiles for running scripts or one-off commands (i.e. a python or bash script can use guix shell as its interpreter listing all the packages it requires).

Previously I used Ubuntu from 2008 to 2009, Trisquel from 2009 to 2014, and Debian from 2014 to 2019.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago

Though I have yet to try Guix, I think I'd move over to it if they adopted something similar to flake support. The idea that it uses a non-arbitrary language for declaration is very appealing to me. Do you know if it's simple enough to get non-free kernels, though?