It's FOSS does a quick review of 13 independent Linux distros which have been built from scratch.
They exclude the three very obvious and popular ones Debian, Fedora, and Arch which are not only widely used on their own but also used as the foundation for hundreds of derivatives.
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13 Independent Linux Distros That are Built From Scratch
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(Score: 4, Interesting) by Runaway1956 on Sunday October 23 2022, @03:54PM (14 children)
Alpine seemed pretty unstable, on my hardware. That could have been improper configuration on my part, or, it might have been a distro problem.
Linux from Scratch is impressive, but I managed to bork it in short order. I gave up on it.
PCLinuxOS just didn't impress me much. I ran it for a few days, and moved on.
Mageia gave me installation and setup problems, I fought with it for a day or two, and moved on. I don't think it liked my hardware.
Void just seems too complicated. It doesn't play well in a virtual machine, or I might have stayed with it. I wasn't willing to install to hardware, it seemed that I might not be able to go back. I was picturing the OS assigning permissions to all the files in my home folder, which would prevent things from working properly with another Linux.
Gentoo. I've done that a couple times, and it seems I'm just not a Gentoo guy. It works, but I don't like it very much.
The rest, I've looked at, but never tried. Maybe I'll give some of them another look.
For the time being, I'm happy with MX Linux. It's very Debian without SystemD.
Abortion is the number one killed of children in the United States.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by canopic jug on Sunday October 23 2022, @03:58PM (5 children)
I've been really happy with Alpine so far. It's really lean with no extras yet has an easy to use package manager and all the familiar packages.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by RS3 on Sunday October 23 2022, @07:45PM (4 children)
I need to deploy a new live server and struggling to pick an OS.
Alpine has been around for quite a few years, is very well updated, extremely stable (when I installed it from scratch- newest version). Many "cloud" providers offer it as the main Linux OS.
I've run Alpine on one of my own machines at home for years, including xen, which is the main reason I tried it. It's almost awesome. It's not rolling release, which is pretty much a must as I'm sick of the major hassle when forced into a major version upgrade. I found you can point Alpine's apk (package tool) at the newer release repos and it'll upgrade for you, but there's been quite a bit of "weirdness", mostly in the GUI, like icons just gone, "midori" browser just won't start, but sometimes does. GUI is not a must- current older CentOS servers are rarely run in X mode. That said, there are a lot of great gui-based tools. I just recently did a full install from scratch of the latest version and it works fully well.
musl seems good, but I'm a little worried I'll need to run a libc binary someday.
I'd like some more functionality with apk (package tool), including a gui tool. I'm spoiled by rpm / yum - which I used to hate 15 years ago, but grew to love. Every Red Hat gui package tool was terrible, but yum was good enough, and I think yumex (gui yum extender) was great but I haven't run it in a few years.
Not sold on xen yet. About to try kvm / qemu. Still not sure of the differences. Either way it could be on Alpine.
XCP-ng seems awesome but I'm concerned that they try to rope you into full paid version (which I can't budget for).
Recently tried MX. It's very cool. I don't like that they kind of cater to systemd, but without fully running systemd. Also, the almost 2GB install did not contain sshd, which tells me they're not trying to be good server OS. But it has a lot of really good gui tools, so it's still a possibility. I like that it's based on Debian and the vast repos.
Tried but did not like Devuan, but now I forget why not...
Thanks to this post, I'm about to try void, but unless it's amazing, I'll probably stick with Alpine.
Either way, thank you much canopic jug!
(Score: 2) by fliptop on Sunday October 23 2022, @10:33PM
If you are willing to use SystemD then Rocky Linux [rockylinux.org] is available. It's making progress on FIPS 140-3 and is on the NIST test list.
To be oneself, and unafraid whether right or wrong, is more admirable than the easy cowardice of surrender to conformity
(Score: 3, Informative) by Reziac on Monday October 24 2022, @03:57AM
I like PCLinuxOS with KDE/Plasma -- I need a desktop not a server. It's been my next choice after WinXP for about five years now. Performance is much better than average, it runs on anything that's x64 (I have it on a really ancient laptop with 2GB RAM and it runs fine), it's relatively free of the usual annoyances, and it's been extremely stable. And I've become rather spoiled by rolling updates. No damned version upgrades and their associated madness. Bonus, it's descended from Mandrake, and inherits that user-centric way of life.
I dislike Debian and didn't care for Devuan until their KDE edition became "powered by PCLOS" (surprise!), and I could have all my familiar and usable tools, and better performance too. Haven't had it up long enough to tell how stable it is, but so far no grief.
I had a Fedora 32 install that had been neglected for a long time... well, I'm not actually using it for anything, if it breaks no loss, so let's see how the upgrade goes. By then the release version was 35. (A loooong time.) You can jump two versions. So I did all the CLI voodoo to bring it to 34, and that worked. Started using it for a daily task, nothing strenuous but it ran all the time. One day I woke it up to find it had updated to 35 on the sly. (I did not do it. I did not run Discover. I did not use the terminal. I have no idea how this was achieved.) Since then have been keeping it updated (via CLI, because when you're used to Synaptic, Discover is like being blind), and 36 arrived in some regular update likewise without troubling to inform me. Fedora's performance isn't good and it needs to be restarted about once a week, or it tends to clog up, but hey, the upgrade process works, and nothing broke.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by bart9h on Friday October 28 2022, @07:53PM (1 child)
I love Linux for my personal desktop, but for the server I feel more comfortable with OpenBSD.
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Friday October 28 2022, @09:02PM
Yeah, I keep hearing that. I'm embarrassed that I've never tried it. I think most people are all-in on something, whatever they do, hobbies, etc. I have a few interests, vocational specialties, etc., so I'm spread around a bit.
Years ago I was much more apt to try this and that with computers and OSes, etc. I think in many ways I'm disappointed in the general direction of many things. I think cars are far too complex mess, much too difficult to work on, and getting worse and worse. Same with computers. I don't need all this TPM and UEFI and encrypting everything and systemd and LVM and ... OpenBSD is probably what I need, but it'll take a good bit of time and effort to learn, much, and I'm not sure if it'll support everything I need to run. Not that long ago we (guy that owns the servers) were going to host something that was partly based on some proprietary binaries and were OS specific, and I don't think it would have worked on BSD. Somehow that whole thing fell through.
Also I tend to shy away from anything that is a free subset of a paid thing. I'm learning that Xen is crippled unless you buy the full version, and the aforementioned server business is far too small to afford paid subscriptions. I inherited the CentOS machines and it seemed pretty stable for 10 or so years. Version 6 would install with no systemd, for example. But now everything is a nightmare and I don't trust IBM / Red Hat / CentOS. Sigh.
Which distro do you like for desktop?
(Score: 4, Informative) by srobert on Sunday October 23 2022, @04:32PM
"I was picturing the OS assigning permissions to all the files in my home folder, which would prevent things from working properly with another Linux."
I use Void as my "daily driver" on my laptop. But I experiment with dual booting on the hardware with other distros, Gentoo, Arch, Devuan, etc. My home partition gets mounted under each of them without any problems. Probably would be too much of a hassle to mount it under the BSD's but it works across Linux distros without issue.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by RamiK on Sunday October 23 2022, @04:38PM
There's a fairly young pid1 project that might interest you: https://aurae.io/ [aurae.io]
It's written in Rust and uses its own Turing complete DSL called AuraeScript with the stdlib going for the full systems language feature set.
The raison d'etre is iron and cloud containers but it's made to replace systemd in all use-cases: https://medium.com/@kris-nova/why-fix-kubernetes-and-systemd-782840e50104 [medium.com]
compiling...
(Score: 4, Informative) by bzipitidoo on Sunday October 23 2022, @04:58PM (1 child)
Void is an almost nice distro. A big obstacle is that you may have to set up WiFi manually, and when I last tried Void, that was enough of a pain that I weighed whether it'd be easier to just wipe and install Ubuntu than mess around trying to configure WiFi drivers, particularly if I had to roll my own kernel.
Gentoo, uuughhh. I'm running it right now. It's a nice idea that you get a little more performance by compiling everything with optimization targeted for the hardware it's on. If having to recompile most of the system to do an update was the only downside, it'd be tolerable. But no. Gentoo is curiously conservative for a distro that goes to such lengths for that tiny little bit of extra performance. If I'm going to bog my computer down with tons of compiling work for a tiny bit more performance when done, then damn it, I want the latest stuff, not no long term release crap. IIRC, Gentoo currently defaults to Firefox 91. Want the latest Firefox, now version 106? Gentoo makes you work too much for that, and that's the next problem with Gentoo: the system utilities need too much hand holding. They flag the latest Firefox as "experimental", and you have to practically hand edit configuration files to get the system to install it. Worst, you have to go through that every single time Firefox updates, and you want that update. I have yet to find a way to get Gentoo's system management utilities to accept a wildcard for the version number. No, it's edit the file where it says "105" and change that to "106". And will have to do it again to change "106" to "107" when that becomes available. You may run into library version dependencies. Have to update a few libraries first, again editing the configuration files, because the libraries also are "experimental". F.T., might as well download Firefox source straight from the Mozilla website, and build and install it yourself without any help from Gentoo utilities.
And as for avoiding systemd, it's become very hard to completely avoid it, and Gentoo doesn't quite manage that. I also tried to completely substitute pipewire for pulseaudio, having seen the latter leak memory like mad. Also very hard to completely avoid. Sure, you can install runit, but parts of systemd will slip in here and there, as library dependencies.
(Score: 3, Informative) by DarkMorph on Monday October 24 2022, @02:48AM
Regarding Firefox, Gentoo stable defaults to Mozilla's stable, the ESR. It is not Gentoo imposing arcane restrictions à la Debian. The maintainers are consistently good with pushing updates to keep up with the latest rolling releases from Mozilla. Accept the unstable version in the same manner as anything else by adding the package atom to /etc/portage/package.accept_keywords and that will convince Portage to try to merge that version of FF. This typically will require unstable versions of nss and nspr to go along with it, but that just about covers it. Exact version numbers are not necessary, but may be set. A range can be declared as well by specifiying a version limit (min or max) and using the appropriate prefix e.g. <, <=, >, >=.
Gentoo absolutely manages running a system without systemd. It is the default to not run systemd, so probabilistically speaking it should be harder to turn it on deliberately. Gentoo has a profile setting which brings in some default targets that Portage ought to know about and this is one of them. Metapackages target virtuals appropriately to handle situations where more than one distinct package can satisfy a common need e.g. a provider for a system logger, or init, or udev etc. Various bits that did stem from systemd have been broken out, and due to how the Linux landscape is shifting, some of these extracted bits are needed like systemd-tmpfiles. Despite its name it does not push systemd on the box. It's entitled for historical reasons and for clarity I gather.
Some of your descriptions sound wrong, and I'm sure if you shared your emerge --info output along with other relevant bits regarding issues with Firefox versioning, pipewire, etc. folks at #gentoo would easily be able to help rectify what you're missing to set your system on the path you wish to have.
Gentoo's package manager has evolved so much since I first started running the distro and the ability to craft the config and settings with such versatility, and the package manager works so well despite allowing all of it, remains unrivaled from what I've seen. I get frustrated with package control on Devuan on my work machine. I had to move the whole box to testing because of the tie-ins among packages with testing binary packages and underlying system packages they require. I never had this problem mixing unstable with stable on Gentoo due to the advantage of compiling things. About 2 decades later I still don't have this issue that binary distros have. It doesn't take much to run into the weaknesses of apt, although it's good overall, simply because I've been so spoiled by how robust Portage is.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Sunday October 23 2022, @05:02PM (2 children)
I tried an Alpine based Docker image, briefly, too many headaches as compared with its Ubuntu based alternative.
I used Gentoo from ~2004-~2008 at first because it was the only way to have a 64 bit OS on a reasonably priced CPU, and later due to inertia. When than motherboard died (of asphyxiation by dust bunnies, never put your workstation in the same room as the clothes dryer) I was looking for something simpler, chose Ubuntu, and have used Kubuntu or Ubuntu since. Kubuntu lost our when I got a notebook with a 4k display in 2013 and Unity/Ubuntu handled it better. I spend so much time with Ubuntu professionally now that nothing else gets much of a chance, did try Xfce on CentOS for about a year around 2016-7, but again: Ubuntu won out by being easier to deal with.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 23 2022, @07:33PM (1 child)
I tried Gentoo during that same mid-2000s time frame you mentioned. I was working for a small company and I was setting up a linux test server and decided to try it. I was following whatever install readme or howto was available and the install went fine, but when I then issued the big "update everything" command as directed, after doing a lot of stuff it left me with a completely unbootable system. I tried to troubleshoot it based upon having done a lot of manual installs and being familiar with messing with lilo and grub, so I turned to the Gentoo community for help. This was during the height of the Gentoo funroll-loops [shlomifish.org] fanboi craze and most of the feedback I got was how impossible it was to do that, what an idiot I must be for messing up my system, and even a few accusations that I was outright fabricating all this, outing me as a Gentoo "hater" trying to spread fud. So I redid it with fedora or CentOS (don't remember which) and didn't have any issues.
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Sunday October 23 2022, @07:56PM
Being a sometimes programmer and general techie, I like the idea of Gentoo. I've never taken the time to run it, but I know a few people who do and like it. The closest I've gotten is to compile some packages, and used to do frequent kernel compiles, 1- to get the latest patch in, and 2- to customize and streamline.
Here's the problem: more than once I've had a hardware failure in a live server running generic CentOS, and because it was _not_ custom compiled to the machine's hardware, I was able to pull the drives, slam them in some other standby hardware, and was back in business while I repaired the main system.
The only hassle I've had lately with moving hard drives around is the X driver: xorg.conf needed tweaking / rebuild / slap in a generic one, but live servers don't run in X mode (can if needed / wanted).
Disaster mitigation / recovery is top priority.
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Monday October 24 2022, @12:16PM
I find Linux from Scratch benefits substantially by using a packaging system, even though it doesn't just following the default instructions. That's because when you screw something up, it's massively easier to sort out what needs to be replaced (it's probably the package you just added, duh), and you're less likely to accumulate cruft on your system, and better able to handle upgrades. I also highly recommend that every would-be geek go through it at least once to give yourself a much deeper understanding of what all does what on a Linux system.
As for Gentoo, it's great, except for waiting for things to compile all the time. It is however one of the most truly interesting distros out there, great for learning what kind of tuning is possible.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by bart on Sunday October 23 2022, @04:03PM (3 children)
I've been very happy with Void on my desktop and several laptops.
Every few months someone asks why Void on the void Reddit channel . The answers are generally well reasoned.
I've used Linux professionally exclusively for the last 20 years or so since SuSE 5 in a dvd box so I have some experience.
(Score: 3, Informative) by srobert on Sunday October 23 2022, @04:35PM (2 children)
Been using desktop linux for 26 years and have used many distributions. IMO the best distro for experienced users currently available is Void.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Sunday October 23 2022, @05:05PM (1 child)
Curious how Void stacks up against Arch? I find lots of Arch based answers for problems I have in Ubuntu, but not much from Void.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Sunday October 23 2022, @07:24PM
I've been using Manjaro (100% Arch compatible, dead easy install) for a few years now, and have it still as my Plex server.
My new PC is running Garuda: arch based but with interesting tweaks. If it ever borks on me and i leave it, it will probably be switched to Manjaro.
Have not used Void for any length of time.
https://garudalinux.org/ [garudalinux.org]
https://manjaro.org/ [manjaro.org]
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 3, Informative) by Sjolfr on Sunday October 23 2022, @06:11PM (1 child)
I started out on Slackware 30 years ago. Compiling the kernel line by line was kind of cool. Made a nice career of it. These days I actually don't enjoy all the fiddling with things that really should just work. Xfce4 seems to work well enough for me.
Ubuntu Studio seems to be the best for low latency audio/video production so I use that on my drumset. For ease of use I also use it for everything else. Ubuntu runs well on Raspberry Pi too. The only nit-picky things I avoid are reinventions of perfectly functional facilities. snap (and other package managers) come to mind. Not a fan of systemd.
At the end of the day I don't really care which dist I use as long as it works and adheres to some standards. I really hope, within my lifetime, that the linux ecosystem will start to trim the chaff some more.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by number11 on Monday October 24 2022, @05:03AM
Slackware was the first distro I actually got working usefully. Wasn't after a desktop, wanted my own mail server. Got it running on two old boxes (to mirror), command line only, and got the mail servers functional. It didn't take too long to figure out that running a mail server for half a dozen users is a major PITA. But that wasn't Slackware's fault. These days I use Win10 and Mint Xfce, and leave the mail server to somebody else.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by KritonK on Monday October 24 2022, @09:02AM (1 child)
The article does not mention SUSE Linux which is also "made from scratch", i.e., not based on other distributions. Some consider SUSE the fourth major Linux distribution, in addition to Debian, Red Hat, and Arch. It comes in both paid (SUSE Linux Enterprise) and free versions (OpenSUSE), the latter in both a release-based ("Leap") and a rolling ("Tumbleweed") version.
Personally, I am using OpenSUSE Tumbleweed which, although a rolling distribution, is extremely stable.
(Score: 3, Informative) by canopic jug on Monday October 24 2022, @04:09PM
SUSE kind of fell of the map in 2006 when it knuckled under to (and doubled down on) M$ software patent extortion [suse.com] and faded further in the following years. That dragged on and on [infoworld.com] until few people were left to take that distro seriously, since these factors far outweigh the distro's technical merits. Along the way, SUSE was sold off [zdnet.com] and not in a good way. In recent years it has been trying to re-legitimize itself, but the stigma still remains.
By paying protection money to M$ for unspecified (and invalid) software patents, SUSE hurt the whole community severely and lent credibility to a scam.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Monday October 24 2022, @03:25PM (2 children)
Tiny Core Linux is an interesting and fairly customizable OS. It is very user unfriendly, though. Suggesting Tiny Core Linux to a friend. Is like suggesting your friend build their own bed frame, find the right stuffing, learn to sew using upholstery fabric, create their own "good enough" mattress, and while they're at it may as well make their own pillows, sheets, and other furnishings for their bed. Sure, you might get a better bed than you could otherwise buy. Then again, you may just have created the Frankenstein of beds. In the event that was your goal, maybe it was perfect for you.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Monday October 24 2022, @03:32PM (1 child)
All that said, I was testing the creation of limited Kiosk stations for my Library. I ultimately never used Tiny Core Linux and eventually our IT department supplied windows based kiosk machines. For a good while though, I was using Puppy Linux with a whitelist extension in Firefox and it worked reasonably well. I used the default JWM and was able to edit various keyboard shortcuts, etc. Then re-author the disk, so certain things were just inaccessible. Even to me.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Freeman on Monday October 24 2022, @03:36PM
I need to stop replying to myself. Last one.
The nice thing about Puppy Linux and Tiny Core Linux is that they both loaded the entire OS into RAM. Which made them feel lightning fast even on very old hardware. At least once they were booted. Though, considering Puppy Linux was a heavy 100-200MB and Tiny Core was a heavy 25-50mb. That wasn't a horribly long load time, either. Tiny Core is Tiny and can be very useful for certain custom applications. Puppy Linux was just as customizable though and was designed to be a bit easier for the end user.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"