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What is Your Operating System of Choice?
| 6% | 9 votes |
| 42% | 57 votes |
| 4% | 6 votes |
| 9% | 13 votes |
| 18% | 24 votes |
| 8% | 11 votes |
| 3% | 4 votes |
| 6% | 9 votes |
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- Don't complain about lack of options. You've got to pick a few when you do multiple choice. Those are the breaks.
- Feel free to suggest poll ideas if you're feeling creative. I'd strongly suggest reading the past polls first.
- This whole thing is wildly inaccurate. Rounding errors, ballot stuffers, dynamic IPs, firewalls. If you're using these numbers to do anything important, you're insane.
What is Your Operating System of Choice?
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Q: What do you call a blind pre-historic animal?
A: Diyathinkhesaurus.
Q: What do you call a blind pre-historic animal with a dog?
A: Diyathinkhesaurus Rex.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Snospar on Monday April 21, @10:17AM (2 children)
Manages to remain stable even though it uses very up-to-date software versions. No systemd is also a nice benefit and I really like runit.
Huge thanks to all the Soylent volunteers without whom this community (and this post) would not be possible.
(Score: 2) by KritonK on Tuesday April 22, @04:19AM (1 child)
The same goes for OpenSUSE Tumbleweed.
(Score: 2, Informative) by shrewdsheep on Tuesday April 22, @11:00AM
Using a mix of openSUSE Leap/Tumbleweed. Strong points: solid engineering backed by SuSE; key innovations in the Linux ecosystem (OBS, openQA, zypper). Weak point: small community.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by turgid on Monday April 21, @10:25AM
Stable, reliable, comprehensive and no systemd. It's also still very unix-like.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 2) by rob_on_earth on Monday April 21, @06:25PM (18 children)
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Thexalon on Monday April 21, @06:38PM (13 children)
I've used Gentoo before. I generally like it. I've also put together my Linux From Scratch systems before.
However, the compiling-time downside is significantly annoying.
"Think of how stupid the average person is. Then realize half of 'em are stupider than that." - George Carlin
(Score: 3, Interesting) by bzipitidoo on Tuesday April 22, @01:35PM (11 children)
> However, the compiling-time downside is significantly annoying.
This. I am using Gentoo right now. Because of the very long compile times, I have not upgraded from Firefox 137.0.1 to the current Firefox, 137.0.2.
A further problem is that all that compiling puts a full load on my computer for several hours, and sometimes drives it to overheating and locking up. If that happens in the midst of a compile of a very large package such as Firefox or, even worse, Chromium, I have to start that package over. Takes around 3 hours to compile Chromium. I have even resorted to good old ctrl-s to pause the compile, leaving it paused for an hour, to give the computer time to cool down.
I tried Gentoo again, in the hopes that my new, faster PC would make short work of the compiles. Last time I tried Gentoo was 20 years ago, on a Pentium IV, a single core CPU. Then I switched to Arch, and stayed with that until they switched to systemd. Alas, the amount of code to compile has kept pace with hardware. Even with 6 cores, compile times are still most of a day. I hate to think how much time that old Pentium IV would need to compile current Gentoo.
(Score: 1) by DECbot on Tuesday April 22, @01:47PM
You could give Artix a try if you like Arch and willing to give OpenRC a go. It seems to have spawned from Arch's [arch-openrc] and [arch-nosystemd] repositories. Here's the link: Artix Linux [artixlinux.org]
cats~$ sudo chown -R us /home/base
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 22, @04:59PM
IIRC I stopped using Gentoo when there were multiple updates to glibc and KDE and the kernel all in one week. Cooked my laptop trying to compile it all.
(Score: 2) by fab23 on Tuesday April 22, @05:04PM
Gentoo does now also have binary packages available, but I have not checked if they are able to build Firefox quickly enough. On the other hand you could always use the binary Firefox directly from Mozilla at e.g. https://download.cdn.mozilla.net/pub/firefox/releases/137.0.2/. [mozilla.net] See e.g. in https://download.cdn.mozilla.net/pub/firefox/releases/137.0.2/linux-x86_64/en-US/ [mozilla.net] and there is even something for Debian/Ubuntu Users.
If you prefer not to adjust the URL each time to get it from the above mention download link, then go to https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/all/desktop-release/ [mozilla.org] or https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/all/desktop-esr/ [mozilla.org] and click through. For a full overview of available options see https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/all/ [mozilla.org] .
(Score: 2) by turgid on Tuesday April 22, @07:03PM (7 children)
A further problem is that all that compiling puts a full load on my computer for several hours, and sometimes drives it to overheating and locking up.
Is this a problem with the heatsink/fan assembly? What CPU is it? Nowadays they tend to be pretty good at throttling the clock to prevent overheating. Maybe it's a power supply problem?
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 22, @10:00PM (6 children)
I'm with you on this. There is a good chance they don't have thermal throttling set. Modern CPUs will self-regulate their boosting down to 100%, but not below that amount unless they have a profile that allows it to underclock under load. That profile isn't the default, so the kernel needs to tell the hardware that is OK and most distros and kernels I know of aren't configured to do that. It could also be a power issue because compiling is known to be extra hard on CPUs and require more power than the baseline load at the same utilization. That is the reason why having a machine that you only use for compiling and another for working (or having one computer that is basically disposable) is the standard for people working on big projects.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by bzipitidoo on Tuesday April 22, @11:45PM (5 children)
The computer is a fanless desktop from silentpc.com. Was very expensive, but I wanted the silence. Ryzen 5600G CPU.
Seems to have no problem with 2 hours of sustained compiling. Even 4 hours is often okay. Longer than that eventually brings it to a boil, so to speak.
If I have all 6 cores doing compiling, and I fire up some game that engages the integrated 3D accelerated graphics (I don't have a dedicated graphics card, owing to them being extremely expensive at the time I got the PC, during the pandemic), then I can overheat it in perhaps 30 minutes.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 23, @04:25AM (4 children)
Do you use a profile that allows thermal throttling below the rated speed under load? Which CPU governor do you use? If it is cooking itself after 4 or so hours, then it probably isn't the power supply (unless that is undervolting due to overheating) but the thermal design. The problem for you is that each time the processor overheats to the point it exceeds the true maximum junction temperature, that temperature falls by a random but chaotic amount for a given voltage. So I'd check which governors and thermal controls you are using to help mitigate that if it is a problem for you. The kernel can be told to all sorts of things, including automatic underclocking and idle looping, to keep temperatures within user constraints. But you have to tell it that you want it to do that first.
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Thursday April 24, @03:25AM (3 children)
I confess I have never looked into this. I have no idea if a CPU governor is being used. But it sure sounds like a good idea. However, a bit of searching for info on this matter brought up a lot of docs to read. Was hoping for a simple, quick solution, along the lines of "echo something > /dev/something"
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 24, @05:32AM (2 children)
The easiest way to potentially solve it is to issue the command (cpufreq-set -g powersave) or (cpupower frequency-set -g powersave) which will cause the CPU to use only the minimum allowed speed regardless of load. Otherwise, you can use that tool to experiment on a CPU speed that will not overheat. It will slow everything at the cost of almost ensuring no ability to overheat until you next reboot. There are also a number of daemons you can use to control it based on your platform and requirements. Sadly there isn't an easy answer because what works for one system doesn't work for another. And part of the problem is that, since it appears that you have exceeded the maximum temperature before, the overheat protection may not be aggressive enough due to the lower temperature where the processor will fail now.
And as a frank side note: you'd think a fanless PC manufacturer would have better documentation on how to configure their servers in this manner.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 24, @04:36PM (1 child)
Setting CPU governor to powersave is easy but it might not work. During a really long compile the heat will build up and a fanless system can't clear it out. You can't cool a CPU with hot air.
Lowering the CPU thermal throttle temperature will probably help more, which you can do with the ryzenadj tool.
Realistically though, a fanless system just isn't a great choice for long sustained workloads. For silent, the best approach is water cooling open loop with a big radiator and fans that can throttle down to silent speed. Not really viable for a laptop but gives you silent 90% of the time and max performance (and still not very loud) the other 10% of the time.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 24, @10:49PM
It is a tradeoff. Lowering the CPU using ryzenadj vs the governor should affect the same settings under load. The difference is powersave is simpler at the expense of not having to do too much tuning and experimentation. Coming up with a complete thermal profile would be best. In the end, the solution will probably include a mix of hardware and kernel tuning. Right now, the APU is cooking itself, which means the throttling is already being exceeded. At a minimum the APU is signaling the platform to shutdown (either hard or soft) and it is a sign that the maximum junction temp is being exceeded and therefore lowered. That means that the built-in cooling profile is unreliable and that the kernel probably needs to get involved by actively cooling through injected idle loops.
(Score: 2) by ese002 on Tuesday April 22, @08:35PM
Gentoo now has pre-compiled packages for many/most things. However, not for every possible build option. It might be virtually everything for typical new installs but for long time users like me, at least half of my updates still require compiling. It was just in the last month that I first saw Firefox and Thunderbird update from binaries.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday April 22, @11:58AM
I used Gentoo 2004ish through 2007ish. It was the only viable option for a full 64 bit OS at the moment.
I recompiled the OS twice in the first month, taking roughly 24 hours per go. The first recompile was because I learned of a compiler flag that was supposed to make my AMD deployment more efficient. It may have worked but the truth about a good OS is that it spends most of its time sleeping, so 1% gains are super hard to notice.
The last recompile was after a couple of years of learning about how it all worked and I applied what I knew, built for another day and again didn't perceive any real difference in the result.
I know Gentoo has precompiled emerge options now, but for me the advantages of swimming in the Debian mainstream far outweigh any additional build control I experienced with Gentoo. If you really want to recompile something in Debian that's an option too. See my other response about a recent Debian downside.
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 24, @08:16AM (2 children)
Gentoo or die
In some ways it's unfortunate that Gentoo originally pitched their niche as performance, because really the extra 0.5% you get from fiddling with compile options basically doesn't matter at all. What Gentoo gives you is flexibility. You can use systemd or not, pulseaudio or not, glibc or musl, gcc or clang (of course some programs actually need one or the other), X or Wayland, whatever. When the systemd wars happened I barely even noticed. I distribute RPi-based embedded systems, and they run Gentoo. This gives me free GPL compliance, even GPL3, because everything required to comply with GPL is right there. In theory, the end-user could log in, type emerge -e world and rebuild every GPL program from source. (The real-world performance of this is another matter, it would take a week). I build the system on an ARM-based AWS host, so I don't even need to cross-compile. Which is good, because a lot of stuff is in Rust now and you can't really cross-compile Rust. It's also possible to do this in QEMU, it's pretty slow, but it does work. Last time I tried this it took a week to build Chromium, but my CPU is slow.
Although the time required for compiling is mildly annoying, because it's rolling release this matters a lot less. You upgrade when you want to, and while not every update is painless, generally I just run the update overnight and when I wake up it's done. The package manager is intelligent enough that even when some update, it never (well, almost never) leaves the system in a broken/inconsistent state. I have had more RedHat-based systems break on upgrade than Gentoo.
The only programs that I find slow enough to compile to be a pain are GCC, LLVM/Clang, Rust, Chromium, Webkit and LibreOffice. GCC wouldn't be so bad if it didn't insist on recompiling itself three times. Firefox is a relatively light compile, it takes less than an hour, and I only have a six-core CPU. But there's a binary version if you want.
I only use binary packages for bootstrapping runtime environments like Java and Rust where you can't really build them from scratch without a version already installed. It's not really different from starting with a binary C compiler. But there are binary packages for all the big, inconvenient packages.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 25, @12:12AM (1 child)
0.5% improvement? We get more than that just by changing the instruction set flags to a more accurate values. All forms of optimization and tuning combined has resulted in speedups of almost 50% in some cases.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 25, @05:13AM
Certainly you can get a big improvement by, say, having AVX enabled vs. having it disabled. But what happens in the real world is binary distros enable everything, and then the code determines at runtime what is available, and chooses the appropriate code path. So really what you are getting in most cases is just a size optimization, not a performance optimization. Maybe you can get more speedup in specific programs with -O3 or higher, which isn't safe to use system-wide.
Gentoo doesn't even allow you to compile glibc any more without all the compatibility cruft. If you build glibc today, it will have compatibility code for kernels going all the way back to 2.6. Ironically, binary distros are now better at this than Gentoo.
(Score: -1, Spam) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 21, @09:03PM (9 children)
poll creator is dumb for including Windows, not an OS, more of a borg-like virus.
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 22, @03:28AM (4 children)
Spam modded for criticism of the only option with no votes? I think the community has spoken, and Micro$erf sucks.
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 23, @10:58PM (3 children)
Only because the vote is anonymous, there are now three votes for "it". SoylentNews should be ashamed. Dox these fanbois, and ban them permanently. Using a convicted criminal OS, like that! Unconsciable!!
(Score: -1, Spam) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 24, @05:47AM (2 children)
We have noticed the preference given to linux hit pieces, and the rejection ot the truth about the harm of the Microsoft infection. SoylentNews is biased, a sell-out, and really, really bad. I will not read this site, anymore, forever.
(Score: 2) by janrinok on Thursday April 24, @06:18AM (1 child)
Who is this "we" that you keep referring to, ari? You mustn't reply because you will not read this, forever.
I am not interested in knowing who people are or where they live. My interest starts and stops at our servers.
(Score: -1, Spam) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 24, @05:44PM
Use the right pronouns, you British twat! We are anonymous. We are legion. We don't use Windoze. We don't forget. Expect us.
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 22, @01:44PM (3 children)
What a stupid spam mod, someone should be mod banned.
(Score: 2) by janrinok on Tuesday April 22, @03:55PM (2 children)
What was it moderated for? If you don't know, how can you say it was stupid?
I am not interested in knowing who people are or where they live. My interest starts and stops at our servers.
(Score: -1, Redundant) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 22, @09:48PM
*yawn*
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 23, @04:35PM
I'll select: because "we moderate based on content"
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday April 22, @12:15PM (5 children)
I believe the cutoff happened in Debian 11, between Ubuntu 20.04 and 22.04.
The impact: video software that used to support RTSP:// (like VLC, mplayer, ffmpeg) no longer does.
The complaint: live555 and associated libraries are not FOSS license compliant.
The low effort mitigation strategy: don't install new Debian based OS if you want to continue using standard tools to view your IP cameras. No replacement for live555 has materialized in the past 3+ years since the change.
It is apparently possible to recompile VLC and others from source to regain live555 RTSP support, but it's far from the easiest compile from source activity I have ever encountered. I assume that professional video companies using Debian all took the day+ of effort to do it. I haven't quite gotten there yet.
I have looked into it, and while live555 claims to be open source, they only distribute via latest version .tar.gz which makes change auditing a pain, basically if you want to track their changes it is up to you to keep the historical versions, basically run your own git repo of their code, pulling new .tar.gz as they become available.
Anybody else using VLC to view your cameras around the home network? This is a case where all the Windows based systems still "just work."
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Tuesday April 22, @01:19PM (1 child)
Until they don't, or you have to spend for the upgrade and the upgrade shows you ads, or nags you, or throws
ClippyCo-pilot at you constantly or surveils you or......--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. I have always been here. ---Gaaark 2.0 --
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday April 22, @02:10PM
Oh, hey, I'm with you 200%, but... while contemplating 10+ hours of research and effort just to regain the camera viewing capability I have been using without thinking about it for 10+ years... I look over at my Windows suffering counterparts and they are still using the very same lib555 code without issues.
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 24, @04:24PM
See, this is why gentoo is good. Sure, you have to compile everything, but that's work for your CPU, not you. When your other distribution inevitably does something you don't like, you also have to compile everything, but it's a huge pain because they don't want you to do it.
This would be, at most, a two line configuration change with gentoo. One to enable non-free licenses, which you'd typically do at install time, and then another to enable the option on VLC.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Unixnut on Friday April 25, @01:56AM (1 child)
I stopped using Linux a while ago, but perhaps this site will help: https://www.deb-multimedia.org/ [deb-multimedia.org]
Not sure if you have seen it already, but these are packages that are built with all options enabled (including the ones not considered "open source" by Debian standards), I used it a lot in the past for my Debian AV editing and decoding machines, so that I would not have to bother re-compiling the packages myself to enable the features.
A quick local search for live555 [google.com] yielded some results, so perhaps it is of use to you?
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday April 25, @11:52AM
Thanks, this looks like the sort of solution I have been looking for - and not seen a single reference to until you showed it to me.
Also in the communication is a good thing department: I stumbled upon the Debian bug report that got live555 pulled in the first place, yesterday afternoon I e-mailed the live555 author asking if any steps had been taken to address the concerns raised in the bug report in early 2021: https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=981439 [debian.org] and offering to do any re-write necessary to address the concerns.
He replied about an hour later:
Me: That's great! Did this just happen today? Are the gatekeepers at Debian aware of the change yet?
Yeah, communication.
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Tuesday April 22, @01:16PM (2 children)
I seem to go between Arch and Debian based systems.
My two favourites are Manjaro and MX.
If MX had easy BTRFS creation and support, I'd probably use it exclusively (systemd-free!). Very easy to make beautiful as well as useful. If Manjaro (systemd...ugh) was more like MX, I'd use it absolutely!
Wish i had the skills and money to port MX to Arch-based, while keeping it systemd-free.
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. I have always been here. ---Gaaark 2.0 --
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Tuesday April 22, @01:40PM (1 child)
Money? Money?!? For a free OS? Must be equating money with time.
It's not the lack of skills, it's the lack of time that stops me from experimenting even more.
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Tuesday April 22, @01:55PM
If i won something like the Powerball, I'd hire a team of people to work full-time on it. I'd love to do this.
Pay (or hire for) some of the 'Windows only' software companies to have people working to make a linux version of their software as well so you COULD scrap Windows. (Was hoping Mark Shuttleworth(?) of Ubuntu was going to do this.)
Time is definitely something i need as well.
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. I have always been here. ---Gaaark 2.0 --
(Score: 3, Interesting) by fab23 on Tuesday April 22, @04:52PM
As the question was kind of not clear enough, I have voted for my preferred server OS (BSD, specifically it would be FreeBSD).
I am also quite familiar with Debian/Ubuntu and Gentoo as server OS. On the Desktop I am using macOS (of course with MacPorts to have many open source command line tools available too).
(Score: 3, Interesting) by mhajicek on Tuesday April 22, @05:43PM (7 children)
I'm using Windows 10, because I have to run Mastercam and Solidworks. I will not use Windows 11. I don't see any good path forward for my use case.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Tuesday April 22, @07:44PM (2 children)
Mastercam and Solidworks have pretty garbage ratings on WINEHQ as well. I wonder how well they would work on ReactOS, if at all.
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: -1, Spam) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 24, @05:34AM (1 child)
Well, stop using such vampiric software that ties you to the Dark Master in Redmond. Drive a steak through their hart, spinkle them with holey water, and bedeck them with a garland of garlic. After all these years, I am sick, and tired, of people claiming they are force to support a monopoly! Well, no shit, janrinok, that is how it stays a monopoly! Break the ties, Cross the streams, punish the proprietaries, and bring about the new world of free software. Or, die in the fire that will be Windows 12!! You have been warned.
(Score: 2) by mhajicek on Friday April 25, @12:28AM
Ok, point me towards an actual professional level CADCAM software that runs on Linux, that can do what I do with Mastercam and Solidworks. I'll wait.
And before you tell me to learn to code and write it myself, look up how many man hours went into it. I don't have a spare few hundred lifetimes to write it myself, on the side, while running my machining business.
Maybe I can have an AI do it for me in a few years...
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday April 24, @02:21PM (2 children)
I am wondering: only 2% chose Windows as their "OS of choice" but how many still use it as their "OS of necessity?"
I know my corporate laptop will only function properly with Windows, so I do technically use it once or twice a month when coerced to do so by my employer.
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 24, @04:48PM (1 child)
I am happy to say I haven't booted Windows since 2022, and that was only to do a video interview with some random proprietary video calling software. Cisco, I think. Even that was in a VM.
(Score: -1, Spam) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 25, @06:31AM
I have not used a Microsoft product since Win95!! I remember CeMeNt! Spend more time looking at Blue screens of Death than actually getting any work done. Microsoft should not have been included as an option on this poll. Cancel Bill!!
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 25, @06:24AM
Pfft. Mastercam and Solidworks? Everyone knows real machinists write ISO 6983-1 by hand. Everything else gets you too far away from having a true and deep understanding of your work. Kids these days have no appreciation for the art or science of manufacturing! /s