I’ve spent over 25 years with Linux. With multiple distros and a lot of that with Gentoo and Arch. At work I specify Ubuntu or Debian, for simplicity and stability. I always used to use the minimal Ubuntu, because it was tiny with no frills. For quite a few years I managed a fleet of Gentoo systems across multiple customers - with Puppet. Those have quietly gone away. I’ve dallied with SuSE (all varieties), Mandrake, Mandriva, RedHat, Slackware, Yggdrassil and more.
Arch is surprisingly stable and being a rolling job there are no big jumps. When I replace one of our laptops, I simply clone the old one to it and crack on. I used to do the same with Gentoo - my Gentoo laptops went from an OpenRC job with dual Nokia N95 ppp connections around 2007 to through to around 2018 with systemd and decent wifi when I switched to Arch to allow the burns on my lap to heal. I still have a Gentoo VM running (amongst friends) on the esxi in my attic.
It was installed in 2006 according to some of the kernel config files. I left it for way too long and had to use git to make Portage advance forwards in time and fix around a decade of neglect. It would have been too easy to wipe and start again. It took about a fortnight to sort out. At one point I even fixed an issue following a forum post I made myself years ago.
I know this was a long comment and I’m only reacting to 1 word, so, I’m sorry in advance… But man, your mention of Mandrake really brought me back… I couldn’t for the life of me remember the distro I used to use all the time and this just clicked it all back into place. So much nostalgia, switching from like red hat 5 or 6 (not rhel, old plain red hat) to mandrake and being so happy.
It is great to have choice. I remember buying a CD with OpenBSD (the one with a yellow pufferfish logo) back in the late 90s/00s and giving it a whirl. I broke my work PC somewhat with it but at the time I worked on a help desk and we used VT200 emulators to access “RMS”. I still had a term but graphics was out of the question! I could never get the modes right. I worked like that for six months. Everyone else had DOS and Win 3.114WG and they thought I was being deliberately edgy. I had a hell of a time working out how to map PF1-4 (DEC Vax) to local keys.
I now run around 30 odd pfSense boxes across the UK. They run FreeBSD, with a frisson of PHP n that on top. My office cluster has six internets - two at 1Gbs-1. The two boxes are Dell servers with a lot of NICs (12 each) I will shortly be swapping out a few for 10Gb NICs. They are rock solid and just crack on and do the job. There are several packages that make life so easy: ACME - SSL certs; HA Proxy - proxy lots of sites with one IP; OpenVPN - we run a lot of them.
However, pppd on BSD is single threaded which means that on an APU2 you max out at around 300MBs-1. Linux pppd is multi-threaded and does better (about 400Mbs-1 on the same hardware. Not exactly the end of the world. The real problem was sticking to APU2!
Anyway. Run what you like - you have choice and choice is good.
I’ve spent over 25 years with Linux. With multiple distros and a lot of that with Gentoo and Arch. At work I specify Ubuntu or Debian, for simplicity and stability. I always used to use the minimal Ubuntu, because it was tiny with no frills. For quite a few years I managed a fleet of Gentoo systems across multiple customers - with Puppet. Those have quietly gone away. I’ve dallied with SuSE (all varieties), Mandrake, Mandriva, RedHat, Slackware, Yggdrassil and more.
Arch is surprisingly stable and being a rolling job there are no big jumps. When I replace one of our laptops, I simply clone the old one to it and crack on. I used to do the same with Gentoo - my Gentoo laptops went from an OpenRC job with dual Nokia N95 ppp connections around 2007 to through to around 2018 with systemd and decent wifi when I switched to Arch to allow the burns on my lap to heal. I still have a Gentoo VM running (amongst friends) on the esxi in my attic.
It was installed in 2006 according to some of the kernel config files. I left it for way too long and had to use git to make Portage advance forwards in time and fix around a decade of neglect. It would have been too easy to wipe and start again. It took about a fortnight to sort out. At one point I even fixed an issue following a forum post I made myself years ago.
Anyway, Arch is pretty stable.
I love when that happens lmao, it’s the best. Thank you past me.
I know this was a long comment and I’m only reacting to 1 word, so, I’m sorry in advance… But man, your mention of Mandrake really brought me back… I couldn’t for the life of me remember the distro I used to use all the time and this just clicked it all back into place. So much nostalgia, switching from like red hat 5 or 6 (not rhel, old plain red hat) to mandrake and being so happy.
Mmmm … RedHat with KDE = Mandrake. I still mostly exclusively use KDE.
Red Hat was a torture device. I do not understand how things shook out the way they did.
Hell, all of Linux was so crude. I don’t understand why we didn’t all just use BSD, like me!
It is great to have choice. I remember buying a CD with OpenBSD (the one with a yellow pufferfish logo) back in the late 90s/00s and giving it a whirl. I broke my work PC somewhat with it but at the time I worked on a help desk and we used VT200 emulators to access “RMS”. I still had a term but graphics was out of the question! I could never get the modes right. I worked like that for six months. Everyone else had DOS and Win 3.114WG and they thought I was being deliberately edgy. I had a hell of a time working out how to map PF1-4 (DEC Vax) to local keys.
I now run around 30 odd pfSense boxes across the UK. They run FreeBSD, with a frisson of PHP n that on top. My office cluster has six internets - two at 1Gbs-1. The two boxes are Dell servers with a lot of NICs (12 each) I will shortly be swapping out a few for 10Gb NICs. They are rock solid and just crack on and do the job. There are several packages that make life so easy: ACME - SSL certs; HA Proxy - proxy lots of sites with one IP; OpenVPN - we run a lot of them.
However, pppd on BSD is single threaded which means that on an APU2 you max out at around 300MBs-1. Linux pppd is multi-threaded and does better (about 400Mbs-1 on the same hardware. Not exactly the end of the world. The real problem was sticking to APU2!
Anyway. Run what you like - you have choice and choice is good.
deleted by creator
The story was divine retribution for blasphemy against arch