What I want from a server system: Minimal default installation, stability, good upgrade paths.

Switched to OpenBSD for my servers a while back. I love it because it’s a no-nonsense system (i.e., sensible default configuration, no stuff enabled that you don’t need – except for sndiod, which is useless on a server), very stable (little surprises on upgrades) and I’m a fan of pledge and unveil. Granted, I only switched after syspatch and sysupgrade were introduced. Before that, uhm, no thanks. OpenSMTPD is a great MTA with a very simple config – all other MTAs that I tried (exim, postfix, courier, sendmail (lol) ages ago) are a total nightmare compared to OpenSMTPD.

What I want from a desktop system: Same as server, but I can tolerate more changes, hardware support is super important, virtualization as well, and I want to do audio stuff.

My desktops still run Arch, because I’m too lazy to migrate. I’ve been using it for a really long time now and, honestly, other than being a bit annoying with regards to systemd, it works really well for me. It still doesn’t install tons of useless stuff by default, it’s a relatively simple system, and I really like that they stick to their policy of “we’ll use the software as upstream provides it, no local patches” whenever possible. When I install nginx, then I want nginx – not some Debian-ized version of it. Building my own packages is incredibly easy. Lots of people keep ranting about rolling releases breaking their stuff, but that doesn’t happen for me. Granted: A lot of the software that I run is stuff that I wrote myself – this might be a very important factor. Anyway, if I were to start from scratch, I’d go for Void these days. Well, actually I’d give OpenBSD a try first on the desktop, but I have a feeling that it won’t work very well, because Linux just has a much superior hardware support (they simply have more manpower). And I like the flexibility that Linux offers in the filesystem area (more filesystem drivers, LVM, maybe btrfs or ZFS some day). And there is no Ardour and no guitarix on OpenBSD. Aaaaand QEMU+KVM is a blessing on Linux. So there’s probably always going to be a Linux box in my house, at least for the foreseeable future.

(17-11-2021, 10:30 PM)pfr Wrote: TheAnachron Wrote:
I'm using Void Linux because it's Arch Linux without systemd and with more stability.
This statement is technically inaccurate and missleading. Void Linux is not (like, at all) "Arch Linux". It is not a fork of anything, it's an independent Linux Distrobution. This is stated clearly on their website's front page.

I can’t speak for TheAnachron of course, but knowing that he’s also from Germany: He probably meant that Void feels a lot like Arch (once did). :-) In German, we’d probably say “Void ist Arch, nur ohne systemd und stabiler”, which doesn’t imply that it’s a fork, but that probably got lost in translation.