On the topic of free operating systems, I have been playing with these lately, and recommend if it suits usage (alpha order).

- Alpine Linux (my daily driver)
- Chimera Linux
- Elementary Linux
- FreeBSD
- OpenBSD
- Solus Linux

Not "mainstream" suggestions per se, and that's kinda the point. Caveats re: glibc/musl, nvidia support, etc. apply.

If I had to have nvidia support for my primary workstation I'd probably go with Solus (KDE), or at least try it, in spite of systemd.

I'm starting to scratch the surface on

- CachyOS

for my son's gaming rig. Pretty much what it says on the tin. I like it. Arch could use a bit of polish. We'll see how it goes on real hardware.

Others that I haven't run much beyond playing with the iso, but am intrigued by, mostly by intended use case tbh:

- Mint
- Zorin

I used to run these for years and years and years but don't nowadays:

- Arch
- Gentoo

Excellent, but the time intensity ...

~20 years ago I used to run Gentoo in a government research agency data centre. Even came up with an "ansible-like" set of deployment scripts/framework and whatnot in /bin/bash+openssh to manage them (pre-dates Ansible).

Fun times... the time... the time.

Gentoo was bracketed by RHEL in the past and CentOS as the successor. CentOS was fine but gave up a lot of performance way back then. Shifting priorities, server hardware was still following Moore's, and all that.

I flirted with Ubuntu a bit over the years. Could never really get into it back when it was decent. I won't touch it now.

Today, I think I'm done with Debian. Too static for my tastes - stuff gets too stale. Sure, there's Testing/Sid but there's also other options at that point.

Now that I'm a sysadmin just for myself I can embrace using whatever I want. Ha.

I'm all about community projects nowadays.

Corporate software will eventually disappoint you so it pays to just not go there in the first place.

Deep thoughts.

#Linux #RunBSD #HomeLab #SelfHosted #SelfHosting #AlpineLinux #ChimeraLinux #Elementary #ElementaryOS #FreeBSD
#OpenBSD #SolusLinux #Solus #LinuxMint #ZorinLinux #Gentoo #ArchLinux #CachyOS