Small sample set aside, the performance differences here are much bigger than I’ve seen in previous linux comparisons. Something has to be off right? Curious if anyone is able to reproduce these results.
Small sample set aside, the performance differences here are much bigger than I’ve seen in previous linux comparisons. Something has to be off right? Curious if anyone is able to reproduce these results.
There are some security issues and poor defaults with FreeBSD, these issues are ultimately what made me swerve left for the time being until these issues are resolved by the FreeBSD security team and devs. It makes me sad, because in my opinion FreeBSD is holistically developed as a unit, so it flows together! It feels coherent and sane, unlike Linux distros which are a disparate parts that are fused into a singular thing. In a way that is pretty fucking metal that all these separate projects are fused into working Linux distros which for the most part are stable…Kinda like a multicellular organism.
Yeah, honestly, it does sound like you have a good idea of where to start at least in terms of either learning Gentoo or FreeBSD. Purchasing recent/old but capable hardware that won’t put your current hardware at risk of getting borked due to experimentation, is for the best (as long as it won’t hurt the old pocketbook). I wouldn’t choose anything Apple because that hardware can be particularly annoying when it comes to driver support and the like, but if you want to live on the wild side. It’s your life and you can have all that smoke, because I can’t imagine the troubleshooting is going to be much fun.
For my part, I plan on learning about Gentoo in a sane timeframe because there is literally no hurry, my spare laptop is recent enough that compiling won’t take long and it will be supported by Gentoo. I love the idea of being able to set specific compiler flags within the package manager that automatically compile programs based on those user designated flags. I’ve wanted to test the viability of stripping systemd out of my life for a while now, openrc (which Gentoo uses as an init service) seems pretty cool and simple. The Gentoo Handbook is okay in terms of describing the process of installing Gentoo…So I hope after reading it several times, I will find the courage to actually install it on my spare laptop. ROFL As right now, it has Solus on it and that is a usability dream.
Oh wow, Solus is something I have never heard of. Or even if I did, I don’t remember. I gave it a quick glance, I it’s a Linux distro, so nothing too niche, right? Why did you pick it? I’d really love to find some blogs where people write on their daily experience with some things Linux. (I’m trying to start one, we’ll see how it goes.)
MacBook Air M1, it should mostly work with Asahi Linux project. The hardware is really impressive. I thought of getting a modern ThinkPad instead, but it’s just an ugly heavy moist machine in comparison. From a laptop, I don’t need a tank. I have that tank in my primary desktop computer. A laptop is more of a lightweight toy to me. So that was my thinking behind the MacBook Air M1 running Gentoo idea. I expect it to be very well supported as it’s probably the best value you can get (assuming used, and assuming 10/10 repeatability is not a concern).
I have a used Microsoft Surface RT3 (they would become Go line with the next model) running Arch Linux. I don’t even consider that device to sport Gentoo. I’m not well versed with Gentoo, but I remember you can actually compile from another machine, so theoretically I can use Gentoo even on a Raspberry Pi (well, that Surface I mentioned isn’t really far from my Raspberry Pi 2B). But to get there, I need to learn all those things :) It’s more like a chicken and egg problem now. I have a somewhat powerful PC (if we can call a quad core Intel i7 that), which I could use as a Gentoo compile machine. But it runs Arch and it’s my primary machine, so migrating it to Gentoo would not be very easy.
Theoretically, an M1 Air is even more powerful than that. So, a perfect storm. All that is theoretical at this point though :)