Re: [dev] which minimal os

On Tue, 15 Feb 2011 19:33 -0700, "Michael Farnbach"
<noble.oblige_AT_gmail.com> wrote:
> As with most answers, this one depends on a few things...
>
> 3. You can run the answers for #2 for this, or the full distros that
> they
> come from in a minimal mode. But for "stay out of the way" while
> running the
> latest obscure packages, if you know what you are doing there's
> nothing
> better than Gentoo -- but you have to be willing to do your own work.

Sorry for the late reply but I have to say that I switched from Gentoo
to Source Mage late in 2005 and never looked back once. Source Mage
saved me a lot of mucking about and has only got better since.

While I'm writing...

> 4. Sure, Plan9, old school FreeDOS, Qnix, Hurd, one of the BSD's ... I
> dunno .. what is the most "hurt me plenty" distro that is like a
> light-weight camping adventure roughing it under a big blue sky? Qnix
> and
> Plan9 have the advantage of their own novel networking models. But for
> real
> bare bones, then there's a the OS's written in assembly ... MenuetOS,
> Kolibri, Mike OS, BareMetalOS, etc...

From this perspective I see all the unixen as nearly the same, except
they differ in that the BSDs are (I'm told) more hackable and less
hassle to learn than the Gnu-powered systems.

If you choose Plan 9 then once you understand how to approach it,
(unlike modern unixen Asperger mentality won't work,) it's both a
remarkably easy system to hack and a very powerful OS in the sense of
enabling you to do remarkable things with little work. Extraordinary.

Kolibri is cute if you can put up with things like a lack of copy and
paste when entering ip addresses. Stray thought: Comparing Kolibri with
Linux is like comparing Tinkerbell with Jabba the Hutt. That just popped
into my head as I tried to find a concise comparison between the two. ;)
Received on Fri Feb 18 2011 - 00:40:56 CET