Manjaro, EndeavourOS and CachyOS: The Arch Derivatives Compared
They all give you Arch without the manual install, and then they differ on the one thing that matters most — whether you are getting packages from Arch's repositories or…
The BSDs: FreeBSD, OpenBSD and NetBSD, for Linux People
Not distributions of a kernel but complete operating systems, developed as a single thing, under a licence that lets anyone ship them without giving anything back. What that actually changes,…
Slackware: The Oldest One Still Standing
The last stable release was in February 2022, which sounds like abandonment and is not — the development branch was updated yesterday. Here is what Slackware actually is, and the…
Container Host Distributions: Fedora CoreOS, Flatcar and Talos
Server operating systems that exist only to run containers. No package manager to speak of, no SSH in one case, and updates that arrive as a whole new image —…
NixOS: A Machine You Describe Rather Than Configure
One file defines the whole system, every change is a new generation you can boot back into, and nothing is installed the usual way. The genuine advantages, the flakes question,…
Void Linux: Rolling, Independent, and Not systemd
Its own package manager, runit instead of systemd, and a choice of glibc or musl. What Void does well, the install images that are eighteen months old, and who it…
Zorin OS and elementary OS: The Two Opinionated Desktops
Both are Ubuntu LTS underneath and both are aimed at people arriving from Windows or macOS — with opposite philosophies. What each actually gives you, what the paid editions add,…
Gentoo: Compiling Everything, and Why You Might Not Have To
USE flags are the real reason to run Gentoo, not speed. What Portage actually does, the official binary packages that changed the trade-off, and an honest account of the time…
Alpine Linux: Small, Fast, and Not Quite Like the Others
The distribution most of your containers are already built on. What musl and busybox change, the support window people misread, and the DNS behaviour that breaks things in Kubernetes.
Immutable and Atomic Distributions: What You Give Up, and Get Back
Read-only system files, updates that apply completely or not at all, and a previous version you can always boot back into. How Fedora Atomic, openSUSE Aeon and NixOS differ, and…