Subj : Re: What's Your Go-to OS
To : neoshock
From : Arelor
Date : Tue Feb 18 2025 09:08 am
Re: Re: What's Your Go-to OS
By: neoshock to Arelor on Sun Feb 16 2025 01:34 pm
> Yes, I agree. Originally Alpine seemed like was something I was going to
> switch all my containers, however it looks with the amount of work needing
> to get some projects working may not be worth the time. I might however use
> Alpine for simple services like Samba and ssh. All my other containers would
> mount those file shares. This allows me only needing to mount to one samba
> server to transfer files if need, rather than need to mount multiple samba
> servers on on desktop.
Depending on what you are doing, I find maintaining a multi-stack network sucks balls.
Say you are operating a server farm. Screw that, let's say you are operating a big homelab (with 20 machines or so). If you are serious you might be using some configuration management scheme so you can manage your farm semi-automatically instead of having to go through every one of your machines everytime you need to push an upgrade or whatever.
If you are using something such as Sake you need to define which tasks you want your configuration management solution to do. Stuff like defining an upgrade task that does apt update and apt upgrade on all your Debian-like machines. Usually that is easy enough.
Then you realize you have an Alma Linux machine, and an Alpine machine, and this NetBSD over there, and a virtual router with some goddamn proprietary firmware. This means your instruction starts looking like (pseudocode follows:)
upgrade () {
if system is debian then do apt-get stuff
else if system is alma linux then do dnf stuff
if system is OpenBSD then do syspach and pkg_add stuff
........
}
This gets out of hand very quickly. Some automation solutions suffer this less than others, but still...
So, in practice, I tend to recommend using as few platforms as possible just because it makes management suck much less. This means I tend to use a small number of operating systems for my VMs and containers (usually Devuan when I need Linux, OpenBSD when I don't) and exceptions exist only when there is no way arround it.
Just saying because if you have more than 5 machines then you might consider thinning your stack rather than adding more Linux distributions to the mix.
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