> If I might make some counter-arguments to some of these
Of course :)
> A lot of the points of differentiation in terms of plumbing layers are slowly eroding away, systemd helped a lot by standardizing things around service files as opposed to the patchwork of init scripts (and OpenRC and everyone else scripts)
It has been my experience that systemd has been inconsistent from one version of systemd to the next. I've given systemd a fair shake, and even those people who swear that it's the bees' knees haven't been able to help me figure out how to work around somewhat silly issues (in other words, they shouldn't have been telling me how easy it is if they can't even illustrate its ease themselves).
> I don't know about BSD's being lighter weight than a Linux system, but I don't really know what your baesline of light weight is (Ubuntu? Debian? Arch? Gentoo?)
You can't really compare a BSD, or all of the three major direct BSDs, with the best of each Linux distro. Sure, Nix is better at being deterministic, and Debian is much better than the others about not changing gratuitously, and Gentoo can easily rebuild everything, but what happens when you need all of those things in once place?
By lightweight, I mean that I can literally run NetBSD on a VAXstation with 24 megs of RAM, or a Mac LC III+ with 36 megs (http://elsie.zia.io/), where I literally compile everything besides the OS from source, on those machines. Sure, perl takes more than a week, but they work.
This has other benefits: I can easily, without much fuss, run everything I need for a tinc tunnel in 128 megs with tmpfs for logs and no swap on an appliance-like device. It's surprisingly easy to do this starting with the default OS, whereas small Linux systems are often unrecognizable compared with their "normal" distro counterparts.
> Gentoo stands out as probably the easiest one in that regard, your entire system can be rebuilt with "emerge -e world"
Exactly. I love that. It's great, and it'd be wonderful if that were more widespread in other Linux distros.
OTOH, NetBSD takes it further: you can build NetBSD for any architecture on any other so long as you're running a reasonably Unix-like OS with a reasonably relevant compiler.
So, again, Linux in general has so many nice things, but if you want them all in the same place, in the same distro, you're kinda out of luck.
Of course :)
> A lot of the points of differentiation in terms of plumbing layers are slowly eroding away, systemd helped a lot by standardizing things around service files as opposed to the patchwork of init scripts (and OpenRC and everyone else scripts)
It has been my experience that systemd has been inconsistent from one version of systemd to the next. I've given systemd a fair shake, and even those people who swear that it's the bees' knees haven't been able to help me figure out how to work around somewhat silly issues (in other words, they shouldn't have been telling me how easy it is if they can't even illustrate its ease themselves).
> I don't know about BSD's being lighter weight than a Linux system, but I don't really know what your baesline of light weight is (Ubuntu? Debian? Arch? Gentoo?)
You can't really compare a BSD, or all of the three major direct BSDs, with the best of each Linux distro. Sure, Nix is better at being deterministic, and Debian is much better than the others about not changing gratuitously, and Gentoo can easily rebuild everything, but what happens when you need all of those things in once place?
By lightweight, I mean that I can literally run NetBSD on a VAXstation with 24 megs of RAM, or a Mac LC III+ with 36 megs (http://elsie.zia.io/), where I literally compile everything besides the OS from source, on those machines. Sure, perl takes more than a week, but they work.
This has other benefits: I can easily, without much fuss, run everything I need for a tinc tunnel in 128 megs with tmpfs for logs and no swap on an appliance-like device. It's surprisingly easy to do this starting with the default OS, whereas small Linux systems are often unrecognizable compared with their "normal" distro counterparts.
> Gentoo stands out as probably the easiest one in that regard, your entire system can be rebuilt with "emerge -e world"
Exactly. I love that. It's great, and it'd be wonderful if that were more widespread in other Linux distros.
OTOH, NetBSD takes it further: you can build NetBSD for any architecture on any other so long as you're running a reasonably Unix-like OS with a reasonably relevant compiler.
So, again, Linux in general has so many nice things, but if you want them all in the same place, in the same distro, you're kinda out of luck.