this post was submitted on 11 May 2024
87 points (100.0% liked)

Free and Open Source Software

17515 readers
277 users here now

If it's free and open source and it's also software, it can be discussed here. Subcommunity of Technology.


This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

I have a 1TB harddrive on my desktop computer that isn't doing much of anything, so I'd like to dual-boot something "interesting". Suggestions are greatly appreciated, so let me know what y'all find intriguing/interesting/frustrating/innovative.

The logo is just for attention, but EFF is a great cause that we should all support.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 month ago (3 children)

You want to try something interesting but want to dual-boot. That last bit could be difficult or "impossible" but using a VM or running from USB stick are options.

  • https://www.haiku-os.org I've run it from USB stick on some older laptop.
  • https://chimera-linux.org FreeBSD user-land with a Linux kernel.
  • https://nomadbsd.org FreeBSD which can be run from USB stick with persistent storage. Has a version with ZFS support.
  • https://nixos.org Very interesting concept.
  • https://www.gobolinux.org GoboLinux is an alternative Linux distribution which redefines the entire filesystem hierarchy. Doesn't seem up to date but quite interesting. If I remember well you can have different versions of software installed at the same time. Let's say (making this up) Bash 1.1, 3.1 and 5.2
  • https://bedrocklinux.org Bedrock Linux is a meta Linux distribution which allows users to mix-and-match components from other, typically incompatible distributions.
[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 month ago (2 children)

I was also going to suggest Haiku. It’s the spiritual successor to BeOs. I was always disappointed that didn’t become more popular.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 month ago

Yes. Haiku is quite light weight, small and snappy. One drawback is that it has not yet multi user implemented (everything still runs as root! But so do old DOS flavors :-) ) but imho it is fun to play with and check which software packages it has (it has several emulators packaged).

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago

BeOS on my old PowerPC blew my mind in the late 90s.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago

GhostBSD My pre-coffee self mistyped. I have a separate drive with my daily drive OS on their (Mint), and I have an additional separate drive that I'd like to do something interesting on. These are fun suggestions, so thank you!

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago

I feel like Talos Linux is NixOS applied to a very specific purpose: kubernetes.
I've recently been playing with kubernetes, and talos linux feels like cheating.

I think NixOS could has a huge market unexplored of server side deployments. Install NixOS, connect to the fresh install via a CLI tool, apply the patches (flakes?), and have an easy way to reset to base NixOS when you make a mistake so you can try a different set of patches.
All from the cli, all with idempotent config files.