My Linux Experience - Introduction

This is a short set of experience guides with various Linux distributions.

Some are very short.

My Linux experience is mostly 10 years or so of SUSE Enterprise Linux (SLES) ranging from SLES8 through SLES11 with various service packs in between.

We used Linux for corporate and customer sales, delivering software- based systems using SLES as the server operating system. It was very successful in that context, with few to no troublesome bugs.

SLES is a good, stable system but it suffers from over engineering (too many graphical user interfaces, very large minimum install size, complicated and multiple package installers, and so on). It is also an “enterprise” Linux where stability is much more highly valued than having the latest versions. And, unfortunately, too much new software is written assuming you have the latest version of just about anything.

My goal with Linux distributions was to find something along the lines of OpenBSD with respect to

• minimum install size, 500MB or so
• flexible enough to allow, or omit, X11 (or Wayland) graphics
• all the current compilers and SCM tools
• well documented
• documented auto-install process
• supports many third-party packages (or lets me build some)
• not so much security (iptables etc) as I’m running standalone

The end-use was for numeric processing for codes that I can’t port to OpenBSD.

The key values of a numeric-processing operating system are:

• low overhead in support processes like NTP, system management, logging
• support current compilers like LLVM and hardware like AVX512
• low “noise” in operations, where run-to-run variance is always very low
• support the memory, storage, network and processing demands of software

What I found is detailed in these pages.

Links:

Distrowatch

OpenBSD Numerics | My Linux Experience | Experience with Alpine Linux | Experience with Clear Linux