====== Linux ======

I've worked with most of the Redhat variants in the past and have a passing familiarity with a number of others but lately I've found myself using Alpine a lot more. Now days the only real use I have for Linux is for a few Docker things. Hopefully that changes as podman on FreeBSD matures. FreeBSD has jails and bhyve which I use often but there are some projects out there that distribute for docker only. I'm not a big fan of Docker - it has it's place but there are a LOT of downsides as well (really calls for a separate post someday).

Alpine is a great minimalist solution that relies heavily on [[https://busybox.net|busybox]]. I get to docker functionality by spinning up an Alpine vm in Bhyve on a FreeBSD system and then run docker in that alpine instance. Works great.

Alpine does have a few eccentricities you will need to overcome. First and foremost is its issues with DNS. See [[https://bell-sw.com/blog/how-to-deal-with-alpine-dns-issues/]] for a discussion. Essentially it's broken due to choices by musl that are not made in glibc. You will want to install dnsmasq as a DNS caching server.


====== Distributions ======

There are many Linux distributions ([[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Linux_distributions|Wikipedia's list]]). Links to a few of them:

  * [[https://alpinelinux.org|Alpine Linux]]
  * [[https://archlinux.org|Arch Linux]]
  * [[https://almalinux.org|AlmaLinux]] - currently my preferred RedHat flavor
  * [[https://debian.org|Debian Linux]]
  * [[https://gentoo.org|Gentoo Linux]]
  * [[https://kali.org|Kali Linux]] - Debian based InfoSec tools
  * [[https://rockylinux.org|Rocky Linux]]
  * [[https://suse.com|Suse]]
  * [[https://ubuntu.com|Ubuntu]]