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 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 (Wikipedia's list). Links to a few of them: