On Tue, 15 Feb 2011 19:33 -0700, "Michael Farnbach" <noble.obl...@gmail.com> wrote: > As with most answers, this one depends on a few things... > > 3. You can run the answers for #2 for this, or the full distros that > they > come from in a minimal mode. But for "stay out of the way" while > running the > latest obscure packages, if you know what you are doing there's > nothing > better than Gentoo -- but you have to be willing to do your own work.
Sorry for the late reply but I have to say that I switched from Gentoo to Source Mage late in 2005 and never looked back once. Source Mage saved me a lot of mucking about and has only got better since. While I'm writing... > 4. Sure, Plan9, old school FreeDOS, Qnix, Hurd, one of the BSD's ... I > dunno .. what is the most "hurt me plenty" distro that is like a > light-weight camping adventure roughing it under a big blue sky? Qnix > and > Plan9 have the advantage of their own novel networking models. But for > real > bare bones, then there's a the OS's written in assembly ... MenuetOS, > Kolibri, Mike OS, BareMetalOS, etc... >From this perspective I see all the unixen as nearly the same, except they differ in that the BSDs are (I'm told) more hackable and less hassle to learn than the Gnu-powered systems. If you choose Plan 9 then once you understand how to approach it, (unlike modern unixen Asperger mentality won't work,) it's both a remarkably easy system to hack and a very powerful OS in the sense of enabling you to do remarkable things with little work. Extraordinary. Kolibri is cute if you can put up with things like a lack of copy and paste when entering ip addresses. Stray thought: Comparing Kolibri with Linux is like comparing Tinkerbell with Jabba the Hutt. That just popped into my head as I tried to find a concise comparison between the two. ;)
