jde3

You need to also keep in mind here that Desktop Linux does not matter. At all. Nobody cares.. MacOS is Unix on the desktop. Get use to it. I know we all have our fav distros and stuff but in the real world desktop linux doesn't really matter. The only thing that matters is the server and that will be *and is now* RHEL.. a commercial distro from IBM for all case and purposes. RHEL and RHEL clones prob have 70% dominance in the market. - it's dangerous and a bad thing. I don't think we will ever go back to a major server distro being maintained by a volunteer community.. but Debian has the best chance of that as it has some business acceptance. FreeBSD is also volunteer run and it likewise has a lot of random deployments in enterprise. You have to understand the people that make these decisions are upper management and they don't know a bash shell from a ham sandwich. They just run what the Dell rep suggests to them or they seen some ad in a magazine when they were on a flight. Technical people are NOT in control of this question.. and if they were we all prob wouldn't even be using Linux.. we'd be using Illumos.

You'll also want to view all process too including system and kernel processes.

As a sysadmin who has worked on Linux/Unix systems for decades I use.. FreeBSD on the server: It's remarkably simple, it's fast, it's highly flexable and it's got a lot of features Linux doesn't have or doesn't have well implemented. (ZFS, Jails, Ports, PF, Boot Enviroments and DTrace) FreeBSD makes a very nice production environment. Gentoo is the closest thing to FreeBSD in the Linux world but FreeBSD ships stable binaries as well as ports and it's build system is the same as it's package system.. They also do backports and it's backwards API compatible. So an install has a very long shelf life as it's easily upgradable and even FreeBSD 4 can be jailed on FreeBSD 13. Yes, it is Unix and not Linux and that means sometimes technicians need more training time but it is a far easier production world to live in and takes less system engineering time to maintain. Simplicity means solving problems faster and getting more work done. MacOS on the desktop: It *is* a Unix distro so this counts. Since I work on systems all day, I get very tired of working on them at home too. I want the least amount of headache on the desktop I can get and I've found that is MacOS. Being commercial Unix, there is a cost to it but I feel it's worth it. If I had to use Linux: I'd use Alpine and Gentoo due to simplicity and flexibility. (or Ubuntu if I just don't care and want something to work now) My least favorite distro to work on is RHEL, it's just needlessly complicated and stupid. I don't have to tell anyone here.. major version RHEL upgrades are absolute hell because they change so much of the system version to version and backport nothing. It has a few nice high level tools but that does not out weigh it's complexity.

I think I read somewhere that only 8% of Linux code is actually made by individuals anymore and most of it is made by IBM.. through their shell company RedHat. Let me be very clear here... You _do not_ want Big Blue in charge of your OS. I've seen that world before and it wasn't good. Long live Ubuntu.

Traitor. lol No, you don't need to use MS because it's "easy". This is how you get Azure AD, and everything else MS makes you get growing your IT budget to stupid levels. Zimbra can do 50 ppl email off a VPS for less than $5 a month.

No, that was AT&T Bell Labs. - Yes, Linux was a response to that and.. It's a long story but you can get a first hand account here. Oracle though is prob the most sue happy company on earth. They are also the only company that I know of that "un-open sourced" an Operating system (Solaris),

Same but replace PLEX with Jellyfin or Emby. Plex has privacy issues.

Well you'll need a static IP. Oracle has a terrible reputation in the industry. (for good reason) - I'd still recommend shopping around.. but, if the price is right from Oracle.. : shrug : Just watch for loopholes and vendor lockin.

One is an emulated GPU driver that passes commands to the real hardware. The other, passthrough, is isolating the hardware from the host to use the guest hardware drivers directly. I don't think so. If you really want MacOS use a Mac.. in the very least you'll want AMD graphics. MacOS VM's will be dead in a few years when apple drops support for x86.

Like I mentioned before, any steam game is going to use the Ubuntu chroot shipped in steam. So 90% of all distros would be pretty similar unless you run steam with native libs.. at that point there is a lot more to tweak. You could try the "less is more" option (gain performance by having your computer do less stuff) like Alpine. Or you could take the compile time optimized "tight code" path of Gentoo or Clear Linux. If you just don't want to worry about it and want as little hassle as possible.. use Ubuntu as that is what Steam uses.

Hey Linux Northwest, I use to go to that. Fedora is a horrible distro. It's bleeding edge RHEL code and all of IBM/RedHat's garbage ideas and expanding complexity (that is intentional to drive the RHEL support market) land there first.. I recommend avoiding it at all costs. If you really want to go fast.. Gentoo can be compiled for link time optimizations. (similar to Intel's Clear Linux) https://github.com/InBetweenNames/gentooLTO It works and it's fast but not for the faint of heart. You will have problems, this will break programs.. You also have to build all the steam libraries to use static built system libraries and not the Ubuntu chroot steam ships with. Phoronix (I know..) has some results on this. https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTI5ODE It might also be possible to ditch the GNU bloat and use the Musl libc (like Alpine Linux does) but I haven't tried it yet. Both of those vectors tho would be as balls to the wall fast as you can go.

Linux at one time was a clone of Unix, however in the past 10 years it's been drifting further away from that. Hopefully they will get back on track at some point and remember.. like Apple has, that being true to Unix's methods is a good thing and it offers easier interoperability across Unix systems. I don't hold a lot of hope for them though. Example: ifconfig has existed since 1983 and was released in 4.2 BSD -- Yet, Linux (actually it's the GNU) has abandoned this with ip (a command name that makes no sense because not all networks are ip based) -- Every other flavor of Unix that wanted to add changes or extensions to ifconfig have fixed ifconfig, (such as FreeBSD and MacOS that have wifi in ifconfig) where as Linux replaced it. It's not a good sign.. There are dozens of examples like this. It's a sad day when Apple, the maker of cell phones, has a more Unix like OS than Linux.

This is OT some but how do you get a degree in systems engineering without learning Linux? - That feels strange to me and understand it's not a critique on you but on your school.. I'd set this as a #1 priority for you in self learning.

In the old days ZFS may not be able to be imported in read write because of differing feature flags on the filesystem. Since the source code re-organization in OpenZFS 2.0 all OS's that support ZFS use the same source. So.. FreeBSD, Linux, Illumos (formerly Solaris), MacOS and Windows with modern ZFS installed should be able to import any pool. This is super nice and I think the only other filesystem that is supported by so many OS's is Fat32. It makes it actually plausible to use ZFS on USB disks.

Do they call it QEMU? hmm.. (QEMU is an emulator and alone would take about 30 minutes to boot Windows 10.) About the world of hypervisors: Almost all hypervisors are built around Intel / AMD's vritulazation engines. These are the components that are doing a lot of work. There are the commercial hypervisors. VMWare, VirtualBox, HtyperV and there is also Xen still out there. They are very full featured but I'm not going to talk a lot about these as you can find information out there. Linux's is ordinarily called KVM and it is a combination of things. QEMU, Libvirt and the kernel bits KVM. Qemu runs 16bit boot code and other emulated machine features, it is a full emulator and can emulate x86 on arm and the like but for KVM it serves a minimal role as emulation is slow.. And Libvirt is the management tools for this for configuring the VM it's virtual hardware etc.. Everything Linux uses KVM. It uses several virtual disk container formats that are mostly loopback files on top of other filesystems. You can think of it like a bunch of different things that build up to a full featured hypervisor.. tho is has limited frontends by itself. Maybe Apache Tomcat would be a good analogue. BHyve is FreeBSD's native hypervisor and it can use libvirt. At least there is some support for bhyve in libvirt. It has no emulation layer making it a minimal or light weight hypervisor hence it's requirement for only booting EFI OS's and it's limited support for emulated (slow) hardware.. It's why you sometimes have a more complicated guest install.. because it only supports doing things the fastest way damn the torpedoes..The reason for this is it serves a different role were a simplified hypervisor is desired. "Just the hypervisor ma'am." It typically uses ZFS as a virtual disk container giving it fewer filesystem layers and fast direct I/O to the disk. It's also been ported to MacOS and Illumos (Solaris) due to it's more simple implementation (Perhaps there is a Linux port as well?). You could think of it like lighttpd or nginx. One is neither better or worse really than the other it just depends on your requirement needs and what you are trying to accomplish. It also really highlights the different design philosophy of the two OS's. Where Linux takes the layered approach building on dozens of existing technologies with lots of support and FreeBSD builds a purpose built custom performant solution.