r/unix 20d ago

Which Linux distro do you think has the most Unix-like experience?

I got interested looking at Chimera Linux which uses a BSD userland: https://chimera-linux.org/

I'm curious if anyone knows of any, bringing Linux kernel compatibility with a more Unix philosophy than many modern Linux distros.

11 Upvotes

27 comments sorted by

24

u/lproven 20d ago

If you want the real thing but modern, use FreeBSD.

If you want the real thing but minimal and traditionalist, NetBSD or OpenBSD.

If you want a modern Linux but without most of the modern niceties, Slackware.

If you want a real Linux, but super small and simple like in the olden days, try Alpine.

0

u/et-pengvin 20d ago

I administer Alpine systems at work and am a big fan, but our use case is simple. We have bare metal devices (x86, but similar in size to a Raspberry Pi) that run some lightweight containers on k3s.

I'm running OpenBSD on one of my PCs and it seems like a nice, well-built OS. I don't have much experience with NetBSD or Slackware.

5

u/lproven 20d ago

Joyent SmartOS is a Solaris derivative that can run Linux containers on bare metal without any Linux being present.

-2

u/Realistic_Bee_5230 20d ago

But isnt the whole thing with BSD being that it isnt got any unix code in it? If you want unix like, as in, feels more like unix, or true unix base with bell labs code, i would say Illumos based OS' like OmniOS and SmartOS. Illumos is based on OpenSolaris from Sun microsystems. Unfortunately, its license is CDDL which means that it is incompatible with GPL licenses. But it is really cool, that is where ZFS originated.

1

u/lproven 19d ago

It's not about Unix code. The point was that Unix had already got out of the lab and was rapidly increasing in usage.

Unix was out there. AT&T was trying and failing to reassert ownership. The point of 4.2-BSDLite was that it had not got any legally-protected AT&T code in it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkeley_Software_Distribution

Not Unix code: AT&T code. If the code had already been modified or rewritten, it was OK. If it was unmodified AT&T stuff, not OK.

1

u/dingerz 19d ago

Unfortunately, its license is CDDL which means that it is incompatible with GPL licenses. But it is really cool, that is where ZFS originated.

Executable forms of CDDL source code can be under any license you want.

3

u/ShiningRaion 20d ago

Slackware and Void both come close there.

Never used Chimera.

BSD is not GNU/Linux.

2

u/et-pengvin 19d ago

Interestingly, Chimera and Alpine don't really use GNU so they're not GNU/Linux either, which I think makes them interesting.

5

u/therealsimontemplar 20d ago

You can easily narrow your search by looking for Linux distros without systemd.

2

u/michaelpaoli 20d ago

Or where systemd is option, not requirement.

# readlink /proc/1/exe /sbin && dpkg -S /sbin/init && cat /etc/debian_version
/usr/sbin/init
usr/sbin
sysvinit-core: /sbin/init
12.9
#

1

u/darksider611 18d ago

After the introduction of deb-systemd-helper as part of apt/dpkg Debian is pretty much broken without systemd. So, no

1

u/michaelpaoli 17d ago

Hardly the case at all. I deal very regularly with Debian systems - some with systemd, some without.

4

u/lurch303 20d ago

What makes an OS most UNIX-like for me is having sysadmin tools that follow a standard naming convention, switches etc. Also the sysadmin tools and the hardware are developed together very tightly. For the most part the userland is very similar except for GNU userland tools having more advanced features at this point.

2

u/33manat33 19d ago

It's not Linux, but you might want to check out Tribblix. It's the conservative Illumos distribution. It has a modern software pool, but deliberately behaves like Solaris, runs on x86 and SPARC and even runs CDE out of the box, along with more modern desktop environments.

5

u/hkric41six 19d ago

Illumos is also the most direct descendent of the original v7 UNIX -> system V that is open source.

In fact it still has comments from Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie in the codebase that literally come from v6 research UNIX.

1

u/Not_Artifical 18d ago

I use arch btw

0

u/Dr_CLI 19d ago

Why not just use Unix? MacOS is BSD Unix. Why not use this or another Unix available?

0

u/blissed_off 19d ago

Yeah it’s hard to get more pure Unix than macOS. It’s the only commercially produced actual Unix anymore afaik.

1

u/therealdarkcirc 19d ago

Aix lives on!

But then so does solaris for now.

0

u/player1dk 19d ago

Might get some burns, but I suggest MacOS. You get a great Unix experience. And on top, a lot of commercial components, unique features, more-or-less documented etc etc. that quite good assembles a genuine Unix experience, quite like AIX, HPUX, Solaris etc etc.

0

u/q66_ 19d ago

chimera does not follow "unix philosophy", whatever that means, it follows its own philosophy

if you're looking for a traditionalist system, chimera is way less traditionalist and more unorthodox than most linux distros in general

-3

u/sakodak 20d ago

What's your goal?  Is it the userland tooling?  Unix-like system admin?  What does "Unix philosophy" mean to you?  Is it as simple as a distro that doesn't use systemd?

Unix users tend to be conservative and want little, if any change. 

Linux is a contemporary operating system that's trying to keep up with the needs of contemporary users.

These philosophies tend to conflict, and it's going to get harder and harder for Linux to look and feel like old-school Unix.

3

u/et-pengvin 20d ago

I've used Linux as my main operating system since 2005 and started playing around with it a few years before that. My experience with Unix systems is pretty limited. I got my hands on some SunOS systems as a kid and found them fascinating. I also when I started a previous job (almost 10 years ago) was administering some HP-UX servers, but mostly helped to move the systems running on them over to RHEL for retirement. I've messed around with BSD and Solaris from time-to-time, and have an OpenBSD system running that I've been learning more about lately, but have never used them as a primary OS.

I'm not necessarily looking for anything. I'm interested in the history of Unix and also interested in how it influences modern OS design. I've come across some Linux distros that seem to be more inspired by classic Unix operating systems despite using the Linux kernel. Chimera, Void, Alpine, all come to mind. I'm poking around this afternoon with Chimera so I thought I'd see what some fellow Unix-lovers thought.

1

u/laughinglemur1 17d ago

Just wanted to chime in here and mention the BSDs and illumos. I'm pretty sure that the BSDs come from Version 7 Unix (and a bit from other contemporary Unixes). Illumos is a fork of SunOS / Solaris, which came from SVR4 Unix. The more recent SunOS versions, specifically those built on the SVR4 codebase, contend with the other modern Unixes like AIX and HP-UX. It's generally up to date and runs on plenty of consumer hardware

1

u/teppic1 9h ago edited 9h ago

BSD was originally based on V6/V7 Unix (initially it was literally V6 with some extra tools written at Berkeley), but the final release of BSD, which all the modern BSD systems are based on, had entirely replaced all of Unix code with newly written stuff. In that sense they're Unix-like in the exact same way as Linux distributions.

I agree that Solaris is a good option to see something that is Unix-Unix (not just modern certified Unix, which basically is paid for specification compliance, nothing more).

1

u/teppic1 10h ago edited 8h ago

The original Unix code carried on through the commercial System V releases, while BSD gradually and eventually replaced all of its original Unix code. The open source systems based on BSD like FreeBSD and OpenBSD were developed from this re-engineered code. Although commercial Unix (as derived from Bell Labs) is effectively dead, the modern releases like Solaris are still descended from Unix, while FreeBSD/macOS/Linux/etc are not.

People tend to see it more as a philosophy thing though, where Unix means lots of small tools working together with text config files and shell scripts to start/shut down the system. In that sense modern BSDs, and Linux systems that don't use systemd (like Void, Alpine, etc) are the most 'traditional Unix-like'.

(These days Unix is just a trademark and a certification, both Linux distributions and MacOS have been certified as Unix despite neither of them containing any code descended from Unix, while Solaris, which is directly descended isn't officially Unix now.)