💾 Archived View for tilde.team › ~bh › gemlog › 013_2022-07-16.gmi captured on 2023-04-20 at 00:39:14. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
⬅️ Previous capture (2023-03-20)
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Like many nerds, I have a single board computer that does a couple of things, from a web server, a backup server, to a couple of services, such as dnscrypt-proxy server, Tor onion services, I2P floodfill router and eepsite, SearXNG meta search aggregator, etc. The thing is, that single board is called LattePanda, whose processor is an Intel Cherry Trail, which is renowned for having a 32-bit UEFI and a 64-bit architecture that support 64-bit OS.
You know, right! That's (one of) the most stupid design, which is well supported by Windows 10, but deemed virtually unusable for a single board computer to have a full-fledged Windows running on it. Of course, every wannabe but sane sysadmin want to have their servers run on a Unix(-like) operating system.
Actually, I first wanted to install FreeBSD on that single board, but FreeBSD does not support chainloading into 64-bit OS from 32-bit UEFI (as of 2022). And then I tried with OpenBSD, which successfully booted into to OS with no problem, but lacks the Wi-fi driver. I'm not sure if I can and I want to find the module and play around further with OpenBSD, because while it looks promising, it shows itself as the most unfamiliar OS from what I have tried. I promise I will try to play more with it on some more..."crash and burn" machine, but for the server I need something familiar, and I don't seem to be able to read through the documentation in a very short time.
The next option I tried was, you guessed it, Arch. Or to be exact, EndeavourOS. That system run smoothly for a few months, until a rolling release shows its disadvantage: after an update, the system broke. Indeed, "patch the shit", "send a pull request", man, I'm not a professional specialist in tech and I don't earn from any jobs in tech, be it development or administration. I'm just a hobbyist and I don't want to suffer from unpredictable breaking changes and maintaining a very niche single board computer, I bought it because it's the cheapest deal at that time.
I now have three remaining options: Gentoo, Alpine, or something new, Void. I tried Alpine before and it's not the most confortable experience, I tried Gentoo 15 years ago as the first distro when I first exposed to Linux, and it left me traumas. I am left with the remaining option, which I also like to test musl and runit, and then distro-hop. But the system is too stable that I have been using it for over a year now and there's no meltdown significant enough that makes me want to switch.
Void came to me as an unanticipated option and saved me some time from the problem with stupid UEFI. I would have tried Gentoo if I know it supports musl and I'm starting to have a distaste for `runit` and `xbps` in favor of `OpenRC` and `emerge`. It was a trial take but it stayed as a very stable distro that, although with some distastes, no loger make me want to switch to another distro, because it would be a very painful trade-off of a stable server for something unforeseenable.