Nah, that wasn't a hissy fit.... :-) Actually useful information for me.

News to me too! I'd heard of Alien Bob's build scripts, but never knew that he did precompiled packages. Of course, expecting the Slackware site to mention either would be asking too much…

And I get so tired of Slackers telling me that Slackware will teach me how everything works. I don't want to know how everything works — I've got a life — I can change a tap washer, but if my boiler needs repair I call the plumber

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Slackware teaches you how Slackware works, Gentoo teaches you how Gentoo works, Arch teaches you how Arch works. If you want to know how Linux works, install Linux From Scratch.

I am with you David - I don't really care anymore. I was a long time Gentoo user and anymore just want things to work...

Yes, I fall into that category as well these days: I just want things to work.

That being said, if I need to do something for example in a bash shell, it would be nice to be able to find the tools I need easily. For example, if system commands are renamed or if files are not where I'm used to them being with a "standard-like" Unix, it will take more time, more researching, more posting questions on forums, etc... ;-)

For example, I have been having trouble with Activity Monitor on my mac. The processes list showing disk and network usage does not update -- completely frozen. So I wanted to do some debugging to see if it was a hardware problem (as arrogantly and patronizingly spewed to me by some unaware Apple fan boy who thinks he's the greatest thing since sliced bread. I wanted to figure out how to correlate the process and the command being run in that process with CPU or disk usage. So I looked at "top" and "ps" and "iostat".

What I could do with "iostat -p" on Unix/Linux I could not do on macOS. I spend hours reading man pages, posting questions, etc. I don't mind learning, but it's just a question of time these days.

Also concomitant to this problem, I started disabling extensions and plug-ins. macOS is really not Unix-like at all (not a criticism) in the sense that the entire structure of services, launch daemons, etc. is completely different. OK, fine. My point is that I had to get into the details to figure out how to manually verify that I did not have conflicting libraries installed and so forth. It took a lot of time.

So in trying to find a Linux platform, I would like to find one that feels the most like Unix because I'm familiar with that the most. I'm not trying to be a purist, zealot or critic of anything.
I know there will be some level of "delta" between systems. But it sure would be nice to find one that feels familiar.

;-)

And thanks again for all your replies. I'm writing down notes so I can go investigate your suggestions and see what works best for me....

It depends on what do you call "UNIX"


IMHO: modern Unixies are too far from "classic", even Solaris is too far: SMF is good, solid and consistent thing, but XML manifests are not classic UNIX things, are they?

If we call UNIX something simple, documented and easy to understand, then the most classic unix nowadays is OpenBSD It is s dead-simple system: installation consists of several .tgz files. Boot process and services are based on shell scripts. Every tool, driver and file has very good documentation, and this documentation is man. No outdated "how-tos", no "wikis" (like in many Linux distros) just plain old mans.

In Linux world many things are complex (but much more powerful that way): systemd instead of "rc", pulseaudio instead of /dev/dsp, and GNU tools tend to have more options. Compare autotools to BSD .mk files, GRUB to classic boot loaders (GRUB config is so big, so people generate it using scripts!), even man page for bash is endless


But many users do not care about it because distro developers do a very good job to hide complexity.

Canonical Ubuntu and RedHat Fedora are good examples: you just insert DVD or flash drive, click "next" a couple of times, and you have desktop ready to be used.

Things are complex under the hood: here is how .deb packages (used by Ubuntu and Debian) work: https://www.debian.org/doc/debian-po...rolfields.html
Not so easy, but you have a nice frontend for all of that.

Slackware takes a different approach: it doesn't have dependency management, doesn't use systemd and GRUB but much closer (IMHO) to 30-years old UNIX. More manual work (in some cases), but easier to fix things.

It is up to you to decide: if you want Linux that "just works" try Ubuntu or Fedora. If you want to dive into system, but ready to read docs, try Debian. If you prefer to read bash scripts (instead of docs), try Slackware.

Once again: this is my IMHO. There are kernel hackers who are happy with Ubuntu and Fedora, so choosing a distro doesn't prevent you from understanding how things work.

It is hard to me to say something about desktop environment (I use window manager called CWM, and no desktop environment) but from what I heard from my friends: KDE, Gnome and XFCE are good and easy to use. Many distros are shipped with "default" DE, so you can use one bundled with your distro. This is a wise thing to do, because it is much easier to get help from community when you are using "default" one.

Good luck with Linux: the most popular unix-like system in 2020

Yes, I agree with you... especially about Solaris. Much has changed over the years.

I think I could describe my "vision" of what I need with a fairly concrete list. Sorry I didn't do this earlier. I am interested in being able to do the following with relative ease on a Linux system:

1. System administration to keep my system running and healthy without being a stud-factor sysadmin

2. Maybe some GUI administration utilities à la Apple System Preferences

3. Regular system back ups with relative ease. I can deal with rsync, but something GUI driven would be nice.

4. Ease of finding things such as system files or resources that I would need to view to debug.

5. Ease of modifying start up parameters, daemons, etc. without having to risk breaking something as a result of editing some "Unix" run script. Hopefully something that precludes me having to write shell scripts.

6. Configuration of multi-lingual input method editor or support for international languages. I gotta admit that Apple does a great job with this. Just add the language and it's available on the input source menu in the top menu bar. This has proven to be extremely difficult for me on both Windows and Linux.

The rest is simple I think. Libre Office, GIMP, Adobe Acrobat Reader DC, any of several photo editing programs (PhotoScape, Lightroom, etc.) are not a problem at all. Emacs is great, and I could always find an IDE if I need to write code again seriously (even Eclipse). Pretty much any language development environment runs on any Linux I've tried (everything from Scala, Lisp, Java, Erlang, Clojure, etc.). VMs work, etc.

Sorry, forgot to say.... I just feel that I'm short on time to "tinker" these days. Otherwise, I'd probably opt to go with the most bare bones system and have some fun getting it just as I want.

I have no strong preferences about package managers or stuff like that. It's more the resiliency, to have ability to mitigate investment of time to troubleshoot problems, resolve problems, etc.

My priorities are:
1. Getting a robust system that can replace my iMac... to move off Apple permanently is the medium- to long-term vision.

2. Have a second Linux system to use to play and learn.

Thanks to everyone who has contributed ideas.... Much appreciated.

Ubuntu is about as close to UNIX now as McDonald's is to a real burger..

In regards to any DE/WM being able to run on any Linux.. not entirely true for anything which jumped on the SystemD bandwagon (mostly just Gnome)..

Slackware may require 'tinkering' to setup but you'll end up with less fixing/troubleshooting as things generally don't change after you've set them.

My two cents.

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Thanks much. Information is much appreciated....

I agree with that. My system was essentially setup in 2010 and I didn't have to do much 'tinkering' after that. Of course I am a long time Slackware user, so other people's experiences may differ.

Thanks, ehartman. Actually that's valuable context for me. I don't mind tinkering to set up, and I am certainly not "afraid" to do it as long as I have the time. But I do now have time to get an installation up and running for my needs while my iMac seems to be working, even if it has some as yet unidentified problem somewhere deep in the OS.

Oh, and I forgot to say that I had a Slackware installation on an old tower pc way back in 1997-1998. But things were so different then. I was just using the system to write Java code examples when I wrote my first Java book. So I did email by browser... no GIMP, no Open Office, no nothing back then. :-)

In fact, my publisher derided me.... They openly laughed at me because I refused to install Windows. So, instead of giving them my chapters in MS Word, I used gnu emacs. To indicate formatting, I would do something like <code> public class MyClass .... </code> and the same for bold and italics and call outs and indentation. The content developer took my files and put it into MS Word. He then just formatted and deleted the meta-information from my original text. At the end my acquisitions editor said "We'll never do that again...!!!"

What do you mean by UNIX? The legal right to call your OS Unix is conferred by The Open Group — and they have granted the designation to macOS. As far as I know no Linux distro has been certified as Unix, probably because The Open Group charge a large fee and an annual licence for the use of the name. What would Red Hat or SUSE gain by paying?

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Yes, you are correct. If macOS is "Unix" then I'm the rightful leader of planet earth as the direct descendant of Zeus and Hera.

It's all very political. Before the Open Group, if I remember the details correctly, the Unix trademark passed to The Open Group in the early '90s. I think there was also an attempt by The Open Group to take control of X from the MIT X Consortium and the X/Open group. The wholeX/Motif, CDE, OpenLook disaster ensued.

Branding, trademark, designation, etc. Politics, politics and people who will do anything to make a fast buck and impose their will onto others. So much for cooperation for the greater good...!

And now look at The Open Group... TOGAF-9, ArchiMate, etc. Very aggressive, even predatory marketers. The pattern continues. They take the work of others, plagiarize, do slight modification, rebrand and pay themselves huge salaries from those annual license fees. Nice gig if you can get it.

https://www.opengroup.org/openbrand/register/

Actually, MacOS is labeled that because Apple paid. I get what you are saying though. They are probably going for the marketing ability to be labeled "stable" as opposed to their competition, which is a steaming heap of unstable shite.

Sure, you're correct sevendogsbsd. To describe my position with a bit more equanimity than I did previously, I'm not saying that any of the *nix systems should not be called Unix-like or that they "don't deserve" to be considered as a Unix-like system. And I include macOS in that category. I was just musing on the political aspect of it all.

To be fair, the original Unix was a segmented memory architecture, no virtual memory, no resiliency. If a new process needed to load, an existing one was just obliterated in the absence of enough physical memory. I don't think anyone would champion the notion that we go back to that situation today...! For me, I would just like a little more uniformity with an eye towards achieving greater interoperability, familiarity and less ramp-up time when having to learn a new variant.

My focus these days is to have something usable, stable, interoperable, convenient but familiar enough that I can get around the system to find out how to do what I need to do without too much headache. But certainly there are respectable efforts to improve the system, applications, utilities. And I think it's good that those efforts continue. It would be nice, however, to see more convergence and less divergence.

Just to be clear, I am not criticizing the quality of Apple or macOS overall. macOS is a pretty stable system with a very user-friendly look and feel overall. It's just recently that their lack of responsiveness, arrogance and degrading of quality has me frustrated. And, with respect to the above, I want less proprietary things and more interoperability. I "think" I could reformat my external back up drives to use EXT4, but the back up structure of Time Machine is not interoperable. So if I just "copy" files to a new file structure, it's not a back up. So I am really looking at finding solutions to practical problems.

I didn't mean to come off as a zealot. :-)