Being the distro-hopper that I am, I decided to give *BSD (various derivatives) a try as a desktop earlier in the week. I found GhostBSD and HelloSystems (FreeBSD derivative too) the best for desktop, but ultimately the desktop environments had a few issues that they don’t have with Linux.
However, I’ve been running ENOS as my server for about a year, but I had a lot of software that weren’t necessary on a headless system (essentially…my tv is the monitor when required). I thought well, it’s about time to change up the server, so I went ahead and did a real install on the server. I had a few issues (a year is long enough to forget some issues with the mini-pc BIOS) but once I got past those, everything went swimmingly, perhaps better than a linux server install. I always have to beat my head against the caching DNS server configuration, but I got it going finally. It serves media, dns, and ntp for the in-home network (totally a geek).
The whole point is that I’m shocked to find that my in-home devices seem snappier than they did in the Linux network environment. I attribute it to DNS since that’s pretty much the only service that I could attribute to that. Admittedly, I umm forgot to save my dns server list, so I’m using different sources and that may be all it is.
Anyway, a Friday evening geek-out. Fun, learning (or re-learning, etc. Just wanted to share (suspect a few of you could empathize).
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If you are adventurous like this and want to try a different server OS I would recommend RockyLinux to you. It is the successor of CentOS. A Red Hat based distro. https://rockylinux.org/
I am playing around with it in a vmware and I benchmark it against a debian server I have in vmware as well. Your comment about DNS reminded me of one finding with my benchmarks: A pihole installation on RockyLinux is faster than on debian. Same version of pihole. Benchmarked with the nameinator tool. RockyLinux pihole answering time is avg. around 70 ms; debian avg. around 100 ms.
debian is my comfort zone. I used it for many years. RockyLinux is completely new to me and I like it. I promised to myself that my next server will be running RockyLInux.
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