Readit NewsI appreciate the first party reference and backup, but I'll stick with this for the consolidation.
Cheapshot: Good Old Games (as long as our proprietary software functions)
False. That's literally the point of GOG. You can download the games directly from their website, install them, and run them without running any GOG software. GOG could vanish tomorrow and you'd still be able to play every game you purchased, as long as you backed up their installers somewhere.
By default, you get snapshots every minute for the last hour, every hour for the last day, and every day into perpetuity. This is configurable. You can set as many cadences as you wish, with the ability to configure their frequency and lifetimes.
Actually, snapshots are like btrfs volumes in many ways, meaning they can be mounted, read from, and written to as desired. This allows the filesystem root to just be another snapshot with a default backup cadence as described above.
The gefs(4) manpage [0] has more info for those interested. It's a short and sweet read. The source [1], is under 12k lines of well-written code, comments and whitespace included. The author is also extremely responsive to issues and a pleasure to talk shop with.
Anyway, given the parsimony of the OS and the small community size, I find 9front to be a really nice incubator for playing around with new ideas.
[0]:https://man.9front.org/4/gefs [1]:https://git.9front.org/plan9front/9front/front/sys/src/cmd/g...
My NixOS install is immutable, so I can trivially roll back any changes to my system/software/configs.
It has a lockfile so the versions of all of my software do not change _at all_ unless I tell it to. That lockfile doesn't just extend to the software I have installed but all the software that is used to build the software on my machine, so I can perfectly reproduce the same system with the same version of software compiled by the same exact versions of the compilers.
On NixOS you can trivially have many versions of any software or library installed on your system and use them all (for example, foo can depend on python 3.7.2, bar can depend on python 2.7.1, and baz can depend on python 3.14. They can all happily live on my machine. You can even have multiple copies of the same version of python but compiled with different flags if you want. On arch linux your only option for python right now is 3.14.2.)
On NixOS I can trivially run 1 command and generate a bootable ISO that has exactly the same software and configs that I have installed on my computer. This has been rather nice for repair/debugging USBs and for running virtual machines off the ISOs.
You're also missing:
- Gentoo (not based on any of the distros you listed)
- Chimera Linux which brings in the FreeBSD userland, musl libc, and Dinit
- Suse Linux (a pop music video cover band that also made some Linux distros. They were pretty big in the live kernel patching ("Don't reboot it just patch!"). Not based on any of the distros you listed)30 years in about 8 software companies, Northern Europe. Often startups. Between 4 to 600 people. When they grow large the work often turns boring, so it's time to find something smaller again.