this post was submitted on 03 Jul 2025
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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
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The docker is not bare metal though.
Does it matter if the overhead is practically irrelevant?
The biggest downside to containers vs. Nix for me is that Nix can produce binaries for Linux and macOS, whereas docker only helps with Linux unless you can perform literal magic to cross-compile your project on Linux for macOS.
Containers also don't give you reproducible environments, and Nix does.
That said, Nix documentation is ass, so I usually end up going with containers because they require far less suffering to get working because writing a containerfile is much easier than guessing how to hobble together a Nix flake with a mostly undocumented language.
Feels very arbitrary. Why would I care about say MacOS versus FreeBSD or say NeXTSTEP (just to be provocative)?
Anyway I'm being pulled away from the actual argument, the "bare metal" argument is about performances, isn't it?
Yes, the systems people actually use vs every system that exists. Very arbitrary
What I mean is that MacOS is proprietary and runs on specific hardware, it's by design not meant to be interoperable so it's not "just" popularity.