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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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Share specific examples of software built from source works better for you than packages or pre-built binaries (self.linux)

submitted 5 days ago by TheTwelveYearOld to c/[email protected]

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I looked up specifically examples of this and didn't find answers, they're buried in general discussions about why compiling may be better than pre-built. The reasons I found were control of flags and features, and optimizations for specific chips (like Intel AVX or ARM Neon), but to what degree do those apply today?

The only software I can tell benefits greatly from building from source, is ffmpeg since there are many non-free encoders decoders and upscalers that can be bundled, and performance varies a lot between devices due to which of them is supported by the CPU or GPU. For instance, Nvidia hardware encoders typically produce higher quality video for similar file sizes than ones from Intel AMD or Apple. Software encoders like x265 has optimizations for AVX and NEON (SIMD extensions for CPUs).

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[–] NeoNachtwaechter 5 points 5 days ago (1 children)

FreeBSD.

I needed to set up a whole new small server for a company I had just joined. (Their old beast with MS Exchange was old and fat and dying, with crashes and manual actions every day etc.) I had an expert do the initial install, and he wanted to compile it all in place, right there on this machine. OK well why not.

The FreeBSD server turned out to be a quiet workhorse that never complained about anything, and only about 3 or 4 years later we had the first occasion when a reboot was needed.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago)

Yeah, FreeBSD OS absolutely awesome
Have nothing more to add...

Well, maybe: I wanted to setup my work server with FreeBSD and I really had trouble getting Linux VMs up and running
Still don't know, what I did wrong, but I went the other way round and setup a Linux server, with a FreeBSD VM as "Gate-keeper" (my Wireguard every point), and so it secures my other stuff behind

But I really liked how nice it is to work with. Sadly I was too stupid to set it up right, with multiple services/containers/VMs I needed ...