I was hoping to install CentOS Stream 9 as an LXC container and that failed because unpriviledged LXC containers cannot mount NFS shares. So then I tried to install CentOS Stream 9 as a proper VM. Most of the basic prerequisites seemed to install but then there were so many exceptions and one-off packages that needed to be installed and some of them were not available in the basic RPM packages. (netstat, figlet, openssh, openvpn) and that was just the basics.

Simple is better

The problem with CentOS is that the default RPM repo seems to be very limited and there are no docs to explain it and in direct conflict with CentOS 7 and 8. Simply put if you’re stuck with Linux then you’re better off with Ubuntu. At least they offer a desktop and server dist where CentOS seems to be an all in one. And even there unless you have a cloud-init file you’ll need access to the console to get ssh running and possibly manually update sudoers… such a mess.

At least OpenBSD has everything I need in the basic install, install resp, and the packages.

I’ve not used FreeBSD or a while and while the packages are huge… it’s not a bad choice. At least FreeBSD was the foundation for MacOS back in the day. It’s also very safe and secure as the members take security very seriously.

Moving on…