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Run browser and/or mpv directly on hardware?
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this post was submitted on 06 Mar 2026
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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 OS doesn't just mediate the devices, it also provides a consistent interface for software to talk to the hardware. E.g. software doesn't care if you're using a USB or PS/2 keyboard, the operating system handles that.
Usually in the context of servers, bare metal means it's not running in a VM, and you are dedicated to the hardware. E.g. one server may otherwise be running multiple customers all isolated from each other using VMs, with bare metal servers you are the only customer using the hardware. They're supposedly more secure as there isn't another customer that could use some VM escape vulnerability and read your data. It's nothing to do with whether you are running an OS or not (although no OS is very not practical on production servers).
The other advantage of a bare metal server is that the computing resources are guaranteed to actually be there when you need them. VM Providers are known to overbook their physical computing resources, so if other customers happen to use more compute than anticipated then your VMs mysteriously won't have the performance you paid for.
There's also a computational cost to virtualization itself, so you can add slightly more performance to a single server before you have to use a distributed system, but I doubt that's significant for more than a handful of businesses.