[TUHS] Re: What do you currently use for your primary OS at home?

[Luther Johnson <luther.johnson@makerlisp.com>]

Oops, wrong thread, sorry.

On 03/07/2024 08:57 PM, Luther Johnson wrote:
> I believe the first Minix C compilers were based on the Amsterdam
> Compiler Kit, so that's another early source.
>
> On 03/07/2024 08:42 PM, Larry McVoy wrote:
>> On Thu, Mar 07, 2024 at 08:15:43PM -0500, Jeffry R. Abramson wrote:
>>> On Thu, 2024-03-07 at 13:08 +0000, Ben Kallus wrote:
>>>> What about Linux is too bloated, in your opinion? Is it the kernel
>>>> itself, or the programs that often go with it? If it's the former,
>>>> OpenBSD may be a good choice. If it's the latter, I would look into a
>>>> minimal distribution (e.g. Alpine, Void, arguably Arch) paired with a
>>>> tiling window manager (e.g. Sway, dwm).
>>>>
>>>> -Ben
>>> The bloated part? IMHO I would say systemd, pulseaudio, NetworkManager,
>>> KDE, GNOME, Cinnamon. ??Even though Cinnamon is the desktop I use. ??My
>>> wife's laptop finally died ie. Windows got so crudded up with stuff
>>> that Outlook couldn't send mail and I just refused to try and fix it.
>>> ??I gave her my old PC with Debian and configured Cinnamon to look like
>>> Windows 7. ??All she does with it is web and email so all I really had
>>> to do was setup Firefox and Evolution and tell her it was Windows.
>>>
>>> As far as the kernel goes, I rebuilt the stock kernel that Debian uses
>>> just for kicks. ??It took 25 minutes on a 16-thread system with SSD
>>> storage, source tree plus build output occupies 26G, pretty bloaty. ??I
>>> just refreshed most of my infrastructure and in the process switched
>>> from xfs/LVM to ZFS so it may be time to make the switch back to
>>> FreeBSD if I retain enough muscle memory.
>> So I'm a SunOS guy, got there just after SunOS 4.0, contributed to 4.1,
>> really contributed to 4.1.1 and 4.1.3.  I loved SunOS.
>>
>> FreeBSD and me got reconnected when Netflix wanted to hire me a while
>> back.  While the kernel may be OK (it's not, ask me how I know, I
>> walked the code), FreeBSD is stuck in the 1980s.  Raise your hand
>> if you have installed FreeBSD in the last 20 years.  That "UI"
>> for partitioning the disks, so arcane.  The whole install experience
>> is _awful_.
>>
>> SunOS was a bug fixed BSD, so I really loved BSD.  But BSD is so dead
>> it is not even funny.  Linux is light years ahead.  Here is an example
>> from more than 20 years ago.  I was installing RedHat Linux and the
>> machine I was installing on didn't have a mouse.  The installer was
>> graphical and it was just easier to tab through the options than go
>> find a mouse.
>>
>> I'd love it if BSD had kept up but it has not.  Linux is way better.
>> Yeah, all the bloat is annoying but we are not running on 64KB PDP-lls.
>> L1 is that size, L2 and L3 are bigger.  Main memory is many orders of
>> magnitude bigger, I'm typing this on a 32GB memory laptop.  It's fine.
>