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

[Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com>]

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.
-- 
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Larry McVoy           Retired to fishing          http://www.mcvoy.com/lm/boat