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

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

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.