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

[Warner Losh <imp@bsdimp.com>]

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On Thu, Mar 7, 2024 at 8:43 PM Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com> 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_.
>

We must be using different installers. The defaults just work.

But so what. Even if it was awful, it's the first 5 minutes of your
experience... People don't use the installer, and with the VM images
there's even less need to day to fixate on it.

And to be fair, it isn't from the 80s. In the 80s, you booted a tape
and got. stuck with whatever partitioning the disk driver had. In the 90s
you used a calculator to figure out the labels to put on the drives
as we started to get a diversity of disks. In the 2000s, everything was
still text based, like FreeBSD's installer, but helped you partition things.
It wasn't until the 2010s that the installers started to become graphical
on a wide-spread basis.

But try installing ZFS root. FreeBSD's installer just does the right thing
setting it up. For Liunx, despite it's "awesome" graphics experience, I
had 6 pages of instructions from the OpenZFS web site to do it. So while
it looks nicer, for sure, there's still some UX issues to overcome.


> 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.
>

FreeBSD's installer doesn't need a mouse... And Linux installers
have been hit or miss on this issue over the years (mostly a hit,
but not always)...

And despite all the pro-Linux Netcraft propaganda, FreeBSD is
not dying.


> 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.
>

What's that? I can't hear you over the 800Gbps of traffic we're able
to generate with FreeBSD but not Linux...  In all fairness, Linux does
a better job at moving lots of packets...

My daily driver is MacOS for work. And FreeBSD laptop for personal. There
are problems
with FreeBSD (I'm looking at you wifi), but it works great. The Graphics
issues
have been solved, by and large.

Warner

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