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I Miss BSD/Linux

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81–90 of 251 posts

Re: I Miss BSD/Linux

#81
post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are frustrations on Linux, but there's also a lot of development where its Windows or macOS that gives "death by a thousand cuts" so there are definitely reasons for you to pick that over Windows or macOS - even with WSL2. Having to forward hardware over HyperV can give a lot of headaches. Windows machines infected by corporate also have crippling I/O speeds. I have a fun example at a customer where even runnin…

These days, Windows is trying to solve the dev I/O scenario by having a separate "developer optimized" partition: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/dev-drive/

Thanks for the link. What an amusing band-aid.

It's weird that they're mixing ReFS into it, as NTFS is not at all the problem. It feels like they're either using this as a random opportunity to air ReFS again, or as a decoy to make it sound like the dev partition is a fancy special filesystem optimization, rather than the more likely reality of it being duct tape on their weird VFS layer, likely doing away with stuff like in-line Windows Defender I/O interception as all the usage warnings and corp group policy references would suggest to be the case...

Re: I Miss BSD/Linux

#82

After running Linux (plain, crappy boring Ubuntu) as my daily driver for the last few years, I'm convinced that we're at the point where the only real barrier to wider adoption is software, and this is less and less of an issue the more we work in the browser. For your basic user, it's performant, simple, stable, and does everything a computer needs. Every time I boot up Windows it takes forever, I find that a new up…

Can not agree more. It finally struck a nice balance of simplicity for day to day usage and advanced features when needed. I have been pleasantly surprised discovering recently that Gnome Disks lets you create image files of single partitions or disks with just a couple of clicks.

Re: I Miss BSD/Linux

#83
The simplest way to run Linux on any computer nowadays is via WSL2. You can have your cake and eat it these days. Windows 11 is capable of replacing Linux efficiently.

Re: I Miss BSD/Linux

#84
post #77
post #16

Around Windows 7 timeframe, I came to peace with FOSS UNIX clones never going to be as mature as proprietary OSes on laptops. Sure, the situation has improved a lot, but they still require compromises of not having everything supported like on desktop PCs, even when buying from Linux OEMs, my experience hasn't been that great. For a brief period, netbooks seemed to be on track, but then they suffered multiple attacks…

>Around Windows 7 timeframe, I came to peace with FOSS UNIX clones never going to be as mature as proprietary OSes on laptops What does mature mean ? Unless you mean an entertainment or gaming device, I find for real computing, Linux/BSD is 100x better than Windows or MACs. For entertainment a TV, Cell Phone, tablet is a better choice.

It means that any normie can get a perfectly working GNU/Linux laptop from a random shopping mall and everything works out of the box without any constraints.

Re: I Miss BSD/Linux

#85

I feel the author's grief over lack of time, but it has lead me to very different solutions. All around the idea of the OS should not interrupt, should not change rapidly, and my interaction with programs should not be much different from OS to OS. At work, I opted for a mac due to how terrible the windows options were. But macos itself fought me all the way so the way to be happy at work was to replace finder, to re…

> At home, I no longer dual-boot because I vm. Curious, do you have a Windows host and Linux guest(s)? Or the other way around? I currently have Linux as my primary with a Windows guest OS for when I need it (e.g. Office - I actually think Excel is great - or if I'm doing any Win32/C++ dev). But, I'm thinking of doing it the other way around on my next PC.

Windows host, because I play VR games and GPU passthrough would be inconvenient.

I just fullscreen the linux VM and it feels native for all the non-3D tasks I do with it. Even media viewing is a breeze.

Re: I Miss BSD/Linux

#86
post #49
post #40

The title for this blog post should be "I Miss BSD/Linux for Apple devices". Unsurprisingly, if you buy hardware from one of the most FLOSS hostile hardware manufacturers in existence, your BSD/Linux experience will not be great. > Why doesn’t a great MacBook alternative exist? I really don't understand this question. Is the author seriously suggesting that MacBooks are objectively the best laptops for any use case a…

The Apple Silicon MacBooks are very, very good. They're efficient, fast, well-built, have great peripherals, don't power themselves back on when you close the lid, and are generally the best laptops I have ever used. The worst part of them is macOS, and I hope that either Asahi Linux can get all of the hardware working correctly or the other laptop manufacturers can get their act together. Unfortunately, I suspect th…

>don't power themselves back on when you close the lid

Huh? I wish. The thing is periodically blocked throughout the night on my pihole as it continues to send network requests even after I click the "sleep" button in the apple menu.

Re: I Miss BSD/Linux

#87
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Apple Silicon MacBooks are very, very good. They're efficient, fast, well-built, have great peripherals, don't power themselves back on when you close the lid, and are generally the best laptops I have ever used. The worst part of them is macOS, and I hope that either Asahi Linux can get all of the hardware working correctly or the other laptop manufacturers can get their act together. Unfortunately, I suspect th…

There’s still no USB-A support, so the dongle book was never truly fixed.

Given that the industry is trying to retire USB-A for good, this doesn't seem likely.

Re: I Miss BSD/Linux

#88
post #68

After running Linux (plain, crappy boring Ubuntu) as my daily driver for the last few years, I'm convinced that we're at the point where the only real barrier to wider adoption is software, and this is less and less of an issue the more we work in the browser. For your basic user, it's performant, simple, stable, and does everything a computer needs. Every time I boot up Windows it takes forever, I find that a new up…

Hardware support can be a problem as well. There are many combinations that "just work" - definitely more so than 20 or even 10 years ago - but you still need to be careful with network cards, for example. And graphics is still kind of a mess, enough so that all major browsers are still either using whitelists to enable hardware acceleration on supported hardware (like Firefox), or straight up disable it by default o…

> reduced by 30% on Linux with default settings

With the default settings being the key there. I had the exact same laptop and was able to get idle power down under 3W.

But to your point, that's a fair amount of friction for someone that understands all the moving points. It's insurmountable for the average user.

Re: I Miss BSD/Linux

#89
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Each year I spend close to zero hours dealing with edge case bugs and incompatibilities in Linux and BSD despite all of my personal devices running one form of FOSS OS or another. My personal laptop is ArchLinux and it definitely took longer to set up than macOS would have, but it’s been just as rock solid since. In fact, perhaps ironically, I’ve had more problems with my work MacBook Pro than I have with my personal…

20 years brings you to 2004. You’ve either being dishonestly hyperbolic, or your experience is so slim or insanely lucky that it’s not useful as a representative account. That’s TWENTY YEARS. Not a chance in hell. Sometimes I think that desktop Linux users get so used the background noise of system maintenance that they forget that they’re even doing it. I say this as an ex heavy Linux desktop user. Distributions I u…

On the flip side, I could confidently bet any amount of money that I do proportionally more MacOS maintainance than I do on Linux. And I'm even using Nvidia drivers, it's probably lower still if you've got an AMD card with built-in kernel level support.

Re: I Miss BSD/Linux

#90
post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These days, Windows is trying to solve the dev I/O scenario by having a separate "developer optimized" partition: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/dev-drive/

Thanks for the link. What an amusing band-aid. It's weird that they're mixing ReFS into it, as NTFS is not at all the problem. It feels like they're either using this as a random opportunity to air ReFS again, or as a decoy to make it sound like the dev partition is a fancy special filesystem optimization, rather than the more likely reality of it being duct tape on their weird VFS layer, likely doing away with stuff…

What’s weird about Microsoft’s VFS layer?
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