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OpenBSD 6.5

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Re: OpenBSD 6.5

#151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Mac OS X only works for this due to herculean community efforts. For programming, yes, although I don't know if brew would be called "herculean". For battery life and ease of use, no. I've setup BSD on linux on personally modded thinkpads (putting in faster cpus, new wifi cards, etc), and you have got to be joking when you say it's simpler or faster than turning on a new mac and installing brew. It's infinitely mor…

Highly used programs: emacs, vi, Tex , latex, R, python, lisp’s, awk, sed. Yes No multimedia programs, cause I am a mathematician and for pdf I use pdftools; so no Adobe also; started with Slackware in 2007 after an abysmal windows period from 1991 till 2007; now I use openbsd and emacs simply rocks and is rock solid on openbsd.

I think the parent poster has unreasonable expectations for what linux/bsds can do as far as laptop battery life and is talking about an entirely different use case than the parent I was originally responding to.

I also think they're vastly underestimating the amount of stuff that needs to be configured on a new mac host.

My office workstation (Arch Linux) and home desktops/servers (all OpenBSD) can be installed and configured repeatably in ~5 minutes flat.

I literally have an ansible playbook that pulls in my dotfiles and installs a list of the packages that I want. That's a hundred times simpler than setting up my work laptop (Mac) for development, where not only do I have to install xcode dev tools and homebrew and the packages that I want, but most of the packages that I install need additional configuration applied to work correctly.

Re: OpenBSD 6.5

#152
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I really enjoy how simple the system is after all these years with Linux. I still shake my head when I think back to the 90s and how Linux managed to overtake the BSDs. Good to see they are still very much alive and moving forward.

The weird thing, though, is that 90s Linux felt a little more like the BSDs than Linux usually does today. I mean, the BSDs were always a bit more coherent, but the default install of a typical Linux distro felt a lot less "heavy" in the past. You can switch from Linux to one of the *BSDs and feel like you are bringing back the glory days. Maybe this is a complaint about Ubuntu, or gnome, or systemd.

>Maybe this is a complaint about Ubuntu, or gnome, or systemd.

In the 90's Linux was pretty well aimed at the techy crowd. you were expected to know or learn administration (including the location of and editing of etc files) and not be afraid of './configure && make && make install'

Then the focus changed and while your Gentoos and Arches never went away, a larger portion of the focus was on either being user friendly and/or providing an enterprise desktop experience.

This is something the BSDs (with the exception of TrueOS) never did -and certainly not OpenBSD.

It's worth pointing out (and folks in this thread already have) that if you want the hacker's experience, it's still out there. It just has almost nothing to do with mainstream Linux (which is a shame).

Re: OpenBSD 6.5

#153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mac OS X only works for this due to herculean community efforts. The base system is fundamentally unusable for this purpose without Homebrew, Macports (oh hey, BSD ports!), or pkgsrc (oh hey, BSD ports again!). The base packages get upgraded on a timescale approaching lolnever. They should be ashamed of themselves for shipping machines with Bash 3 still and that's just the tip of the iceberg. OpenBSD is so simple for…

> Mac OS X only works for this due to herculean community efforts. For programming, yes, although I don't know if brew would be called "herculean". For battery life and ease of use, no. I've setup BSD on linux on personally modded thinkpads (putting in faster cpus, new wifi cards, etc), and you have got to be joking when you say it's simpler or faster than turning on a new mac and installing brew. It's infinitely mor…

> I've setup BSD on linux on personally modded thinkpads (putting in faster cpus, new wifi cards, etc), and you have got to be joking when you say it's simpler or faster than turning on a new mac and installing brew. It's infinitely more customizable for sure, but it's not simpler or easier. Especially when it comes to tuning battery life.

This is not an apples-to-apples comparison. You're comparing highly modified laptops with questionably supported mods to a stock Mac. Of course the highly modified laptop isn't going to install BSD smoothly. It's unlikely to install anything smoothly, at least compared to a Mac where the hardware configuration is locked down.

Re: OpenBSD 6.5

#154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Mac OS X only works for this due to herculean community efforts. For programming, yes, although I don't know if brew would be called "herculean". For battery life and ease of use, no. I've setup BSD on linux on personally modded thinkpads (putting in faster cpus, new wifi cards, etc), and you have got to be joking when you say it's simpler or faster than turning on a new mac and installing brew. It's infinitely mor…

Highly used programs: emacs, vi, Tex , latex, R, python, lisp’s, awk, sed. Yes No multimedia programs, cause I am a mathematician and for pdf I use pdftools; so no Adobe also; started with Slackware in 2007 after an abysmal windows period from 1991 till 2007; now I use openbsd and emacs simply rocks and is rock solid on openbsd.

I have openbsd on an old thinkpad been sitting and gathering dust. Rstudio isn't on OpenBSD and it'll take a bit of the down time to emulate it with tmux and vim... so I never got around doing it... too busy trying to finish my thesis.

How is your R setup in OpenBSD? Like what software do you use in tandem when coding R?

Re: OpenBSD 6.5

#155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but for surfing, some hobby programming and as a travel OS OpenBSD definitely won me over. Mac OS X has won me (and many others) over when it comes to these topics. I'm curious why BSD would be your choice. It sounds painful?

Mac OS X only works for this due to herculean community efforts. The base system is fundamentally unusable for this purpose without Homebrew, Macports (oh hey, BSD ports!), or pkgsrc (oh hey, BSD ports again!). The base packages get upgraded on a timescale approaching lolnever. They should be ashamed of themselves for shipping machines with Bash 3 still and that's just the tip of the iceberg. OpenBSD is so simple for…

> without Homebrew, Macports (oh hey, BSD ports!), or pkgsrc (oh hey, BSD ports again!)

The only thing that makes macos at all usable for me is Nix.

Re: OpenBSD 6.5

#156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but for surfing, some hobby programming and as a travel OS OpenBSD definitely won me over. Mac OS X has won me (and many others) over when it comes to these topics. I'm curious why BSD would be your choice. It sounds painful?

Mac OS X only works for this due to herculean community efforts. The base system is fundamentally unusable for this purpose without Homebrew, Macports (oh hey, BSD ports!), or pkgsrc (oh hey, BSD ports again!). The base packages get upgraded on a timescale approaching lolnever. They should be ashamed of themselves for shipping machines with Bash 3 still and that's just the tip of the iceberg. OpenBSD is so simple for…

It might seem surprising, but OS X is pretty fine for programming without dealing with Homebrew, Macports or whatever.

That is not what matters to developers invested into Apple's ecosystem.

Re: OpenBSD 6.5

#157
post #57
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love it when software projects does whimsical artwork like this :)

It's pretty great. As someone said below: I'd buy a tshirt.

There's a funny story by Linda Branagan, of an earlier BSD T-shirt: https://www.astro.umd.edu/~avondale/extra/Humor/ComputerHumo...

Re: OpenBSD 6.5

#158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but for surfing, some hobby programming and as a travel OS OpenBSD definitely won me over. Mac OS X has won me (and many others) over when it comes to these topics. I'm curious why BSD would be your choice. It sounds painful?

I use MacOS at work, and I just can't get used to it. I love how fast I can navigate in i3 and how fast everything feels. I do like MacOS but I hate how the only shortcut keys to switch Windows are from cmd 1 - 5, I hate that I can't easily move windows without something like spectacle (that feels clunky - 4 buttons to move a window to another screen?) and I really can never get used to the cmd key placement :D I've…

> and I really can never get used to the cmd key placement :D

The first thing I do when setting up a new Mac is swap the option and command keys.

Re: OpenBSD 6.5

#159

As a long time Linux user, I keep thinking about trying a BSD variant, but I get hung up on two things. 1) Which do I pick? NetBSD? OpenBSD? 2) Hardware? I'm thinking about an old ThinkPad for programming, and it looks like OpenBSD at least should run fine on that. What's hardware support like overall?

I, like you, am quite curious about it. I've given OpenBSD a few tries and it runs quite well in a VM, but I've never managed to get it running properly with wifi. I guess it's time to give it a new go, considering there's a bunch of wifi-improvements listed.

Re: OpenBSD 6.5

#160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Funny you say that. I can see your perspective but at the same time the beauty of Unix is that the OS is really just a bunch of files you can see and manipulate yourself. The system doesn’t have convoluted registry systems for instance to hold state. So for me, deleting a few files is as good as or better than asking a package manager to do it. It proves to me that the OS is simple. I think we have become so accustom…

Wow this is gatekeeping if I have ever seen it before. A package manager that tracks all files installed by a distribution of software is an excellent tool, and in no way incompatible with the Unix philosophy.

I'm incredibly curious in hearing your rationalization for accusing me of this 'gatekeeping' ???
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