8 Mar
2024
8 Mar
'24
4:44 a.m.
On Thursday, 7 March 2024 at 1:47:26 -0500, Jeffry R. Abramson wrote:
I eventually reverted back to Linux because it was clear that the
user community was getting much larger, I was using it
professionally at work and there was just a larger range of
applications available. Lately, I find myself getting tired of the
bloat and how big and messy and complicated it has all gotten.
Thinking of looking for something simpler and was just wondering
what do other old timers use for their primary home computing needs?
I'm surprised how few of the responders use BSD. My machines all
(currently) run FreeBSD, with the exception of a Microsoft box
(distress.lemis.com) that I use remotely for photo processing. I've
tried Linux (used to work developing Linux kernel code), but I
couldn't really make friends with it. It sounds like our reasons are
similar.
More details:
1977-1984: CP/M, 86-DOS
1984-1990: MS-DOS
1991-1992: Inactive UNIX
1992-1997: BSD/386, BSD/OS
1997-now: FreeBSD
Greg
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8 Mar
8 Mar
5:43 a.m.
On Thursday, March 7th, 2024 at 2:44 PM, Greg 'groggy' Lehey
<grog(a)lemis.com> wrote:
On Thursday, 7 March 2024 at 1:47:26 -0500, Jeffry R.
Abramson wrote:
Not an old timer but feel like getting in on the fun. My main system these days
is a Raspberry Pi 400 running a home-grown (but quite generic) Linux setup.
Started as a cross-compiled kernel with a Gentoo stage 3 stuck on top, then
started replacing and removing bits of userland. The main Gentoo-ism still
around is that I didn't bump from OpenRC down to bare sysvinit, but pretty much
everything else has been replaced by upstream packages at this point. Desktop
is X11/dwm, haven't quite gotten hip with the Wayland stuff these days. I keep
a Windows 10 x86_64 desktop around for video games. Work is then a macOS host
but frequently working in a remote Windows desktop, so I use Windows, mac, and
Linux pretty evenly in a regular day.
Have volleyed between FreeBSD and Linux historically, whichever has better
hardware support for the main machine I'm running at the time, with FreeBSD
preferred all things equal. I've taken my approach with Linux for a long time,
opting out of distros wherever possible and rolling my own system build. I've
found it keeps the things I want working while being adaptable to incorporating
new bits at will. Firefox is the only major component that I don't build from
source, instead opting to grab updated binaries from Arch or Debian whenever I
feel like doing an update cycle. Everything else I just nab from whoever makes
it and build it up from the source packages. It's nice having intimate control
over what goes in /bin vs /usr/bin vs /opt/bin (no /usr/local tree here...)
On Thursday, March 7th, 2024 at 2:32 PM, Mike Markowski <mike.ab3ap(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
I eventually reverted back to Linux because it
was clear that the
user community was getting much larger, I was using it
professionally at work and there was just a larger range of
applications available. Lately, I find myself getting tired of the
bloat and how big and messy and complicated it has all gotten.
Thinking of looking for something simpler and was just wondering
what do other old timers use for their primary home computing needs?
I'm surprised how few of the responders use BSD. My machines all
(currently) run FreeBSD, with the exception of a Microsoft box
(distress.lemis.com) that I use remotely for photo processing. I've
tried Linux (used to work developing Linux kernel code), but I
couldn't really make friends with it. It sounds like our reasons are
similar.
More details:
1977-1984: CP/M, 86-DOS
1984-1990: MS-DOS
1991-1992: Inactive UNIX
1992-1997: BSD/386, BSD/OS
1997-now: FreeBSD
Greg
--
Sent from my desktop computer.
Finger grog(a)lemis.com for PGP public key.
See complete headers for address and phone numbers.
This message is digitally signed. If your Microsoft mail program
reports problems, please read http://lemis.com/broken-MUA.php
I also use Raspberry Pi 3's in PiDP 8/I (https://udel.edu/~mm/pidp8i/) and 11/70. I
wonder how long till a R-Pi is enough for a work station...
Mike Markowski
I find the Raspberry Pi 400 checks all my boxes for what I tend to work on,
although I'm not doing any, say, CAD or media editing, just writing code,
some image processing, document scanning, and web browsing.
- Matt G.
5:50 a.m.
On Thu, Mar 7, 2024 at 5:52 PM Greg 'groggy' Lehey <grog(a)lemis.com>
wrote:
On Thursday, 7 March 2024 at 1:47:26 -0500, Jeffry
R. Abramson wrote:
I'm a bit surprised by this, as well.
I consider myself very fortunate in that the first computer we had at
home was a Macintosh (the 1985, 512K model; the so-called "Fat Mac").
I say I was fortunate for this because the machine really gave a very
consistent experience compared to the 8-bit micros and the IBM PC that
were common at the time; I didn't realize how important that was until
much later, but once I did, I considered myself very lucky indeed.
The next machine I had was a 486 running DOS. From there, I had a
short stint running COHERENT, the MWC clone of (essentially) 7th
Edition. Then I ran NetBSD for a few months, and then FreeBSD. I
stayed on FreeBSD for a while, until sometime in the 4.9-era when
`periodic(8)` got added. At that point, the growing complexity got to
me. My friend Scott Schwartz had been telling me about Plan 9, and it
was available around that time, so I installed it; that was my primary
environment for a few years until I landed on a Macintosh.
Nowadays, I sit in front of a Mac Studio as my workstation, and I have
a bunch of other machines running a bunch of other stuff around the
house: Plan 9 runs much of the home infrastructure (DNS, DHCP, that
kind of stuff). There's a rinky dink FreeBSD print server running my
ancient laser printer. There's an OpenBSD machine downstairs that runs
backup DNS and consoles. I've got machines running FreeBSD,
OpenBSD-current, and DragonFly, plus a Linux workstation that I run
headless that I use for stuff that requires KVM. There are a couple of
Raspberry Pi's and an x86 Linux machine that all speak AX.25 and are
all connected to various (amateur) radios, an Alpha running VMS, and
emulated VAXen, PDP-11s, mainframes, Multics, Pr1me, CDC, and a few
other weird machines running different legacy OSes.
I never gravitated towards Linux as a desktop machine, really. It has
always felt very fiddly to me. I don't miss FreeBSD on the desktop,
really.
- Dan C.
I eventually reverted back to Linux because it
was clear that the
user community was getting much larger, I was using it
professionally at work and there was just a larger range of
applications available. Lately, I find myself getting tired of the
bloat and how big and messy and complicated it has all gotten.
Thinking of looking for something simpler and was just wondering
what do other old timers use for their primary home computing needs?
I'm surprised how few of the responders use BSD. My machines all
(currently) run FreeBSD, with the exception of a Microsoft box
(distress.lemis.com) that I use remotely for photo processing. I've
tried Linux (used to work developing Linux kernel code), but I
couldn't really make friends with it. It sounds like our reasons are
similar.
More details:
1977-1984: CP/M, 86-DOS
1984-1990: MS-DOS
1991-1992: Inactive UNIX
1992-1997: BSD/386, BSD/OS
1997-now: FreeBSD
6:19 a.m.
On Thu, Mar 7, 2024 at 6:50 PM Dan Cross <crossd(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On Thu, Mar 7, 2024 at 5:52 PM Greg 'groggy'
Lehey <grog(a)lemis.com> wrote:
Oh, and not to toot my own horn, but I forgot that in there for a year
or two was a MIPS DECstation running Ultrix. That was pretty stylin',
I gotta say: my friends were jealous. :-D
- Dan C.
On Thursday, 7 March 2024 at 1:47:26 -0500,
Jeffry R. Abramson wrote:
I'm a bit surprised by this, as well.
I consider myself very fortunate in that the first computer we had at
home was a Macintosh (the 1985, 512K model; the so-called "Fat Mac").
I say I was fortunate for this because the machine really gave a very
consistent experience compared to the 8-bit micros and the IBM PC that
were common at the time; I didn't realize how important that was until
much later, but once I did, I considered myself very lucky indeed.
The next machine I had was a 486 running DOS. From there, I had a
short stint running COHERENT, the MWC clone of (essentially) 7th
Edition. Then I ran NetBSD for a few months, and then FreeBSD. I
stayed on FreeBSD for a while, until sometime in the 4.9-era when
`periodic(8)` got added. At that point, the growing complexity got to
me. My friend Scott Schwartz had been telling me about Plan 9, and it
was available around that time, so I installed it; that was my primary
environment for a few years until I landed on a Macintosh.
Nowadays, I sit in front of a Mac Studio as my workstation, and I have
a bunch of other machines running a bunch of other stuff around the
house: Plan 9 runs much of the home infrastructure (DNS, DHCP, that
kind of stuff). There's a rinky dink FreeBSD print server running my
ancient laser printer. There's an OpenBSD machine downstairs that runs
backup DNS and consoles. I've got machines running FreeBSD,
OpenBSD-current, and DragonFly, plus a Linux workstation that I run
headless that I use for stuff that requires KVM. There are a couple of
Raspberry Pi's and an x86 Linux machine that all speak AX.25 and are
all connected to various (amateur) radios, an Alpha running VMS, and
emulated VAXen, PDP-11s, mainframes, Multics, Pr1me, CDC, and a few
other weird machines running different legacy OSes.
I never gravitated towards Linux as a desktop machine, really. It has
always felt very fiddly to me. I don't miss FreeBSD on the desktop,
really. I eventually reverted back to Linux because it
was clear that the
user community was getting much larger, I was using it
professionally at work and there was just a larger range of
applications available. Lately, I find myself getting tired of the
bloat and how big and messy and complicated it has all gotten.
Thinking of looking for something simpler and was just wondering
what do other old timers use for their primary home computing needs?
I'm surprised how few of the responders use BSD. My machines all
(currently) run FreeBSD, with the exception of a Microsoft box
(distress.lemis.com) that I use remotely for photo processing. I've
tried Linux (used to work developing Linux kernel code), but I
couldn't really make friends with it. It sounds like our reasons are
similar.
More details:
1977-1984: CP/M, 86-DOS
1984-1990: MS-DOS
1991-1992: Inactive UNIX
1992-1997: BSD/386, BSD/OS
1997-now: FreeBSD 
14 Mar
14 Mar
7:39 p.m.
Greg 'groggy' Lehey <grog(a)lemis.com> writes:
I'm surprised how few of the responders use BSD.
I started out with MINIX 1 on a 286-based PC. Ported various software
to it, including UUCP, so I had email and could be on mailing lists.
Moved to 386bsd when that came out, joining the Internet community
around it. Stuck with it as it became NetBSD, and have run NetBSD on my
primary systems ever since.
I enjoyed playing with kernel code on MINIX and early NetBSD, but modern
kernels are much too complicated for me, so I get those urges satisfied
on MINIX 3, 2.11BSD, and 6th Edition UNIX, all on proper hardware. :)
-tih
--
Most people who graduate with CS degrees don't understand the significance
of Lisp. Lisp is the most important idea in computer science. --Alan Kay
282
days inactive
289
days old
4 comments
4 participants
participants (4)
-
Dan Cross -
Greg 'groggy' Lehey -
segaloco -
Tom Ivar Helbekkmo