/g/ - Technology

>>12380

I'm planning on installing OpenBSD this week, if/when I do I'll report back

minimal

I used OpenBSD on a laptop like 4 years back. I honestly didn't really do much with it since i only used the laptop when going away from home, so i only really used it to read stuff and sometimes listen to music or watch videos. It ran kinda slow but not to any stupid degree.

I will say that ports is kinda shit though, it's a mess in terms of keeping everything updated or really doing anything complicated at all. It's obvious that the devs know this and they generally want you to use the normal binary package manager for this reason. But as a mainly gentoo user it's a little disappointing that the main way to do source installs is shit. The binary package manager was decent enough back when i tried it. Not sure how it is now, most likely better. Compiling and updating the main system from source was easy and straightforward though.

I also ran a mumble server for some time on OpenBSD but i didn't really have anything OpenBSD specific come up when doing that, it turns out that running a simple mumble server doesn't really give you the full experience.

>>12389

OpenBSD's ports system has worked superbly for me hitherto. I've been able to avoid D-Bus, dconf, and generally most of the freedesktop.orgy crap using it. I have never used Gentoo before, and probably never will, so I can't compare it to the ports system, but as far as it concerns mitigation of shitty dependencies I have had no problems to do it on OpenBSD.

Void with glibc "just works" in the way that ubuntu is supposed to. It's amazing. I intend to switch to OpenBSD, but I'm no good at porting shit, so it's going to take some doing.

OpenBSD or Alpine/anything with musl will have you struggling to build any programs that aren't in the package manager. Just about everything will be at least slightly broken if the devs aren't themselves OpenBSD users. Things will break when you git-pull, and these are often problems that nobody cares about but you. Still, it's worth fixing these things because musl and OpenBSD are otherwise objectively better than glibc/Linux.

Alpine seemed to use the least amount of memory under my normal load, probably because of busybox. I liked busybox; it seemed to be a good logical reduction of redundancy in the tools. I don't remember the details, but it impressed me with its parsimony and low overhead instead of aggravating me with needless breakage.

I liked OpenBSD's approach, too: the system seems intent on encouraging you to actually read the manpages by eliminating a lot of the `--help` options. You learn more that way. I was curious if OpenBSD supports busybox in some way:

>busybox is a big pile of poo and openbsd does not do what busybox does. but you can probably compare the busybox concept with our crunched install images (see crunchgen(1)), many programs are linked into one single binary to get a very small system.

kek

Alpine's "minimalism" comes too much from being half-baked, imo. The package manager downgraded python to install something, which broke a bunch of other shit, and I couldn't undo very easily. Nothing like that happened on Void or OpenBSD. Would not recommend.

Nor is OpenBSD all smiles and sunshine: it, for example, offers some sort of mk-tmpfs tool despite "tmpfs" not being supported. That's not to say you can't have a ramdisk, though— you just have to use a different, apparently identical tool under a different name. Just some stupid shit you'll have to trip over and spend time on.

I've heard good things about OpenBSD's security design, which is why I ultimately want to stick with that. There are very interesting talks that go into details. Also, pf > iptables.

>Plan9

Never tried. Would like more information.

<Haiku

This probably isn't even "minimal" but I tried it and the installer failed to boot properly. Hung on a loading screen. It's a shame, too; it seemed comfy.

<Kolibrios

Great in theory: just, like, write everything in fasm, bro. You can use C, too, I'm told. In that way, you figure it's even more poz-proof than OpenBSD. In practice I'd rather have the same thing (ie, an OS in ASM that fits on a floppy, etc) pretending to be DOS (single process and all) instead of what kolibrios seems to want to be: Win95. I mean it's a meme OS to begin with, but where's my goddamn bash shell?

What kind of retard hasn't been using OpenBSD for 20 years at this point?

I've used gentoo more or less for almost 20 years at this point and I can tell you about the Linux kernel and it's software landscape that there's nothing minimal about it anymore. Starts with the kernel, ends with the software. Even allegedly "minimal" software is often stuck in dependency hell and uses over 9000 libraries to do one simple thing in a mediocre way. You can kinda avoid it sometimes, here and there, but package maintainers have been become increasingly retarded too because they're more concerned about CoCs and their little gay online politics and virtue signaling than doing proper work. Only way to a minimal linux system (as minimal as linux can get) is a custom-tailored kernel to your hardware and needs and building your userland from scratch. Linux from scratch is a good guideline but has also a lot of retarded and unnecessary stuff in it. Then rewrite the stuff that doesn't fit your minimalist approach yourself. Avoid bloated software that "needs" updates every three minutes. Software that updates often is often misunderstood as quality software. Indeed it's usually software that's a complete mess, usually controlled by devs with ADHD. If you have no experience with the software, some basic kernel stuff and what all this entails, don't even bother.

The *BSDs are slightly better and run a tighter ship with many things but hardware support is shit. Stuff either won't work at all or use the hardware inefficiently. Also lots of Unixoid crud and brain damage.

If you really want minimal you need old computers with their old OSes. They weren't programmed by soy-latte-slupring-mac-book-pro-owning-pronoun-respecting faggots. If you really wanna stick to x86, FreeDOS is a good basis. It's barely an operating system, is compatible to a ton of useful legacy software and won't get in your way and the same soy-faggots from above haven't ruined their pricing with their hoard.. I mean VINTAGE collecting yet because there are just tons of old systems out there. Select your hardware carefully, many Pentium era chipsets have datasheets freely available, and I wouldn't go any faster/modern. The more modern you get, the more intransparent and botnet things become. Be prepared to learn that x86 is actually really retarded and solves everything by brute force.

If your computing requirements are really low, you can also go with something Z80 based and CP/M. There are tons of different projects and ready made kits out there to build your very own computer from readily available parts. Some are quite fast for an 8-bitter. Some others are slower but more compatible to legacy stuff. There are no secrets in such systems, it's perfectly possible for a single person to 100% understand such a computer and everything it does and custom-tailor it to every need. You won't browse youtube with it and your optical mouse might have more processing power.

Everything else is trying to polish a turd. You can tell yourself that you're minimal because you only use X11 sometimes and then only few select programs that hide their complexity by offering only few options and do most things in the shell but you're bullshitting yourself, I hope at least you know that.

>>12464

>Be prepared to learn that x86 is actually really retarded and solves everything by brute force.

Embed related gives a staggering example of how true that can be.

Who the hell knows what other disgusting shit is in these chips?

>FreeDOS

Hot damn, I forgot about that. Got it installing in QEMU.

>Some are quite fast for an 8-bitter.

I doubt anyone here has any experience with actually running one of these, and at a minimum being able to check their email with it.

I want very much to get off intelaviv et al. In fact, I pretty much want a Forth machine, maybe on an FPGA, which is something people apparently do: http://www.forth.org/cores.html

It's all very exciting, but requires some research to find the best options.

>>12454

Sure enough. What's your experience with it been like?

>>12470

It works. People who have problems with it are people who are trying to run horrifying bloatware shit like KDE or gnome. Those people do not deserve computers.

>>12472

OpenBSD just works for me as well, but I am having a bit of a problem with the recent amdgpu0 driver. It doesn't happen so often that it renders my general experience with the OS inadequate, but sometimes Xorg crashes and with it the whole OS is brought down (I can't even switch to other tty's). Others have reported the same thing as well so I believe the problem is rooted into the driver.

>>12473

Could be. Or it could be rooted in the card. I have and AMD card that hard crashes everything under openbsd, linux and windows.

install debian

>>12749

Debian is bloated

>>12751

oh pls it's as small as a linux distro gets and it works flawlessly

>>12751

t. Only uses his computer to flex on the desktop threads

>>12791

if only there were a consistent definition of "bloat"

>>12380

That woman is pretty despite appealing to a sort of "nerd" zeitgeist. If a picture like that were made today, she'd be plastic & androgynous.

>>12380

>void musl

been using it for 2 years

#voidlinux on irc.freenode.net is brilliant

>>12830

There's an actual definition. What happens here is that /g/ autists use that word for literally everything that's wrong with software. Just like "botnet".

I use OpenBSD for a mailserver and webserver, and have used it for a main "daily driver" for about 8 years on a laptop. Its super easy to upgrade the OS and the packages (ports). I run "current" (development branch) and the kernal *always* compiles. If you keep track of the tech mailing list and time your upgrades, ugrading ports always goes without a hitch. If you just randomly update whenever, then maybe once a year you might get a library mismatch. Or just run the releases then this is never a problem. Some people pretend that OpenBSD is not really good for security or that it is all hype, but they really have no clue, or are just speaking that BS to befuddle others.