Re: UNIX systems

D <nospam@example.net> writes:

On Mon, 10 Mar 2025, Salvador Mirzo wrote:
>

I wouldn't say it died.  I believe Plan 9 is doing pretty well, but I
don't think they're trying to compete with popular systems.  It's a
research system, I'd say.  OpenBSD is a research system, even though
it's totally usable.  In fact, it's the one I like to use.

>
Would be nice if someone took Plan 9 and managed to get it to run natively on
servers and laptops, or even one brand of server and one brand of laptop. I
would definitely try it!

>
I've ran Plan 9 on an x86 virtual machine, which means it will probably
install okay on popular hardware.  I think some people do run Plan 9 as
their daily system.

>
Interesting! I'll have to look into that to see if it would run on an older
laptop. That would be awesome!

Give it a try?  I think if it you were to specify the hardware here,
someone would tell you what would happen.  For instance, Dan Cross. :)

How is openbsd as a daily driver? I've been close to replacing my
opensuse with freebsd. It wasn't quite there in terms of hardware
support (it lacked anything beyond G wifi, which is too slow). Maybe
openbsd is better than freebsd?

>
I got in the BSD world by way of FreeBSD.  What attracted me to FreeBSD
was the documentation in the system---manuals in particular---and I also
appreciated the ports collection.  (It was so much easier to compile and

>
I agree! The documentation and the community is outstanding!
>

run an application back then than it was to hunt for sources in the GNU
systems worlds.  That allowed me to make small changes in the software I
was running to learn about how it worked.)  In more recent years I had
switched to Windows due to working with companies that required me to
run a Windows system.  (Also due to personal reasons: when I was in
graduate school, I wanted to keep all my software in a single directory,
which was easy on Windows and hard on UNIX.  But to use Windows, I
needed a GNU EMACS packed with other programs such as cat, grep, find,
awk, sed, ...)  The work and personal reasons have gone away, so I
decided to go FreeBSD again.  But ever since hibernation was implemented
in Windows XP that I love the feature.  It turns out FreeBSD doesn't
hibernate, but OpenBSD does (on my amd64 computer).  And then I

>
Hmm, really? I think I got it to work on Freebas 14.x or a snapshot of 15 a long
time ago, but I don't quite remember, so could very well be that I tricked
myself with suspend. Since I only used it for a week, I didn't check too deeply.

Yeah, I believe FreeBSD can suspend to RAM, but not to disk.

discovered that OpenBSD is as impeccable in the documentation as FreeBSD
is.  So I went with OpenBSD.  I have not found a way to run OpenBSD in a
battery-saving mode, though, so my entire battery last about an hour
with OpenBSD, while it would likely last the entire day with Windows 10,
say.  There's probably things I can do that I don't know how to do at
the moment.  I'm hardly ever in need of a battery, though.  So I'm a
pretty happy OpenBSD user.

>
Freebsd I got 13-14 hours out of, and my current opensuse running on a 1.5 year
old laptop still sits at around 12-14 hours.

That's impressive.  If I could get some 3 hours with OpenBSD, I'd be
very happy.  But, honestly, I hardly ever need it and when I'm on the
go, there's usually an outlet where I need.

I also learned about cwm, the ``calm window manager'', which I think it
was built by the OpenBSD people.  It's the window manager that has
enchanted me the most.

>
Yes, I've heard about it. I like the concept! I run XFCE, since it is a nice
compromise between batteries included, and some kind of lightness. For business
it works great. If I only did development, I'd look at cwm or perhaps dwm.

I remember I thought XFCE was very ``beautiful''.  But I think after it
went down with GTK, it lost its feeling of new kid on the block.  So the
definition of ``beautiful'' here is just ``different from the same
old''.  That's likely a problem I have with graphical interfaces: I get
tired of them.  Text interfaces, though, don't seem to bother me at
all---on the contrary, I tend to get addicted to them.  For instance, I
love the GNU EMACS and software like slrn, which I don't use anymore
(due to Gnus).