Re: UNIX systems

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!

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.

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.

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.