Re: UNIX systems

D <nospam@example.net> writes:

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.

>
Only 3 hours? How old is your laptop? Sounds like you should at least be able to
get 7-8 hours out of a new one, unless you are running enormous amount of VM:s
or scientific calculations.

Right now I get 1 hour, so 3 is a major upgrade.  My notebook is quite
new.  It's a Lenovo 15IMH05 with 24 GiB of RAM.

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).

>
True.
>
I have 4 virtual desktop. On 1 lives the web browser, 2 alpine email
(terminal based email client), 3 qpdf a pdf reader with session
support and on 4 my neovim with aout 18 buffers saved in a session
file.

That's very close to my what I do here.  The web on 2.  My 1 is work. :)
On 3 is USENET and 4 is literature---PDF.

I run cwm, which is known as not having a virtual desktop thingies, but
it's actually does.  When I press super-1 I go to desktop 1.  I created
4 virtual desktops (which is enough), but I think I could have at least
9 of them.

When I was young(er) I fiddled around a lot with GUI:s, but somewhere
the past 10 years or so, I just wanted something minimal with all
batteries included so that scanning, printing, wifi etc. just work our
of the box. Xfce fulfilled that for me, and I have never bothered to
change it. I did have a quick look at i3 and dwm, but I would still
have to keep xfce around for print/scan/wifi so in the end, what's the
point?

Yeah, these things are important---printer, scanner and wifi.  Although
I think wifi is a lot less important than it seems.  I've read this
article yesterday called ``the computer built to last 50 years'' and
offline mode is quite an important part of it.  I agree with that. 

The system would be designed to usually function offline.  It's when you
connect to the Internet that it does its pull and pushes.  With a system
like that, wifi is less important---you connect your system to the
router once a day, say, and, just like pumping gas into a vehicle, you
get everything you need.  Now you can go back to your desk, after
unplugging the cable from your router.

I like that.

Clearly, these are people trying to work without distractions and
interruptions.  I am one of them.

My latest revelation (a few years back) was alpine email, it probably
doubled my email productivity compared with thunderbird, and is a "all
in one" solution that comes with a lot of help included. Still
flexible and extensible though, but probably not as much as mutt or
neomutt, but it strikes a beautiful balance for me. =)

Now I would really look into alpine, but I'm a Gnus user, so I'm
forbidden from performing heretic research.