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From: Salvador Mirzo <smirzo@example.com>
Newsgroups: comp.misc
Subject: Re: UNIX systems
Date: Thu, 13 Mar 2025 18:17:54 -0300
Organization: A noiseless patient Spider
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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).