Re: [dev] Operating system choice
On Wed, Nov 19, 2014 at 12:19:15PM -0600, Josh Lawrence wrote: > I'm curious to know what flavor of *nix people on this list use on a > day-to-day basis. Debian and Alpine (in containers) on servers, my own Arch spinoff[1] on desktops. Arch has a huge software library and provides all the tools to do whatever the hell you want with it. Debian I hate with all my heart, so servers will probably use Alpine in the future. signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: [dev] Operating system choice
sta...@cs.tu-berlin.de wrote: > microkernel is beautiful Beauty might be the only property superior to monolithic.
Re: [dev] Operating system choice
* koneu 2014-11-21 13:22 > + microkernel is inferior to monolithic in almost all aspects microkernel is beautiful --s
Re: [dev] Operating system choice
+ microkernel is inferior to monolithic in almost all aspects
Re: [dev] Operating system choice
On 21 November 2014 12:07, Alexander Huemer wrote: > In my personal opinion Minix is no foundation to build on. There is a > reason why Linux Torvalds with his 'hobby project' got much more thrust > from the community than Andrew. S. Tanenbaum with his professional work. Not sure if Tanenbaum's minix efforts qualify for 'professional work'. I do think the reasons why minix did not gain the adoption are more related to it being less open towards the open source community, and being controlled by rather academic circles... -Anselm
Re: [dev] Operating system choice
Hi. On Thu, Nov 20, 2014 at 06:25:13PM -0800, Charles Thorley wrote: > I find Minix3 to be extremely interesting, and attractive (at least in > principle). The advantages of Minix are purely theoretical. All the different servers can be restarted when they crash, but that does not make the cause for the crash go away. I saw this happening a few times when I worked with Minix. A server crashes, it is restarted, it crashes again because the cause for the crash did not magically go away, it is restarted… You get the idea. In many situations this does not even work. If the filesystem server, or whatever this thing is called crashed it _should_ be restarted, but this not possible, because the necessary binary for the restart is unavailable, because the filesystem can't be reached. Most parts of the environment do not even work correctly. The last thing I remember was something like find /usr -name \*foo\* which crashed miserably, because find can only recurse through filesystem structures with no more than 256 entries or so. In my personal opinion Minix is no foundation to build on. There is a reason why Linux Torvalds with his 'hobby project' got much more thrust from the community than Andrew. S. Tanenbaum with his professional work. Kind regards, -Alex
Re: [dev] Operating system choice
On 20/11/2014, FRIGN wrote: > On Wed, 19 Nov 2014 22:53:12 -0500 > M Farkas-Dyck wrote: > >> OpenBSD has poor multiprocessing performance but Bitrig is working on it. > > You can buy yourself performance by buying faster Hardware, but you > can't buy yourself security. > That's why choosing security is always better than choosing speed. I ought to rather note that OpenBSD has cumbersome synchronization mechanisms which also happen to be inefficient, and Bitrig is moving to simpler synchronization mechanisms. For example: critical sections rather than interrupt priority levels. On 20/11/2014, Louis Santillan wrote: > systemd bus Ah, I see what you did there ☺
Re: [dev] Operating system choice
On Thu, Nov 20, 2014, at 06:34 PM, Greg Reagle wrote: > Well I am a member of this mailing list, and I am very interested in > Minix. Yes, to be clear - I meant "ignored in discussions on this mailing list," not "ignored by members of this mailing list." :)
Re: [dev] Operating system choice
On Thu, Nov 20, 2014, at 09:25 PM, Charles Thorley wrote: > It's surprising to me that Minix 3 appears to be, by way of googling > 'site:lists.suckless.org minix', almost completely ignored by this > mailing list. This thread brought that curiosity to my attention once > again. I wonder if anyone would be willing to shed some light on this > apparent discrepancy, even if it's only to correct my misunderstanding. Well I am a member of this mailing list, and I am very interested in Minix. I find it too immature to be "usable" at this point, but it is fascinating. For example it has very limited hardware support. I fervently hope that it does really well. I have made some very very minor contributions to the Minix wiki and I've run it in a virtual machine. Note that when it is fully mature it will be a NetBSD clone but with a very reliable and fault-tolerant core of the operating system. Speaking of NetBSD, I really like the concept of the NetBSD packaging system (pkgsrc) as one packaging system for all the Unix-like operating systems. I don't know if it's implemented in a suckless way, but I don't like all the duplication of effort of the very many packaging systems out there. These are my own opinions only. -- http://www.fastmail.com - Email service worth paying for. Try it for free
Re: [dev] Operating system choice
Greetings to the Suckless community. Thanks for all the awesome software. I find Minix3 to be extremely interesting, and attractive (at least in principle). A kernel that's only a few thousand (I think I heard 12 last?) LOC sounds like "do one thing and do it well" taken to an extreme. I realize that there is substantially more to the OS outside of that kernel, but my understanding is that the total size is still quite modest compared to most codebases that represent the same general scope of functionality. It's surprising to me that Minix 3 appears to be, by way of googling 'site:lists.suckless.org minix', almost completely ignored by this mailing list. This thread brought that curiosity to my attention once again. I wonder if anyone would be willing to shed some light on this apparent discrepancy, even if it's only to correct my misunderstanding. Many thanks, Charles
Re: [dev] Operating system choice
Wolfgang Corcoran-Mathe said: > None of this applies to insane software. (I do not wish to recompile > libwebkitgtk _ever again_, for example.) But aside from speeding up > fresh installs, software too awful to compile is the only good > argument for a large binary package library. Updating software is another good argument for a large binary package library. Updating xorg manually tends to be painful. -- Dmitrij D. Czarkoff
Re: [dev] Operating system choice
Quoth Markus Wichmann on Thu, Nov 20 2014 21:18 +0100: sabotage/Morpheus/sta.li: All great ideas, but since they're lacking the sheer manpower the major distributions boast, they can't possibly have the same library of packages. After running Slackware for a while, I've come to think this is not a flaw, and maybe even an advantage. Compiling good software is not much more complex or time-consuming than installing a binary, and the advantages of a custom build are great. None of this applies to insane software. (I do not wish to recompile libwebkitgtk _ever again_, for example.) But aside from speeding up fresh installs, software too awful to compile is the only good argument for a large binary package library. -- Wolfgang Corcoran-Mathe
Re: [dev] Operating system choice
I'm surprised nobody has mentioned TinyCore Linux. Not everything about it is suckless, but at least it's frugal on resources once you get it configured how you like. For my development machines, I started on RedHat in the 90s and continued on with Fedora until I found Crux around 2002. Loved it but maintaining and upgrading between versions is iffy. Finally converted Ubuntu around 2008. Been stuck with it ever since. Got a bunch RPi's I play with that have Debian, XBian, XBMC, etc. Experimented with TinyCore Linux, Slax, Arch, CrunchBang, others. I also maintain a few VPSes with Ubuntu. I eagerly await the victor of sabotage/Morpheus/sta.li. I'd love to get simpler and not get hit by the systemd bus. I guess we'll see who comes out on top. What I'd really like is a statically linked Crux built on busybox or toybox or sbase/ubase running the system/root binaries off a RAM disk and apps off SSD. For day-to-day stuff, I use OSX (Mac Mini & Mac Book Air). It's just too easy that way.
Re: [dev] Operating system choice
Markus Wichmann said: > sabotage/Morpheus/sta.li: All great ideas, but since they're lacking the > sheer manpower the major distributions boast, they can't possibly have > the same library of packages. They can't possibly have the same library of packages simply because their goal is to be suckless, which implies not including software that sucks too much. If your choice of software would correspond to that of sabotage/Morpheus/sta.li developers, you could easily contribute back packages for those few tools you would be missing. -- Dmitrij D. Czarkoff
Re: [dev] Operating system choice
Hey there, On Wed, Nov 19, 2014 at 12:19:15PM -0600, Josh Lawrence wrote: > I'm curious to know what flavor of *nix people on this list use on a > day-to-day basis. Slackware atm at home, I'm still tinkering with it to get an environment which conforms to my quirks. It's installed in dual boot with a dumbuntu (bodhi) for my relatives, who use it just for the browser and sometimes the word processor... I'd like to switch to a statically compiled *nix system next. Or to work a hell lot, adapting the modern world to a p9 distro. But I'm not going to change soon, slack is cool and I'm not in the mood. -- Teodoro Santoni
Re: [dev] Operating system choice
On Wed, Nov 19, 2014 at 12:19:15PM -0600, Josh Lawrence wrote: > So for those of you that participate in the suckless community in some > way: What do you run on your computer, and why? > Debian testing on my laptop and Windows on my PC. Because I use my laptop for working and playing around with stuff, and for programming, and I use my PC solely for video games (it's about the one thing where Windows is still better than Linux). Anyway, regarding my choice of distribution: I've started out on SuSE Linux, but that basically killed itself when I deleted HAL (ah, nostalgia...) Since then I've shopped around a bit before settling on Debian, because: Plan9: When I heard about it, it was pitched to me (by the fine folks at cat-v.org) as the greatest OS since sliced bread. However, the fact that it wouldn't even install in a Virtual PC instance (the error message was "I/O error". Gee, thanks, that tells me exactly what to do!) quickly turned me off. Gentoo: I like the basic idea of compiling everything yourself, but since you can't change a few fundamentals, like the choice of libc or compiler, you aren't reaping all the benefits of that, leaving you only with the drawback of watching a complicated package install itself, taking bloody ages! (I wanted to install xmonad. I aborted after an hour, because of course it had to install ghc first.) Ubuntu: Didn't get it to work. I don't know what went wrong, and now I don't much care anymore. sabotage/Morpheus/sta.li: All great ideas, but since they're lacking the sheer manpower the major distributions boast, they can't possibly have the same library of packages. Now, I wouldn't mind if they had everything or even most of what I need, but they don't. Also, missing even a possible glibc support, it is unlikely for me to get Adobe Flash running in those distributions. Which is a shame because surfing youtube/blip.tv/etc. is most of what I do in my free time. Debian: Simple enough that you can install it on pretty much anything with a display, but boasting a huge package library so you can make your box as blinged out or as spartan as you like. It's a binary distribution, so package installations are fast, and unlike with SuSE I never really managed to break it. I had a brief infatuation with ReiserFS, back when you didn't get the "murderous performance" jokes for that, but when I learned that having another ReiserFS image in a file on your ReiserFS means that the most agressive fsck option would eat itself, and that your file system can be relied upon to get into that state with just a few poorly chosen power outages (a problem on a laptop that would have to run for hours without an AC connection), I switched over to XFS, which of course meant having to reinstall. Oh, and there was that one time where I tried to upgrade from 32 to 64 bit. I somehow managed to upgrade everything except libc, leaving the system irrecoverable. So, yeah, it's Debian, because I managed to have it run for years on end without breaking, no matter what crazy stuff I did with it. Ciao, Markus
Re: [dev] Operating system choice
On 19 November 2014 19:19, Josh Lawrence wrote: > I'm curious to know what flavor of *nix people on this list use on a > day-to-day basis. I've recall that some have mentioned using OpenBSD, > and I recently saw a reference to Fedora which, to be honest, > surprised me. I haven't settled yet, I hope I will settle with sta.li some day. Most of the time I use suckbuntu these days (only the LTS versions)... I stopped using arch when they switched to systemd. I guess soon I will look for an alternative again, until sta.li becomes ready. The day when Linux won't start without systemd as depencency, I will potentially stop using linux-related systems at all and presumably migrate back to MS DOS. -Anselm
Re: [dev] Operating system choice
On Wed, 19 Nov 2014 22:53:12 -0500 M Farkas-Dyck wrote: > OpenBSD has poor multiprocessing performance but Bitrig is working on it. You can buy yourself performance by buying faster Hardware, but you can't buy yourself security. That's why choosing security is always better than choosing speed. Cheers FRIGN -- FRIGN
Re: [dev] Operating system choice
Hello, On Wed, Nov 19, 2014 at 12:19:15PM -0600, Josh Lawrence wrote: > So for those of you that participate in the suckless community in some > way: What do you run on your computer, and why? I use Exherbo, which is similar to Gentoo but more decentralized, (and probably less user friendly). I like being able to have my packages built exactly how I want them, with the dependencies *I* choose. Cheers, Maxime.
Re: [dev] Operating system choice
Hand-crafted Linux distro on my desktop, maintaining it is a pain in the ass so might switch to Gentoo soon. I am currently using root to log in and run each "package" with a different uid (was supposed to be an experiment but it worked somewhat well) which might be hard to do on Gentoo. Arch with uselessd on my laptop, it allows great configurability in my opinion, has an amazing package manager and is easy to maintain. I would love to run netbsd but it currently lacks support for _any_ hardware.
Re: [dev] Operating system choice
Void Linux [1] and (OpenBSD [2] or Bitrig [3]). Both easy to install, configure, and use. OpenBSD has poor multiprocessing performance but Bitrig is working on it. Void seems, in many ways, a better Arch. I mean to try morpheus too at some time when not so busy. I tried Plan 9 but the interface is very strange to me to learn all at once; perhaps this too when not so busy. I would want to properly port it to amd64/arm64 and port or write i3 or equivalent. [1] http://voidlinux.eu/ [2] http://openbsd.org/ [3] http://bitrig.org/
Re: [dev] Operating system choice
There's an incredible amount of spam and OT on this list isn't there! On 19/11/14 21:27, Lee Fallat wrote: On Wed, Nov 19, 2014 at 4:14 PM, Dmitrij D. Czarkoff wrote: Which of these aren't available on OpenBSD in your opinion? I think OpenBSD has most of what I listed, but lacks hardware support. Using a computer's CPU to its full extent is nice too. I'm usually running apache with at least 10 virtual instances and other servers, with 2 web browsers open, 5 terminals and a bunch of text editing windows (can you guess what I do yet?). I also like playing games the odd time, because some people just can't code for 50 years straight. If I did zero web development I think I'd be running OpenBSD, or hell even Plan 9, already full-time. I ran Plan 9 full-time once on my netbook, but couldn't deal with no Wi-Fi. I even had to look through Intel video driver source code for Linux to adjust the backlight. That was pretty awesome actually. Thankfully I didn't nuke the LCD. If you don't game, don't care about performance and peripherals, you can essentially run any OS of your choice. VGA support is fairly simple to implement as well as PS/2 devices from what I've observed (but I've never done this).
Re: [dev] Operating system choice
On Wed, Nov 19, 2014 at 4:14 PM, Dmitrij D. Czarkoff wrote: > Which of these aren't available on OpenBSD in your opinion? > I think OpenBSD has most of what I listed, but lacks hardware support. Using a computer's CPU to its full extent is nice too. I'm usually running apache with at least 10 virtual instances and other servers, with 2 web browsers open, 5 terminals and a bunch of text editing windows (can you guess what I do yet?). I also like playing games the odd time, because some people just can't code for 50 years straight. If I did zero web development I think I'd be running OpenBSD, or hell even Plan 9, already full-time. I ran Plan 9 full-time once on my netbook, but couldn't deal with no Wi-Fi. I even had to look through Intel video driver source code for Linux to adjust the backlight. That was pretty awesome actually. Thankfully I didn't nuke the LCD. If you don't game, don't care about performance and peripherals, you can essentially run any OS of your choice. VGA support is fairly simple to implement as well as PS/2 devices from what I've observed (but I've never done this).
Re: [dev] Operating system choice
Lee Fallat said: > I would like to use an alternative OS, such as OpenBSD or Plan 9 full > time, but I don't have the resources. Resources in this case are > servers running mainstream OSs to run services and tools like apache, > database software, 3d modeling software and so on. Which of these aren't available on OpenBSD in your opinion? -- Dmitrij D. Czarkoff
Re: [dev] Operating system choice
I've been a happy Arch user for 4 years, but I've been seriously considering moving to FreeBSD. Lots of similarities between the two, and FreeBSD has all the software I use in its ports tree. It seems to have the right balance of simplicity and customizability, and the -STABLE branch gets regular updates while being more stable, reliable and predictable than Arch. Stability has become a big concern of mine, insofar as I've finally got my user applications and system services and such configured just so and don't want to wonder if the next Arch update will break something. I've never had any major breaks on Arch, but I'm at the point where even minor setbacks piss me off. Case in point: While all of my outgoing email from the last week has ended up in the "Sent" folder none of them have actually been sent. I've been screwing with it for over an hour. If this mail reaches the list it's because Mutt's built-in SMTP support worked, which means msmtp is broken, possibly from the recent gnutls update. Second time a gnutls update broke something in the last month. I've play with CRUX before and was impressed by its ports system, but since a) managing wireless is more tedious than I think it should be, and b) you're pretty much required to maintiain your own heap of ports, I'll probably take a pass on that. CRUX has always felt kinda kludge-y. I'd give OpenBSD a try if it weren't lacking a couple packages/ports I need for work. Gentoo isn't an option. Don't get me started. -- "A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools." - Douglas Adams
Re: [dev] Operating system choice
On 19 November 2014 14:32, Greg Reagle wrote: > On 11/19/2014 01:19 PM, Josh Lawrence wrote: >> I'm curious to know what flavor of *nix people on this list use on a >> day-to-day basis. > for linux, I use debian across the board, it makes it easier for me to deal with getting my development/use setup across multiple machines. This plus NFS gives me almost identical usage across different destkops / servers. I do have different setup for my laptop, but it's simply a slightly modified version of my i3 config and additional laptop power saving tools. otherwise I use plan9 on some servers, and I have a box running Haiku just for fun (it's actually rather coherent) Calvin
Re: [dev] Operating system choice
On 11/19/2014 01:19 PM, Josh Lawrence wrote: > I'm curious to know what flavor of *nix people on this list use on a > day-to-day basis. I use: Ubuntu LTS: job workstation and job server Manjaro: job laptop and home laptop Debian stable: home desktop and job server I really like the stability of Debian, the ease of use of Ubuntu, and the recent packages of Manjaro. For my coworkers (who are neither programmers nor sysadmins) who want Linux I install Xubuntu LTS. I have dabbled with OpenBSD and NetBSD. From what I know of Plan 9 (which is just a little bit), it seems to be the ultimate in sucklessness.
Re: [dev] Operating system choice
On Wed, Nov 19, 2014 at 12:19:15PM -0600, Josh Lawrence wrote: > Hello list, > > I'm curious to know what flavor of *nix people on this list use on a > day-to-day basis. I've recall that some have mentioned using OpenBSD, > and I recently saw a reference to Fedora which, to be honest, > surprised me. I use OpenBSD at home and Slackware at work. I mostly want to focus on my work and I prefer systems that require almost no configuration while still being sane and simple enough to debug any potential issues. I am also maintaining a bunch of servers almost all of which run OpenBSD.
Re: [dev] Operating system choice
On Wed, Nov 19, 2014 at 12:19:15PM -0600, Josh Lawrence wrote: > So for those of you that participate in the suckless community in some > way: What do you run on your computer, and why? I moved from gentoo to sabotage linux. https://github.com/sabotage-linux/sabotage Having fun with it, but waiting for sta.li. Regards, -- Henrique Lengler
Re: [dev] Operating system choice
On Wed, Nov 19, 2014 at 1:19 PM, Josh Lawrence wrote: > Hello list, > Hey! > > So for those of you that participate in the suckless community in some > way: What do you run on your computer, and why? > I used Debian stable for a long time because obviously it provided stability in an environment where I needed it, which is my laptop which is extremely general purpose. I like the philosophy of actually being able to use your computer for everything it's capable of. Being pragmatic is important while working. Turns out though Debian stable has stomped on my foot a few times because of out dated packages. A flawless upgrade to Debian testing was done. I was extremely happy it was just an hour or so of waiting, reboot and I was in Debian testing. I would like to use an alternative OS, such as OpenBSD or Plan 9 full time, but I don't have the resources. Resources in this case are servers running mainstream OSs to run services and tools like apache, database software, 3d modeling software and so on. I would like to be able to learn more about USB, VGA standards and creating device drivers so I don't have to worry too much about hardware support. Maybe it'll be a good project for when I'm 50.
Re: [dev] Operating system choice
On Wed, Nov 19, 2014 at 1:19 PM, Josh Lawrence wrote: > So for those of you that participate in the suckless community in some > way: What do you run on your computer, and why? Crux at home, as I like it's simplicity coupled with customizability. Arch at work solely because of the ease of maintenance (and I don't particularly care what init system etc this machine uses, just that I can get the software I want at the version I want.)
Re: [dev] Operating system choice
On Wed, 19 Nov 2014 12:19:15 -0600 Josh Lawrence wrote: Hey Josh, > So for those of you that participate in the suckless community in some > way: What do you run on your computer, and why? It's a matter of taste, but I absolutely prefer Gentoo for Linux stuff because of its great flexibility. Alpine Linux, Morpheus and OpenBSD should be very good, as well, but I don't have the incentive to switch. Cheers FRIGN -- FRIGN
[dev] Operating system choice
Hello list, I'm curious to know what flavor of *nix people on this list use on a day-to-day basis. I've recall that some have mentioned using OpenBSD, and I recently saw a reference to Fedora which, to be honest, surprised me. This thread came up in my search: http://lists.suckless.org/dev/1006/4706.html ...but 2010 is a long time ago in "Internet years," so I thought the topic would be worth revisiting. While these types of threads are viewed by some as a waste of time, I usually learn something from them. So for those of you that participate in the suckless community in some way: What do you run on your computer, and why? Josh -- Josh Lawrence
