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Early in my Unix-ish at home journey (26-ish years ago) I tried FreeBSD. It was so Unix because, well, it is. An operating system, not a collection of parts.
by MarkusWandel 7mo ago
Early in my Unix-ish at home journey (26-ish years ago) I tried FreeBSD. It was so Unix because, well, it is. An operating system, not a collection of parts. I found at the time in Linux land Debian felt similar.
But there is always pressure for more features, more bloat. In Linux, on the plus side, I can plug in some random gadget and in most cases it just works. And any laptop that's a few years old, you can just install Fedora from its bootable live image, and it will work. Secure boot, suspend, Wifi, the special buttons on the keyboard, and so on. But the downside is enormous bloat and yes, often the kind of tinkering you really don't want to do any more, such as the Brother laser printer drivers still being shipped as 32-bit binaries and the installer silently failing because one particular 32-bit dependency wasn't autoinstalled. Or having to get an Ubuntu-dedicated installer (Displaylink!) to run on Fedora.
But here you have the "mainstream" Unix-ish OS absorbing all the bleeding edge stuff, all the bloat. Allowing FreeBSD free reign to be pure, with a higher average quality of user, which sets the tone of the whole scene. An echo of the old days, like Usenet before "Eternal September" and before Canter & Siegel - for those old enough to remember how it all felt back then.
- sidkshatriya 7mo ago> But the downside is enormous bloat If you think Linux can have "enormous bloat" then Windows bloat by the same standards is terrifyingly humongous (and slow!).
- Asooka 7mo agoIt is.
- MarkusWandel 7mo agoWell, all those years ago, my testbed for installing and trying out FreeBSD was a 486 with 8MB of memory. That was a heck of a machine compared to the ones BSD grew up on, and it ran great. No GUI on that setup of course, but all the Unixy stuff... vi editor, C toolchain, NFS etc. I don't know what's the minimum system to run no-GUI mainline Linux on these days. I'm sure BSD has gotten bloated too, but I'll bet not as much.
- adiabatichottub 7mo agoStock FreeBSD is about 1.5GB. If you really strip it down to a barebones OS it's about 300MB.
- throwaway27448 7mo agoIronically windows still ships without basic functionality
- philistine 7mo agoFreeBSD is the macOS to Linux's Windows. Or better yet, the iOS to Linux's Android.
- steve1977 7mo agoI mean, parts of FreeBSD literally are in macOS and iOS...
- massysett 7mo agoWhat kind of Brother laser printer is this? If it’s Postscript or PCL or AirPrint you don’t need drivers.
- kalleboo 7mo agoBrother ship mystery meat linux "drivers" that have a PPD that sends your document through Ghostscript I guess to scrub PostScript that the printer doesn't support. I tried just using a generic PPD from openprinting.org but that caused the printer to spit out a ream of pages printed with binary junk, so mystery drivers it is.