Friends of #BSDCafe and the #Fediverse, for those who may not have heard, we recently lost Mike Karels - @karels - a truly significant figure in the history of our favorite operating systems. Among our BSD Cafe community, we have his niece - @kristin_charlotte
Let's show her family our warmth and gratitude for the role he played.
Seems to work fine with LXQT, couldn't get enlightenment to work, apparently the current version in pkgsrc is rather old as well.
So I'll run this for now and have a second laptop just in case with #NetBSD#BSD#Linux#OpenSource#LXQT
Wrote a few more chapters, and boom. It's 23:30. The /Forks and Wars/ chapter of my Unix History is going smoothly. However there is so much info that would make the text incomprehensable, I think I'll add "bonus" subpages, like timeline.
Which Unix forks would you consider as the most important/noteable except of BSD, Solaris and Xenix? Have you used others maybe?
A nerd nostalgia thread of possible #RetroComputing interest:
From 1993-1994, I was a “technical assistant” in the RF Engineering department of #Comcast#Cellular. Back then, Comcast was a scrappy regional cable #TV operator making its first foray into #mobile telephony, not the multinational #telecommunications and media behemoth we know today. (1/6)
Before moving to greener (and higher-paying 🤑) pastures, one of my two big "technical assistant" projects for #Comcast#Cellular was upgrading the engineers' Sun #Unix workstations from the #BSD-based #SunOS 4 to #SVR4-based SunOS 5 (#Solaris 2), and from #NIS / #YellowPages to NIS+.
In hindsight, it was a bad idea to make both changes at once, but I was a kid entranced by novelty and not yet very considerate of my users during the inevitable downtimes. (3/6)
Adding myself here: I'm happy to chat about #Linux and answer what I can or help find resources. I don't know a lot about the latest, fanciest KDE and Gnome desktops but maybe you don't want that anyway and want to run something like xfce or another lightweight desktop (and yeah, for better or worse, there are lots of options with this stuff). Or #BSD. OpenBSD has been the daily driver for years now. One starting point might be https://fedoraproject.org/spins/ to easily try different desktops...
Alas, I have to consider some other hardware that is more BSD friendly than what I currently have for my main laptop. Wifi worked great on NetBSD, whereas it was flaky on FreeBSD, but the audio input was the flaky one.
A ThinkPad, maybe? I'll gladly accept hardware recommendations for BSD-friendly models from at least a decade ago (read: cheap).
Current status: Deciding between Void and Alpine for the next episode of The Main Machine Trials®
After a search in the NetBSD packages for lightweight web browsers, the winners are: vimb, dillo, luakit and netsurf.
Dillo's new release 3.1.0 still hasn't landed, so no HTTPS there. Luakit is very neat, extremely lightweight, minimal, has vim-like bindings and would be perfect if it weren't for the constant white flashing between each pageload when using a custom, darker CSS. NetSurf is also quite neat, with tab support for heavier sessions.
The winner for me is vimb, which although leaving tabs to the window manager, has vim-like bindings, is pretty minimal and does not cause flashing when switching between pages on a custom darker CSS setting.
Honor mention to Arctic Fox, a Pale Moon clone that hits peak nostalgia with the pre-omnibar Firefox look. No theming, not as lightweight, but going strong at 29.5k commits since 2018.
🧵 …although I tend to favour OpenBSD and Linux for personal reasons, I find this decision OK. Certain open source projects lack clear, reasoned positions and decisions.
»NetBSD’s New Policy – No Place for AI-Created Code:
NetBSD bans AI-generated code to preserve clear copyright and meet licensing goals.«