[nycbug-talk] Desktop

[Miles Nordin]

>>>>> "mj" == Matt Juszczak <matt at atopia.net> writes:

    mj> what do all the BSD lovers here use on their desktops?

I use OpenBSD.  The original reason was (1) a friend told me it works
well on the X40, so i went out and bought an X40 and ran openbsd on
it.  known-good combination.  and (2) free wireless drivers providing
basic functionality.  

It fails both parts.

for (1), it mostly works but if you do ANYthing to it while suspended,
plug or unplug anything, including DC power, it'll panic or kill the X
server.  Also I trired to play audio on it, and it started skipping
and clicking like the samplerate was wrong somehow.

yeah, sure, S2RAM works, but on Linux you can get S2RAM supported by
the manufacturer if you buy Acer One or EEE or whatever, and when you
don't have S2RAM, Ubuntu can do software-only hibernation to the swap
partition, so it's kind of <yawn>, that's pretty good for 2004, so why
don't you go back in time in your OpenBSD-powered time machine and pat
yourselves on the back.

for (2), ``basic'' seems to omit any stable chip with 802.11a support.
Their favorite, Ralink, doesn't make an 802.11a chip, and their
Reyk-freeHAL-based atheros driver doesn't do 802.11a.  Also they don't
do WPA which seems to have shifted into the Basic category.  and I
can't get aircrack to work on it consistently.  it halfway works I
guess.  I dunno what's wrong with it.  Honestly wireless is a fucking
disaster everywhere though.  I am betting the ar5k driver and the new
mac80211 framework in Linux is going to school everyone in another 12
months, though.  especially with OpenWRT driving them to do some real
release engineering.  there is some funded development of openwrt by
La Fonera and others, and also I think there is a culture of backdoor
NDA-breaking information-leeking between chip company insiders and
Linux developers because of the new college students, the
piraatengeneraation or whatever.  I think BSD will always have
shittier laptop wireless drivers because it can't run on a real AP: no
JFFS2, no squashfs, no execute-in-place, no embedded targets for
fashionable chips that people actually use like Atheros SoC or Marvell
Orion.

What panned out stunningly well was the ports collection.  The
/usr/ports on openbsd have zero knobs, so you can start things
building, walk away, expect to come back and find them working.
Gentoo/FreeBSD/pkgsrc has all those shitty dials that keep stopping
your builds until you fiddle them into a combination that works
together.  This would be not so bad if the dials shipped with
reasonable settings, and those settings worked together---in that
case, it'd be a superset of OpenBSD or Ubuntu which comes with no
dials.  But they don't do this.  You find retarded things like someone
disabled GIFs or MP3 support because of patents with the reasoning
``people should be using oggs and ayway you can always turn it back on
again with the package option.''  Or A4 paper is a compile-time
option.  Or else they pander to these fucking OCD dinosaur retards who
are like ``I like to run my machine as lean as possible.  I don't want
all these extra packages pulled in.  god, why is it building X when X
has NOTHING TO DO with Y.  It's just slowing down my build.  That shit
should be turned off, that's why I come here.'' so you find all this
broken missing shit, like maybe no manuals because Wolford Brimley
threw a tantrum when he found Java was a build-dependency of Vim
because it was needed by some other package that translated the man
page from XML into nroff/mandoc.  I don't give a shit how long or how
much space it takes to build, only how many times the build craps out,
waiting for my attention, hurting my brain digging through other
people's broken spaghetti.  Go ahead, build Java, and use it to make
the manuals.  Just do it while I'm sleeping so I can come back to a
working system.  OpenBSD produced a working system an order of
magnitude faster than FreeBSD, pkgsrc, gentoo.  mostly because of the
lack of pkgoptions/USEflags, though in Gentoo's case also because the
BSD existence of a base system breaks open the circular dependencies.
Anyway I'm just so over this gamer shit that thinks I want to spend a
month ``customizing'' my machine---I feel like these people piss where
they live and then go to Mac OS or Ubuntu or ``live CDs'' and other
panzyass purple-dinosaur distributions so they can escape themselves.
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