david

joined 1 year ago
[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

Millennial here. I used computers from a very young age, and when my near-continuous use became untenable, my parents got me my own: first computer was a Macintosh IIfx, then a Sun Ultra 1, then a Power Mac G4 (the stripes on the front, handles, don't remember exact model name). Everything after the G4 has been less exciting, even if it's all more powerful. Not sure if this is because I've gotten older or if the gear has gotten less fun.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

You bring up another good point that I haven't considered - signal! Man, why isn't there a signal client? I almost want to make this a side project now.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

I've found sysupgrade to be pretty good at the core OS, but I have definitely had issues with drivers (particularly audio and display) and third party packages installed through pkg_add. Upgrading seems to be a mixed bag in terms of continuity of function when you're running a richer system, as a workstation often is. On a server, with minimal package surface area, things are just fine.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Exploring! SDF is like the coalition of servers I ran in college with friends and campus friendlies. A little of it was explicitly practical, some of it unstable, all of it educational and fun and sometimes stuff took off. I love that SDF survives, and I love that they have paying members.

When new or esoteric stuff hits, whether it's 9front or the latest fedi service, SDF is where to see if it makes sense for you. Sure there's home labs, but a home lab doesn't have the community around it that we have here on SDF, which means it doesn't give you the sense of how a service runs at scale or in the (sometimes positive, sometimes corrupting, but always informative) presence of others.

 

This is an OS which has everything. It's clean, it's simple, it has a helpful community, stable code, and even pretty good package counts to support nearly any desktop/workstation activity.

And yet, I feel like there are nagging issues which ultimately affect all non-mainstream^1^ OSes. Display driver complications, janky system upgrades, a lack of groupware clients. I'm not picking on OpenBSD, I love the distro and I think it should succeed in this particular area (the desktop/workstation) where other open source alternatives have failed, but why hasn't anybody managed to make it happen yet?

For a while, there was a similar hope around DragonflyBSD in the FreeBSD community, but I don't know where that ended up... I do know I see nobody really using it.

What's it going to take?

^1^Obviously, I mean MacOS and Windows, since Linux is at least as hampered on the desktop, perhaps moreso on account of the poor community and scattered vision.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Cool, wasn't sure if there were rules or anything around this. I guess as long as folks stay civil it doesn't much matter. It's pleasant that that's more or less the norm in whole swaths of the fediverse here.

 

What are we thinking in terms of the hierarchy here? Multiple communities on this instance, or just one community and consolidate into posts for topics?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

That license plate though!