February 11th, 2020:
I've had some feedback on the other day's phlog post[1], specifically the
part where I mentioned I've ditched Linux for good in favour of OpenBSD.
As I love dialogue, I thought I'd respond.
I've read a few excellent posts [2][3][4] from fellow phloggers/Mastoneros
wondering about my rationale for the switch, which I half-jokingly
attributed (on Mastodon) to "boredom". This isn't entirely untrue - I've
been futzing about with Linux since '97-ish and, while I *still* have no
idea what the Hell I'm doing half the time, I've gotten pretty comfortable
doing my daily tasks. I'm at a point where it's not a challenge to make
my Linux system do what I want. Hardware support is excellent (apart from
that *one* unsupported fucking Broadcomm chipset that's in most of my wifi
cards), and I've been hard-pressed to find something that doesn't work
with a minimum of fuss. Even an obscure SCSI (photographic) slide scanner
worked out-of-the-box in Debian/xsane!
Now, as for the "many and myriad" reasons I alluded to, I'd like to be
able to give you a technical or even philosophical justification for
ditching Linux... but I won't. It's not because of systemd, monolithic
kernels, DRM, or even with Microsoft joining the Linux Foundation (shit,
have you ever actually read who's on board? Yikes!). I'll be honest, as
an end-user who sometimes works "under the hood", I really don't know much
about the real implications of each of these, apart from the occasional
opinion piece from more knowledgeable friends. I'll leave the pros and
cons to people with a more vested interest to debate, although my gut
tells me to sit the debate out and wait for the dust to settle.
The *real* fact of the matter is I wanted to try something new but
something a little familiar. OpenBSD worked first try on my ancient
Presario, so I stuck with it. I had to put in a little more work to get
it set up the way I wanted, but I persevered and enjoyed myself. It's
package management system is pretty much the same as the one I learned on
Solaris way back when, and it didn't take long for me to be productive.
Now, I want to install it on more capable, contemporary hardware to see
what I can do.
Like I said, no deep, philosophical reasoning, just an urge to do
something different for a while.
[1]
gopher://sdf.org:70/0/users/sparcipx/phlog/February_2020/02-08-20
[2]
gopher://republic.circumlunar.space:70/0/~slugmax/phlog/2020-02-10-
comments-on-ditching-linux
[3]
gopher://i-logout.cz/0/phlog/posts/2020-02-11_on_ditching_linux.txt
[4]
gopher://1436.ninja:70/0/Phlog/20200210.post
