geek OS

On Sat, 8 Jan 2005 gordonjcp(a)gjcp.net wrote: Windows is appropriate in places, there's many good software packages for it, but I otherwise agree you, especiially for anyone with more than pedestrian demands. I just sink further into geekdom, and after getting bamboozled by the increasing complexity and featuritis of linux (SuSE 9.2) (*) "went back" to freeBSD. (It's > 10 years old... :-) I found that since the last time I used it (mid 90's) it's MUCH nicer. Supports all the crappy hardware I have (Sony VAIO vx89), boots 2X faster, imported, transformed all my data, and tuned for the new OS in three days. I'm running fvwm2 (over KDE), gained 200 MEGABYTES FREE MEMORY!, and sacrificed *nothing* in the way of convenience. Nothing. I installed it with the three-floppy kernel and an ethernet to the world (at UCI.EDU, fat pipe to freebsd.org). Practically painless. Geek onward! (*) somehow Yast got confused; can't ID the OS version, couldn't figure out how to do online updates any more. Spent a few hous over a few weeks trying to track down just how yast determines it, realized there was a lengthening list of problems knowable, but unwilling, to solve. CVS for updates is at least debuggable. Big linux distros are getting more and more baroque as they try to "compete" with W$.