Hacker News Reader

Comment by CoolCold | Hacker News Reader

Not related to OpenBSD itself, more for "minimalistic" approach - screenshots with irssi were popular like 25 or 20 years ago. I see kinda nothing new here, just fly stuck in amber.

Has minimalistic meant to be "limited"? Then makes sense.

TUI based? Somewhat makes a bit of sense.

Minimalistic but yet full featured? I couldn't see that on provided sample.

View on HN

I have a similar setup as I mentioned in another comment.

I wouldn't say it is limited or not fully featured. It does everything one needs. There's nothing missing, rather it lacks the bloat. It begins with a basic system and you build up the things you need and want on top of it (versus starting with a bloated system and trying to remove things you don't need or want).

Why do I prefer the minimal setup? In my mind, stability. I have used the same setup and mostly the same configuration for ~16 years. At times my machine has had an uptime of 700+ days before a reboot.

I like things that "just work" and continue to work, forever (preferably). More moving parts means more potential breakage. Keep it stupid simple and to the point.

One's needs are much different from other one's needs.

Not blaming your setup is bad for your needs, but I'm pessimistic on ideals of 700 days uptime and not changing things for 16 years. Sign of stagnation for me.

My needs includes being able to cast my screen to TV or play music via AirPlay or chat in Slack/Mattermost or run some ML/Cuda stuff or tell (by voice) my laptop (Cortana actually) to set alarm for 5 minutes or...

I'm not sure I could do all that with setup of the sort you have.

>cast

Just use HDMI.

> Music

VLC has Chromecast support, and maybe Airplay.

> Slack

Bitlbee has plugins for everything. Just plug your fav IRC client.

It’s very easy to be minimalistic when you’re doing very little.

I don't need nor desire desktop software written with web technologies or other bloated UIs to be productive, thank you.

If you enjoy the bloat of Electron and using your toy mouse to make your computer do what many people do in a terminal then that's your choice. I won't begrudge someone their TOMY computer experience.

Do I understand it right that taskset you need to cover with computer is quite static and not that much focused on collaboration with others? For example - other team members have daily stand up in Slack's huddle, with screen sharing and even drawing from time to time, but you are not actively involved or even cannot attend at all?

Wider question - how it makes your productivity/life better?

I used Slack for the first time the other day and I don't see the fascination and buzz behind it. I'd rather an open source / in-house solution, regardless of whether it's for a business or non-profit project; Mattermost or Zulip, for example. Perhaps even IRC.

I wouldn't be drawing anything with a mouse or trackpad, that much is certain - perhaps a tablet with a stylus would be more suitable for those things. I could use a digitiser tablet with Gimp or Krita if I wanted to do some drawing.

That said, I have access to a web browser which allows participation in Slack, Zoom, etc if required as well as any other GUI programs I may want to run in my minimalist environment. Even in the screenshot I have IRC and Matrix - those are used for collaboration, it's just the clients aren't written in JavaScript/TypeScript.

Some people consider Discord essential for collaboration - those people are probably bad dangers.

I'm more productive and my life is better because I know every file on my computer and what it is doing or what it is communicating with at any one time; I can customise everything to be used in the way I find most optimal/efficient without permission from anyone :)

Like Linus the creator of Linux? Is he really doing "very little"?

Admittedly he does very little with his computer. He often said these days it's mostly reading and writing emails and merging patches. And he often stated he does not know nor care much about how his desktop works. He uses stock Fedora and spends his time inside his Micro Emacs clone, and laments he's not even doing much coding these days.

I wouldn't be surprised if he had a harder time than an average sweng to set up a LAMP server or troubleshoot networking issues.

Being central to the kernel development doesn't automatically mean you're a computer wiz.

Writing version 0.1 of a kernel from scratch very much does mean you are a computer wiz, how else are you going to make it run? You need to program the base hardware of the computer manually!

Of course if to you a computer wiz is someone who knows how to write a web page, or how Windows works, or how you use Photoshop, then no that’s not what you need. Then again the people who know that probably aren’t enough of a computer wiz to write a kernel from scratch.

Not really it does not. We differ on the definition of wiz: you mean one that knows really well how the hardware works, in this context I mean someone that knows how to "program" a computer. This is why I used the very generic word "wiz" and not software engineer. I mean being generally proficient, and he said he is not.

Knowing the exact procedure to enter protected mode in x86 doesn't mean knowing how to troubleshoot network issues, setting up a Wireguard connection or figuring out why systemd doesn't want to start that process.

And in any case, as I mentioned, Linus hasn't been doing much coding these days. These days Linus is a world class product manager. This is main role, and he has admitted that himself. His main responsibilities and daily duties have evolved since 1991, and so has the computing world.

In my opinion a computer wiz has enough talent and knowledge about tech that he can very quickly learn how to do all these things. And I don’t doubt for a second that Linus would be able to learn Wireguard, systemd or any networking system within a few days to a level far exceeding most people, insofar he doesn’t already know.

Linus didn’t just build the most used kernel on the planet, he also built the most used revision control system on the planet and has proven to be an effective project manager, whatever people think about his style. You’d probably be short sighted to dismiss any of his abilities.

you are right and I agree with you on fast learning path, knowledge and being smart in general. The original point though, it all started with

> It’s very easy to be minimalistic when you’re doing very little.

Still makes sense even for Linus, as he probably not need to have say Hadoop running in Docker Desktop, Chromecast playing videos/casting and whatever beyond things related to kernel development on the coding machine vs general case machine.

Standards change.

The screenshot was mostly to break up the article - it's not a picture book, the meat is in the words.

As a minimalist setup there's not really anything of note you could screenshot; Just a bunch of windows without decorations and some non-bloated software.

And I thought my Sway config is complex. Look at this stuff, it even runs X. Does Wayland work on OpenBSD?

The howto also uses an FTP client, and doesn't explain how it got the checksum.

"file transfer program" https://man.openbsd.org/ftp

Wayland applications can be used with the Arcan display server, but there is no native support for OpenBSD in Wayland.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com