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Comment by hylaride | Hacker News Reader

The BSDs were so clean. With the exception of Slackware, Linux distros at the time (late 90s/early 2000s) tended to be bloated with everything installed and enabled by default for "ease of use" reasons. I was an OpenBSD guy, and the way they made loading things so cleanly and straightforward in /etc/rc.conf was a delight.

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> With the exception of Slackware, Linux distros at the time (late 90s/early 2000s) tended to be bloated with everything installed and enabled by default for "ease of use" reasons.

Not true. There were many lesser known Distros like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Source_Mage , or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T2_SDE which survived to this day.

I'd say the latter is running on more diverse hardware platforms than NetBSD, and actively developed and maintained :-)

Portable means just that: "Potentially portable if someone makes the effort."

Which NetBSD didn't in comparison.

And even if, it's lacking drivers for being fully featured.

I mean there was always Minix! Minix was available on floppies long before most people started running linux. Because it existed several years before linux. There was also SCO Unix.

But you couldn't do shit with it, on most hardware. And it wasn't really free.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coherent_(operating_system) would have been more practical.

I mean, why not BeOS, GNU Hurd, or ... etc. There wasn't much software for any of those things (and you would have had to be a pretty exotic sort of software pirate or know some hobbyists or be in an academic setting to afford them if you could not). That said I don't really support open source OSes for stuff like the stock market, and did not in the 1990s before they all shifted from AIX, Solaris, HP-UX and non-UNIX-based OSes to Linux in the late 90s/just before 9/11. Throwing this out there because we talked about how things can go wrong.

If you had any of the less common things like your mention or mine though, it was pretty good for job hunting. FWIW, never heard of your suggestion (more surprised I hadn't). But a lot of things were word of mouth back then, if not Computerworld, or something like it. I personally liked QNX a sh-t ton.

Huh! I had to work with AIX and some AS400, HP-UX, SunOS/early Solaris, but mostly SINIX. Also held a Microsoft MCSE for WinNT 4 and IIS once. I abandoned Windows for personal use by about 1994, gotten fed-up/snapped because of the unreliability of finding network peers during private LAN-parties. While that instantly worked with some Linux booted from ONE 1.44MB floppy disk! OFC no gaming possible with that. But that made me SNAP!

The last time I touched Windows in a professional setting was about 2001. Yay! Finally! Good Riddance!

Later on I had (by then obsolete) Sparc stations, and smaller pizza-boxes with PA-RISC 7500, or something. And many X86s. I abused my large kitchen as 'Cyberkitchen', having arranged all the systems in one corner, along two empty walls in a right angle, sometimes even shaped like an U. When I came home while it was dark, before switching the lights on it looked like something out of Sci-Fi, with all the status LEDs glowing in different colors :-)

But I didn't have any of that stuff in my living or sleeping room. I've found 'couch surfing' to be uncomfortable/unergonomic, even with early laptops. Always a good office chair, and big, non-wobbly/vibrating desks at the right height, even if somehow improvised.

Didn't do much with QNX, because I only had the demo version. While very impressive, it seemed impractical for my use-cases. Similar for BeOS.

At the moment I feel really comfortable with CachyOS running Plasma/KDE, minus all the gaming stuff, which I'm not interested in.

Absolutely hassle-free since about 2 years, doing everything I need without any lag, in most wacky configuration like ZRAM over all the 32GB physical RAM, on BTRFS.

Plus profile-sync-deamon for holding the browser profile in RAM, too.

And syncing it back periodically to 'disk', err...SSD, making even good old Firefox(or a derivative like LibreFox) fly.

Oh, and working suspend/resume every single time. AHARR HARR HARR!1!!

I preferred Byte, UnixWorld, c't, and iX to Computerworld.

Edit: Since you've mentioned GNU/Hurd/QNX/BeOS, ever heard of https://chimera-linux.org ?

Or https://genode.org ? I find the latter to be a most interesting alternative to things like QNX/BeOS/Haiku. Especially since it has a native port of current QT. But I have been too lazy and spoiled by CachyOS to invest much time into it. Though it does boot into live mode from USB-Keychain on my hardware. Hrrrm. Decisions, decisions...

Seen and heard of chimera but only witnessed other people running it. It's a little too arcane for my tastes.

Pity you abandoned Windows before even winsock/trumpet came out.

94 may have been a typo/misremember. I remember for certain that the LAN-partying happened either on DOS via IPX or on Windows95 over NetBios, and it was the latter that enraged me. Which later on could be remedied by installing/activating the MS IP-stack, and using fixed IPs. No more endless waiting then. Even if the games themselves didn't use IP. It was just that the fixed IPs also made the other stuff synchronize in an instant, be it NetBios, or IPX(which didn't have that problem as much, or at all IIRC. But still, any relevant protocol installed, and Bam! Game on!). I also remember Trumpet/Winsock from even later, by using it to bring some older legacy systems into the network for some businesses, and thought of it as impressive for what it was, and what it ran on. But as I said, 'legacy' by then. I had no use for it before that, because almost nobody had internet at the time in that place. Compuserve and AOL via dial-in existed, though. But that was something else. I also fiddled with something based on KA9Q for the legacy stuff, which I've found to be more impressive, because leaner and meaner. And could show off my superior 'memmaker' powers, meaning I didn't have to rely on that thing to get the most free DOS RAM, by loading it high into UMB, EMS, XMS, whatever. That I don't remember exactly anymore.

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