How much disk space do you actually need to do your work? I've been thinking about this lately.
Of course, there are people who work with video and graphics and for them the answer is "the more the better". 1-2 Tb is an absolute minimum, I guess.
But there are people who work with texts (all kinds of). As a translator I find that my laptop with 32Gb eMMC is more than enough. Actually, it had been more than enough for many years in the past. Now I rarely use it.
Most of this space actually goes to OS. And the space to ACTUALLY DO the work boils to... well, 2-3Gb: PDFs, DOCXs, MDs, image files, dictionaries.
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[#]Caturday is almost over and... well, Fyodor Ivanovich kindly asks to not disturb him.
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It has come to my mind that we live the last years of a happy era when you can actually buy a phone with no #AI shenanigans whatsoever (well, except for obvious neural networks working with camera images if you count them as AI for some reason).
The end of this era is nigh. And there's basically nothing we can do about it.
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Not a bash on OpenSUSE Tumbleweed per se, but a reason NOT to use rolling distros.
After one of the updates sdcv (console dictionary I use every day) disappeared from my computer.
That seemed strange and after some questions it turned out that sdcv haven't been built successfully for the last 6 weeks, so it was removed from repositories.
And because Tumbleweed does "distro update" instead of usual update, it synced my installation with repos and cleaned everything that's not currently present.
Now, from an end-user perspective it basically means that maintainer of my OS deleted an application that I use from my device. An application itself was perfectly fine and working well, they just couldn't build it on their side, so deleted it on mine as well.
Of course there was a moment when I pressed "y" to update, but when there's thousands of packages getting updates and removals it's easy to miss something you actually use.
I see their reasons (and I probably could do some proactive steps to "pin" my app or prevent that if I had known about a problem beforehand), but it doesn't seem right to me. It could've been some obscure library that could wipe many apps at once through chain of dependencies. One more thing to consider about rolling distros.
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Had to install Windows 10 yesterday and in the process was amazed how bad big corporations are in basic things.
So, the installer itself pretty much didn't change since Windows 95. And in *nix world it often is a good thing, it means that there were some right things done back in the days: Slackware (Pat made the installer and saw it was good), FreeBSD, OpenBSD, etc.
But no, sir, that's not the case here. Windows installer sucked back in '90s and it sucks some thirty years later.
There's no single moment during Windows 10 installation when you can "Go back". All changes apply immediately. It's simply abysmal.
Formatting the disk, choosing right partition for installation is terrifying:
you get long list of all disks and partitions without ANY directions as to what's where. No disk label, no disk name, size, nothing. Just Disk 0 Partition 1, Disk 1 Partition 2, etc.
You hit "Delete partition" and installer deletes it instantly, without any warning.
I can't imagine easier way to bork your whole system and data if you have several disks installed.
Any random Linux distro now have figured out how to do it right. It can actually partition the disk in the right way automatically.
But Microsoft can't figure out this advanced technology yet.
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So, a little New Year gift from me to myself. FreeBSD 6 Unleashed. 1st edition, 2006. Well, Russian translation from 2007. Just $5 nowadays. Without DVD, sadly.
Subtitle says "Complete manual", and it's really complete: 1056 pages that cover basically everything from installation to administration, userland, shell programming, basics of Perl, configuring X, network configuration et al.
For the most part book seems still relevant.
[#]FreeBSD
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Man, this article from 2001 called "Why OpenBSD will never be as secure as Linux" surely didn't age well (https://seifried.org/security/os/20011107-openbsd-linux.html):
"As you can see there is a large selection of security software Linux, ranging from simple items like the Openwall kernel patch to very configurable security suites like PitBull LX.
These solutions are simply not available for OpenBSD, so if you have needs beyond the basic User/Group/Other filesystem restrictions for example you are basically out of luck. Restricting access to port 80 for example, while easily achieved in Linux with NSA SELinux or PitBull LX is basically impossible in OpenBSD. Protecting binary software can be done in Linux with a variety of tools, doing so in OpenBSD is very difficult (there is little you can do).
Even with some of the most secure source code in the world OpenBSD will not be capable of providing the same levels of security and trust that a Linux system with the appropriate software (i.e. NSA SELinux or PitBull) can. For a system to be both secure and trusted you need both secure code and additional items that provide Mandatory Access Controls, RBAC, Type enforcement and so on. This is why OpenBSD will never be as secure as Linux."
[#]OpenBSD
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Is there a way to disable touchpad while typing in #OpenBSD ? wsmouse(4) doesn't seem to contain such option. I can think of disabling tapping, but that's not the best solution...
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Using Dillo makes you think that modern Web is fundamentally broken. Although, it's not entirely fair, of course, because Dillo doesn't fully support even HTML 4.01 and supports only elements of HTML 5.0. But Web is broken nonetheless, no doubt about that.
I'm glad that my static site in Dillo looks... well, relatively authentic. It's usable.
Dillo brings me back that taste of 00's WWW. When Internet was a free (not as in a free beer) and open space. When sites looked strange and it was fine. When your voice wasn't suppressed by governments on the one side and swarms of activists on the other.
And most of all, when browsers had one digit version numbers.
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I've made some experiments with vim and neovim on my HP Stream laptop with OpenBSD (Intel N3060 instead of CPU, 4Gb of RAM, some eMMC) to see how fast vim and neovim are.
laptop.local.domain:me $ time vim -c "q!"
0m00.39s real 0m00.24s user 0m00.12s system
laptop.local.domain:me $ time nvim -c "q!"
0m00.12s real 0m00.06s user 0m00.05s system
Not surprising, my neovim installation is clear, with no config, whereas vim has 151 lines in .vimrc with exactly two plugins (NERDTree and Notational-fzf). So it's bound to be heavier. Also, all numbers aren't cold starts, so some libraries are already loaded in memory.
Now, let's see how clear run fares:
laptop.local.domain:me $ time vim -u "NONE" -c "q!"
0m00.09s real 0m00.04s user 0m00.05s system
laptop.local.domain:me $ time nvim -u "NONE" -c "q!"
0m00.10s real 0m00.05s user 0m00.02s system
Pretty much on par with each other. Next, I've prepared redacted .vimrc excluding plugins and everything else to see which options influence load times the most.
Single "set number" option doesn't influence load time at all. But when I turn "filetype plugin on" I get some increase in load time:
laptop.local.domain:me $ time vim -u ".vimrc2" -c "q!"
0m00.16s real 0m00.10s user 0m00.05s system
Around 6ms. I've tried including many other options and most of them won't influence load time at all (remaps, autogroups, functions, global variables, etc.), except "set nocompatible" that adds 2ms more.
Adding any plugin heavily influences load time. Say, vim-airline alone can do this:
laptop.local.domain:me $ time vim -u ".vimrc2" -c "q!"
0m00.76s real 0m00.68s user 0m00.06s system
But neovim with vim-airline does it much better (on the same config file).
laptop.local.domain:me $ time vim -u ".vimrc2" -c "q!"
0m00.70s real 0m00.60s user 0m00.07s system
laptop.local.domain:me $ time nvim -u ".vimrc2" -c "q!"
0m00.47s real 0m00.33s user 0m00.11s system
Here's what neovim capable of with only NERDTree and notational-fzf installed:
laptop.local.domain:me $ time nvim -u ".vimrc2" -c "q!"
0m00.23s real 0m00.10s user 0m00.11s system
Looks waaay better to me than vim. Of course, on a somewhat more capable hardware you probably won't notice the difference, but in my case it's night and day. That's a little sad as I've always prefered vim to neovim.
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Here's my newbie two cents on Vim and Emacs no one asked about.
Vim is when simple things are easy, while complex things are difficult.
Emacs is when simple things are complex, while complex things are manageable.
For example, say, you need Markdown syntax highlighting in Vim. Just open .md file, it's already there. You need syntax highlighting in Emacs? Well, you need a whole package for that. It lets you do everything you can imagine with Markdown. But if you just wanted syntax highlighting, well, that's not how it's gonna work.
Say, you need to keep track of your TODO's. Well, there are plugins for Vim, for sure. Most of them depend on some external utilities, and you probably should use them anyway. Or you can write your own shell scripts for that.
While Emacs comes with a system that lets you keep track of everything you can imagine (org-mode) and then some. Don't let me even start about things like org-roam and howm. All of them require extensive tinkering, but in the end you get a system that can do almost anything you can imagine.
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It's that time of the year again when I think I can migrate to Emacs and use OS as a bootloader for it. #emacs
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KDE probably fixed a 9 year old bug (https://invent.kde.org/plasma/plasma-desktop/-/merge_requests/2607) in version 6.3.0. Across different KDE versions your desktop icons shuffle after reboot which makes using desktop icons practically meaningless. It was first reported in 2015 (https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=354802). But actually, its first appearances could be noticed even as far as KDE3.
Why probably fixed? It was reported to be fixed in 5.27 already. And then in 6.0 it was kinda fixed again. Yet here we are.
It actually drives me nuts to see in Plasma6 the same bugs I saw in KDE3 in 2005.
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Years of using tiling window managers taught me two things:
So using stacking window managers or DE sometimes borders with panic: what the hell is going on behind my web browser window? I don't know. Could be nothing, could be something, could be anything.
There's an indefinite space out there, you know. Here be dragons.
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I often see posts in OpenBSD and FreeBSD subreddits from people thinking about moving to said OS'es (I'm talking about desktop users, of course). Now that Linus does his things again, these posts pop up even more often.
They usually have some bullet lists with things need to daily drive the OS.
One of the things many people ask about is support for games, whether something relatively simple like Minecraft or even some AAA titles.
I know for a fact that gaming support (especially with Valve efforts) brought a lot of attention to Linux. Many people moved from Windows or even discovered Linux for the first time thanks to the fact that they actually can play the games they like on this OS. Now we even have gaming distros like Nobara.
But I wonder, would it be a good thing for BSDs to widen gaming support?
On the one hand, it's not a bad thing - more attention to BSDs, more support for more things.
On the other hand, something in me tells it might be a wrong type of attention that might bring wrong type of changes to OS.
What do you think about it? Would it be good for desktop BSDs to widen gaming support, e.g. via better ports of wine/Proton/Steam, etc.?
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My second flawless sysupgrade on this laptop. Great work, OpenBSD team!
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