​izzy

Took about 15 minutes to spin up a mate desktop with #openbsd

Thats pretty easy.

Around 11 minutes of that 15 was installing the os and the desktop packages, but im on a slow 100mbit internet. The remaining 4 or so was configuring which involved reading a pkg-readme file, following instructions in it, and setting up a few themes.

I really don't get it when people say OpenBSD is hard to set up. Its really not

When i show screenshots of my usual setup on openbsd in linux-oriented places online i'll often get questions like "how do you *even* run that? Isn't it bad for desktop?" Or "openbsd is really bad and supports nothing, i don't think i could use it" or, "you're brave for using openbsd, i could NEVER" Etc.

Ive been getting by fine for the past 4 years or so, and have no plans to switch away.

Its true that desktop on the BSDs isn't nearly as streamlined as some linux systems, but if you can put in a little effort, its actually really quite nice to use as a desktop, and in some ways, better than linux

i needed ipv6 for accessing my VPS hosted on https://boxybsd.com which is ipv6 only from me and my partner's new apartment so i called up my isp asking for an allocation. at first they told me that they're not ipv6 ready, but i got a call a few minutes after.....

now, I'm working with my isp and apparently i can be a early tester for their network support of ipv6.

apparently they're "almost there" in fully supporting it and want to work with me to test it. haha i'm loving this! i'm like a kid in a candy shop.

glad i made that first call!

#sysadmin #ddwrt #openbsd #networking #ipv6

How do y’all organize your #Linux or #BSD workflow?

Are you a desktop environment user that treats it as a turnkey environment for all your needs and don’t tweak it much?

Do you just use the tty and terminal programs really leveraging the power of the unix-y shell?

Or do you play in the middle ground somewhere and use a tiling wm like me?

—

For me, I treat my #OpenBSD install like a unix-y flavored lisp machine. I don’t need much gui integration that much outside of the terminal, my wm’s lisp process socket and emacs, to be happy.

I like the old #lisp sense of “ai”, where it was more about processing natural language than generating it.

Grammarly’s language engine used to be written in common lisp and it did an excellent job. Then…they threw all that away for LLM “technology”.

Unsurprisingly…it got worse. Holy shit- crazy that the black box machine does a worse job, who would’ve guessed!

I hate when a piece of software is so corporate. Messing around with zed feels like a corporate product instead of a open source code editor. I’m used to open source programs that have a “i was made by passionate community devs” feel. Its just so much more personal. When open source projects try to mimic modern corporate feels its just forced and wrong. Classic open source desktop environments like mate/gnome 2 or older ides like geany or vanilla emacs or chat clients like pidgin or hexchat just have this imperfect comfiness to them.

I like it when my software has a little bit of jank. Its like how corporate art feels flat and devoid of a certain je ne sais quios, but regular expression-based art has a very human aspect to it.

A perfect example of how this can show up that ik you’re familiar with. Vlc. Vlc is very polished, but not in the way zed is. You know how it feels. It just works. It doesn’t try to “wow” you. Its got its quirks, but you learn to love these imperfections. You can feel the love and labor the dev(s) put into vlc. It absolutely is filled with life.

Anyone else feel this way?

Playing a CD #OpenBSD

Personally I don’t like #gentoo or #archlinux much at all anymore. I try to use stable systems like OpenBSD or LTS linux systems with a desktop focus. The only reason I tried arch linux last night was cos I was curious if anything got better in the power user linux world.

I used to use arch and later gentoo on production machines but honestly that was a huge waste of time. I can get that same customization fix on OpenBSD without wasting hours debugging shit that breaks that shouldn’t.

I only really use #linux for gaming so I don’t mind using mint or ubuntu or fedora or something.

And if I want bleeding edge but OK stability, OpenBSD -current is more than enough for me.

@SamuraiSakura@mastodon.bsd.cafe the only "gotcha" is that by default the terminal tries to load colors from the system theme, which curiously results in borderline unreadable terminal text. I think this is just a bad default from upstream. Simply installing a theme from ports/packages such as arc as shown in my screenshot, and setting it in the appearance settings can fix this however.

cursed UNIX moment just happened to me on #OpenBSD with my hardware on modesetting gfx

i have been facing a bug with xenodm where if i log in then log out, the xenodm screen never updates "live". i can switch to a vtty and back and any text entered or cursor movement will render, though.

after about 15 minutes of digging in ps aux output, i saw that picom was still running as my user after log out. killing picom fixed the not-updating xenodm screen. i remembered that i recently set glx backend to picom for hwaccel compositing, so i tried changing it back to software accel xrender backend and magically the problem went away.

to make things weirder, this only affected my intel gpu based machines, my radeon/amdgpu machines were unscathed

fuckin hell