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Comment Re:I love that FreeBSD exists (Score 1) 46

Really? It wasn't that long ago (6 years) that there was a FreeBSD based distro targeted at desktops/laptops - called PC-BSD. They had a beautiful installation system called PBI (Push-Button Interface), which tested each package for its library dependencies, and separately collected any old ones needed by the package, so that the user wouldn't have had to resolve conflicts

Beyond that, they had a beautiful lightweight Qt-based DE called Lumina, which was very similar to LX/QT or Razor/QT on Linux. I used that as my daily driver for a while. The only shortcoming of that system was the non-existent WiFi support, which is why I needed an RJ-45 cable every time I wanted to be online. Other than that, it was a great system to use

If the FreeBSD Foundation leaders want to get it back on laptops, resurrect PC-BSD (I never cared for its rebranding as "TrueOS": keep the BSD part of the brandname!) and do a few things

  1. 1. Improve the WiFi support and bring it up to at least Linux, if not WIndows or MacOS standards
  2. 2. Make Lumina, rather than KDE, the default DE. Have choices if you like such as SonicDE, Mate, XFCE,... if you like
  3. 3. Work w/ Valve on getting Steam natively ported to FreeBSD, w/o having to use either Wine/Proton or Linux containers, which is just more overhead and defeats the purpose of letting gamers use FreeBSD
  4. 4. Port all this to all those new Arm based laptops. Windows on Arm is not gonna click the way macOS did on Apple's Arm silicon, or ChromeOS/Android on Snapdragon, simply b'cos Windows users can't abandon backwards compatibility the way macOS or Android users could. There is an acute shortage of native apps for Windows/Arm, and once those users realize it, they'll want something else to put on them. Linux is one option, but there are limitations due to the sheer variety of Arm variants. Having FreeBSD in its PC-BSD avatar on it would be a clean solution

Comment Re:Horses for courses (Score 2) 46

The differences b/w the 3 BSDs are due to their different goals. NetBSD tries to be there on the widest assortment of hardware, from 1970s computers, and so it deliberately doesn't include features that can't be easily ported to all of them. OpenBSD is security obsessed, so disables any features that could be potential attack vectors. FreeBSD is the one most people might gravitate towards, since it's the one that tries to be competitive w/ Linux

Apt? Is that the only package manager in Linux? RedHat has rpm/yumm last I checked, Arch has pacman and Gentoo or Slackware has something else I forget. Are you sure that your favorite Linux package is supported by the package manager of your distro?

Comment Re:Horses for courses (Score 1) 46

No, systemd doesn't exist on the BSDs after all these years, and they don't plan to either, given the number of Linux-specific dependencies they have. It's a tad different from Wayland, which although it also had Linux specific dependencies, has also developed somethings to work w/ the BSDs

Anyway, all the BSDs have endorsed XLibre, which is the only option left for platforms not going Wayland. Similarly, the BSDs are still on InitV or the other alternatives out there

Comment Re: Pare down the bloat (Score 1) 91

This there decision needs to reflect the actual support costs. Right now x86-64v2 is probably the least common denominator in terms of not requiring a lot of special hoops to support. Maybe you could argue x86-64v1 stuff is still viable but I'd counter you have a lot of instruction set inconsistency there in those products and from a performance and efficiency perspective it probably does not make sense to be using them as daily drivers of contemporary software.

Wouldn't v2 be backwards compatible w/ v1, the way CPUs are designed? What exactly would have been introduced into v2 that would have broken v1 compatibility to the point that one would need separate codebases for each? I can understand the 32-bit vs 64-bit argument, but not this

Comment Re:Pare down the bloat (Score 1) 91

Surely, the kernel could benefit from a concerted effort to pare down support for devices that are 30+ years past their prime and focus more on chasing bugs?

I can certainly understand ending support for 32-bit CPUs if 64-bit is now the norm

However, I don't get why beyond that, older CPUs have to be abandoned. I know that's not what was mentioned in this article, but if AMD introduced the Athlon-64 and the Opteron-64, I don't see why support for them needs to drop, since they use the same instruction set as today's Ryzens, sans whatever AMD may have introduced since. Since it's a subset, it can be a common base, and anything specific to newer CPUs can be added. If a CPU doesn't have the newer extensions, then supporting it w/ the subset of today's feature set shouldn't be an issue

Comment Re:Please, John, (Score 1) 45

Suggestion: make iCloud optional, and allow AirDrop b/w an iPhone, Mac, iPad and other Apple devices. All the devices are now 256GB or more of storage, so there's no need for a 5GB bottleneck while syncing those devices. Just allow those devices to sync w/ each other using AirDrop

Comment AT&T's CPU and Unix (Score 1) 62

While we're on this topic of AT&T's Unix PC, I do wonder what happened to AT&T's own CPU - the WE 32000 microprocessor? There were 2 computers that used that CPU - the 3B5 and the 3B15. AT&T could/should have made that the main platform for Unix, then they could have bundled it for free w/ those computers and sold it that way

Comment Re:OPEC is really the Saudis (Score 3, Informative) 122

Qatar had left OPEC during its 2019 dispute w/ Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Emirates and Bahrein. Since then, they focused on LNG. Now, w/ the Emirates leaving it, OPEC is even more fractured. Countries that don't like OPEC cartel prices can deal w/ Emirates or Qatar, or even Russia or Iran, if they don't care about US trade relations

Once the islamic regime in Iran falls, Iranian oil will be back on the world oil markets, lowering their prices. If and when the Ukraine war ends, Russian oil too can return online. At that point, the oil suppliers will be too fragmented, and a new Iran may not be as accommodative of Saudi desires, given their own priorities in economic recovery. Same w/ Russia once their war ends, or in a post Putin regime

Comment RISC options (Score 1) 41

I'm glad that they have 2 RISC options - one RISC-V whose motherboard was made for them by a third party, and more recently, and Arm which too was. Both were tested by Jeff Geerling, and turns out that both are underpowered. They would do well as development platforms for people writing software for Linux (or BSD, RISC-OS or anything else). Hopefully, there will be more powerful Arm and RISC-V CPUs in future

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