What is the opinion of university teachers about *BSD?

  • Thread starter Deleted member 53988
  • Start date
Its an odd one. On my old Thinkpad Android tablet, it is faster for me to boot up Windows 95 and Office 97 in Limbo (a port of qemu) in 100% software emulation than it is for me to load up "modern" Office for Android or Office 365.

Its sad though because if the developers of both hardware and software did everything more openly and correctly, I could run a port of Office 97 natively at blazing speed, get my work done faster whilst also saving the environment from the energy costs.

But as it stands this relatively fantastic bit of hardware remains unused as I keep to my old ratty x61. Admittedly TexLive is more useful for my day to day work than Office 97. I might look for an old distribution of LaTeX for Windows 95... ;)
 
Moores law says the performance doubles every 18 months. Gates law says that the performance of software halves every 12 month. I wonder why. I have two old color macs, this all-in-one periscop design. I use them as stylish book shelf blocks so nothing tumbles around. Two MB RAM and a 7MHz 68k, and you can run Word(tm) on them.

"Moores law says the performance doubles every 18 months. "
not half ??
Systems get slower and slower (same for BSD).

"Two MB RAM and a 7MHz 68k, and you can run Word(tm) on them."
That's good. Libraries were tiny at that time, and then evolved to large ones.
Security reasons came and gave today systems. Much secured, reliable, and heavily much more complex. Kernels are a node of vipers of complexity, for security and reliability reasons mostly. +Drivers.

"Two MB RAM and a 7MHz 68k, and you can run Word(tm) on them"
This probably even less:
http://mikeos.sourceforge.net/write-your-own-os.html#firstos
with a simple #include <stdio.h> ... system( myline ); return 0;... (C compiled with minix, like during old good gold time of informatics.) Crivens: you get your terminal in even less than your book shelf first MAC. ;)

Btw, BSD is also bloated, like all today BSD / Unix (netbsd, freebsd,...). The base system is too large in my opinion, but ok, this is modern times.
If you hadn't a slow sofware (operating systems), programmers and developers would not have possibility to give fault on hardware manufacturers. This would be a too boring ... more lines of codes, more fun ;)
 
Somewhat related: does anyone remember Control Data Institute, a school for electronics by Control Data in the 1970s and 80s? It was a trade school for cranking out electronic technicians who knew nothing of the subject....

If they ran commercials on KPLR, KTVI, or KDNL I remember them. :)
 
I better not broadcast too much personal info. INTERPOL is looking to haul me off in chains to another hemisphere.
 
I don't remember but those are the likely suspects. Actually, CDI was supposed to be somewhat respected but it should not have been and I think everyone figured that out.

Spartrekus I would say you seem to have turned into a clueless troll but I'd get into trouble for saying that.

Let's take some of my selected examples:
- My Android Samsung phone runs slow. Likely this is normal for everyone.
- My Windows PC runs slows. Booting, Logging,... takes several minutes. Normal today. Well, 10 years ago, this was very exactly the same. No single change.
- My BSD runs like magic, however this is fairly terminal base. Not so sure however that it could be made faster.

=> Some possible status: maybe the nicer graphical environment, the slower...


Bloat - BSD:
It can likely be found of not being, considering the all power of today's hardware. Yes or no?
Good luck to define accurately it ("bloat"). I would be difficult to find an adapted definition for "bloat".
It depends on many things. It is an opinion like another one, like preferring Windows to Unix.

Using BSD at Univ makes real sense because it is fast, less slower than WIndows, Unix, free, Opensource,.... and many more.
You can learn Unix during your studies, and keep it later for longer term usage.
 
Just out of curiosity I installed some old NetBSD version in a VM. The CD (yes, 600MB) was usable on x86, sparc and m68k. And it ran like crazy. Also, no zfs, ip6, usb... Everybody should try it once in a while.
 
Just out of curiosity I installed some old NetBSD version in a VM. The CD (yes, 600MB) was usable on x86, sparc and m68k. And it ran like crazy. Also, no zfs, ip6, usb... Everybody should try it once in a while.
NetBSD's default VESA graphics are in low resolution. Also, in the release version, only 1 program can use sound at a time. They said the current version fixes the sound issue. NetBSD lacks ports that I need as well, but most are at least in work in progress (WIP). On a virtual machine, I don't see those as issues.

The base system of FreeBSD is not bloated, but it is not slim either. NetBSD's base is slim, and it wouldn't take much to get the base and its ports to run as well as FreeBSD.

Now, FreeBSD's ports are bloated, no matter what anyone else says. For starters, OSS, portaudio or sndio should be the default and patched in for every port that uses audio (libcanberra, pulseaudio, gstreamer1). I wish to start learning C and get started. A few programs need alternates or reduced dependencies.
 
Its odd. In theory both Solaris 10 and OpenBSD are "bloated" because they provide a relatively large amount in their base. However they just seem to handle it well. For example Solaris has the /usr/sfw, /opt/csw, etc... prefixes (which I personally love). Likewise OpenBSD manages to provide three different Window Managers and yet they just stay out of your way if not in use. None of them drag in actual dependencies.

OpenBSD's Xenocara Xorg distribution not only provides more functionality than FreeBSD's Xorg in ports (glxgears, glxinfo) but also does not clutter up /usr/local and drag in many many more dependencies (dbus, hald and cruddy friends. Why the heck is this the port options default?!).

I would go so far as to say a larger (albeit well planned) base actually reduces bloat because people start to try to use libraries available rather than drag in a shed-load of ratty libs and services.
 
Just out of curiosity I installed some old NetBSD version in a VM. The CD (yes, 600MB) was usable on x86, sparc and m68k. And it ran like crazy. Also, no zfs, ip6, usb... Everybody should try it once in a while.

netbsd is particularly interesting. Not easy to get it working, but definitely performant. Which VM?

sidetone, the problem is that the installation should target to a minimum. Even ssh, ls, cp, mv, ..., the most basic ones, could be even re-checked.
Why not to focus on simplicity by keeping simple base components. Using common libraries makes the system complex and dependent. Sometimes scratch has some benefits, especially for outstanding, superior, performances.

"Its odd. In theory both Solaris 10 and OpenBSD are "bloated" because they provide a relatively large amount in their base. However they just seem to handle it well. For example Solaris has the /usr/sfw, /opt/csw, etc... prefixes (which I personally love). Likewise OpenBSD manages to provide three different Window Managers and yet they just stay out of your way if not in use. None of them drag in actual dependencies."
For this sentence, you may be careful, people will tell you here that it is troll maneers. Take care. It is like saying to a MS-Windows user not to use Windows because of whatever reasons.

Btw, why Xorg, and not something else?

@seeing post above:
pulseaudio is a good one. Why not having similarities BSD <=> Linux. If then it comes, then, I will make my own operating system ;) Just based on PDP-7.
 
Its odd. In theory both Solaris 10 and OpenBSD are "bloated" because they provide a relatively large amount in their base. However they just seem to handle it well.
NetBSD and OpenBSD's installation iso for the base system is small, around 500MB. FreeBSD's and DragonFlyBSD's base install iso doesn't even fit on a cd it was meant for.
installation should target to a minimum. Even ssh, ls, cp, mv, ..., the most basic ones, could be even re-checked. Why not to focus on simplicity by keeping simple base components. Using common libraries makes the system complex and dependent. Sometimes scratch has some benefits, especially for outstanding, superior, performances.
It should be slimmed down by 1 or 2 hundred MB, but I don't consider the base of FreeBSD to be bloat. If a common library is made well, it should be useful for various programs and reduce bloat.
 
this is not small at all!

Below 90 mb or even less is going to be small.

In that case, here's your operating system... http://www.minibsd.org/

There's this... https://www.freebsd.org/doc/en/articles/nanobsd/article.html but it's complicated IMO. Anything you remove that's like from src.conf will interfere with ports and packages. For instance, removing legacy hardware, will even remove ability to use modern printers. Removing binutils will make your sytem unable to compile. Removing CDDL which removes Compat C code, will also make your system unable to compile.
 
Subjective. OpenBSD's installation cd iso image is around 9MB, but that pulls down the base packages via the net. the amd installation iso image with the base files included is around 350MB. But they're tgz files, so when expanded take up more space when installed.

I believe 50 or no more than 90 is mb is a good, sufficient, amount for a base system. It is about x10 more than about 30 years ago. It is a good value.

Drivers, Sockets for ethernnet, compiler, just few binaries,... to get bare bone system. minibsd or nanobsd should be rewarded, that's great
 
this is not small at all!

Below 90 mb or even less is going to be small.

Even Puppy Linux at it's smallest would just barely fit on a 100MB ZIp Disk. It was the first Linux distro I ran, because I had an Iomega 100MB Zip Disk drive.
 
Last edited by a moderator:
.oO(Now where did I put that floppy with the fully working qnx?)
 
Same place as my 1.44MB floppy with BeOS?
 
Back
Top