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| author | Paul Buetow <paul@buetow.org> | 2022-02-04 09:56:51 +0000 |
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| committer | Paul Buetow <paul@buetow.org> | 2022-02-04 09:56:51 +0000 |
| commit | e095dea342d2b67c387f01f92384c74a50c06c3e (patch) | |
| tree | 2e8758f62c3c2b57456a7673bf45325fed8b116d | |
| parent | bd5a4b23812150bf9f5b9ea8c5066ca7f8d7b34e (diff) | |
finalize
| -rw-r--r-- | computer-operating-systems-i-use.gmi | 44 |
1 files changed, 26 insertions, 18 deletions
diff --git a/computer-operating-systems-i-use.gmi b/computer-operating-systems-i-use.gmi index 343dbe4f..9781eab7 100644 --- a/computer-operating-systems-i-use.gmi +++ b/computer-operating-systems-i-use.gmi @@ -23,11 +23,11 @@ > Published by Paul at ????-??-?? -This is a list of Operating Systems I currently use. This list is in no particular order and also will receive updates over time. The very first operating system I used was MS-DOS and the very first Unix like operating system I used was SuSE Linux 5.3. +This is a list of Operating Systems I currently use. This list is in no particular order and also will be updated over time. The very first operating system I used was MS-DOS (mainly for games) and the very first Unix like operating system I used was SuSE Linux 5.3. My first smartphone OS was Symbian on a clunky Sony Ericsson device. ## Fedora Linux -Fedora Linux is the operating system I use on my primary (personal) laptop. It's a ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen. 9 which comes along with official Linux support by Lenovo. I already saw hardware firmware updates being installed directly through Fedora from Lenovo. Fedora is a real powerhouse, cutting-edge and reasonably stable at the same time. It's baked by Red Hat after all. +Fedora Linux is the operating system I use on my primary (personal) laptop. It's a ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen. 9. Lenovo which comes along with official Lenovo Linux support. I already noticed hardware firmware updates being installed directly through Fedora from Lenovo. Fedora is a real powerhouse, cutting-edge and reasonably stable at the same time. It's baked by Red Hat. I also use Fedora on my Microsoft Surface Go 2 convertible tablet. Fedora works quite OK (and much better than Windows) on this device. It's also the perfect travel companion. @@ -35,15 +35,15 @@ I use the GNOME Desktop on my Fedora boxes. I have memorized and customized a bu ## EndeavourOS -I installed EndeavourOS on my (older) ThinkPad X240 to try out an Arch based Linux distribution. I also could have installed plain Arch, but I don't see the point when there is EndeavourOS. EndeavourOS is as close as you can get to the plain Arch experience but with an easy installer. I am not saying that it's difficult to install plain Arch but it's (unless you are new to Linux and want to learn about the installation procedure) just waste of time in my humble opinion. Give Linux From Scratch a shot instead if you really want to learn about linux. +I installed EndeavourOS on my (older) ThinkPad X240 to try out an Arch based Linux distribution. I also could have installed plain Arch, but I don't see the point when there is EndeavourOS. EndeavourOS is as close as you can get to the plain Arch experience but with an easy installer. I am not saying that it's difficult to install plain Arch but it's, unless you are new to Linux and want to learn about the installation procedure, just waste of time in my humble opinion. Give Linux From Scratch a shot instead if you really want to learn about Linux. => https://www.linuxfromscratch.org/ I use the Xfce desktop environment here which feels very snappy and fast on the X240 (which I purchased back in 2014). Usually, I have my X240 standing right next to my work laptop and use it for playing music (mainly online radio streams), for personal note taking and occasional emailing and instant messaging. -As this is a rolling Linux distribution there are a lot of software updates coming through every day. Sometimes, it only takes a minute until the next version of a package is available. Honestly, I find that a bit annoying to constantly catch up with all the updates. As for now I will live with it and/or automate it a bit more. It'll OK if it breaks, as this is not my primary laptop anyway. +As this is a rolling Linux distribution there are a lot of software updates coming through every day. Sometimes, it only takes a minute until the next version of a package is available. Honestly, I find that a bit annoying to constantly catch up with all the updates. As for now I will live with it and/or automate it a bit more. It'll OK if it breaks occasionally, as this is not my primary laptop anyway. -Arch Linux and EndeavourOS are community distributions. This means, that there is no big corporation in the backyard lurking around. They won't give you the firmware updates for cutting edge hardware out of the box, though, but they are still a very good choice for hobbyist and and also for older hardware where future firmware updates are less likely to happen. +Arch Linux and EndeavourOS are community distributions. This means, that there is no big corporation in the backyard lurking around. They won't give you the firmware updates for cutting edge hardware out of the box, though, but they are still a very good choice for hobbyist and also for older hardware where future firmware updates are less likely to happen. I am very happy with the package availability through the official repository and AUR. @@ -53,6 +53,8 @@ I am very happy with the package availability through the official repository an I have run FreeBSD in many occasions. Right after SuSE Linux, FreeBSD (around 4.x) was the second open source system I used in my life on regularly basis. I didn't even go to university yet then I started using it :-). Also, a former employer of mine even allowed me to install FreeBSD on my main workstation (which I actually did and used it for a couple of years). +I remember it used to be a pain bootstrapping Java for FreeBSD due to the lack of pre-compiled binary packages. You had first to enable the Linux compatibility layer, then install Linux Java, and then compile FreeBSD Java with the bootstrapped Linux Java (yes, Java is mainly programmed in C++, but for some reason compiling Java also required an installation of Java). Nowadays, there are ready OpenJDK binary packages you could install. So things have improved a lot since. + FreeBSD always had a place somewhere in my life: * On a Desktop PC (personal and work) @@ -88,7 +90,7 @@ While CentOS 8 is already out of support, I still use CentOS 7 (which still will The reason I use Linux and not *BSD at the moment for these services is Docker. With Docker, it's so easy-peasy to get these up and running. I will have to switch to another OS before CentOS 7 runs out of support, though. It might be CentOS Stream, Rocky Linux, or, more likely, I will use FreeBSD. On FreeBSD there isn't Docker, but what can be done is to create a self-contained Jail for each of the web-apps. -I have been using FreeBSD Jails for fairly complex LAMP stacks before I started using CentOS. The reason why I switched to CentOS (it was still CentOS 6 at that time) in the first place was, that I wanted to try out something new. It doesn't hurt to switch OSes once in a while. FreeBSD is so convenient: When something goes wrong with an update, just roll back to a previous ZFS snapshot. That's especially convenient for PHP based web-apps (which sometimes come along with a hell of dependencies). +I have been using FreeBSD Jails for fairly complex LAMP stacks before I started using CentOS. The reason why I switched to CentOS (it was still CentOS 6 at that time) in the first place was, that I wanted to try out something new. => https://www.centos.org @@ -110,15 +112,19 @@ The only softwares which were not part of the base system and I had to install a ## macOS (proprietary) -I have to use a MacBook Pro with macOS for work. What else can I say but that this would have never been my personal choice. At least macOS is a UNIX under the hood and comes with a decent terminal and there are plenty of terminal apps available via Brew. Some of the inner workings of macOS were actually forked from the FreeBSD project. I find the macOS UI rather confusing. +I have to use a MacBook Pro with macOS for work. What else can I say but that this would have never been my personal choice. At least macOS is a UNIX under the hood and comes with a decent terminal and there are plenty of terminal apps available via Brew. Some of the inner workings of macOS were actually forked from the FreeBSD project. => https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Darwin/Conceptual/KernelProgramming/BSD/BSD.html developer.apple.com: BSD in macOS/Darwin +I find the macOS UI rather confusing. + ## LineageOS (mobile) At some point I got fed up with big tech, like Google and Samsung (or Apple, but personally I don't use Apple), spying on me. So I purchased a Google phone (a midrange Pixel phone) and installed LineageOS, a free and open source distribution of Android, on it. I don't have anything from Google installed on it (not even the play store, I install my apps from F-Droid). It's my daily driver since mid 2021 now. -So far the experience is not great but good. The main culprits are not having Google Maps, Google Gboard and the camera app. The latter lacks some features on LineageOS (e.g. No wide angle lens support). Also, I can't use my banking apps anymore. Somtimes apps crash for no apparent reason(s) but I get around it so far. I shouldn't spend so much time on my smartphone anyway! And the whole point of switching to LineageOS was to get away of big tech and therefore I should not complain :-). What I do like is that 95% the things I used to do on a proprietary mobile phone also can be done with LineageOS. +So far the experience is not great but good. The main culprits are not having Google Maps, Google Gboard and the camera app. The latter lacks some features on LineageOS (e.g. No wide angle lens support). Also, I can't use my banking apps anymore. Sometimes apps crash for no apparent reason(s) but I get around it so far. I shouldn't spend so much time on my smartphone anyway! And the whole point of switching to LineageOS was to get away of big tech and therefore I should not complain :-). What I do like is that 95% the things I used to do on a proprietary mobile phone also can be done with LineageOS. + +=> ./2021-08-01-on-being-pedantic-about-open-source.gmi Read also "The Midle Way" section of this blog post regarding smartphones. There's also the excellent Termux app in the F-Droid store, which transforms the phone into a small Linux handheld device. I am able to run all of my Linux/Unix terminal apps with it. @@ -131,9 +137,9 @@ Unfortunatley, I still have to keep my proprietary Android phone around. Sometim ## iOS (mobile proprietary) -I have to use an iPhone for work. I like the hardware but I hate the OS (you can also call it spyOS), but it's the necessary's evil, unfortunately. Apple is even worse than Google here. I don't have it with me all the time or switched off when I don't need it. I also find iOS quite unintuitive to use. -Being on-call for work means to to be reachable 24/7. This implies that the phone is carried around all the time (in an switched-on state). 1984 is now. +I have to use an iPhone for work. I like the hardware but I hate the OS (you can also call it spyOS), but it's the necessarries evil, unfortunately. Apple is even worse than Google here (despite claiming for themselves to produce the most secure phone(s)). I don't have it with me all the time or switched off when I don't need it. I also find iOS quite unintuitive to use. +Being on-call for work means to to be reachable 24/7. This implies that the phone is carried around all the time (in an switched-on state). 1984 is now. => https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nineteen_Eighty-Four ## Other OSes @@ -158,15 +164,17 @@ I use a Kobo Forma as my e-reader device. I have started to switch off the Wifi => https://www.pine64.org/pinenote/ The PineNote => https://liliputing.com/2021/07/kobo-clara-hd-becomes-an-e-ink-linux-tablet-with-the-help-of-postmarketos.html Kobo Clara HD becomes an e-link Linux tablet +But as a fall-back, someone could still use the good old dead tree format! + ### Android TV (proprietary) -A Android TV box is used for watching Netflix and Amazon Prime video (yes, I am human too and rely once in a while on big tech streaming services). The Android TV box is currently in the process of being replaced by OSMC, though. +A Android TV box is used for watching Netflix and Amazon Prime video (yes, I am human too and rely once in a while on big tech streaming services). The Android TV box is currently in the process of being replaced by OSMC, though. Most services seem to work fine with OSMC, but didn't get around tinkering with Netflix there yet. => https://osmc.tv/ ## Other OSes.. -This section is just for the sake of having a complete list of all OSes I used for some significant amount of time. I might not use all of these anymore... +This section is just for the sake of having a complete list of all OSes I used for some significant amount of time. I might not use all of these any more... ### NetBSD @@ -174,12 +182,12 @@ I have been using NetBSD on an old Sun Sparcstation 10 as a student. I also have => https://netbsd.org -### Other OSes used... +### Other OSes in use... -=> https://sailfish.org SailfishOS - Nice mobile os, but unfortunately includes proprietary components +=> https://sailfish.org SailfishOS - Nice mobile OS, but unfortunately includes proprietary components => https://www.redhat.com/en/technologies/linux-platforms/enterprise-linux Red Hat Enterprose Linux - Only for some work stuff -### Other OSes not used anymore... +### Other OSes not used any more... => https://en.opensuse.org/Archive:S.u.S.E._Linux_5.3 SuSE Linux 5.3 - The first Linux OS I used => https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IRIX SGI's IRIX - On a SGI Onyx 3200 @@ -187,8 +195,8 @@ I have been using NetBSD on an old Sun Sparcstation 10 as a student. I also have => https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Windows Microsoft Windows => https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MS-DOS Microsoft DOS - With and without Windows 3.x => https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbian Symbian - The first smartphone OS I used -=> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wear_OS - WearOS - On a google smartwatch -=> https://www.debian.org Debian GNU/Linux - Rock solid, but atm I prefer Fedora/EndeavourOS +=> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wear_OS - WearOS - On a Google smartwatch +=> https://www.debian.org Debian GNU/Linux - Rock solid, but atm. I prefer Fedora/EndeavourOS => https://www.linuxfromscratch.org/ - Linux from scratch - The best way to learn Linux => https://www.suse.com/products/server/ - SUSE Linux Enterprise - Only for some work stuff @@ -208,7 +216,7 @@ I have been using NetBSD on an old Sun Sparcstation 10 as a student. I also have => https://www.gentoo.org Gentoo Linux => https://www.haiku-os.org/ Haiku - A BeOS open source clone => https://www.oracle.com/solaris/solaris11/ Sun Solaris (now owned by Oracle) -=> https://www.puredarwin.org/ PureDarwin - Open source operating system parts from macOS +=> https://www.puredarwin.org/ PureDarwin - Open source operating system based on the open parts of macOS ### Other OSes which seem interesting... |
