Post by @nina_kali_nina@tech.lgbt

@nina_kali_nina Imagine we forked from last summer or whenever right before the first pro-slop policy was (ie the documentation policies that predated the code policies).

Aside from the problem of getting a team together, what do you think would be the limitations on developing from that point?

(To be clear this is not my preferred solution. I'm just trying to understand what the options are.)

@nina_kali_nina linus must be on some real crack or worse sources of inspirations or reflections

@toots I feel there must be some financial incentives in play. But then if you try using LLMs, you might discover that they're built for the maximum engagement, they're really good at convincing people that they can do the job...

@nina_kali_nina yeah I think Linus' immigration into USA from Finland might have been weighed down by Transmeta or whatever, but I'm definitely not one to judge or suspect or being an amateour detective. Whatever; I actually suspect none of the things I listed has much to do with anything, but yeah the LLM train surely has incentives, beyond my interest really, since I try to ignore all of it.

@nina_kali_nina Doing one last Arch Linux backup, and then I'm going to try NetBSD on my desktop. It didn't like my wifi card on my laptop. T.T

Maybe I should learn to write drivers for Intel Wifi cards....

@xilatsad OpenBSD has better support for intel WiFi and a compatible license. AFAIK it might not be trivial to port the drivers from one to the other in this case, though

@nina_kali_nina That's the plan. NetBSD on the desktop, openBSD on the laptop, and then 9Front for when I really lose my mind.

@nina_kali_nina Good luck everyone, my first hangup is finding a proper source of entropy somewhere. (2008 Thinkpad R61i, core2duo life) Also it asking for cylinder and head counts on an SSD, praying BIOS reported all of that correctly.

@Officeplant you can smash the keys to generate the entropy, especially if you ask a proper RNG for the order of keys to hit

@nina_kali_nina i do not recommend vbox if youre on linux for some reason its not very performant compared to qemu

@nina_kali_nina which of these would be able to handle steam games?

@OliviaVespera sadly none of them would work with Steam. You could have Steam on FreeBSD, according to reports, but it's not fully free of slop. You can also emulate Windows and Linux in NetBSD, and run Steam this way, or use NetBSD's wine and open-source tool called steamdepot to get games from Steam on your computer. The game compatibility won't be very high yet, but some popular indie games like Balatro, Celeste, Va-11 Hall-A or Kitsune Tails would work.

@nina_kali_nina is openbsd slop free? Last I heard they were on the fence re. their LLM policy.

@alexmu their official stance is that LLM code is not compatible with OpenBSD in license. However, they imported some LLM tainted code from the upstream (e.g. tmux and Xorg)

@nina_kali_nina another way to start is by switching from proprietary and/or OS-specific apps to apps that can run on BSD. I used to use the Mac-specific Banktivity to track my bank accounts, now I’ve gone back to using spreadsheets, in LibreOffice which runs on BSD, Linux, macOS, and Windows. I’m in the process of replacing the macOS builtin Mail.app, testing whether the Vivaldi browser’s builtin client suits me. Maybe after I switch I should write up what I land on and why…

@ShadSterling that's a great tip, yes!

P.S. alternative operating systems aren't easy. My feeling is that NetBSD and OpenBSD are roughly as easy to get into as Linux used to be 20 years ago. If your hardware is supported, you're in luck, but for computers newer than 5-7 years old, especially laptops, some crucial bits might be missing. The documentation is much better today than it was 20 years ago, though, and the range of ports and software available is pretty good, sure.

But it still is difficult to use. For me it's learning a new thing under stress while grieving about the computing future I wish I've had.

@nina_kali_nina Let's try #NetBSD, virtual machine. Installation in progress. I knew Linux for 30 years, I never tried a BSD.

@pascal_delrot enjoy!

Edit; i mean "have fun!"

@pascal_delrot @nina_kali_nina I have dusted off some *BSD VMs, upgraded to the latest version, and started actively investigating how to reconstruct various bits of my (currently Linux based) infrastructure.
You'll find that the BSDs are generally a bit more old school, like the original UNIX systems, and although that may be a bit inconvenient if you have originally come from a Windows or Mac environment, I think it may actually be an advantage. There is value in being able to drive stick...

@wfk @nina_kali_nina Well yes, I used to have CDE at university (90's), it's like a travel to the past for me. But still more recent that the city's radiologist building and appliances (like the intercom) here (80's)

@nina_kali_nina or SmartOS; - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SmartOS - our good friend Stefano Marinelli has a really good writeup about this kind of base-system: - https://it-notes.dragas.net/2026/09/28/smartos-the-illumos-way-of-thinking-about-servers/

@nina_kali_nina Last time I tried to get NetBSD running on my laptop I hit a wall with network config, but I'm going to try again. I can't remember which laptop, so maybe I'll get lucky and it will be different hadware this time 😄

Any idea if NetBSD installation might get more user friendly with time, or would that be at odds with other project goals?

@roaminchemicals the installer, when it works, is actually quite nice. But it bugged on me and other people, especially on newer laptops. The network support can be hit and miss, but you almost definitely can tether from your phone

@nina_kali_nina Thoughts on how to minimize slop exposure under Gentoo now that the kernel itself is getting slopped? Would you say that staying on 6.12.x or 6.18.x branch would have less slop than the latest kernel versions?

I am trying to use NetBSD more, but currently I am not able to switch all of my computers over to NetBSD

@vaporeon_ I'd switch to the CIP kernel if you could, LTS with security patches and thus reduced amount of slop from upstream.

@nina_kali_nina I hear that NetBSD's driver infrastructure is promising in that it'd make it easier to port these drivers to other kernels. Thus removing barriers to kernel competition!

Not that most people would care about any other differences...

As for me: I think I'll stick with elementary OS, & let them make such calls for me. They are at the very least vocally anti-"AI"!

@nina_kali_nina my attempt to switch from Mac to Linux is at 18 months and not very close to done, so, I won’t be trying to go from Linux to BSD in a single weekend - tho once I’m not using the Mac I might try to put BSD on it

@ShadSterling good news is that if you get used to the software (desktop, office suite, etc etc) you'll likely find it available on NetBSD, unless it's something very niche and professional

@nina_kali_nina 🙏 thanks for the tips!

@nina_kali_nina@tech.lgbt mmmm, alpineBSD you say... That's an interesting concept (I use alpine)

But otherwise...yeah, #NetBSD install weekend around the world!

@nina_kali_nina
I'll say as someone who got #netbsd running on an older laptop recently, I'm very pleased. Was it the easiest install? No. But I learned a lot by troubleshooting the issues that I ran into myself. Getting the config files all setup, making ctwm feel like I actually wanted, not just picking a DE.

It does have a surprising amount of packages availabe and does what I need. I'll probably have to keep a Linux install for my gaming PC but it's now my go to for everyday tasks.

@nina_kali_nina What about Debian? I've got that installed on my desktop and am planning to have it setup on my next laptop (probably the MNT Reform Next).