Tue 21 March 2023

Welp, it's been literally a month since my last blog post. 1,000 days to offload, right? 😆

I had a checkup with my doctor today, and going over the results of my blood test, I was encouraged in no uncertain terms to pick up regular exercise again, and stick with it.

Like with so many things today, there just seems to be so much that wants to get in the way, including our predilection towards potatoism.

So, I just decided that I'd do something productive every day (outside of work, that is), kinda no matter what, with a strong emphasis on exercise.

But also, I'm getting back into blogging, and I hope to get into a rhythm of posting nearly every day. I have some ideas that have been queued up for about a month, and it's time to get the jump on them.

In other news, I've almost fully converted my workflow on my "playing around with unix" Thinkpad at home from OpenBSD to FreeBSD. I was playing with NetBSD for a couple days, and while I rather liked it, but the lack of Full Disk Encryption was kind of a deal-breaker for me. Still, a very neat OS, and one I will be checking out again later.

So far, FreeBSD has been a breeze. There's a bit more setup to do than Linux (install XOrg and your preferred window manager and apps, then go through about a two minute process of enabling drm video and xdm, and making sure the driver for your video card gets loaded.) I almost gave up and went back to Debian/Devuan because I wasn't able to get X running at first, but once I looked through that page of the handbook, it was really quite easy.

There aren't a ton of hard, technical reasons to #RunBSD instead of Linux, but many "soft" reasons which amount to "mere" preference:

• I want a modern OS with strong ties to the Unix Philosophy
• I want a somewhat cohesive OS, not an amalgamation of projects slapped together with some pretty theming
• I want an OS that is elegant and understandable, rather than a catch-all sprawl of code

None of these reasons are enough to stop using Linux, because Linux has become truly amazing in the last decade in terms of capabilities and compatibility. But it's enough to make me want to broaden my horizons and try something else, if nothing more than to better understand what I have in Linux, and to better understand what I do and don't like about it.

#100DaysToOffload - Day 6

Category: Tech Tagged: 100DaysToOffload Computing FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) Linux/Unix Tips Life/Productivity Non-religious post