I've been re-reconverting a lot of my "stuff" to the BSDs (Free, Open, Net). It's refreshing. The Linux every-tool-has-to-be-a-swiss-army-knife ethos is exhausting after a while. The relative simplicity and clean organization of *BSD (especially OpenBSD) re-affirms my fondness for UNIX-y things.
You might think there's not that much difference but, in many cases, I'd rather admin a BSD box. Try it, you'll see.
Also, NetBSD is soo lean, it has made my old Pentium III almost useful again. Even with 333Mhz and 128 MB of RAM 🙃
@rory Yeah, I get what you mean, with THICC Distros like @ubuntu having dropped #i686 support half a decade ago...
I do however think that #thinn and #minimalist#Linux isn't just possible (see #TinyCore) but also could be made to work from a single 1440kB 3,5" FDD...
You can see it's old because it still has a #FrontSideBus and used a dedicaded #Chipset (or rather #PCH known as #US15W - but could also be married with other Chipsets like #nVidia#Ion - and only a single core and #HyperThreading...
Wow, @linux does actually improve efficiency over time...
I just compiled a minimal kernel 6.5 for OS/1337 targeting #i486 instead of #i686 and the resulting binary is even 10kB smaller than the one for 6.4.12...
For real: That's awesome cuz it allows me to make the #Floppy version for #486SX a reality and still have #Toybox & #dropbear as #SSH client in it...
Cudos to @torvalds and the maintainers for that:
They really did cleanup the codebase and made it #smol|ler!