What's Your Favorite Unix Version?

[Bryce Vandegrift]

Just wondering what everyone's favorite Unix version/distro is.
(Also includes Unix-like and other variants).

Currently, my favorite is Void Linux because it strikes a balance
between minimalism and usability. For what I've seen, it operates very
similarly to BSD. Speaking of BSD, I'm thinking about switching to
OpenBSD as I am hearing a lot of good things about it.

--bpv

[John McCue]

Bryce Vandegrift <b...@disroot.org> wrote:
> Just wondering what everyone's favorite Unix version/distro is.
> (Also includes Unix-like and other variants).

For me the first was always the best, IN/ix on a Wang
System in the late 80s. Then Coherent at home.

Now, Slackware and OpenBSD.

> Currently, my favorite is Void Linux because it strikes a balance
> between minimalism and usability. For what I've seen, it operates very
> similarly to BSD. Speaking of BSD, I'm thinking about switching to
> OpenBSD as I am hearing a lot of good things about it.

You are about 2 months from the next release of OpenBSD.
Be aware, Nvidia Video has no support, but AFAIK most
others should be OK. You just need to be aware of your
hardware. Thinkpads T4xx work great.
>
> --bpv

[Bryce Vandegrift]

John McCue <jmc...@obsd2.mhome.org> writes:

> For me the first was always the best, IN/ix on a Wang
> System in the late 80s. Then Coherent at home.

What's IN/ix? I've never heard of it before.

> Now, Slackware and OpenBSD.

Is Slackware still alive? Last I heard, it was updated in 2016 at the
latest.
Also, how's OpenBSD? :)

> You are about 2 months from the next release of OpenBSD.
> Be aware, Nvidia Video has no support, but AFAIK most
> others should be OK. You just need to be aware of your
> hardware. Thinkpads T4xx work great.

I have an AMD integreated GPU (Vega), so I'm hoping that it works.
I hear lots of great things about OpenBSD.

[root]

Bryce Vandegrift <b...@disroot.org> wrote:
>
> Is Slackware still alive? Last I heard, it was updated in 2016 at the
> latest.

Yes Slackware is alive and well. Slackware (Current) is updated regularly
but is not considered an official release. The last official release
was Slackware 14.2. Components of the official release are updated
as security or other problems are discovered.

[Eli the Bearded]

In comp.unix.misc, Bryce Vandegrift <b...@disroot.org> wrote:
> John McCue <jmc...@obsd2.mhome.org> writes:
> > For me the first was always the best, IN/ix on a Wang
> > System in the late 80s. Then Coherent at home.
> What's IN/ix? I've never heard of it before.

Obscure for sure. I did find this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wang_Laboratories

UNIX ran on the VS -- Interactive Systems first ported IN/ix (their
IBM360 version of SYS5 UNIX) to run in a VSOS Virtual machine circa
1985, and then Wang engineers completed the port so that it ran
"native" on the VS hardware soon thereafter -- but performance was
always sub-par as UNIX was never a good fit for the inherently
batch-mode nature of the VS hardware, and the line-at-a-time
processing approach taken by the VS workstations; indeed, the
workstation code had to be largely rewritten to bundle up each
keystroke into a frame to be sent back to the host when running UNIX
so that "tty" style processing could be implemented.

Hard to imagine that's "best", but I wasn't there. :^)

A search for "Interactive systems IN/ix" on archive.org gave me an
error. I think the "in/ux" bit confused it. Using quotes got me a
little further, but many many bad results.

Here's an ad for Interactive Systems IN/ix software for PCs:

https://archive.org/details/sim_unix-review_1988-09_6_9/page/n19/mode/2up?q=in+ix+unix

$195 for "core package".

> > Now, Slackware and OpenBSD.
> Is Slackware still alive? Last I heard, it was updated in 2016 at the
> latest.

14.2 is latest release, but release candidates for 15.0 have started
this month.

> Also, how's OpenBSD? :)

I personally never use it. I'm posting this from a NetBSD 9.1 system.
(Headless box used over ssh.)

Elijah
------
started out on A/UX

[John McCue]

Eli the Bearded <*@eli.users.panix.com> wrote:
> Hard to imagine that's "best", but I wasn't there. :^)

For me it was the best because it was my First UNIX :)
I learned a lot on that system.

> A search for "Interactive systems IN/ix" on archive.org gave me an
> error. I think the "in/ux" bit confused it. Using quotes got me a
> little further, but many many bad results.
>
> Here's an ad for Interactive Systems IN/ix software for PCs:
>
> https://archive.org/details/sim_unix-review_1988-09_6_9/page/n19/mode/2up?q=in+ix+unix

Nice.

> I personally never use it. I'm posting this from a NetBSD 9.1 system.
> (Headless box used over ssh.)

I am on OpenBSD because I could not get NetBSD working
on a spare T-Pad. But it is rather nice so I stuck
with it.

I had NetBSD on an old system, but the mboard got very
unstable. I really liked NetBSD. Now I hoping to
install it again once I find a 'free' system. I have
my eye on a cousin's old T61 and have been asking him
if he still needs it, no straight answer yet.

[John Goerzen]

On 2021-08-30, Bryce Vandegrift <b...@disroot.org> wrote:
> Just wondering what everyone's favorite Unix version/distro is.
> (Also includes Unix-like and other variants).

I've used quite a few, but Debian is my favorite. I've been a Debian developer
for about 25 years now and it still holds up for me. Note that I have
absolutely nothing against other distros and OSs - this is just me! Why I like
it:

- It runs on everything. It's on my dedicated server at OVH. Inside my Docker
containers. On my Raspberry Pis (sometimes in the flavor of Raspberry Pi OS,
which is a very light twist on it). On my laptop, on my desktop... And it
supports all the hardware well.

- unattended-upgrades is magic. My systems apply security patches themselves
why I sleep. This is one of the reasons I haven't jumped to one of the
rolling distros (Arch, etc) or even a BSD; every Debian package on the system
is eligible for this, because fixes are backported and I'm not going to get
some unwanted upgrade by patching things.

- ZFS works there.

- Developed by a community-led nonprofit.

What else have I used? FreeBSD, SunOS, Solaris, NetBSD, Ubuntu, BSD/OS, AIX. I
sort of shudder remembering compiling things for BSD/OS. The rest all have
their own soft spot for me. Except AIX. May smit die in a black hole <grin>

There is a double-edged sword to Linux. There are a lot of cool new things
happening there (seccomp, BPF, mount namespaces, etc). But they also add a lot
of potential complexity. I'm not sure it's always worth it.

- John

[John McCue]

John Goerzen <jgoe...@complete.org> wrote:
<snip>

> I've used quite a few, but Debian is my favorite.

I never used Debian, but I always wanted to give it a try.
I suspect I would like it better than RHEL which I need to
use a work (RHEL is good, but its direction is a bit
concerning to me)

<snip>

> What else have I used? FreeBSD, SunOS, Solaris, NetBSD, Ubuntu,
> BSD/OS, AIX. I sort of shudder remembering compiling things for
> BSD/OS. The rest all have their own soft spot for me. Except AIX.
> May smit die in a black hole <grin>

:), At work, I support a proprietary package on AIX and that
sometimes involves compiling and development. I have noticed
AIX development is quite similar to the BSDs.

> There is a double-edged sword to Linux. There are a lot of cool new
> things happening there (seccomp, BPF, mount namespaces, etc). But
> they also add a lot of potential complexity. I'm not sure it's always
> worth it.

Agreed

> - John

[John Goerzen]

On 2021-09-02, John McCue <jmc...@obsd2.mhome.org> wrote:
> John Goerzen <jgoe...@complete.org> wrote:
><snip>
>
>> I've used quite a few, but Debian is my favorite.
>
> I never used Debian, but I always wanted to give it a try.
> I suspect I would like it better than RHEL which I need to
> use a work (RHEL is good, but its direction is a bit
> concerning to me)

If you're using RHEL, Debian may be one of the closer cousins, philosophically.
It prizes "stability", not just in the sense of "it doesn't crash", but also in
the sense of "if you don't want the system to change out from under you for a
year or two, we've got you covered". RHEL takes this even farther, of course.

>> BSD/OS. The rest all have their own soft spot for me. Except AIX.
>> May smit die in a black hole <grin>
>
>:), At work, I support a proprietary package on AIX and that
> sometimes involves compiling and development. I have noticed
> AIX development is quite similar to the BSDs.

OK, so AIX story time. Why do I loathe AIX?

So I was working for a manufacturing company. I had been using Linux/Unix for
years, but never AIX. They were migrating off an AS/400 and quite literally
bought AIX because Linux was too cheap. Like, they had been used to paying
$200,000 for server hardware and were deeply mistrustful that the
already-overpriced $20,000 Linux box the vendor quoted would be sufficient. So
cue sparkle in vendor's eyes. "Oh, we could sell you AIX!" $90,000 later, they
had.

It was AIX 5.1L. It wasn't quite sure if it was a 64-bit OS, a 32-bit OS, or a
31-bit one. Ints were one bit smaller than I expected, for some reason I can't
remember now (to differentiate them from pointers maybe?) So you had 1GB file
size limits in different places.

So AIX had its own package management system, and also came with a CD that was
the "Linux environment for AIX" with a penguin on it and everything. Except it
had nothing to do with Linux. It was just open source stuff compiled for AIX -
but get this, installed with RPM compiled for AIX (if memory serves). So weird.
But that is how you'd get ssh.

So then I tried to get Haskell stuff to compile, and I discovered that both IBM
ld and GNU ld were broken in different horrendous ways. Most difficult port
I've ever done.

Then there was the day we had a drive in the RAID fail. Should have been easy,
right? Orange lamp goes on, you make a service ticket, drive gets swapped, lamp
goes off. Hah, no.

So first IBM wants to know the FRU or part number or something for the drive.
Of course they have like 5 part numbers for every part, and the one they want
isn't one that we know. Somewhere it is buried in smit, apparently. But
nobody, not them, not the manual, not Google, knows where. Several escalations
later, we had some senior level AIX tech figure out what part number we needed.

Tech arrives, does the 5-minute drive swap thing, and prepares to leave. I
observe:

1) The RAID is quite manifestly not rebuilding;

2) The orange trouble lamp is still on.

Tech accelerates his departure, saying "I just swap the drives. You'll have to
call support."

"Is the drive even working?"

"Of course it is. It's new!"

"How do you know, when the lamp is still on?"

"Uh, I just know. Sign here."

So then ensued several more hours of figuring out how to make a stupid RAID
rebuild. Yes the answer was somewhere in smit. No it wasn't obvious, and also
required multiple escalations to solve.

As an effort to put "all the things in one easy to use place", well smit utterly
failed. "zpool replace" is so much easier.

And the sad part was that, it generally seemed, smit was just a thin menu around
underlying more Unixy commands. Except there was zero tribal knowledge in
AIX-land (even at IBM) about the underlying commands, because "you use smit for
that".

- John

[Kevin Bowling]

smit shows you exactly what command and arguments it executed, it's just
a TUI and systems like SCO and HP-UX had the same thing. Most AIX
dissatisfaction seems to be, loosely translated, things are different
and I am too lazy to read the manual.

[b...@disroot.org]

>I am on OpenBSD because I could not get NetBSD working
>on a spare T-Pad. But it is rather nice so I stuck
>with it.

I've been thinking about getting a Thinkpad for a while.
I heard that support for OpenBSD and other BSD operating systems is great on some models.

--bpv

[John McCue]

b...@disroot.org wrote:
<snip>

>
> I've been thinking about getting a Thinkpad for a while.
> I heard that support for OpenBSD and other BSD operating
> systems is great on some models.

For OpenBSD, T4[123]0 works great.

> --bpv

Good luck if you do that
John

--
csh(1) - "An elegant shell, for a more... civilized age."
- Paraphrasing Star Wars

[Ander GM]

I'm using Void in my AMD Turion 2 but I prefer Slackware 14 in
the old Celeron.

[John McCue]

John Goerzen <jgoe...@complete.org> wrote:
> On 2021-09-02, John McCue <jmc...@obsd2.mhome.org> wrote:
>> John Goerzen <jgoe...@complete.org> wrote:
<snip>

>> have noticed AIX development is quite similar to the BSDs.

<snip>

> OK, so AIX story time. Why do I loathe AIX?

Yes, AIX has odd things comparied with Linuxs :) One binary,
on the development AIX system, worked fine, on the test
system I had to use 'ldedit' on it to increase its stack.
From what I can see, both systems are on the same release
and have the same packages (but that means little, see
below).

> Somewhere it is buried in smit, apparently. But...

I lack access to smit due to my role, so I have never seen
it. When it comes to admin tasks on AIX I know very little.

[rtr]

On Sun, 29 Aug 2021 22:00:39 -0400

OpenBSD. Funnily enough, I got into the BSD path when I was using Void
Linux. I still use it from time to time, whenever I needed special
"Linux-only" support. But for the most part, OpenBSD does everything
for me.

[ander]

On 2021-08-30, Bryce Vandegrift <b...@disroot.org> wrote:

Now, OpenBSD.

[Laurens Kils-Hütten]

ander <bo...@dev.null> wrote:
> On 2021-08-30, Bryce Vandegrift <b...@disroot.org> wrote:
>> Just wondering what everyone's favorite Unix version/distro is.
>> (Also includes Unix-like and other variants).

depends very much on the use case. I'm quite happy with Arch on my laptop. On
the VPS I use for our private Nextcloud I thought debian to be a wise choice.

I very much enjoy using NetBSD on the SDFs and would be very interested to
give it a try as my daily driver on the Laptop 8-)

cheers,

--
Laurens Kils-Hütten
https://sdf-eu.org/~lkh

[Anthk]

OpenBSD runs fast as hell on an n270 netbook.
With some xorg.d tweaks (10-intel.conf), even PSX emulators run
fast enough on GL 1.4.

[Molly A. McCollum]

On Sun, 29 Aug 2021, Bryce Vandegrift wrote:

> Date: Sun, 29 Aug 2021 22:00:39 -0400
> From: Bryce Vandegrift <b...@disroot.org>
> Newsgroups: comp.unix.misc
> Subject: What's Your Favorite Unix Version?

Definitely late to the party (2 years later...) but when it comes to Unix
history, my favorite is 4.4BSD, the last one from the CSRG. I have all 5
O'Reilly/USENIX books published on the OS, including the System Manager's
Manual.

In recent/modern Unix? I like NetBSD, as SDF introduced me to it. It feels
very traditional to me.

m...@SDF.org -- Molly A. McCollum

[Dennis Grevenstein]

Molly A. McCollum <m...@sdf.org> wrote:
>
> Definitely late to the party (2 years later...) but when it comes to Unix
> history, my favorite is 4.4BSD, the last one from the CSRG. I have all 5
> O'Reilly/USENIX books published on the OS, including the System Manager's
> Manual.
>
> In recent/modern Unix? I like NetBSD, as SDF introduced me to it. It feels
> very traditional to me.

Really?
Can you tell me how to increase maximum VM beyond 64MB in 4.4BSD pmax?

This is truly not a joke. I've got 4.4BSD on a DECstation 5000/200
and it won't use more than 64MB of VM and will run out of memory
even though there is enough swap space available.

regards,
Dennis

--
"I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the
shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser
gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain."

[Molly A. McCollum]

Unfortunately, a large portion of the SMM is on paperback only.
Thankfully, some of the chapters exist online in PDF and PostScript:

01. Installing & Operating:
https://github.com/sergev/4.4BSD-Lite2/blob/master/usr/share/doc/smm/01.setup.pdf?raw=true

02. Building Kernels
https://github.com/sergev/4.4BSD-Lite2/blob/master/usr/share/doc/smm/02.config.pdf?raw=true

On 02, page 22-23, I was able to find a fair amount of mentions about
virtual memory -- you might be able to look there for some advice. Let me
know if you succeed in figuring this out. Also, the Github files I linked
are under the same repository, which has more chapters from multiple of
the books. Check it out.

On Tue, 18 Jul 2023, Dennis Grevenstein wrote:

> Date: Tue, 18 Jul 2023 14:12:08 -0000 (UTC)
> From: Dennis Grevenstein <dennis.gr...@gmail.com>
> Newsgroups: comp.unix.misc
> Subject: Re: What's Your Favorite Unix Version?

[Dennis Grevenstein]

Molly A. McCollum <m...@sdf.org> wrote:

> On 02, page 22-23, I was able to find a fair amount of mentions about
> virtual memory -- you might be able to look there for some advice. Let me
> know if you succeed in figuring this out. Also, the Github files I linked
> are under the same repository, which has more chapters from multiple of
> the books. Check it out.

I will have a look. Thanks!

[Sudo]

FreeBSD is still the best, it works great, has nice hardware support and is
pretty powerful in general.

BUT.

If you wanted me to ask what's your favorite Vintage Unix ? I would respond
IRIX. It has that mid 90s UI that i love.
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