February 11th, 2020:

I've had some feedback on the other day's phlog post[1], specifically the 
part where I mentioned I've ditched Linux for good in favour of OpenBSD.  
As I love dialogue, I thought I'd respond.

I've read a few excellent posts [2][3][4] from fellow phloggers/Mastoneros 
wondering about my rationale for the switch, which I half-jokingly 
attributed (on Mastodon) to "boredom".  This isn't entirely untrue - I've 
been futzing about with Linux since '97-ish and, while I *still* have no 
idea what the Hell I'm doing half the time, I've gotten pretty comfortable 
doing my daily tasks.  I'm at a point where it's not a challenge to make 
my Linux system do what I want.  Hardware support is excellent (apart from 
that *one* unsupported fucking Broadcomm chipset that's in most of my wifi 
cards), and I've been hard-pressed to find something that doesn't work 
with a minimum of fuss.  Even an obscure SCSI (photographic) slide scanner 
worked out-of-the-box in Debian/xsane!

Now, as for the "many and myriad" reasons I alluded to, I'd like to be 
able to give you a technical or even philosophical justification for 
ditching Linux... but I won't.  It's not because of systemd, monolithic 
kernels, DRM, or even with Microsoft joining the Linux Foundation (shit, 
have you ever actually read who's on board? Yikes!).  I'll be honest, as 
an end-user who sometimes works "under the hood", I really don't know much 
about the real implications of each of these, apart from the occasional 
opinion piece from more knowledgeable friends.  I'll leave the pros and 
cons to people with a more vested interest to debate, although my gut 
tells me to sit the debate out and wait for the dust to settle.

The *real* fact of the matter is I wanted to try something new but 
something a little familiar.  OpenBSD worked first try on my ancient 
Presario, so I stuck with it.  I had to put in a little more work to get 
it set up the way I wanted, but I persevered and enjoyed myself.  It's 
package management system is pretty much the same as the one I learned on 
Solaris way back when, and it didn't take long for me to be productive.  
Now, I want to install it on more capable, contemporary hardware to see 
what I can do.

Like I said, no deep, philosophical reasoning, just an urge to do 
something different for a while.





[1] gopher://sdf.org:70/0/users/sparcipx/phlog/February_2020/02-08-20

[2] gopher://republic.circumlunar.space:70/0/~slugmax/phlog/2020-02-10- 
comments-on-ditching-linux

[3] gopher://i-logout.cz/0/phlog/posts/2020-02-11_on_ditching_linux.txt

[4] gopher://1436.ninja:70/0/Phlog/20200210.post