On Unix and gaming and SIGINFO
I used #Linux a bit in the days when Slackware was recent, then a friend of mine suggested #FreeBSD (4.7 at the time) and it was love at first sight. After that day, I used FreeBSD on all the servers I am the admin of, and also on my office desktop PC. Still very happy about my choice.
At home, on the other hand, I always needed to keep Windows to cater my gaming habit (no, I don't like dual booting at all, as I often game for a short time while keeping tens of other programs open and ready to use afterwards). Resorting to CygWin to have Unix tools, which I later substituted with WSL 1 (WSL 2 doesn't properly support IPv6 and also it occupies Hyper-V and thus forces VirtualBox in "turtle mode", so it is a no go for me), happily enough for a couple of decades.
Enter Steam creating Proton (out of Wine), making gaming on Linux a common and accessible thing almost overnight (of course it was possible for a long time already, but mostly retro-gaming and via emulators).
So, as an experiment, in the desktop PC I keep at my significant other's home I decided to try and avoid Windows… I tried FreeBSD for a couple of days, but running Proton on my nVidia 1070 card was very difficult (if at all possilble, I wonder) so, contrary to my convictions, I tried Arch Linux (mainly because it is the one Steam Deck is based on, and the fact that AUR is very similar to the FreeBSD Ports I love and use daily) and… even if #ZFS (I filesystem I cannot do without, ever) is not officially supported and using it via DKMS is a bit of an hack, that only took me 2 hours to conquer and from there it was all much smooth and easier that I dared dream. In only a couple more hours I had everything working at first try, all "by default" and with no need for extra configuration, including things like: nVidia with 3D and CUDA support, USB webcam, Wi-Fi printer/scanner, Bluetooth USB dongle.
I am impressed. 2024 might really be the "Linux on desktop year" as some say, for sure it was for me (at least in this PC, I'm still not migrating the existing Windows setup for now — but someday I will).
Now, ironically, the thing I feel absence mostly is control-T support in the terminal, which on BSD sends a SIGINFO which makes most programs print a status report on stderr. It is something that on Linux wasn't included "mostly out of laziness" as reported by Theodore Ts'o in 2014, but is still missing.
I am of course using FreeBSD on all the servers and hoping that FreeBSD will catch up on ease of use on the desktop to change to it again, but right now… I like using Linux better than Windows+WSL.
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Magitian
in reply to Lapo Luchini • • •Lapo Luchini
in reply to Magitian • •I'm actually not sure… there's also the fact that I end up doing some devops on RedHat for work and had some past Ubuntu experience on Windows WSL too (I recently switched to Arch also on WSL).
I don't really like systemd, but in the end I don't hate it as much as I thought and I will not remove it from the system (I'm not even sure if that's possible); what I really like is that packages are (IMvHO) "properly updated" just like on FreeBSD, I really really dislike Debian approach "old is more secure" (which is not, IMHO, and sometimes is even spectacularly worse just because of that approach).