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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 14th, 2023

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  • Not very practical, but good for understanding the OS: Everything is a file. Even your filesystem and harddrive is represented by a file (devicenode).

    Back in the day, before things such as pulseaudio and equivalents became the norm, there was also such a file (it might still exist, idk) for your soundcard. By shoving the contents of a wav file directly into /dev/dsp, you could hear it as if it was played normally.

    Unrelates to the above, in a terminal context it’s very handy to learn the concepts of STDIN, STDOUT, and STDERR, and how to manipulate these. I won’t go into it here, but whenever you see a bunch of commands strung together with redirects, < > | >>, that’s usually for sending the output (STDOUT) of one command somewhere else, such as to the input STDIN to another command.



  • I miss /usr/ports. I could spend days just exploring its contents.

    I miss an /etc structure that wasn’t a complete mess.

    I miss UFS and its soft updates.

    I miss the stability of fBSD 3 and 4.

    I miss the ease of which you tweaked, compiled, and installed a new kernel.

    And just because of the hilarious legacy that was obsolete 20 years beforw I started with it, I miss the concept of font-servers.

    The main reason for my migration was the bigger userbase of linux where it was easier to find people who has resolved whatever issue I was having, plus nvidia drivers. Plus I’ve only needed to use fBSD once professionally.