Wonderful rizitis! I have a calendar reminder to make a habit of starting xsnow this time of the year

Finally, decorated for the holidays.

http://pineviewfarm.net/wp-content/u...2023-12-16.jpg

Mageia v. 9 and Plasma.

Framebuffer (fbcon). Linux stable 6.6.8 (most recent), busybox (latest) stable 1.36.1, plus
OpenSSH, framebuffer vnc, alsa and sndiod,
plus some odds and bods (framebuffer battery and time widgets).
Fatdog based build system
Acer Aspire ES15, AMD, 4GB ram, Radeon.

6.6MB refined (for my laptop) kernel compile, all firmware built in (no modules)
9.6MB initramfs (both kernel and initramfs are xz compressed)
Boots to 50MB ram used from a usb stick, boots in around a second
Even with a chrome/youtube playing (via vnc) ram usage increases little

Single user usage, so I sym link /usr/lib64 and /lib64, within which there are 35 total lib files
/bin is all busybox
/usr/bin around 30 bin and scripts

sshfs mount my phone (that has f-droid/termux installed)
ssh tunnel and fbvnc into phone for laptop fullscreen of otter browser (similar to Opera)
sshfs mount my server .. that includes the build system (compiles kernel in around 10 minutes)
ssh tunnel and fbvnc into server (nvidia/i5) for more intense surfing and full desktop
gui (Fatdog), libreoffice ...etc. As that's the server doing the downloading and rendering
'internet speed' tests on my laptop indicate hardwired ethernet speeds (very fast) even though
the laptop is served via wifi.
ssh into ssh server for IRC/email
telnet to a number of BBS's

Tend to play a 1 hour music youtube video on the phone, as that's visible to the side of the
laptop screen when the two are tethered via USB

Fundamentally a linux distro where once you know basic cli, vi and ssh ... you're set to go.

I also have termux-api installed on the phone, so can send sms's, trigger call etc. from the laptop.

Combined vnc and sndio works well, both see and hear chrome playing youtubes etc. lip sync however
is generally evident, mostly fine, excepting when a video has someone talking directly at the camera
when a brief lag of the sound is evident (induced by the initial sound buffering time), that doesn't
particularly bother me.

Why? Because its more fun to build and maintain a minimal system, built from scratch that's highly
refined to your particular hardware and where you get to know pretty much what every file is/does.
For instance I have fewer libs than what many have packages installed in their minimal system.
Messing around with Framebuffer is also more fun (simpler/direct). cat /dev/fb0 >snap.raw to copy
the current screen, cat snap.raw >/dev/fb0 to re-show that screen copy.

Picture of the laptop doesn't do the wallpaper justice, so I've attached a small copy of that www.pixelstalk.net image separately

Attached Thumbnails

   

nice man

that set-up is really cool.
my OpenBSD bridge is like this :
https://i.imgur.com/WuDeudz.png

with Tilda && Plank && Buuf iconset

Very nice.

Much of my own look is down to whatever I ssh or vnc into
My main vnc, for a gui desktop, is a Fatdog setup running jwm.
Mostly I leave the screen black as videos bleed through to
the other ctrl-alt-Fn framebuffer terminals better that way.
My top right battery and time 'widgets' were also sized/aligned
to fit in with that jwm tray bar (framebuffer battery/clock that
bleed through to the gui vnc session).

I've just rebuilt to have the initramfs inside the vmlinuz, so
just a single vmlinuz file, around 17MB that boots to less than
50MB of ram being used, but that can wifi net connect, has ssh
and vnc that can be used to direct what the post booted desktop
looks like

Often I'll boot, vnc into a gui desktop and start chrome playing
a music video, pullout that video and position that somewhere
out of the way but visible, and then back in cli framebuffer
(ctrl-alt-F3 or whatever), I can continue to see/hear that
comfortably. The mouse can even still drag/resize it within that
cli

When I vnc into my phone I run otter browser, and given that I
tether the laptop to the phone via a usb cable that tends to run
well whilst providing wifi/data to the laptop.

Attached Thumbnails

     

My OpenBSD boot is much the same as my Linux boot,
just base OpenBSD with tigervnc added in. Again
just enough to provide network connection (I have
to tether OpenBSD as it doesn't support my laptops
wifi), ssh and vnc. A lot easier to setup/use, but
I like the messing around element with Linux in
rebuilding the kernel and compiling/building the
rest.

My laptops HDD is slow, so default OpenBSD also
runs slow, at least initially. In contrast my Linux
session all loads/runs in ram from the get-go. I
keep meaning to set OpenBSD to also boot from usb
into and run from ram as that way the speed of both
would likely compare equally. Configuration wise
and OpenBSD is so much easier/cleaner.

I use grub4dos as a bootloader, on a usb stick, so
I could boot either Linux or OpenBSD just as easy
either way. As-is however I have OpenBSD installed
to the HDD's 4th partition.

My #free :


Arch with 1.1k packages installed

Setting my server (kvm/qemu full Fatdog Linux session on a
i5/nvidia/8GB) and resetting the res of that to 640x480,
down from 1366x768 as per my laptops regular res, along with
also booting the laptop framebuffer to 640x480, didn't make
that much difference to the ram being used, 54MB when the
vnc session is using chrome to play a youtube video. The main
saving was in data throughput, as per the attached image with
the framebuffer in a cli, with the video bleeding through, the
bandwidth was around 1.3MiB/sec (as per bmon). Which includes
the audio also being forwarded (via sndio). Usage wise and it
was very snappy/quick, dragging windows around ..etc. But as
ever a trade-off, lower/higher quality/resolution, higher/lower
throughput/responsiveness. For remote working, 1.3MiB/sec is
low enough to run even via slow wifi in a cafe. That's using
framebuffer vnc, which is far from optimized, the likes of
tigervnc viewer layers all sorts of tricks on top to dynamically
adjust/compress/balance the dataloads.

We're entering a era when local hardware/software may become
more like terminals of old, just basic/good enough to throw
what they're fed at the local screen/sound-card/whatever. With
GBit wifi just around the corner much of the higher power might
be on servers that you simply connect to (concurrently) for
whatever task you have in-hand. OpenBSD base - being mostly
good enough as-is, remote-add-in the rest.

Attached Thumbnails

 

my new install of 7.4, got bored with other OS'es.
https://i.imgur.com/ZeTA9xK.png

little work to do still.

i have to say your system sounds really cool.

I do like the look of your desktop. Will have to give that
setup a try for myself. Mine is really just a boot system,
wifi/sound/ssh/vnc from which I tend to vnc into 'servers'
and adding a OpenBSD one like yours would be a nice addition.

Once mine is booted and vnd'd into other gui desktops, sshfs
file sharing works well for me. If I have one Linux vnc, and
another OpenBSD vnc, along with sshfs ... and copying files
between the two becomes just a gui drag/drop operation (I
tend to use ROX filer for that).

My current main gui desktop is on a desktop box the other side
of the room, a kvm/qemu Fatdog linux desktop. Being a vm its
sound/video is isolated/separate from the 'host' session, so
for instance I can be running chrome playing a youtube and the
sound doesn't leak into the host systems sound, so other family
members can be using that box to separately be running their
own chrome/playing youtubes (or whatever). That box is fast
and hard ethernet wired, so downloads/renders web pages very
quick, quicker than what my wifi net connected can. So I get
the look/feel of a wifi couch laptop running at hardwired
i5/nvidia speeds. So even though the laptop is relatively old
it responds much like a modern/recent system.

I'm tracking kernel 6.6 and as of 6.6.8 I've restarted building
the initramfs back into the kernel, so all firmware/modules and
init (busybox based) are all contained within the single vmlinuz
file, that with xz compression = 16MB filesize. Even with many vnc
sessions running, the ram used in the running system rarely rises
to 100MB, basically because all its doing is throwing rendered gui
screen contents at the framebuffer along with passing mouse (touchpad)
and keys, oh and throwing sound at alsa/speakers/headphones.

Ctrl-alt-F2 running fbvnc wifi net connected to our family server,
running a kvm/qemu Fatdog linux that's running chrome and playing
a youtube video (music).

Ctrl-alt-F3 cli alsamixer loaded (sound level)

Ctrl-alt-F4 tethered android phones termux/X/otter browser running,
prsently on the BBC news web page.

Phones chrome on the google search web page, ready for a speak for
a google search item.

ctrl-alt-F5 .. cli ssh session to a cloud based ssh server, that I
use for email and IRC

ctrl-alt-F6 .. cli session, telnet into endofthelinebbs.com BBS
site - for fido and other news groups.

ctrl-alt-F7 and F8 free, cli prompts

I believe the ssh server I use is debian based, phone is obviously
android, could also be vnc'ing into Windows, MAC, whatever but I
tend to stick with just Linux and OpenBSD.

How many cores/what RAM does my 'desktop' have? Don't know, it
varies, 20+ cores at the moment, 100GB ram+. One thing for certain
when I compile the Linux kernel it takes just 5 minutes or so that
on my laptop would take a hour+

That's my interpretation of *nix, many separate things all
individually doing single tasks well. Many former Windows users
however would prefer Linux to look/feel like Windows, do many
things, none well and where one distro to another is largely just
a difference in desktop wallpapers or icon positioning (program
launching).

Attached image is where I set the phone to also display a music
video within the otter browser, alongside the vnc into server also
doing the same (desktop/servers chrome browser). Just have to
position each of those windows video displays to not overlap
otherwise the two battle each other. Neither has exclusive
lock of the framebuffer.

Attached Thumbnails

 

How things have changed over time

Attached Thumbnails

 

looks familiar

my box is now triple boot one.
win 11 pro + arch linux + openbsd.

The moment you went from C:\DOS> [batch files] to $_ [shell scripts] you had it made.
Shell scripts = batch files on steroids. It almost felt as if DOS had been
intentionally crippled, at least that was my impression.