Comment by 💎 pista
Re: "I have a late-2010s ThinkPad running OpenBSD, but it's…"
Getting harder and harder to find pages that don't completely break as soon as you turn on NoScript.
When Web devs decided to make AJAX everywhere and "lazy loading" the standard of the Web they destroyed the Web.
2025-09-06 · 8 months ago
7 Later Comments ↓
🐙 norayr · 2025-09-07 at 00:31:
so you are saying openbsd on ssd feels slower that tiny (tiny core linux?) on hdd?
and what prevents you to write papers on that machine? didn't people write papers on 16bit pdp machines?
🐙 norayr · 2025-09-07 at 00:35:
maybe you need to browse web and download other papers in order to write yur paper?
i never played that game but i think there was a free libre implementation called minetest, now renamed to something else because people were thinking it is a test version.
🚀 stack · 2025-09-07 at 00:39:
I wrote papers with a quill pen!
Apple ][ with a dot matrix printer.
☕️ dce [OP] · 2025-09-07 at 01:25:
@norayr Tiny10 is a stripped-down image of Windows 10. It's surprisingly fast, especially considering it's running on an old HDD. However, since Microsoft are evil and Windows has more holes than Swiss cheese, installing it as the laptop's main OS it's not an option.
As for writing papers, that was more of an example; although I could rephrase it as "I want to be able to write my dissertation without losing my work or defenestrating my laptop".
🚀 Phosphors-ghost · 2025-09-12 at 13:49:
I’m running openbsd on my VPS right now, probably trying FreeBSD again on the micro desktop when 15 gets released shortly (I was burned by their build system being broken last time I tried in the spring.) On my Thinkpad, I’m running alpine Linux. Yes! The setup-alpine and setup-desktops can build a system incredibly fast, it can run in various “from ram” modes, and is very BSD-like (no systemd), but benefits from the Linux hardware support. It’s a little weird, but the fastest think I’ve tried.
☕️ dce [OP] · 2025-09-12 at 15:24:
@Phosphors-ghost If my new Slackware installation fails for whatever reason, which isn't unlikely, I'll give it a shot!
🚀 stack · 2025-09-12 at 16:22:
As I pointed out before, I am running Ubuntu on an i5 t470 with 16GB, and it works like a charm -- I use it as my dev machine.
additional 8GB = $10-20. Well worth it.
Original Post
I have a late-2010s ThinkPad running OpenBSD, but it's about as fast as a snail carrying heavy shopping through molasses. I'd like to run something other than Linux, for variety, but the other members of the BSD family failed for various reasons. What OS do you guys think I should try? Note: The machine in question has 8GB of RAM and an SSD. UPDATE: I am now running Slackware with Window Maker. However, further suggestions are still appreciated.