Sometimes I want to have yet another Personal Computer that is definitely disconnected from the Internet.
Mar 29 · 7 months ago
10 Comments ↓
🐐 drh3xx · 2025-03-29 at 10:20:
I've considered this too. No Wi-Fi/Bluetooth installed. Sideload updates via USB. I'm pretty sure this would be possible with OpenBSD.
👻 darkghost · 2025-03-29 at 11:08:
I got one of those Book386 things from Alibaba. It's a handheld 386 running DOS and Windows 3.11. I don't recommend it because the keyboard is absolute garbage, the BIOS clears every time you turn it on due to a missing resistor, but the idea is otherwise nice. The sad truth is if I want software for it I go on the internet.
Any offline PC will be hobbled by this fact unless you're talking box retail Linux from times of old that included all the software intended to run on it on however many CDs or DVDs. I suppose for modern Linux you could mirror a software repo. The amd64 Debian repo is only 742 GB. At some point somebody made a pared back 64 DVD library that was a mirror of .debs.
👻 darkghost · 2025-03-29 at 14:54:
@hansbrix I used to use MS Works back in the day. Found the installer on the internet and it works pretty well for basic functionality. Except for that keyboard. I was playing a 3D game and as I shrunk the window to improve performance the game mocked me by saying "get a 486"!!!
👻 darkghost · 2025-03-29 at 16:33:
Rise of the Triad! It's about a dangerous violent cult. The 8086 version, so I have heard, has a horrible screen. It's all industrial surplus and salvage parts.
💎 pista · 2025-03-31 at 13:24:
@darkghost Look into Haiku. The repository is certainly much smaller than anything on Linux.
Used it as a daily OS the last few years but recently had to give it up because I needed to give that laptop to my son since he wants to start learning programming and Arduino stuff.
If you wanted to go Linux or BSD it would probably be doable to run it old school and just install everything from source using ports.
👻 darkghost · 2025-03-31 at 14:45:
Huge fan of Haiku. But I am not kidding myself it needs some more work to make it more stable. I get nervous it's going to topple over when I do anything too in depth. My current application for Haiku is an offline repository of reference material through kiwix. But I still put it online once in a while to grab updates.
💎 pista · 2025-04-01 at 00:14:
Totally different concept.
Haiku is a single-user desktop without all the concepts of users and remissions and only the bare minimum of POSIX compatibility.
It follows the philosophy of every application doing one thing and doing it well. Very little reinvention. For example sample, “Translators”, programs that handle file conversion. By adding a new translator every software on the system inherits the ability to read/write files in that format.
It’s a very interesting design when it came out in the 1990s as BeOS.
👻 darkghost · 2025-04-01 at 01:36:
Haiku is a mixed bag. Optimized in that it was designed for memory footprints from 25 years ago, so a base system uses practically no resources. Yet you press it into modern workflows and it can be something of a pig, particularly since things like videos and 3D cannot take advantage of hardware acceleration and certain CPU features. Running Firefox pegs one of my threads at max. The OS itself is single user. Many apps and their dependencies have been ported. So you get the bloat but only when you load the app. *nix will be more stable.
64 bit testing: MX Linux boots up using 1GB on my laptop. Haiku boots up using 500 MB. While you have options to slim Linux down, no such options exist with Haiku.
👻 darkghost · 2025-04-01 at 09:37:
Ha. I never saw anything modern in Risc OS. It is still using unprotected memory like Windows 95. It doesn't have a modern browser. Haiku has all that going for it at least.
The idea of Haiku was to run BeOS binaries in an open source environment on modern hardware. Mission accomplished there, at least in 32 bit mode. But it took so long to get there (and BeOS software isn't all that abundant in the first place) that people began to think "what else can we do?" And you can have a modern software experience with it. LibreOffice, Firefox, tor, lots of KDE software. It's honestly impressive that this is all running on a kernel and WM written from scratch.
👻 darkghost · 2025-04-01 at 16:15:
Could be accurate if it is a competition. Sometimes you do things just because they're fun. It's certainly more challenging to port software to Haiku than for Linux.
The feeling I had while using it was the same feeling I had while using Linux in the mid 90s. There's potential here but we have a long way to go. Using it is adapting to the limited environment.
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