On 3/5/25 05:26, sylv...@saboua.me wrote:
I'm thinking of purchasing parts to an all-purpose *BSD personal computer.
My budget is ~€3000 (+1k). Ideally I would like it not too noisy while
staying as cool as possible (I live in a studio), and dual screen monitor
(I'm thinking of one HD screen to also watch movies on and one square
screen on the left for the console).
First thing is the motherboard, processor, and RAM. Here also lies the
bottleneck : is there a motherboard/processor combo that can host
all four BSD's and derivatives ? If I'm not mistaken, I think the blowfish
does not maximally exploit multi-core processor, so a quad core (for instance)
is enough. It'd also be great to have it without MINIX's IME/PSP,
but I know this is asking too much ! Or is it ?
Stop here.
IF you are looking for one computer to run multiple OSs, I think it is safe
to say you won't be doing any serious work, just dinking around.
So specs don't matter. Anything in the last ten-fifteen years will do great.
What I'd suggest instead is pick up a few used computers, one per OS.
Put the other 3/4ths of your money in the bank.
See what you like. See what you expect to do with it. Then if you wish
to push forward on a particular OS.
Multibooting is difficult. VERY difficult, really requiring a knowledge of
the boot process in all the OSs involved (or hope your OS is happy to play
second fiddle to Windows and does all the magic for you..hopefully your use
case fits their assumptions...and you have a good backup!)
For reference...I'm writing this to you on an ~13 (it's got a Windows 7
sticker on it) year old Dell T5500. It is driving a 43" 4k monitor (add-on
low-end video card), it has 32GB RAM. The HD has been replaced with an SSD.
It has been on basically 24hrs a day for the last probably six or seven
years (I don't really recall when I put it into service). I'll probably
replace it soon with a small desktop that fell into my life and will have
lower power consumption.
There are things in the world to worry about. Specs for a computer running
OpenBSD (or any of the BSDs, really) is just not one of them. Or if it does
matter, it is because of your application and work load, and only you can
answer that question...but then you wouldn't be talking about multiple OSs
on one computer.
Nick.
