Surely something like OPNsense/PFsense would be better for the average user than setting up all the software manually?

I appreciated learning what's involved, though.

Not necessarily. For one, the BSD has, or at least used to have much worse driver support for wireless adapters. With a regular server/desktop Linux distro, it's also easier to run other services on the same device. For example, nothing prevents you from running nginx and hosting a website, or a personal email server.

Why?

Configuring FreeBSD is extremely straightforward.

In this day and age, if that's what you're after, you can just point an AI at the problem and give it shell access, and it'll just do what you describe (Claude code, codex, etc).

Pentium-compatible processors were more numerous than you think.

- AMD (K5/K6/K6-2/K6-III) - Intel (Pentium) - Centaur (IDT Winchip, later Via C3/C7/Nano) - Cyrix (6x86, 6x86MX) - Rise (mp6)

For the vast, vast majority of use cases, they are faster, yes.

Cyrix chips get too much hate because of Quake being optimized specifically for the Pentium and its FPU.

Homebrew wouldn't support Haiku anyway.

No.

And there was the same problem with early PS3s, on Nvidia's GPU package...it was a fairly widespread problem at the time.

And Apple iBook G3s too. There's a whole thing with owners reflowing the GPU: https://www.instructables.com/Fixing-the-infamous-iBook-scre...

I seem to recall baking PC nvidia GPU boards in your oven was a reasonably common out-of-warranty fix around that era.

I had to do this with my MacBook Pro models early 2015 and late 2017.

It seems like there was a period in time when solder just wasn’t done well, it seems like.

IIRC this is to do with the phase in of RoHS and bad lead free solder

I don't have any solid numbers on me, but I believe early 360s failing wasn't just widespread; it was straight up most of them dying within the first couple years. It's honestly insane they more or less got away with that. And I guess also speaks to how much Microsoft was killing it in that era that people were willing to go through multiple console RMAs (which I heard was a terrible, slow, and unreliable process) to play 360 games. How far they've fallen.

It was something like 25% - 50% of all first version 360s died.

Microsoft spent over a billion dollars replacing and repairing consoles to maintain the good brand name of Xbox.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xbox_360_technical_problems

Family got first gen 360. Still works to this day. We hit the jackpot with that console. It out lasted 2 wiis and a ps2

Simple answer: Halo 3.

Whenever we lost a 360 we got a pre owned 360 from gamestop. I think they went for like $70 for one without any hdd.

That was the real story, by the time they started dying you could just grab a working one for "decently cheap" if you still cared.

However, I wonder how many people got "burned" by it and swore off Xbox consoles going forward.

I know that era we got a lot more use out of the Xbox (original) and the Wii.

I knew plenty of people who had rrod no one swore off xbox though. You were still in the ecosystem through games, controllers, xbox live membership, and in my case network effects since we all played halo.

The code style seems to be targeting some old version of PHP...but I'm absolutely sure typed properties require a newer version of PHP than existed in 2008. (If I recall correctly, that's around the days of PHP 5.4 or so)

I'm pretty sure screen-spanning was better before "fullscreen"...In Lion, I think?

Just uses make-like syntax, not yaml, which I view as a huge advantage.

There are new models that are recreating beam spring too. (Although I don't think they are in stock yet).