As a longtime BSD user, I have my doubts about our future. reddit / BSD ---------------------------------------------------------------------- RaionTardist · 2021-04-30 04:19 I've used FreeBSD since 2013, NetBSD since 2015, and occasionally tried other BSDs here and there. I've used them in production for major websites, worked with them at a job, used them on the desktop (I don't currently, I'll get into it), and programmed for them. I also, once upon a time, maintained some ports before getting banned for "conduct issues" shortly after John Marino left FreeBSD - not going to get into that hot mess because it's not important to the story and points. But suffice to say, I've been around the block. My doubts have been growing as I've seen the GNU/Linux creep continue, especially in our packaging of things on FreeBSD and NetBSD. This improved very /slightly/ in recent years, but it still is a problem. Hence, I want to bring up a few key problems I notice, and instead of whine about it, engage others here so I can alert them to problems, and explain how they affect us as a system. 1. The BSDs increasing upstream dependence on the Linux kernel. This is exemplified by the OpenZFS project switching its upstream to ZoL. I've spoken about this before and gotten blown off, so I'll be brief. If you don't agree with me, you are certainly free to take your negativity elsewhere. I have no misconceptions on this issue: By the BSDs relying solely on GNU/Linux for graphics drivers, desktop environments, and now one of the most cutting edge filesystems, we have given them enormous control over our future. This is exemplified by the stall of 2011-2015 that saw many AMD cards simply not get support in a timely manner. The ZoL project now being the upstream for OpenZFS is a problem because it gives support to a niche group of devs that are in a hostile relationship with the Linux kernel developers, and giving them control over ZFS leaves potential for hostage situations. The intent to "unify" the versions between illumos, BSD and Linux is probably noble, but I am pessimistic. Performance, as well, when I tested between 12-RELEASE and 13-CURRENT, was poorer as well. 2. Our packages relying on Linuxisms. Not one QT5 app on FreeBSD have I ever managed to run without it needing dbus. GTK3 for years required it, only in 2020 getting a patch to remove the mandated dependency. dbus, outside of the context of GNU/Linux is ridiculous, plain and simple. It even can activate daemons on its own and occupies a privileged sector of the OS. An object model and IPC have nothing to do with each other. UNIX STREAMS + SunRPC or sockets + SunRPC is really not enough for some people. Anyways, the infection of this is spreading, as GNU/Linux does prepare to move to new tech all the time in a never ending treadmill of trying to fix by replacement instead of actually confronting the underlying issues. Other Linuxisms would be consolekit, which barely gets updates and I'm sure by now has little in the way of API compatibility with logind, polkit, gstreamer etc. My point is that the root of our issues is that we have no BSD-native answer to say, GNOME, QT, Firefox etc. We just rely on trying to patch GNU/Linux hand-me-downs up until they are tattered and gross. Self- sufficiency would be nice. 3. Many developers continue to be the kind to not use BSD as a desktop. For years, people made fun of us that NetBSD and FreeBSD devs used macOS. That needs to stop - not here to dictate others choices, but it has caused desktops to languish as nobody other than say GhostBSD nowadays even bothers to keep the desktop alive. If you want to point to OpenBSD, fair enough; but I cannot use OpenBSD for reasons that are tangential. It's a huge reason I switched back to MS Windows for a desktop -- I'd rather use what most of you probably consider the worst OS to converge on, even worse than GNU/Linux, because not only do I not want to pay thousands of dollars for cheap designer status symbol trash that is macOS and its fischer price interface, but because this elitism among developers has led to the desktop being patently ignored by many. Can it be done? Yes. But I had to leave for over a year due to the discontinuation of Palemoon, because I couldn't use Firefox as I wanted to keep my desktop BSD-like, not a worse version of GNU/Linux. Without a stable main browser, what's one to do? Use w3m? If we want BSD to be used as a desktop, we need to get rid of the Apple elitism, and lead by example, take it into account how we would want it and work to try and improve it. I'll be reinstalling BSD as a desktop soonish; just need to figure out what I'll do for an actual desktop though. 4. We need to stay out of the politics of the larger FOSS scene. These codes of conduct, these stupid arguments over what is and isn't acceptable will continue to go on as the CoCs are a solution in search of a problem. We are all adults, we know what is and isn't generally acceptable on the internet. But if everyone got offended and quit a project over someone saying mean 30 years ago, all FOSS would have quickly died out. It's ridiculousness like this that led to John Marino and others leaving the FreeBSD project. **In conclusion**: I'm fully expecting that many of you will respond negatively to my criticisms. I'm not in a position to address most of these, when I got removed from the FreeBSD ports project, I was ready to just pull the plug and leave it entirely behind, and I mostly have left the FreeBSD community behind and use it quietly other than the communities I run. I'm not expecting any of you to take me seriously if you don't want to - people are going to either agree with me or completely disagree and want to scream at me for being an idiot -- used to both things haha. In any case, my intention of this post is to be constructive, not destructive, and just give opinions I think aren't idiotic or FUD-based. This is not FUD, these are legitimate concerns mostly rooted in one rhetorical question: **Can we trust the GNU/Linux community to be better to us than it has?** I think the answer I would give is abundantly clear. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- haroldp · 2021-04-30 05:07 IMO the biggest threat is the, "just install via Docker" mono-culture taking over opensource software projects. And we don't really even have an alternative. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- [deleted] · 2021-04-30 05:16 That's more of a server-specific issue, and while I agree it's an issue, it really depends on your applications. For me, it's tangential at best, and that is why I really didn't address it. It's possible to run many apps outside of Docker, it just requires a bit of creativity. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- s_w_eek · 2021-04-30 05:18 1. After running ZFS for years I see nothing but good coming out of the OpenZFS project. FreeBSD never held the implemention repo of the filesystem anyways, it's always been in Solaris/Illumos hands. Even if it's a bit slower from the ZoL codebase, having tests in the same repo for both OSs is a relatively huge deal imo and most of the recent (corporate-backed) development work has shifted to ZoL over the past few years anyway. ZFS was never meant to be Linux specific and I don't quite understand how you feel that hostile Linux kernel devs will really cause that much (more) trouble in general. The LLNL and Delphix folks have kept ZoL/OpenZFS going strong for many years so far. Adding diversity in the form of additional OSs in the repo seems unlikely to worsen that situation and if anything has the chance to help it as more talent is pulled into the common repo. There's also a matter of the features that have been lacking in the FreeBSD ZFS, personally I'll take native encryption and draid over a couple MBs of read/write performance any day (but I'm also running PB scale data lakes) Those features might not matter to you, I which case the loss in performance is probably a bigger deal, but I think those are ripe examples of feature slip FreeBSD had been experiencing for the last several years and I'm glad to see that being addressed. 2-3. I think that you are correct in your assessment of more Linux- like things coming into the OS, but personally it doesn't really bother me and I suspect many people might feel the same way. The folks who are employed for *nix development largely focus on Linux related software anyway. If firefox can install and run, that's fine for me, it's still a much better alternative than dealing with lower quality OSs. I also think FreeBSD should be more open to incorporating some of the things Linux is doing, if it doesn't I fear we may see FreeBSD slip even further away from the standard modern day "unix" production environment. Developers not running the OS they develop on seems pretty common and is even a "problem" for the Linux guys (I think it's gotten better in the last 5yo or so though). You go to dev conferences and it's always a glowing sea of illuminated Apple logos (and a few thinkpads ;)). Personally instead of pivoting away from that I'd rather like to see some work around adding cross compiling support for FreeBSD on MacOS as I think it would really help foster growth in the area of development. (Let's be real here, most of the younger devs/sysadmins/it support folks coming into the scene haven't ever used unix or bsd a lot of the time now it seems.) It seems more important to me for the project to be focusing on talent recruitment and retention rather than demanding the younger folks play catchup with older school technologies and development methods (where it makes sense). Point 4 is a much larger can of worms in general that I think has little to do with FreeBSD specifically, so I really have no comment. That's my 2¢ anyway, I wish you luck getting back up and going with your BSD desktop again. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- [deleted] · 2021-04-30 05:40 [deleted] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- demetrioussharpe · 2021-04-30 05:41 I agree with you & I’ve been very critical about some of these issues. However, there’s practically zero interest from the BSD community in separating the future of the BSDs from Linux. The only way to change this would be to fork FreeBSD & make the changes there, but there’s almost no manpower available to even start this. If enough people could be scrounged together, we could possibly get something going. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- LiamW · 2021-04-30 06:02 Funny, I just started using FreeBSD due to not liking the direction Linux has been taking due to the enterprise bias of Linux kernel development, and some frustrations with how inconsistent changes tend to be. I get the annoying GTK/QT dbus concerns, the linuxization of software to rely on systemd/linux/etc. pseudo-standards that change or no longer follow unix-philosophy, etc. I don't get the ZFS concern, ZoL has momentum, no reason not to work with it. If it goes in a direction that doesn't work it gets forked. Its good to have enterprise-grade FS codebases be the same. I don't know the underlying politics, but I feel very comfortable coming to FreeBSD as a workstation/desktop OS. I work in python mostly, but want to start testing/supporting FreeBSD with my instrument libraries now. Maybe I am missing the boat for FreeBSD, but I feel more comfortable using it than Ubuntu/Redhat/Debian at this point, those distros seem unreliable. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- DoNotAgreeToDisagree · 2021-04-30 06:10 Please elaborate on why you're not willing to use OpenBSD? No ZFS, no CoCs, much better experience for desktop users than FreeBSD (IMHO), etc. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- bawdyanarchist · 2021-04-30 06:10 Interesting points. I have noticed that dbus is required for alot of my GUI stuff, and I even had to install stupid GTKto get everything running smoothly (libreoffice > openoffice). It's not that they don't work well enough, it's that I'm one of those weirdos who thinks GPL is basically the communism of opensource (they beg daddy govt to force everyone to share). And I REALLY don't like the way that Gnome has attempted to create a closed ecosystem that isn't inter-compatible with others, by constantly changing their APIs and trying to lock out 3rd parties. I think that basically all of that is fairly counter to the idea of open information sharing among humans, and basically serves some weird and contradictory bad philosophy of the guy who wrote some utils 2 decades ago and somehow coded his communist dogma into a very long licesnse with a stupid pre-ramble. One point, I'm sure you're aware and have some words, Falkon browser. Seems to work well for most applications ... however, it unfortunately doesn't work for me with quite a number of login/security/pay type sites. Pretty much have to use Firefox for that. Seeing how Firefox is fully opensource spyware that has to be meticulously fixed just to get some damn privacy, and seeing how Google funds Mozilla, the conspiracy theorist in me suspects that these behemoth corporations have already made the decision to only whitelist certain browsers with certain "security" features. Other than that though, Falkon works pretty well for me. I enjoy FreeBSD very much, as well as ZFS (I'm still only about a year old on FreeBSD); so it's disconcerting to hear that OpenZFS has now upstream dependency on something linked directly to Linux. I consider that whole ecosystem fairly compromised in very fundamental ways. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- digifuzzy · 2021-04-30 06:29 I would add Snap packages and/or other pre-compiled, supposedly sandboxed, pre-wrapped binary applications. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- seizedengine · 2021-04-30 06:45 Once you've used ZFS, not having it isn't a selling point. Regardless of the OS. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Neko-san-kun · 2021-04-30 07:08 Personally, I'm a GNU/Linux user (Arch btw), and I've recently become interested in FreeBSD as a desktop due to its interests in security and the dedication to that mission but I can't fathom using it as a desktop when most companies struggle to be interested in supporting Linux as it is. For example, if I want to game on FreeBSD, I'd have to depend on Linux emulation (to my understanding) that's even worse at running Linux applications than Wine and doesn't even run /wine or Proton/ properly nor keep it up to date. It's just an unthinkable alternative. That aside, many Ports of expected things to find in the AUR (as an alternative) are just non-existent, Ports' offerings there are almost sparse in comparison... (This may not be true for everyone, but if I need to compile the Unreal Engine for work or want to run FOSS Godot- mono [which FreeBSD doesn't keep mono up to date, as of writing this], I can't because it simply isn't available. The FreeBSD desktop ecosystem feels severely lacking, looking in from the outside. That's not to say I don't like FreeBSD, I do find it interesting, but investments like these are what keep Linux (power) users that need more at their fingertips away. (I've been a GNU/Linux user since late 2019 and refuse to ever use Windows in my personal life ever again.) That said, I'm unfamiliar with a lot of BSD OS politics on what is and isn't acceptable, but what I do know is this: if you want new users, we need stuff that actually works to be convinced to join. I agree that it's better to have some independence, but it's better than having nothing; if you (not telling you what to do, just suggesting to the community) think truly BSD desktop environments and other software should be the norm (to compete with big projects like KDE and such), then tangible efforts for these lofty goals need to be worked on. Personally, I'm a junior developer with no C experience (at the time of writing), so I can't really contribute to such an endeavour (though I would like to make FreeBSD better for a living; I want to work in FOSS), but this really needs to be made clear: people say GNU/Linux has an ecosystem problem all the time, and as a Linux user, BSD's looks far worse. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- s_w_eek · 2021-04-30 07:13 I'd like to take a minute to point out that OpenZFS, the project that recently merged the BSD bits, is *not* in anyway dependent on Linux, while the focus of that group in the past was to provide a Linux implemention of ZFS on Linux (ZoL) this codebase has been renamed with the integration of FreeBSD to OpenZFS and most ZFS community development effort occurs here now. There's quite a bit of history to dig into here, but I'll keep it brief, there's much more than I'm mentioning here to go look up if you are interested. In the past all distros that supported ZFS (illumos, MacOS, Linux and Windows) kept separate codebases with the standard workflow of: bits get added to repo where development is being done and tested (at this time usually illumos), pulled into the illumos zfs codebase if the work was done elsewhere then ported back out to the other OSs (sometimes). The illumos ZFS was generally seen as upstream by the community with development bits being migrated around as time and effort allowed. This worked well for several years but as time passed the different repos started to see drift between versions. A few years back several of the "heavy hitter" companies in the ZFS world migrated their primary development efforts from the illumos repo to the Linux (ZoL) repo. At this point ZoL and the illumos ZFS started to begin looking more different as new features were added into the ZoL version and never made it back into the illumos repo (native encryption, draid, zstandard compression and more). The OpenZFS project has combined the ZoL and FreeBSD codebase into one repo with OS specific bits separated out. This has allowed FreeBSD to pick up many missing features and ensure developers are testing changes for both platforms. From a development standpoint this brings many great things to the table. In general I think most of the community has come to see ZoL as the primary repo of truth and the OpenZFS group has done amazing work over the last few years to get all this put together. If I had to guess, I'd say there's a decent chance illumos may end up on the same codebase in the future as well. The OpenZFS groups have mentioned in past meetings they would be welcome to adding in the other OSs in the future. Also many of the people involved in the OpenZFS project have been involved in ZFS development for many years (or in Matt Ahrens case since the filesystem was created). For most ZFS developers it has been a case of their employer moving away from illumos platforms in favor of Linux, taking their (non OS specific) ZFS development efforts with them. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- s_w_eek · 2021-04-30 07:30 Yep, and let's not forget about kubernetes ;) I think I let my biases slip in my original response forgetting your goal is strictly a desktop here. Several of the Linuxism drifts come more into play there but I personally don't think about them as much. I primarily use FreeBSD for servers so I think it's best to keep that in mind in context of my answer. That being said boy I would love to kill off all our docker/k8 things at work and just use jails, because they are way less of a pain to deal with. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- reditanian · 2021-04-30 07:46 Just please don’t call it LibreBSD :P ---------------------------------------------------------------------- [deleted] · 2021-04-30 07:48 Please read and think before you decide. https://www.freebsd.org/internal/code-of-conduct/#:~:text=Members%20of %20the%20FreeBSD%20community,exclusionary%20behavior%20aren't%20accept able. https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd- current/2018-December/072430.html If FreeBSD or any BSD isn't fit with you that is fine. BSD projects still grow up like the way they do in the past. You can use whatever you want. I don't consider Code Of Coduct is good. But just imagine, your boss want you and your team to work on a project. Will your project can be done before it reach to death line without any issues from relationships in your team? That said CoC can be useful for this situation. Remember you can't choose your partner to work with so it will be better if you acquainted with your team even some people are annoying. If your relationship with your team is good, there will be a good chance that the project can easily be done. Code Of Conduct make people respect each others. I don't know where you live but in my country without having a guns in my house or everyone house is a good point and I'm okay with rules. GPL software and Linuxism isn't too bad. But here is the problem with messy people, they want to use software without any fragmented stuff. I pretty sad to see we have more users than developers and contributors. It would be easier if someone just make a web browser or music player for BSD system. People should stop complaining and it is time to do something. I usually don't get messy topic from people but if you can't even look what fit with you. You just make yourself harder just like OP and you will stick your head with messy stuff. Go and find your answer don't let's anyone control your mind. Life isn't that hard. I use Windows alongside FreeBSD, OpenBSD and NetBSD. I use what I found it is useful for me. That all. In the end, you will see no one care about what operating system they should use but they will care more what they can do to make their life easier and make their operating system more better. Edit: I try to fix some grammar. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- s_w_eek · 2021-04-30 07:49 Yes these are good points. I think a lot of FreeBSDs biggest weaknesses are in its desktop usage, especially around games. That being said, FreeBSD is excellent for servers but I still use Linux as a desktop because I game and do development work for Linux. Keep in mind there are some bundled FreeBSD versions with GUIs as well as alternative package managers like pkgsrc to help round out some things that might be missing. I suspect it's not so much a matter of the number of packages available as it is what packages are missing. Last time I checked the ports tree provided more packages than the enterprise linux repos, but I imagine both are lacked when compared to the AUR (but I didn't check). Also keep in mind if you do end up starting to use FreeBSD more you can always add and help maintain ports, they're not too hard to get the hang of, especially if you're already familiar with writing AUR packages. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- s_w_eek · 2021-04-30 07:51 SystemBSD 🤔 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- achauv1 · 2021-04-30 08:07 Your post is interesting because of its criticism but I don't think there is anything to be pessimistic about. Cheer up mate ! ---------------------------------------------------------------------- reddit_original · 2021-04-30 08:51 1. Linux adopted ZFS. BSD merged with Linux's version in order to keep everything on the same track so all of ZFS would be consistent. The BSD's did NOT "switch" to ZoL. >I'm not in a position to address most of these I can tell. I stopped at number one because the rest of your points have little or nothing to do with the BSDs success. BSD success has nothing to do with whether people can run their desktop on it (as if they can't. I do.). Complaining that the BSDs run third party software is a feature, not a fault. Linux runs those same third party packages. Why aren't you complaining about that? This is just another version of this BS we've heard for decades: >Netcraft confirms: BSD is dead ---------------------------------------------------------------------- capsevilla · 2021-04-30 09:19 I don't know, went through a hard reset due to power outage in the middle of jobs on my backup drive. I was pleasantly surprised how resilient OpenBSD's ffs2 was, no data loss. Just picked up where I left off. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- New-Cellist976 · 2021-04-30 09:46 Debian kfreebsd ---------------------------------------------------------------------- [deleted] · 2021-04-30 10:08 Gentoo kfreebsd with systemd ---------------------------------------------------------------------- vvelox · 2021-04-30 10:20 Actually we do. This is an area Linux is still very much playing catch up on. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- vvelox · 2021-04-30 10:30 > 1... This is actually getting us way faster updates for graphics than ever. If you use Nvidia chipsets this ain't an issue, but for ever other one it is a massive freaking win. > 2..... This has nothing to do with FreeBSD as we are talking about packages that people choose to run on FreeBSD. Ones which for the most part will work on anything vaguely unix like. > 3.... This is just crazy as it works perfectly fine as a desktop. I've been running it as such for two decades now. Also if you think FreeBSD package and OS wise is anything Linux like, this very much tells me you've not used many Linux distros. 1: Packages on FreeBSD are trivial to manage and build thanks to ports and poudriere. 2: They are kept up to date. No janky ass phoned in back porting. 3: Rust actually works with out relying on third party binaries. 4: X actually works and does not requiring fucking with to make it behave. > 4.... You realize this is old news. We got a much better one and honestly as far as shit like this goes this is one of the far better communities. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- TechnoRat63 · 2021-04-30 10:32 First started using BSD before some of the readers were born: BSD 4.2 in 1983 on a VAX 11/750. Most of my IT career has been supporting BSD-based UNIX (SunOS/Solaris). I've also used Linux since shortly after it came out. (1999 or thereabouts) When I decided I wanted a desktop that used ZFS (I'm a big ZFS bigot!) on root, I tried several flavors of BSD. Extremely disappointed. Very difficult to find the packages that I wanted (I'm an Extra-class Amateur Radio Operator, so wanted several of the hamlib utilities, etc.) and those that I found, I usually had to build from scratch. Nothing was straightforward. Certainly had the Devil's own time trying to install any games (EVE Online my main game.) Fix this. Come up with The Way for desktops. Get up to speed on the average user's needs/wants. Yeah, BSD is great for servers. I'd run BSD on a server any day, for most applications. On my desk? Not yet. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- goldfluss · 2021-04-30 12:00 RemindMe! 2 Weeks ---------------------------------------------------------------------- RemindMeBot · 2021-04-30 12:00 I will be messaging you in 14 days on [**2021-05-14 12:00:14 UTC**](ht tp://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=2021-05- 14%2012:00:14%20UTC%20To%20Local%20Time) to remind you of [**this link **](https://www.reddit.com/r/BSD/comments/n1m4he/as_a_longtime_bsd_use r_i_have_my_doubts_about_our/gwez9rw/?context=3) [**CLICK THIS LINK**](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose/?to=Remin dMeBot&subject=Reminder&message=%5Bhttps%3A%2F%2Fwww.reddit.com%2Fr%2F BSD%2Fcomments%2Fn1m4he%2Fas_a_longtime_bsd_user_i_have_my_doubts_abou t_our%2Fgwez9rw%2F%5D%0A%0ARemindMe%21%202021-05- 14%2012%3A00%3A14%20UTC) to send a PM to also be reminded and to reduce spam. ^(Parent commenter can ) [^(delete this message to hide from others.)] (https://www.reddit.com/message/compose/?to=RemindMeBot&subject=Delete %20Comment&message=Delete%21%20n1m4he) ***** |[^(Info)](https://www.reddit.com/r/RemindMeBot/comments/e1bko7/remind mebot_info_v21/)|[^(Custom)](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose/?t o=RemindMeBot&subject=Reminder&message=%5BLink%20or%20message%20inside %20square%20brackets%5D%0A%0ARemindMe%21%20Time%20period%20here)|[^(Yo ur Reminders)](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose/?to=RemindMeBot& subject=List%20Of%20Reminders&message=MyReminders%21)|[^(Feedback)](ht tps://www.reddit.com/message/compose/?to=Watchful1&subject=RemindMeBot %20Feedback)| |-|-|-|-| ---------------------------------------------------------------------- demetrioussharpe · 2021-04-30 13:22 Kill it with fire! Lol ---------------------------------------------------------------------- escarg0tic · 2021-04-30 14:44 I'm an OpenBSD user, and I don't feel really concerned by these problems. I think FreeBSD's lack of autonomy is nothing new. FreeBSD has always been a complex machine (compared to other BSDs), which has always wanted to attract Linux users. It seems normal to me that it ended up becoming like Linux. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- [deleted] · 2021-04-30 15:03 > ZoL has momentum, no reason not to work with it. Control. They could easily hold the other versions of ZFS hostage by introducing features that would break our systems. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- [deleted] · 2021-04-30 15:03 I considered this but there's, as you said, insufficient manpower. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- [deleted] · 2021-04-30 15:05 Without disparaging OpenBSD, which I do have respect for, the design philosophy is incompatible with anything that I use on a daily basis. Frankly, the idea that UFS with Soft Dependencies is competitive performance-wise to even XFS is ridiculous. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- [deleted] · 2021-04-30 15:06 I do not think this currently is a good situation, so I am staying on FBSD 12. Nothing you say currently is going to allay my concerns. From my POV, we've just gotten closer to tit-sucking more and more off GNU/Linux. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Snaffu100 · 2021-04-30 15:08 I agree with your comments. Interesting as it seems you are a long time BSD person as well. Myself, I started with 2.2.8 and Greg Lehey's book. I switched from Linux to FreeBSD around v3.0 or 3.1 as it was just what I felt a better OS at that time and think it still could be today. The core team break up that happened in the V5 time frame really hurt the project (its how Dragonfly got started for those not around then) and the v5 releases were not nearly as stable as v4.x. Looking back now, this marked the beginning of the decline IMHO. I did continue to use it through my entire grad school for 95% of my needs.. just had a couple classes that used M$ Access that I couldn't use it for. Wrote all my papers using Lyx and coded in Vim. (Before I became and Emacs advocate). I use OpenBSD a lot as well, but have always tended to use Free for as my desktop of choice running FVWM or Fluxbox mostly at the time. Unfortunately without one of the two big desktop environments (Gnome or KDE) being fully supported today by Free due to wayland and or systemd dependencies I don't see much of a future for them which means the project ultimately. Desktop is required at this point I would say. I run a lot of i3 but there are times where the Desktop just comes in handy.. not that its required, but its convenient.. and for newcomers basically expected I think. They don't want to fire up FVWM, i3, TWM and hand configure files at this point. They grew up with Macs its a different time. At a certain level I can appreciate that, they should have the option after 20+ years of development to do things the easy way or the old school way. Personally I still prefer FreeBSD as an OS, its better constructed, has a great track record and is really lean. Running top in a Debian box makes me ill. However I think I may have to go the way of others rather soon... as I sit here on a Debian box writing this comment, wishing I was on my 13-STABLE system, but can't be because I needed to spin up Debian because of some lack of support in Free for something I needed earlier in the day. Still hoping that it isn't over, but I see my hope dwindling. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- [deleted] · 2021-04-30 15:10 As someone who never liked Arch much, I can't say I agree with trying to /convince/ you to join anything. Arch is a bleeding edge unstable distro with nothing in common with BSD - it claims KISS but integrates systemd and other standard GNU trash easily. For me, Windows isn't glamorous, but I never had the same "OMG Windows sucks!" moment most people appear to have had -- quite the opposite. I spent a short time interested in macOS and ditched it due to the fact it's an anti-user operating system that looks more like a fischer price toy than a serious OS. But your criticism of our ecosystem is pretty much inline. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- [deleted] · 2021-04-30 15:17 > That's my 2¢ anyway, I wish you luck getting back up and going with your BSD desktop again. Thanks, I do have my work cut out for me as some of the stuff I used to use no longer works on FreeBSD. > Those features might not matter to you, I which case the loss in performance is probably a bigger deal, but I think those are ripe examples of feature slip FreeBSD had been experiencing for the last several years and I'm glad to see that being addressed. I would have rathered we keep our independence and developed these features natively and with our use cases in mind. Rather, we just pulled what ZoL did. But really, I've been considering aborting my plans to return to a FreeBSD desktop and going in a different direction only because I only have a choice between UFS and ZFS - and currently I'm at FreeBSD 12, which has only a few more years of security updates realistically. Beyond that, future is uncertain. > I also think FreeBSD should be more open to incorporating some of the things Linux is doing, if it doesn't I fear we may see FreeBSD slip even further away from the standard modern day "unix" production environment. I am of the opposite sentiment. For me, I don't want dbus, as I said, cgroups, systemd etc. is all trash. > Personally instead of pivoting away from that I'd rather like to see some work around adding cross compiling support for FreeBSD on MacOS as I think it would really help foster growth in the area of development. If it's not an 8-bit computer or console, I think cross-compilation has no place in an OS. IRIX community has to deal with this (I do retrocomputing) being a fad by some users. For me, it saves no time and it only served as a dividing line by the community members who introduced it and RPM to our OS ecosystem - different topic for another day though. I'm pretty anti-Apple, as well. Hate the culture around it and think they need to go die in a sewer pipe. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- escarg0tic · 2021-04-30 15:17 I don't say that OpenBSD has both software support and sane design. It's really a matter of compromise. Today, the poor software design, forces systems to change for something worse. I use OpenBSD, I'm happy with my sane system, but I have to adapt and change my habits (in terms of end-user software). ---------------------------------------------------------------------- [deleted] · 2021-04-30 15:18 dbus and other trash are Linuxisms - that's what I'm referring to. We don't need it. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- [deleted] · 2021-04-30 15:20 > Please elaborate on why you're not willing to use OpenBSD? Giant locked kernel causing poor performance. Outdated partioning layouts, far worse performance due to removal of SMT and other features, no Wine, no linux emulation at all, bad package manager comparatively, UFS is a horrible filesystem with no comparability to even XFS or HAMMER. Elitism is rife in that community etc. If you think that any of this is a linuxism you're an idiot. Fine grained locking was explored on IRIX and Solaris years before GNU/Linux. And performance is not even a Linux issue. Don't be foolish. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- [deleted] · 2021-04-30 15:21 If you want to criticize me, come up with something original. This is not some revival of anti-BSD sentiment - I do not use GNU/Linux at all. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Neko-san-kun · 2021-04-30 15:35 My point on the joining part is that communities don't generally grow around things people can't use. Sure, Arch Linux follows a lot of particular standards with the wider Linux architecture, but that's far from the point I'm trying to make: no new people, no new word of mouth, fewer potential developers; the subject of what Arch Linux does under the hood is beside the point but I did acknowledge that the reason why I was interested in BSD, to begin with, was precisely because it pays attention to "architectural" and security flaws. At the end of the day, people who truly love FOSS and don't want to be held by a big tech ecosystem, like Windows and MacOS, are going to choose the Linux desktop over BSD because it's a no-brainer. We don't need Windows updates in the background, collecting telemetry in real time, hogging resources, installing bloatware, being unfathomably insecure and unintuitive, and God knows what else; nor should users have to find potentially illegal and/or ridiculous methods to cull Microsoft's BS from the OS just to have sane control over the machine that they paid for in the first place. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- [deleted] · 2021-04-30 15:40 The difference for me at least is that I've been from my teens installing hacked and modified versions of Windows, often based on Windows Server or Embedded products onto systems. I am currently replying from a Windows 10 Enterprise LTSC system that I customized myself. It doesn't collect telemetry (I have a traffic monitoring system that tells me what comes in and out) anymore, nor is it really anything other than unintuitive. For me, compareed to say macOS it's a no brainer. Compared to GNU/Linux, it's a matter of principle; GNU/Linux like macOS is not my ideal, so why bother? If I'm gonna use something, may as well go for the most compatibility and make it so I don't have to restart to play games or anything. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- johnklos · 2021-04-30 15:44 These are issues that aren't related directly to BSD. Nobody in the BSD world can stop Linux-isms, but we can continue to move in the direction of replacing non-BSD tools with BSD tools. On the other hand, writing video drivers from scratch is hardly trivial. Apps which choose to adopt Linux-isms can't be told what to do, either. Likewise, you can't really expect people to use something differently than how they prefer. For instance, I use BSD on the desktop sometimes, but use a Mac most of the time because the software just isn't there. Can I use Messages or Safari? No. We don't even have good browser choices - I will never run Chrome / Chromium, and Firefox is showing every update that they have corporate interests in mind. Can I watch Netflix? You get the idea. I'd love to do all of this on a NetBSD machine, but it's not practical right now. So far, I've been saying that we can't tell people what to do or not to do. If you wanted to write support for NVIDIA from scratch, you're obviously welcome to do so, but nobody can make you do it. The projects themselves have a responsibility to the holistic whole of the OS, and slow and steady is a very good idea for a project that we want to see around for many decades. However, I have to vehemently disagree with your #4 suggestion. You don't - you **never** say that things were OK when abuse happened, and now that abuse is being called out, the problem is the calling out. We have to normalize people voicing the negativity, the gatekeeping, the racism and misogyny, the bigotry, the anti-anything. Negative people who want to hurt others have been given a free pass, or at very least it has been too easy for them, for too long. There is no place whatsoever for disparaging others, for ad hominem attacks, for any attacks at all that aren't directly and specifically related to the project. Heck, not even then. Adamant arguing is one thing, but people shouldn't attack, really. We've all seen it, and it happens on social media all the time, but the projects aren't social media. Therefore, the idea of having a code of conduct is a good one, and an important one. People who want to participate should be made aware, clearly and unambiguously, that hurtful, harmful behavior will be met with real consequences. Most of the problems people have with codes of conduct are related to the idea that they want to suggest it's arbitrary and limits them needlessly. But does it really? Are people really so close to the threshold of being an asshole that they're constantly worried about crossing it and getting called out? Or is the concern really all a bit disingenuous? Nobody should ever be made to feel excluded because of who they are. On the other hand, people should definitely be excluded because of how they choose to behave, should they choose to be shitty. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- [deleted] · 2021-04-30 15:57 > On the other hand, writing video drivers from scratch is hardly trivial. Don't misunderstand John, I wasn't proposing such a solution. I was simply lamenting our increasing dependence on foreign actors for our survival. I'd be more likely to reach out to AMD in particular and ask them what one could do to better make it lucrative for them to give the BSDs a bit of attention. Unlike others here, I'm not opposed to working with proprietary companies when it does offer a clear benefit. others may disagree. > Apps which choose to adopt Linux-isms can't be told what to do, either. No, but we should be looking to replace such apps with better solutions or else not package them at all is my POV. Settling for the status-quo has led to the situation we're in. > You don't - you never say that things were OK when abuse happened, and now that abuse is being called out, the problem is the calling out. Pardon me for cutting my reply short, but I don't think there's much for you and me to discuss here in good faith without one of us getting angry at the other. Point blank, I'll get to the point: We're not social justice activists. If you want that attitude to be taken, find another outlet other than software. My POV, as someone whose worked as both a sysadmin and small time devops guy, is that social justice is a distraction in the workplace and in the field of actually getting stuff done. Race cards and vagina cards have no place in software development. Here, your ability and your capabilities to work with others are far more important. Some of the greatest software dev minds in the BSD and Linux communities are well known for their tempers and rants. I am unwilling to let that talent go to waste just because they piss off a few people. If that means kicking a few noisy cans to the curb, so be it. Ability, merit, not how many oppression points you have, matters. > Therefore, the idea of having a code of conduct is a good one, and an important one. NetBSD and OpenBSD don't have one. DragonflyBSD doesn't either. Beyond that, John, you and I have little to discuss it seems. I've made my points, so we probably should just agree to disagree. Further discussion would probably be unwise. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- haroldp · 2021-04-30 16:08 Yeah, I mean, I have used jails since v4 and they are fantastic, but that's not quite a Docker alternative. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- DoNotAgreeToDisagree · 2021-04-30 16:22 Ah, so you do not want to use \*BSD because of a lot of linuxism. When presented with the alternative that doesn't contain those, you're response is "it doesn't have enough linuxism". Nice trolling. Alas, a waste of time. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- johnklos · 2021-04-30 16:30 I suppose I should've been less vague. By suggesting what I was suggesting, I was wondering what you think the options are. I read what you wrote, and leaving #4 out for now, I wonder what concrete things could we do? You answered one, for example: contact AMD and see what it'd take to get them more involved. I like that idea, and I like the idea of concrete ideas we can try. Replacing apps with Linux-isms is a nice idea, but hardly trivial. I think the work that lots of BSD developers do to fix and package software with Linux-isms, whether it's in-tree nouveau or thousands of packages in ports/pkgsrc, is nothing short of amazing. And I appreciate your desire to not devolve in to less relevant discussion about codes of conduct, and I see where you stand, but I do have to point out this out: I don't like that they're necessary. But if behavior is going on that makes someone or some people feel denigrated, ostracized, excluded, or otherwise attacked, a group or organization should have tools to handle this. The idea that there's no precedent doesn't exist when a code of conduct has been made. Nothing about it is clean, but if the ultimate goal is to be more inclusive and safe for everyone, then I'm for it. I mention this because you wrote that we're not social justice activists, as if that means we shouldn't take steps to make our communities safer. (As an aside, we are precisely social justice activists - we make and share things freely in the face of corporate interests, but that's a discussion for another time.) That's utter bull. Saying we shouldn't take a stance is taking a stance in favor of the way things have been. How is what you're suggesting different from, "Don't tell me to not do something that might be hurtful to others"? That's a real question. And, in the interest of not beating around the bush, I am flatly saying it: I think you made this post with several good points about Linux-isms and how they affect BSD so you could also sneak in your complaints about codes of conduct. I see no other purpose, because I don't see any salient points about how they somehow hurt the community. If you have real examples of them doing more harm than good, please share. At the same time you're trying to preemptively discourage me from replying, which says something about the kind of behavior you find acceptable, I think. Bottom line - either we have a discussion, and this is good, or this is an announcement from you, in which case Reddit isn't the place for that. You could've just written a blog post somewhere. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- [deleted] · 2021-04-30 16:39 Nope. Not trolling. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- demetrioussharpe · 2021-04-30 16:45 I wonder how many people we can get together to explore what might be possible. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- [deleted] · 2021-04-30 16:47 > How is what you're suggesting different from, "Don't tell me to not do something that might be hurtful to others"? That's a real question. It comes down to the moral question of whether or not you believe you have a right to tell others what to do. I believe I can't control others, I can only control myself. > so you could also sneak in your complaints about codes of conduct. I see no other purpose, because I don't see any salient points about how they somehow hurt the community. This was not my intention, #4 was a footnote at best. It's not a technical issue, but it's one that I thought was worth including nonetheless. I didn't want to certainly have this devolve into a topic centred on it. > At the same time you're trying to preemptively discourage me from replying, which says something about the kind of behavior you find acceptable, I think. No, I just can tell that we don't have common ground on the issue. You see it prudent to apply rules and use leverage to try and improve 'safety'. I do not. There's not a whole lot of common ground to be applied, and I feel that your display shows a level of passion that suggests even if I had good philosophical reasons that you agreed with, you'd still hold to your convictions strongly. That's actually respectable in a strict sense. Similarly, I feel that all of the points you made above lack any real efficacy - you see I am of the belief that thought policing of any kind, or anything resembling that, is wrong. I think we can survive without such a document that clearly pits people into a dichotomous situation of the oppressors and the oppressed. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- [deleted] · 2021-04-30 16:48 Considering the squabbling that has occurred based on this post, it may be difficult to find a specific target and common ground. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- demetrioussharpe · 2021-04-30 16:50 Pay no attention to the squabbling. Maybe we should set up a telegram group for talking about potential goals & features. That could potentially keep naysayers out. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- [deleted] · 2021-04-30 16:55 > Replacing apps with Linux-isms is a nice idea, but hardly trivial. I think the work that lots of BSD developers do to fix and package software with Linux-isms, whether it's in-tree nouveau or thousands of packages in ports/pkgsrc, is nothing short of amazing. One idea I had, and one I intend to pursue one day, is a competing standard to something like dbus - probably a combination of SunRPC and UNIX STREAMS (though, getting the BSDs to adopt a STREAMS implementation is probably not realistic?) along with a migration path guide that would make rewriting such an app easy. Other than that, divide and conquer. Focus on one particular area of interest, and go outwards from there. We should focus on the big thing, which is dbus. There's two potential routes: For DEs, either remove the ones that have it and gather a team to design a competing DE under a BSD-friendly toolkit like Motif or FLTK (I like Motif for its retro aesthetic) or we fork existing DEs into our own specific versions, removing code and features we can't/won't use. For media apps, focus first on one particular stack of media apps, decide whether we're writing new ones or modifying them, and then we can accept alternatives at our leisure. Really, my big thing is we need to consider removing swaths of projects that don't respect the BSDs and focus ourselves better. That may mean we need to sacrifice portions of our current ports/pkgsrc tree to make it better. (Splitting this between CoC and technical talk since I want to continue the latter, but want to conclude the former) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- [deleted] · 2021-04-30 16:56 I don't believe I have either the development skills or leadership skills to lead such an effort, but if you have people in mind I will assist as an accessory person with the goal. I just don't want to be the core person behind such an effort because I am uncomfortable being the one calling the shots, I tend to upset people haha. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- isaybullshit69 · 2021-04-30 16:59 I'm new to the BSD world, so apologies if this is a noob question. But, why would OpenZFS (previously known as ZoL) devs introduce a feature that would break BSD functionality/systems (considering BSD and Linux codebase is ~~same~~ similar)? I see no reason behind your argument. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- [deleted] · 2021-04-30 17:07 Linux and BSD have sweeping API incompatibility. They aren't anymore similar than POSIX interoperability allows. Thus, there may be features that are feasible/beneficial on Linux but not a BSD and vice versa. Because they are the ones running the upstream now, they can break large portions of the codebase if they wanted to and thus give the Linux kernel the leg up ---------------------------------------------------------------------- demetrioussharpe · 2021-04-30 17:07 Get some help. We could build a core team & go from there. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- isaybullshit69 · 2021-04-30 17:11 I understand that, but *why would they?* Why would they break BSD compatibility? If they do develop something that is Linux specific, they surely would have/create a BSD abstraction layer handling that. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- [deleted] · 2021-04-30 17:14 Because you can't assume these things. Back when user modesetting was a thing, the BSDs and Linux had mostly similar driver comparability. Then Linux introduced kernel modesetting, sending BSDs to the stone age for years. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- ryze_cotch · 2021-04-30 17:21 > BSD success Bha ha ha ha ha ha ha :) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- isaybullshit69 · 2021-04-30 17:22 I'd argue BSD is not popular enough because of the AT&T litigation issue and Linux was growing in popularity due to the litigation issue at the same time. And I don't see kernel modsetting as a bad thing (from my very limited knowledge on KMS). As much as I want to see FreeBSD everywhere, you can't blame Linux folks for implementing a good thing because BSD folks didn't implement it. I'm a purist too, but at the end of the day I do have to adjust. Granted, I shouldn't, but I am forced to. > The Linux kernel's implementation of KMS enables native resolution in the framebuffer and allows for instant console (tty) switching. KMS also enables newer technologies (such as DRI2) which will help reduce artifacts and increase 3D performance, even kernel space power-saving. [Arch Wiki](https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/kernel_mode_setting) It's late here, so I'll put a pause to this right now, this is an interesting conversation and I'll reply once I'm free again. Have a nice day. :") ---------------------------------------------------------------------- ryze_cotch · 2021-04-30 17:25 > The BSDs increasing upstream dependence on the Linux kernel. Linux is UNIX-like. freebsd is linux-like :) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- david-chaves · 2021-04-30 17:57 what's wrong with having Linux Apps as upstream? IMHO, the main difference between Linux and BSD is: things change in BSD only when they is no other alternative, but Linux Desktop makes changes just for pleasure. this makes BSD much more stable, dependable, and it does not have to change. if you were a professional bicycle racer, you would understand the benefits of riding just behind somebody else, who has to fight air friction, not you. there is nothing wrong with that. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- [deleted] · 2021-04-30 18:03 Because those applications introduce problems. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- qci · 2021-04-30 18:06 Also long time user (since 4.3) here. I've been running it as a desktop for almost 20 years. I like my desktop very robust, so it's based on Xmonad with heavy customizations. My idea of having a fancy desktop probably differs from yours. ZFS has been great. I like it because I need data integrity. Ports collection is huge. Sure, some people went away, but it still works. CoC is surely annoying and distracting, but the community is great. Simply forget the bad things and avoid this shady part of the community. Why should FreeBSD die? It's inside major game consoles (yes, imagine games on FreeBSD!), it's in appliances, it's everywhere in leading companies. One thing that worries me is that the development appears a bit chaotic to me. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- [deleted] · 2021-04-30 18:11 My last FreeBSD desktop was openbox, tint2 and such. Pretty simple. Xmonad terrifies me, I don't do well with functional programming. The fact you can swing it is pretty nice. I'm not asking for FreeBSD to die I just don't like the way that we have been going. If things continue I might have to retreat to illumos. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- passthejoe · 2021-04-30 18:56 I really wanted to run an OpenBSD desktop about a year ago. I did it successfully 10 years ago, but that's another story. After muscling through as many tutorials as I could find, I did have a working system, but I couldn't get Chromium to run w/o crashing. I'm sure there's a secret to making this work, but all the fixes/tweaks didn't help me. I tried NetBSD and couldn't get X working. It's just so easy to pop in the Debian installer and have a fast, working system. My shared host runs FreeBSD, and I have an account on a Tilde site that uses OpenBSD, so I still have a hand in. That said, I don't know what the state of desktop projects using FreeBSD is right now, but I am open to a FreeBSD desktop that doesn't compel me to reinvent the wheel and then continually fail at repairing it. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- trucekill · 2021-04-30 19:38 FreeBSD is everywhere isn't it? Like, it runs on PS4s and PS5s. Netflix uses FreeBSD for its caching infrastructure. It seems pretty clear that BSD has a strong future. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- s_w_eek · 2021-04-30 20:09 I might agree except there is not enough development effort in the overlap of ZFS and FreeBSD, the feature drift alone was becoming a massive indication that the manpower needed to maintain a special repo does not currently exist in the community. I'm curious why you think more developers working together in tandem can be a bad thing when the alterative is a filesystem that continues to drift behind. It starts with features, but it could easily continue to security updates if things just continued on as they had been. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- [deleted] · 2021-04-30 20:12 I'm stating concerns with its direction. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- [deleted] · 2021-04-30 20:17 > I'm curious why you think more developers working together in tandem can be a bad thing when the alterative is a filesystem that continues to drift behind. Vulnerability, mostly. I am concerned that the ZoL team will hold the BSD port, and potentially others, hostage in the future in the sense they will add a feature that's infeasible or impossible for the other branches to upgrade to. Because GNU/Linux in general has been unkind/uncooperative/outright hostile to the BSDs, and ZoL in and of itself has a bad relationship with the mainline Linux devs, it's a bad situation. In my opinion, the answer wasn't to surrender our independence. It was to allocate more manpower to upkeep of ZFS, or else consider migrating off ZFS. I don't trust the Linux community to treat us fairly, and the ZoL version of ZFS performed demonstrably worse than the native port did in my testing, so I choose to not upgrade. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- [deleted] · 2021-04-30 20:17 [deleted] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- [deleted] · 2021-04-30 20:18 [deleted] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- himdel · 2021-04-30 20:37 [runj](https://samuel.karp.dev/blog/2021/03/runj-a-new-oci-runtime- for-freebsd-jails/) .. getting there ---------------------------------------------------------------------- haroldp · 2021-04-30 20:44 Solid link. Thanks. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- [deleted] · 2021-04-30 20:47 [deleted] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- PyR3X · 2021-04-30 21:10 I agree with most of what you said. I’m switching to NetBSD on the desktop. If more developers use it as a daily driver it will start to point out some of the primary issues. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- [deleted] · 2021-04-30 21:12 Considered that a few times, I just wish they had XFS or something. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Neko-san-kun · 2021-04-30 21:16 I should have just said BSD there; I'm not particularly savvy on the details and I trusted that FreeBSD cares about it ---------------------------------------------------------------------- [deleted] · 2021-04-30 21:22 [deleted] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- vsoul · 2021-04-30 21:41 For someone very concerned with elitism in other communities, you could read your post and your comments. You come off as extremely elitist yourself ---------------------------------------------------------------------- i915 · 2021-04-30 22:40 k8s are actually very good thing, especially if you are for example offering game hosting services for "regular" people instead of virtual servers etc. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- [deleted] · 2021-04-30 23:38 KMS is a good thing, but what I meant was that because Linux got to the goal first, the BSDs had to play catchup, and that took years. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- [deleted] · 2021-04-30 23:39 I'll let someone else lead, but if such a movement came about I may be able to help with the things I am skilled with. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- [deleted] · 2021-05-01 00:06 Raion, Oh Raion. You worry too much... Should I tell my opinion? I will keep it short. ​ * At 1, if ZoL isn't a solution then give us a solution. But wait, why your post don't have real technical issues to avoid ZoL. Oh, I am wondering why don't you post this 1st argument in FreeBSD mailing list? I am sure that you can have a real answer. * At 2, what is the real reason here? What happen if people don't have time to reinvent wheel? Can you find your solution or you just try to complain us for have too much GNU and GPL software inside your system? You don't want crap software then try to write software for your own. Complaining just for loser. * At 3, people have freedom to use what they want. If you want to see developers use BSD as a desktop that maybe less to see. Do you know who is better at eating their own soup? That right OpenBSD community. Is that can fit with you since most of OpenBSD developers use OpenBSD most of time? * At 4, no Code of Conduct? I don't think most of adults is smarter and maturer than children. I don't think people can easily control themself. But what wrong with CoC? Because we are adults we don't need rules, aren't we? That is a false statement I ever heard. Wait, is CoC political issue or humanity solution? Now ask yourself. But I sooner recognize that your words still have "GNU" and "Linuxism" more than a normal post. Really, if there were a lot of Linux users here they could make this as a real joke. If you want to stay away from GNU and Linuxism you can use OpenBSD. OpenBSD developers are great at making cool software and eating their own soup. But wait, you simply don't like it, didn't you? "Poor Performance", lol. You want too much thing from a healthy project. Is your contribution less than your compilation? I don't know. But I can sure that half of your life, you spend time to complain everything rather than find a solution to solve your problems. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- segfaulting · 2021-05-01 00:57 > what I really want is a Windows Subsystem for FreeBSD So your response to "we should stray away from being dependent on GNU/Linux" is "I wish we could throw Microsoft into the mix as well!"? please [no](https://youtube.com/watch?v=CwIXSrjkBuI)... ---------------------------------------------------------------------- segfaulting · 2021-05-01 01:08 In an imaginary world without the GPLv3, I wonder if proprietary devices like game consoles would still be running FreeBSD... (My guess is far less) ISPs and data companies like Netflix use(d) FreeBSD over Linux due to at one time it had superior network performance and stability. And of course, ZFS. Nowadays the network divide between BSD and Linux is moot, (or maybe the war is still there in the 10gbps+ range, I don't know). Also Linux having ZFS is another blow... Jails are great. Linux has docker. Capsicum is great. Linux has SELinux, apparmor, etc. Probably going to get downvoted for all this and I do love *BSD but it's "moat" is dwindling. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- [deleted] · 2021-05-01 01:16 I've already voiced my opinion and FreeBSD made it's choices; and I no longer am on the FBSD mailing list. How about you stop with the intimacy like you know me, unless you're too chicken to tell me who the hell you are. As far as complaining, I'm aware of when a solution is beyond my current means. If the grievances and we'll thought out opinions in this post amount to whining, in your view, you need to consider leaving me alone instead of harassing me with unwanted contact. If a solution is beyond my means, by you're logic I have to sit around and "git gud" before I can have an opinion. That is bull, and you know it. As far as the OpenBSD community goes, they don't have everything I want, and I would lose far more than I gain by going over. Nvidia graphics for one, and most processor performance advantages. OpenBSD is insular, but it isn't immune to the problems discussed above. Your elitism is unwelcome, your harassment is unwanted. Go crawl back under a rock. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- segfaulting · 2021-05-01 01:18 > Giant locked kernel causing poor performance. This is slowly being chipped away every release. 6.9 had a ton of improvements for network multithreading. > far worse performance due to removal of SMT OpenBSD sounded the alarm and made actual change where others wouldn't. It's a **"secure by default"** OS, not *"performant by default"*. You're free to change it with a single line in `/etc/sysctl.conf`, hell its only 8 characters: `hw.smt=1` ---------------------------------------------------------------------- [deleted] · 2021-05-01 01:19 I actually had no idea it was toggle-able, but fair enough, I guess should focus on things that matter. For the record, I've used OpenBSD's wider contributions to FOSS extensively. I respect them a lot, just the OS itself isn't for me. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- [deleted] · 2021-05-01 01:23 Thank you for the gold, I was surprised by the niceness of many of the comments. Some of you otoh... Very ornery. Negativity like that is bad for your psyche. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- segfaulting · 2021-05-01 01:23 Honestly from your post it seems like it would be for you. All this talk of "Linux-isms" is what OpenBSD fights against more than any other group I know. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- [deleted] · 2021-05-01 01:24 Agreed, I use Windows regularly and while I tolerate it, I don't need it and BSD to be pushed together. Não obrigado!! ---------------------------------------------------------------------- [deleted] · 2021-05-01 01:33 I'm not as radical as they are. Their situation would definitely cripple many of my projects and make some of them infeasible. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- seizedengine · 2021-05-01 02:29 That's.... About as low as the bar can be though? One of the original ZFS test cases was pulling the power cords hundreds of times in a row without fault. I've even disconnected the SFF-8088 cable by accident on 12 drives and it was fine. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- istarian · 2021-05-01 02:30 What rational sense does it make to insist on completely independent hardware drivers? That sounds like a lot of duplication of effort. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- [deleted] · 2021-05-01 02:31 How about constantly being 6+ months behind because Linux gets preferential treatment? Some stuff is worse - 2-3 years behind even. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- istarian · 2021-05-01 02:32 If the BSDs rely on Linux drivers why would they be any further behind than Linux? ---------------------------------------------------------------------- [deleted] · 2021-05-01 02:34 Because the Linux drivers are KMS-based, meaning they're GPL. All of the BSDs have a policy against GPL in their kernels, so they must reimplement the kernel driver portions without using any GPL code. In other words, they have to constantly play catch-up. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- istarian · 2021-05-01 02:39 I see. That does seem a little unfortunate, but at the same time the alternative is doing it the hard way... Do Nvidia or AMD really care what FreeBSD can or can't do with their hardware? ---------------------------------------------------------------------- [deleted] · 2021-05-01 02:43 > Do Nvidia or AMD really care what FreeBSD can or can't do with their hardware? In Nvidia's case, you get a reasonably good blob driver that is a port of the Solaris/Linux codebase that Nvidia provides. In AMD's case, you have no drivers unless they're written/based off the Linux ones. If you read up a bit where I replied to John, I'd probably reach out to AMD if I was a project lead and say "hey, what do we gotta do to get a little bit of skin from you guys in the game?" sorta thing. If we need to do a little bit of give and take, so be it! ---------------------------------------------------------------------- E39M5S62 · 2021-05-01 03:02 Well said. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- fwaggle · 2021-05-01 03:11 ... do you think that the developers on the BSD side who formerly worked on ZFS code just stopped working on it when the switch to OpenZFS happened? > It was to allocate more manpower to upkeep of ZFS, or else consider migrating off ZFS. Where does this manpower come from, and who is in charge of allocating it? > I don't trust the Linux community to treat us fairly, OpenZFS != Linux community. In fact as you said it yourself, many of the Linux community don't like ZFS purely because of NIH syndrome. > and the ZoL version of ZFS performed demonstrably worse than the native port did in my testing, Link to your performance regression ticket/issue? ---------------------------------------------------------------------- bolapara · 2021-05-01 03:45 This is the crux of all the problems you outline, besides #4 which I don't even really see as needing to be here as it's not a technology problem. There is insufficient manpower working on the BSDs so they leverage what they can from others in order to keep up with the ever evolving expectations of what a system is supposed to be able to do. It's not ideal, but if it's not done there just isn't the momentum to stay relevant. I love the BSDs and got started with them around the same time I did with Linux but as time has gone on I just find less and less use cases where there are not too many trade-offs to the BSD option for me. Most everything I run is Linux these days. If I could wave a magic wand and everything worked the way I wanted I'd be typing this on an OpenBSD laptop but unfortunately there are too many downsides to that setup for me so I'm typing this from my cheap designer status symbol trash machine. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- [deleted] · 2021-05-01 03:52 > ... do you think that the developers on the BSD side who formerly worked on ZFS code just stopped working on it when the switch to OpenZFS happened? No they switched to the ZoB github. I'm more familiar with the situation than you credit me for. ZoB is a downstream of the ZoL git repo. > Where does this manpower come from, and who is in charge of allocating it? It's what I'd do if I was a project lead at FreeBSD. Don't turn this into "what do you propose instead"!? I am not associated any further with the FreeBSD project, and I choose to not participate in their communities directly anymore. OpenZFS has effectively become ZoL now. I don't care. Don't correct me or try to feed me bull. > Link to your performance regression ticket/issue? See above. Not that it would have changed the mind of the FreeBSD devs, they made a decision with a one-way ticket. Your condescension is palpable, leave me alone. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- reditanian · 2021-05-01 04:51 I see what you did there... ---------------------------------------------------------------------- johnklos · 2021-05-01 05:19 > It comes down to the moral question of whether or not you believe you have a right to tell others what to do. I believe I can't control others, I can only control myself. A community obviously has the right to say that participation in said community should be bereft of attacks, hurtful or harmful things. This isn't really the same as controlling others or telling others what to do (without context). > thought policing of any kind, or anything resembling that, is wrong If someone tells your child that he is a piece of shit, or tells her that she can't do anything right because she's a girl, or says that they're evil and they're going to hell because they're gay, would you say that telling them to fuck off is policing their thought? Or would you simply say there's something inherently wrong with the idea that some asshole is even in a position to talk to your child in the first place? This is the latter. An open source community is simply *not* a place where attacks or exclusion should ever take place :) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- [deleted] · 2021-05-01 05:26 > A community obviously has the right to say that participation in said community should be bereft of attacks, hurtful or harmful things. This isn't really the same as controlling others or telling others what to do (without context). A community is not able to control its individual members through collectivist statements. It only serves as more red tape. > If someone tells your child that he is a piece of shit, or tells her that she can't do anything right because she's a girl, or says that they're evil and they're going to hell because they're gay, would you say that telling them to fuck off is policing their thought? More like I'd ignore such a person making such a statement. In the context of say, a mailing list or IRC, I would ignore the statement, and bring it back to topicalness. If the person refused, then I would if I was in a position of authority reprimand them for insubordination. If I wasn't, I'd probably call for a staff member to get involved (I have a joking habit of pinging staff members and saying "mom, dad, the kids are fighting again" both because it's funny, and it perfectly portrays the role most moderators have to take. Wouldn't you agree? > An open source community is simply not a place where attacks or exclusion should ever take place :) I don't believe any of that requires a code of conduct. If you do... well I'd point out that only the FreeBSD project does. By that conviction, the FreeBSD project is somehow superior to the OpenBSD or NetBSD or DragonFlyBSD projects for having one. In isolation, I'd say that's a foolish statement to make. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- johnklos · 2021-05-01 05:33 I like the idea, generally, but I suppose the real question might be: what about a dbus alternative might be so compelling that 1) large projects would (eventually) support it alongside of dbus, and 2) new projects would find it sufficiently more desirable to support it over dbus? I'm not saying it can't be done, but it does seem lofty. Regarding removing swaths of projects, I'd be interested to hear thoughts about which those might be. For instance, I strongly disagree about pkgsrc, because I've never heard anyone who works on it complain more than jokingly about supporting things they don't want to, because it's purely volunteer. I do think there's lots of misunderstanding about open source projects where people have the impression that "maintaining" legacy code is somehow a thing. Sure, much of the older code in the BSDs has been updated for modern c-isms, but people often talk about it like having the code means that there are people who have to go through all of it every time there's an update, and supporting multiple platforms, for instance, is somehow adding work for everyone. This is so completely untrue. There are people who write whole, large open source projects who've never compiled on an Alpha or a VAX, and some who don't even know what they are! But if they write code properly, they don't *need* to. The code just compiles and runs. Likewise, VAX support in NetBSD requires extra work to deal with toolchain issues, but that's being done by people who have an interest in VAX. People working on processor-independent code just have to care that the code is correct - they don't have to worry about VAX in particular. On the other hand, if they make bad assumptions about floating point, or write code that performs poorly on modest hardware, the VAX port will bear that out. It's the opposite of extra work - it's useful and helpful. But do you think there are BSD projects that are working on things that take away from better work? If so, what're some examples? ---------------------------------------------------------------------- johnklos · 2021-05-01 05:47 I think the bottom line is that you think a code of conduct is inherently bad. I think it's a shame that a code of conduct is necessary, but I can see the use of it when people are uncivil. I don't suppose you've had to deal with bullying, racism, prejudice, misogyny or other extreme negativity much. But as someone who was taught to help others, especially if they're not in a position to help themselves, I will gladly and openly attack the hell out of anyone who attacks people in those ways. I guess you're suggesting that you wouldn't, but even worse, I get the impression that you'd find fault with me for taking a stand. I may be exaggerating how you actually feel, but this is the impression I get. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- [deleted] · 2021-05-01 06:00 > I don't suppose you've had to deal with bullying, racism, prejudice, misogyny or other extreme negativity much. I have with the three first ones you listed. But I don't escalate conflict anymore unless I'm backed into a corner, and at that point, if I'm fighting verbally or physically, it's because I genuinely believe that I have no option, i.e. in the case of the former the threat is unignorable, or in the latter, if I physically cannot escape/cannot do so without risk of injury to me or someone else other than the attacker/the attacker's accomplices. I believe if you can't stand up for yourself, the onus is not on others to defend you, though I certainly have defended people. However, I find that it's rarely the case that calling someone any of the names/labels you, or most of the Contributor Covenant/Geek Feminism CoCs, mention, is going to do anything other than provoke/escalate the issue. I could go deeper into the reasons I find the current CoC trend disagreeable, but as that basically gets deep into politics and viewpoints on something that's deeply divisive, lemme just say, any ideology/belief that says a neutral/bystander position is somehow indefensible is not something I can agree with. Dichotomous bull is dichotomous bull, no matter how it's packaged. > I guess you're suggesting that you wouldn't, but even worse, I get the impression that you'd find fault with me for taking a stand. Depends on what it's for. I can't say for certain without seeing an example in action. Suffice to say though, I think it's far better to de-escalate issues and just leave people alone rather than try to fight people constantly. Pick and choose your battles. I really think I've laid out my position as best I can. I believe that it's a solution in search of a problem. I was on what I believe was the proper side of Gamergate, which I'd say was the kind of "fort sumter" of sorts of this modern SocJus movement activism. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- [deleted] · 2021-05-01 06:04 > I do think there's lots of misunderstanding about open source projects where people have the impression that "maintaining" legacy code is somehow a thing. Sure, much of the older code in the BSDs has been updated for modern c-isms, but people often talk about it like having the code means that there are people who have to go through all of it every time there's an update, and supporting multiple platforms, for instance, is somehow adding work for everyone. I'd say it depends on the issue. I like NetBSD's run on everything goal - lofty and a constant moving target, but ultimately successful I'd say. > But do you think there are BSD projects that are working on things that take away from better work? If so, what're some examples? The only thing I'd say is I'd like for ports of things like GNOME, KDE, QT5 etc. to end if they cannot be re-engineered to get rid of nonnative riff raff like Consolekit, dbus, polkit etc. As I said in my OP, dbus, which links heavily into most of this, is basically not a good thing outside of GNU/Linux. > I like the idea, generally, but I suppose the real question might be: what about a dbus alternative might be so compelling that 1) large projects would (eventually) support it alongside of dbus, and 2) new projects would find it sufficiently more desirable to support it over dbus? I'm not saying it can't be done, but it does seem lofty. I have no doubts that nobody in Linux-land would support it. RedHat pumps cash into the Linux kernel, and many of the big hitters work for/worked for RedHat. It's more of "this could be a BSD way of doing the same thing" and we develop our own ecosystem around it. I guess you could compare it to say how capiscum and pledge on the BSDs are similar to some of the hardening on GNU/Linux in the form of AppArmor, SELinux etc. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- kraileth · 2021-05-01 06:55 I really like that spirit! If you choose a discussion platform that's accessible to people who don't own a mobile (i.e. not Telegram), I'd be glad to join in. I recently built a jail to play with a Jabber server - so if that'd be of any help, I could offer an XMPP-based chat. Truth be told, I've thought about creating an experimental fork of FreeBSD for quite a while now. No, not because I think that I have what it takes to successfully maintain a healthy project in the long run. More on the contrary - but I see that as an opportunity to learn. Had simple things in mind like importing zsh and doas into base. Wanted to play with the init system a little (as in [this](https://jmmv.dev/2020/08/rcd-libexec-etc.html)). Stuff like that. Not just doing it for myself but being able to do it together with others would be even better. While I don't think that my contributions would be substantial, for a young project every bit helps in gaining some traction. Some thoughts: We have two of the major BSDs existing today due to headstrong people who wouldn't give in as conflicts arise - OpenBSD and Dragonfly BSD. If it wasn't for Theo and Mat, both wouldn't exist. Of course that only worked out because they found enough like-minded and capable people to maintain the projects that they had in mind. One of them easily the other barely but still. We also have another example that shows us what happens if things don't go so well. That's Lucas Holt who started MidnightBSD with high hopes - and then not enough people cared to help. Now for many years he has basically been a one-man army, maintaining a whole OS. Of course that does not live up to the standards some people expect and he has had to endure a lot of disrespectful comments about the quality of his project. I'm also not using MidnightBSD, but I don't agree with all the mocking. Lucas doing his thing for years despite all of that has totally earned my respect. Let's learn from history! There are more people who are not exactly happy with the current situation. Let's gather some of them and discuss what ideas and goals we have! Best outcome would be if we could address some of that either in FreeBSD or externally but with the perspective to be merged back. If not... Well, there are times where you have to make your own stand. If that becomes clear, we can still think forming a core team. It shouldn't be the first step IMHO! ---------------------------------------------------------------------- nia_netbsd · 2021-05-01 06:56 >NetBSD and OpenBSD don't have one. DragonflyBSD doesn't either. The NetBSD Foundation has made developers sign a contract that explicitly notes that you will be kicked out for being an asshole for decades. Looking at the file in cvs, it was last modified in 2006... By the way, I'm not sure where the "developers use macbooks" thing comes from, because I've never observed it in reality. When we had meetings people would always bring thinkpads, pinebooks, and occasionally some bulky obscure hardware :) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- nia_netbsd · 2021-05-01 07:05 The KMS drivers are not GPL. You're showing your ignorance. /* * Copyright (c) 2015 Intel Corporation * * Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a * copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), * to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation * the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, * and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the * Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions: * * The above copyright notice and this permission notice (including the next * paragraph) shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the * Software. * * THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR * IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, * FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL * THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER * LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, * OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE * SOFTWARE. */ ---------------------------------------------------------------------- nia_netbsd · 2021-05-01 07:10 DBus supports things like kqueue in the upstream repository. Calling it a Linuxism is doing a disservice to far more offensively non- portable software. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- kraileth · 2021-05-01 07:46 Same thing here. I'd like to support such a project according to my skills, but rather in the second or third row. Here's a couple of thoughts on people who I think could play an important role in something like this: You already mentioned **John Marino**. It's true that he left FreeBSD, but not entirely by choice. They kicked him from ports (and worse: didn't even tell him why, so he doesn't really know even today!). When that happened, he had enough pride to quit entirely (which was the only sensible thing to do). He started [Ravenports](http://www.ravenports.com/) and has been running that for 5 years now (disclosure: I participate in RP but John's doing like > 99% of the work alone). It's about 3,000 ports right now and it's the long-standing top repository on repology when it comes to package freshness. He's mostly using DragonFly and as far as I can tell happy with that. So I do not see him spearheading a new BSD project. Ravenports could be a very important piece of the puzzle, though. Having a superior ports system (he was active in NetBSD's pkgsrc, FreeBSD's ports and created Dragonfly's dports - ha had a lot of experience when he went on to design something better) could give the project a kick-start: It would e.g. mean that we could provide e.g. an Xfce-based or Lumina- based desktop on day 1 with very little effort required. Off the top of my head I can think of at least four people who have proven that they can silently do their thing against all odds. The most successful one is **Eric Turgeon** who founded and leads GhostBSD. I've been on the team in the past and can say that Eric does a terrific job, not just technically but also managing the project itself, finances, etc. He knows the GTK world very well and for sure is familiar with many of the problems around it (basically being the FreeBSD maintainer of Mate). Eric also mentioned once that he'd love to create a *proper* BSD desktop environment (he very much disliked Lumina when that came out). GhostBSD is FreeBSD-based but already diverges from it. For example it inherited the openRC init system from TrueOS. Being a co-founder, today **Shawn Webb** pretty much represents HardenedBSD. He keeps the project going and even managed to get a foundation started. Him not being afraid to criticize FreeBSD where the project screws up (e.g. with ASLR) is certainly a plus. There's always **Lucas Holt**. I meant to get in contact with him for years now to learn more about what MidnightBSD actually wants to accomplish today. Going his own way for 14 (!) years now, he's definitely a person to count on. Latest addition to the club is **Simon Peter**, creator of AppImage and admirer of the original Macintosh principles. He has been involved in the PureDarwin project and tried for years to get "the Linux desktop" into reasonable shape. Eventually he came to the conclusion that the Linux ecosystem does not make a good platform to develop something like what he envisioned on and switched to FreeBSD. Simon founded helloSystem to try a whole new approach of a \*nix desktop. There's probably more people who could be mentioned here, but this might suffice as a couple of examples. Depending on what goals we come up, we might actually find a home with an existing project. I'm not completely opposed to doing something new, but participating in something that's already there might be easier and anything we contribute will make a difference for real people - as there are actually already users of those systems. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- LiamW · 2021-05-01 08:13 Aren’t there still user space daemons, and doesn’t a lot of software crash if dbud crashes? It certainly doesn’t feel very Unix-y to me. I get that, like systemd, it makes things a lot easier. But my recent experience with embedded development makes me really, really like simpler systems. Though I will say, I really liked how easy it was to develop a service for systemd. I’m half tempted to evaluate FreeBSD arm64 for a bench top instrument I’m developing because I’m already experiencing incredible frustration with Linux based systems massively changing underlying libraries and minor APIs for no apparent reason. I’m almost impressed with how boring FreeBSD has been in comparison on my workstation. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- kraileth · 2021-05-01 08:16 >For DEs, either remove the ones that have it and gather a team to design a competing DE under a BSD-friendly toolkit like Motif or FLTK (I like Motif for its retro aesthetic) or we fork existing DEs into our own specific versions, removing code and features we can't/won't use. I very much like FLTK and I have used the EDE desktop for a while (pretty bare-bones, looks like Win 95). Its development stalled however and it's no longer in ports. Also FLTK / EDE don't offer a lot of features that many people today will expect. One other idea that I had: There are new approaches to the desktop like e.g. [FyneDesk](https://fyne.io/fynedesk/), a \*nix desktop environment written in Golang (using its own GUI toolkit). It's BSD- licensed (3-clause) and I would expect the team being more than happy with anybody trying to make it available to a wider audience. Might be worth a thought. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- demetrioussharpe · 2021-05-01 11:03 Telegram is perfectly usable on the desktop. I use it on Linux & FreeBSD. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- kraileth · 2021-05-01 11:16 Looked into it once. No matter what I tried, it wanted me to provide a phone number. Since that doesn't make any sense at all for a messenger application (not even discord does that!), I didn't dig deeper. Do you know if Telegram is usable without requiring a phone number (I don't have one!)? ---------------------------------------------------------------------- demetrioussharpe · 2021-05-01 11:19 I’m not sure. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- kraileth · 2021-05-01 11:42 Just did a little research. Doesn't seem to be possible. People suggest various tricks to get a temporary number or just use somebody else's. That means Telegram is not for me, I'm not going to support this kind of madness. Are you open to different messengers (any other forms of communication)? ---------------------------------------------------------------------- arturbac · 2021-05-01 15:16 many years ago i switched from bsd to gentoo linux for 2 reasons.I no longer couldn't use bsd as a desktop after buying r9-390x and I had enough of drama with broken ports and dependencies. I've many linux servers just because i can't develop code on BSD desktop. To use bsd server i \_need\_ to have fully wrking bsd desktop with gles and ocl support to have fully reproductible system on development side, easy to write code, debug and sanitize.. As a cherry on the top of cake after swithcing to gentoo and got perfectly working portage system that maintains all dependencies in proper way, and have always fresh llvm, gcc toolchains available.I hope some day I will be able to get back to fully working bsd desktop with at least with gles support preferably ogl and ocl too. PS: Today again i gave a try this time ghost bsd - it simply fails to install with advanced partitioning scheme .. installer is broken. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- [deleted] · 2021-05-01 16:05 Ok, pardon me for a second here, but then why did it take years for KMS drivers on BSD to reach parity. That was, from my understanding, the reason. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- [deleted] · 2021-05-01 16:07 Hey Nia that was totally more of a FreeBSD phenomenon to the point it became a meme. The developer contract isn't a Code of Conduct in a strict sense, nor does it specifically say anything about the things a modern one does. A code conduct has a specific setup to it, and the NetBSD dev contract ain't it. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- [deleted] · 2021-05-01 16:13 I prefer functionality over prettiness. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- [deleted] · 2021-05-01 16:17 I would never join Hello system because I am against apple principles, but good examples are good examples. I have my own projects in retrocomputing taking most of my current time up, so that's another reason I'm resigned. If someone here wants to take the lead I can offer input and suggestions but ultimately I feel that my personal preferences are not shared by a crowd. I don't want a pretty desktop, I don't want fischer price looking color schemes. You know what my ideals are? Unobtrusive graphical interfaces with high customizability such as the Amiga GUI, CDE, IRIX Interactive Desktop/4DWM, OpenLOOK etc. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- nia_netbsd · 2021-05-01 16:20 Because GPUs are _incredibly complex_ and we have to care about things like accurate locking and memory management quirks in modern kernels and we're dealing with a fraction of the resources of Intel and AMD? ---------------------------------------------------------------------- [deleted] · 2021-05-01 16:21 I'll explain issues with dbus I see: 1. It combines IPC and object models ala Windows COM or the Apple MACH messaging system. I believe the two should be somewhat separate. 2. It activates other daemons. I don't like privileged daemons who have fingers in multiple domains of an OS. 3. It is an API over an existing protocol, UNIX sockets, which work and have worked for years. Instead, if you want something to augment sockets, STREAMS has been around for ages and is very useful. 4. It's LGPL. 5. As Liam says, it is linked to development of systemd and udev now, and before that it was part of the garbage heap that's HAL. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- [deleted] · 2021-05-01 16:23 Ok, riddle me this. Was this the same situation. 10 years ago when the timeframe I expressed was ongoing? Keep in mind when that started I was not using the BSDs and had only cursory knowledge of their existence. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- kraileth · 2021-05-01 16:51 Me to, anytime! For that reason I chose to learn a tiling WM to get rid of all the DEs and simply have things my way. But I understand that a lot of people don't want to do that and prefer using the mouse and an intuitive DE over it. On the boxes that I share with my wife for example I have both. She logs into a full-blown DE while I don't. Among other things that's one reason why I'm still interested in "proper" FreeBSD desktops. I do share your reluctance towards things like dbus, though. But maybe we should be grateful that we at least got rid of that ~~Hell~~ HAL thing... ;) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- kraileth · 2021-05-01 17:05 Maybe your taste is not shared by a crowd, but I'd say that there definitely are people who appreciate some of the great work of the past. I still like FreeDOS with OpenGEM and things like UDE (Unix Desktop Environment) with the nice idea of the "ring menu" coming up if you right-click any window's edge. This way they got rid of the typical minimize, maximize and close icons as well as window decoration to save space ([example pic here](http://udeproject.sourcef orge.net/images/screenshots/ude029.1.jpg)). I didn't join helloSystem because I hate the Qt looks. But I wish the project well. At least they are trying out something new. Simon hasn't been too fond of what Apple does for a while, BTW. He aims for the original ideas. We'll see how that works out. What retrocomputing projects do you do currently? A good year ago I hoped that I'd be able to help [FreeBSD on sparc64 survive](https://eerielinux.wordpress.com/2020/02/15/freebsd-on- sparc64-is-dead/) but failed since nobody with actual skills in that field was interested. Still have it running on my SunFire v100 and look forward to an attempt of reviving an Ultra 80 that I got from a former Sun employee. I'm not only interested in new stuff, I have a heart for old machines and software, too (we can learn a lot from them IMO like how we actually got here). ---------------------------------------------------------------------- [deleted] · 2021-05-01 17:27 I'm developing IRIX Community Edition, a set of patches and library/system upgrades in a style similar to how SGI would have released security updates during the system's lifespan. I'm also a huge Amiga guy, and that field has been far more exciting in the last few years compared to say 10-15 years ago. For IRIX CE, it's a multipart path to try and revive IRIX. For starters we're starting small with the eventual goal of getting to the point that we can patch longstanding bugs in the kernel and replace core parts of the system with compatible but far superior implementations. For me, a BSD or illumos OS that is as self sufficient as possible, has all of its core base needs handled entirely in house and not downstream of a Linux or Apple project, respects the UNIX philosophy, doesn't use garbage like HAL or dbus, and maintains similar aesthetics to Motif or FLTK. I'm not a fan of this generic Windows -lite crap QT and GTK have been in pursuit of. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- [deleted] · 2021-05-01 21:28 [deleted] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- demetrioussharpe · 2021-05-01 21:58 If anyone’s interested... https://www.reddit.com/r/BSD/comments/n2sito/lets_solidify_the_bsds_on _the_desktop/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf ---------------------------------------------------------------------- vermaden · 2021-05-02 10:02 The OpenZFS case does not scares me. Actually its better now as ZFS on Linux got more development then ZFS on FreeBSD had. Now under single code base all development takes in one place and both FreeBSD and Linux are happy about it. What does scares me is the dependence on Linux subsystem for critical desktop stuff - like DRM and graphics drivers stuff. Linux world will introduce new 'scary' things that are more and more anti UNIX ... but we can not do anything about that. World generally seems to go into the wrong direction ... but not much we can do about that ... ---------------------------------------------------------------------- lost-packet · 2021-05-02 13:24 EVE Online is the only thing holding me to using Arch as a desktop as opposed to FreeBSD 😀 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- emaste · 2021-05-02 13:54 10 years ago we had a (somewhat) bespoke driver, and were always behind - sometimes adding support just as the hardware stopped being sold. After switching to the dual-licensed drivers from the Linux kernel we've been able to remain up-to-date with contemporary hardware. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- johnklos · 2021-05-02 16:35 Sigh. "The onus is not on others to defend you" and "de-escalate", I think, summarizes your positions here. You can't de-escalate racists and bigots. You can do things to minimize their abuse, such as making them fear consequences, for instance, but that's addressing symptoms, not the problem. If people are abusive and don't stop, they should simply be booted. There's a huge difference between someone who is a bit asshole-y sometimes (heaven knows I have been now and then) and is having a bad day versus someone who is abusive. If I were to make someone feel bad, I'd regret it. An abusive person would enjoy it. If I were told my behavior is out of line, I'd regret it and would genuinely want to change it. An abuser would simply not want to get caught. Huge differences. We want to discourage asshole behavior and not boot every curmudgeony person, but we definitely want to boot abusers. Who gets to make decisions about where the line is drawn? The community! That's why FreeBSD has a code of conduct. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- user24781482 · 2021-05-02 19:44 http://catern.com/posts/docker.html#orge9823e6 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- user24781482 · 2021-05-02 19:45 Even knowing it is a joke, what an abomination to read this. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- laffer1 · 2021-05-02 20:00 The idea is good, the implementation is terrible. Kubernetes is overly complex for most use cases. It was designed for google scale, not small shops. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- laffer1 · 2021-05-02 20:03 Most things that run on windows also run on linux now. Let's be real, the real blocker here is chromium. Yes, freebsd and some of the others have a massive bsd patchset, but that not getting upstreamed also complicates other things like node, v8 in general and electron apps also. It's bad enough you have to do the porting work, but doing it repeatedly because the upstream sucks is a lot of effort wasted. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- laffer1 · 2021-05-02 20:05 I tried this and at this point my project is mostly still reliant on FreeBSD upstream. Smaller projects have huge difficulty getting upstreamed patches. My project has been around for over 15 years and still not native in LLVM or Python for instance. You can't get firefox without rust. Rust depends on tight coupling with specific versions of LLVM. That means reporting LLVM and Rust all the time to move up versions. It's a ton of work. The linux community is gatekeeping like microsoft did 20 years ago. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- dhal_sim · 2021-05-03 00:13 EVE Anywhere lets you play it in a web browser. I have not tried it. see: https://www.eveonline.com/news/view/eve-anywhere-enters-beta ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Nettly_ · 2021-05-03 01:22 As a Linux user turned BSD user, this is not only interesting bus smth I might make a blog with my view points. Sadly even as Linux takes an AK-47 to it's foot, it is more likely to stay around than BSD is, which is sad. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- tofazzz · 2021-05-03 01:30 I hope BastilleBSD will fill the gap! ---------------------------------------------------------------------- jsb_reddit · 2021-05-03 13:24 Hmmm. ufs2 has saved my data innumerable times. I've read and not truly understood Zfs terminology SOLELY for lack of time to implement a test case. Many of the most promising for its future user of FreeBSD are passionate about Zfs now that memory and CPU power seem to accomodate its usage. Thus one of the most promising harbringers of a golden FreeBSD future as an operating system beyond just servers may be the NOT YET AUTHORED laymens ufs-to-zfs msdos-to-zfs ntfs-to-zfs all-inclusive IMPLEMENTATION flowchart as if it was a 20 page 1995 shareware howto with a problem/solution index included. ......... If I was 30 years younger I'd set about it. But that's just me. ......... Please don't be critical for the tone of this 'missing documentation' post. I'd contribute $100 to its author when/if the flowchart becomes available simply to help contribute to FreeBSD and support is present and future community. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- vermaden · 2021-05-03 14:39 I like ZFS but I also like UFS. I recently made *UFS Boot Environments* manager both for amd64 and arm86 - here: [https://vermaden.wordpress.com/2021/04/02/ufs-boot- environments/](https://vermaden.wordpress.com/2021/04/02/ufs-boot- environments/) [https://vermaden.wordpress.com/2021/04/05/ufs-boot-environments-for- arm/](https://vermaden.wordpress.com/2021/04/05/ufs-boot-environments- for-arm/) ... and yes ZFS can be complicated at start :) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- trquacker · 2021-05-03 17:14 What do you get with a room full of "system purity" elitists with a distaste for CoCs? To the OP, if you were relieved of your duties due to CoC violations, you are the reason CoCs exist. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- l1x- · 2021-05-04 14:17 Linux won when FreeBSD guys decided to accept subpar technologies pushed into FreeBSD. There are few things really good, pf, MAC, dtrace and jails. However the kernel in particular was not keeping up with Linux and the community nature of BSD development really did not help. Having a dictator like Linus really helps to keep the project on track. This is now proven empirically by history. I used to use FreeBSD for everything but I just gave up. With Linux I have to work much less and I get a much more usable environment faster. Nowadays there is io\_uring, eBPF, containers (especially Firecracker) and most of the platforms are supported (PPC, ARM, AMD) that I would like to run an operating system on. The capability system is also pretty amazing. If somebody ports pf to Linux it would be great. That is the only thing I kind of miss. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- mj_turner · 2021-05-04 14:23 NetBSD has [supported ZFS](https://wiki.netbsd.org/zfs/) for some time, although some features are not yet 100% (eg, [root on ZFS](https://wiki.netbsd.org/wiki/RootOnZFS/)). That said, according to the wiki, "NetBSD-9 has ZFS that is considered to work well". ---------------------------------------------------------------------- ScratchinCommander · 2021-05-04 14:43 I think Docker gets used so much because of dependency hell, especially with some of these ecosystems like nodejs/npm. I've seen some apps that install hundreds of packages, it's nuts. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- 1r0n_m6n · 2021-05-04 18:57 When you have a foot in each world, the most striking difference is cultural. Linux has always been user-focused because it was initially promoted by activists. Of course, Linux target users have changed in nature - initially people like you and me, now global megacorps - but user focus has always been and still is a central value in the Linux world. Unfortunately, this is not the case with any BSD. There are a few people in the 3 BSD communities who try hard to change this, but they're not a majority. And because you can't change people, nothing is going to change. Furthermore, nobody in the BSD world seems to understand the crucial importance of the desktop in terms of adoption - which Linux activists were aware of from the start. A French proverb says "Far from the eyes, far from the heart". Of course, you'll inevitably hear someone claim they've always been happy with e.g. FreeBSD as a desktop OS. Due to the lack of user focus, those people simply don't realize THEIR desktop will never, ever suit the taste and needs of mere mortals. Plus, mere mortals buy contemporary, easily available hardware - they would never, ever go hunting for retired hardware known to happily run their favorite BSD. Linux activists were also aware of this and went very early on a crusade for decent hardware support. Because of these cultural differences, I see the issues raised by the OP being symptoms of the agony of the BSD - FreeBSD being the most at risk because the culture of its community is the most rigid of the 3. An aggravating factor is that most of the people interested in BSD (myself included) are over 50, key people being even much older. Plus corporate sponsors can withdraw their support at any time for a variety of reasons (e.g. merger, technological disruption - the last 25 years provide a wealth of illustrations). ---------------------------------------------------------------------- 3G6A5W338E · 2021-05-04 19:05 >Code Of Conduct make people respect each others. Does it now? I'm curious how you reached that conclusion. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- segfaulting · 2021-05-04 21:53 Already a thing! And it works flawlessly, just as designed! https://github.com/reyk/systemd-openbsd ---------------------------------------------------------------------- NitroNilz · 2021-05-05 13:41 Come to illumos, anyway! It needs more user base/love. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- TechnoRat63 · 2021-05-05 19:19 Tried it, didn't work, yet. Maybe after it goes from Beta to GR. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- arturbac · 2021-05-08 13:24 navidia linux driver binary bloob are terrible compared to open source amd onces. They are binary bloobs You have to mach glibc and kernel against, there are problems runing simple gmaes with them.. On the other hand I see great improvment in amd linux drivers since amdgpu/mesa driver repleaced old driver bloobs. On linux i'm even able to play read dead redemption 2 with amdgpu and wine proton. Thanks to thise open amdgpu code from linux I'm happy GhostBSD user since last week, I decided to give a try again freebsd after 10 years of switching from freebsd to gentoo becouse of lack of drivers for my hardware. Now with 5700xt and 3900x 2 x 4K monitors again I'm able to develop code on freebsd/ghostbsd. And linux binary support is crucial for me as for example I'need to use android ndk wich is build only for macos,win and linux. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- archysailor · 2021-05-08 20:53 cgroup support will make sure to, no worries ---------------------------------------------------------------------- sanxiyn · 2021-05-11 04:21 Hello from Rust community. It is a policy of Rust project to support at least two old versions of LLVM (LLVM releases every six months, so that amounts to one year old version) exactly to support such cases. Did it not work for you, or is it that one year is still too tight? It hurts to read "Rust depends on tight coupling with specific versions of LLVM", since that's not true, and we spent efforts not to do so. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- laffer1 · 2021-05-11 04:43 Try porting LLVM to an operating system. Then do it again and again because you won't pay the server tax to get your patches considered. I'm already dropping over $300 a month on my project. I can't afford buying ec2 instances for LLVM devs to run regression tests on too. The newest version of LLVM I can get to work right now is 8.0. There are really two problems here and one of them isn't the rust community's fault but rather how LLVM handles patches. The second is simply that there isn't a second compiler for rust. If say GCC had a front end or another compiler, it might open up a lot more platforms and architectures long term. Rust seems fine if you are within the confines of supported OS/arch within LLVM but a problem otherwise. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- sanxiyn · 2021-05-11 04:50 I agree it is absurd to reject porting patches because of CI. Frequently broken port is still preferable to no port. LLVM should fix that policy. Rust does not have such policy. Both GCC frontend for Rust and alternative non-LLVM backend (Cranelift) for Rust are work in progress. In fact Cranelift backend is already merged. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- notoriouslyfastsloth · 2021-05-15 20:11 I guess my question is, what purpose do BSD's serve? I used to use freebsd, and openbsd quite a bit (1998ish-2010) eventually it lost it's purpose to me, both windows and mac provide me better desktop experiences, and linux serves just fine for server, most times these days I'm just using very minimal linux in containers. I'm not sure at least for me, how BSD plays a part in any of that...I couldn't find the real benefits any longer. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- V_M · 2021-05-15 22:13 A classic high level vs low level discussion. At a low level nose to the grindstone level it provides virtually nothing for the user of a web browser or text editor or ssh client. At a high level, it provides a unix-like systems administration experience, which many prefer to the alternatives. Originally, like 40 years ago, there was the unix OS systems administration experience, complete with text CLI administration, text CLI shell script orchestration for init and general automation, text configuration and logging files, dynamic linked system wide libraries, TCPIP internet connectivity, sockets and streams, multiprocessing via processes, multiuser OS, yah know, the whole unix experience. And that unix-like experience was only available under a kinda restrictive and expensive commercial license. Oh and some minicomputer hardware by the BSD people. The Linux people came along with their brand new 386 just barely technically capable of running a unix-like experience that people like so much, so they did that on lowly commodity PC hardware. In more recent years the linux folks have rapidly moved away from a unix experience. No more CLI, no more text config files, logging, or scripting. Replace shared system wide dynamically linked libraries with what amounts to static linked binary distribution via docker. No more multiuser, either one user or no human logins at all. Multiprocessor via threads (edited: or docker images) (we have to use threads today because in the old days microsoft process spawning was incredibly slow so MS people had to use threads so "everyone has to use threads" now). And thats fine. Big world, millions of people using non-unix operating systems, whatever. Clearly my android phone is not a "unix like experience" nor is my chromebook or my smartish tv. And thats fine. Meanwhile the folks remaining and doing a unix-like experience, the BSD folks, wonder if they should give up on unix also, go for something chromebook like or android like or whatever has a CPU in it and is selling today. Or continue to produce a unix-like OS. And at the same time, people who like the unix OS experience are flooding into the BSDs because clearly modern linux is rapidly moving to often be the opposite of a unix OS experience at an architectural level. And of course there's a closing the barn door after the horses already escaped thing going on where if we just have better video drivers the folks that left for a chromebook a decade ago will come back... Nah more realistically they aint ever coming back. Striving to build last years PC tomorrow is a fools errand, I'm sad to say, especially if it comes at a cost of ignoring or repelling the only folks remaining. Personally I have seen its vastly easier and more pleasant to admin a unix-like server than a MS server or whatever it is linux is turning into. I mean I had fun with MVS and VMS back in the day but just logging in and doing stuff freely under no constraints at home I'd prefer FreeBSD 13.0-RELEASE over anything out there to provide me a highly productive and easy to use unix-like experience. If I just want to get something to work at home as a sysadmin developer type, FreeBSD is my first choice as a unix-alike experience. I can't imagine doing sysadmin/developer stuff on an android tablet, but I'm perfectly OK that millions of people scroll facebook all day on one, or use a non-unix OS like windows or linux. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- intelminer · 2021-05-15 23:38 >If it's not an 8-bit computer or console, I think cross-compilation has no place in an OS What? How do you expect people to get software running on a brand new architecture then? "This is our RISC-V toolchain we re-wrote GCC and friends in RISC-V machine code because we didn't want to cross-compile it" ---------------------------------------------------------------------- intelminer · 2021-05-16 01:47 10 years ago AMD was almost bankrupt. Their Linux drivers were shit, let alone having anyone to care for BSD ---------------------------------------------------------------------- intelminer · 2021-05-16 01:50 You either participate respectfully or you're removed. There's no "terrible person but brilliant coder" exceptions. Abuse is not tolerable ---------------------------------------------------------------------- intelminer · 2021-05-16 01:51 >I am currently replying from a Windows 10 Enterprise LTSC system that I customized myself. That is a dangerous and terrible idea, especially with a proprietary operating system as large and complex as Windows 10 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- intelminer · 2021-05-16 01:54 You know you could save a lot of strained insults and consternation if there was a code of conduct to abide by Though from what others have said, the code of conduct is what got you removed before ---------------------------------------------------------------------- demetrioussharpe · 2021-05-16 02:00 What’s your target hardware platform? Also, will you be able to call it IRIX? ---------------------------------------------------------------------- [deleted] · 2021-05-16 02:33 [deleted] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- intelminer · 2021-05-16 02:34 Sure it does If you're a terrible person, you get removed. ***That's what a CoC is for*** ---------------------------------------------------------------------- [deleted] · 2021-05-16 02:36 [deleted] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- intelminer · 2021-05-16 02:39 Is there a reason you deleted your prior comment? And no. A CoC doesn't "change reality". It codifies expectations If you don't want to meet those expectations you're free to disassociate from the project, or you'll be removed when you breach the rules set out ---------------------------------------------------------------------- [deleted] · 2021-05-16 02:47 [deleted] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- intelminer · 2021-05-16 02:50 Sounds to me like CoC's are a good thing and just provide more incentive to ban shitty people from projects, if their impetus is to "laugh at them" ---------------------------------------------------------------------- [deleted] · 2021-05-16 02:58 [deleted] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- intelminer · 2021-05-16 03:05 I've not changed my original assumption on codes of conduct, I've just shifted my position to meet the goalposts you set for me You've yet to explain why codes of conduct are bad beyond "shitty people exist anyway" and "yeah but just ban them" ---------------------------------------------------------------------- [deleted] · 2021-05-16 04:11 [deleted] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- intelminer · 2021-05-16 04:21 I guess it's hard to have a discussion with someone who would rather delete their comments at every turn :) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- [deleted] · 2021-05-16 17:37 For my specific use case it's completely irrelevant. I'm also not a fan of RISC-V or any of the nouveau architectures being made now. I'd rather see a revival of Alpha, than anything else. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- [deleted] · 2021-05-16 17:39 Yeah, and your overly argumentative nature could be saved by you cutting the cord to your internet. I don't like you, and I'm gonna block you because you came into a weeks-old thread just to argue. Seriously, your brain must be scrambled egg. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- [deleted] · 2021-05-16 17:42 The IRIX Community Edition currently doesn't replace any system-level components, it only patches libraries, replaces userland code etc. So it's stuck on SGI-MIPS for the foreseeable future. And yes, because I've been using IRIX branding for years after the trademark expired, legally I have the strongest claim to the TM. If I ever convince HPE to release the IP to IRIX, then the logical continuance of IRIX would be on POWER64el (64-bit IBM/OPEN POWER, little endian). That would preclude PowerPC trash, thankfully, and only target systems post POWER 8 in an HPC/HPD fashion. I'm famously cynical and not a fan of RISC-V or other nouveau architectures. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- intelminer · 2021-05-16 17:43 Your post got put on HackerNews, so :) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- intelminer · 2021-05-16 17:43 Ah, so you cling to obsolete technology as well as make ignorant comments ---------------------------------------------------------------------- [deleted] · 2021-05-16 17:48 [deleted] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- intelminer · 2021-05-16 17:48 >because I've been using IRIX branding for years after the trademark expired, legally I have the strongest claim to the TM. Lmaaaooo you should speak to a lawyer that's not how that works ---------------------------------------------------------------------- demetrioussharpe · 2021-05-16 18:53 “The IRIX Community Edition currently doesn't replace any system-level components, it only patches libraries, replaces userland code etc. So it's stuck on SGI-MIPS for the foreseeable future.” Have you considered doing a clone project? Is it possible to reimplement IRIX with your own source. “And yes, because I've been using IRIX branding for years after the trademark expired, legally I have the strongest claim to the TM.” That sounds like a can of legal worms. You might want to speak with a lawyer. “If I ever convince HPE to release the IP to IRIX, then the logical continuance of IRIX would be on POWER64el (64-bit IBM/OPEN POWER, little endian). That would preclude PowerPC trash, thankfully, and only target systems post POWER 8 in an HPC/HPD fashion.” The Blackbird or Talos II systems might be a great platform to target. https://www.raptorcs.com ---------------------------------------------------------------------- [deleted] · 2021-05-16 18:57 > Have you considered doing a clone project? Is it possible to reimplement IRIX with your own source. Not yet. The goal is to replace what we can easily first, though. I'm operating under the potential belief that HPE may have lost the source code to IRIX; and thus it's prudent to replace what can be done first. I don't have the manpower, or skills myself, to reimplement the entire OS, nor is that a point right now. > That sounds like a can of legal worms. You might want to speak with a lawyer. I'm not concerned, most people don't understand under US law a trademark is different from intellectual property. In the US, if you legally use a mark that is unclaimed in commerce, you have a legitimate claim to it. A trademark is a right to a name, not to a product or its interiors. When Leaf Brands bought Hydrox trademarks, they had to reverse engineer the recipe with food science. > The Blackbird or Talos II systems might be a great platform to target. Potentially, but also IBM POWER8/9 systems. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- MoneroWTF · 2021-05-25 02:07 I never expected to chime in on something like this, but I agree with you. Not because I share the same knowledge as you and share concensus, but rather because I don't share that knowledge, but have still been affected by what you speak of. I am ideologically aligned with BSD and others and have made many attempts to fully switch to it over the years but was ultimately unable to do so for various reasons I'll not get into. I can read what you say here though and fill in the gaps of why it never worked out for me. Makes perfect sense now. Tl;dr: this dudes probably spot on. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- stemid85 · 2021-05-26 22:36 Sorry I'm just a visitor passing through, saw your post recommended to me by Reddit. If you started using BSD in 2013 then I had worked in a BSD dominant ISP, been a BSD fanboy and even gotten sick of BSD and switched to Linux before you had even installed your first FreeBSD. I agree with you, the way things are looking BSD on mainstream servers and desktops is a losing battle. I only see a potential future in special devices such as routers, switches and firewalls. Linux and specifically cgroups/containers is absolutely superior for service ops. And this is coming from someone who automated Jail setups for shared hosting clients back in 2005-2007. Unless you have an established career in BSD already I would suggest leaving that sinking ship ASAP. That said though, speaking of careers, I actually landed my current ten year employment in big telco partly due to my past experiences with BSD. But that contract was over after 2 years and I have not seen a BSD system since. It actually went out the same time as Solaris, ominously enough. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- [deleted] · 2021-05-27 23:25 > If you started using BSD in 2013 then I had worked in a BSD dominant ISP, been a BSD fanboy and even gotten sick of BSD and switched to Linux before you had even installed your first FreeBSD. Well when you're young, 8 years is a large portion of your life. I don't feel I need a decade+ of seniority to complain. > Unless you have an established career in BSD already I would suggest leaving that sinking ship ASAP. I have no career in tech anymore. I left it behind, and my day job is a far more tame industry involving selling a certain kind of product that's highly controversial especially among those in Europe, Oceania and Asia. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- stemid85 · 2021-05-28 01:53 You sell guns? ---------------------------------------------------------------------- [deleted] · 2021-05-28 02:15 mmhmm. And business is booming right now. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- stream_hosting · 2021-05-30 01:39 First off, stop complaining and start doing. BSD does not have the mindshare to develop as fast as Linux but if you don't want to take from Linux, then do it yourself from scratch. Your mindset is what will kill BSD. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- thatguyrenic · 2021-07-10 06:27 Telegram is literally the worst option for organizing anything. You cram everything into a single channel and lose usability. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Current_Hearing_6138 · 2021-12-30 03:22 To avoid linuxisms, I compile most of my software from source and remove them. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Current_Hearing_6138 · 2021-12-30 03:29 It is, for all intents and purposes, proper unix. linux is just a unix wannabe. As to your actual question, consider systemd. If you want a unix like pc without systemd, your options are gentoo, lfs, and bsd. Mac has launchd which is too similar to systemd. Windows is a hulking spaghetti code bloatware nightmare. Essentially: bsd | gentoo | lfs > other linux | mac > windows ---------------------------------------------------------------------- notoriouslyfastsloth · 2021-12-30 15:30 what does a "proper unix" provide me? It feels like something we all used a few decades ago to sound cool ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Current_Hearing_6138 · 2021-12-30 15:57 Configure your entire system yourself via text files. No gui necessary for sys administration. A design philosophy of simplicity and functionality. On a unix system, the ultimate authority is root, not some company or community. It is standalone and has no hard external dependancies. That eliminates systemd based systems, which eliminates 95% of Linux based operating systems. I predict that Linus will soon allow systemd to be a part of the mainline kernel. You'll never see systemd on a proper unix system. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- 11B_Geek_with_gun · 2022-01-19 20:32 As a non-technical user of FreeBSD since 2005, I'll throw my 2 cents in: We shouldn't be too worried about *BSD's future. I'm sure you coders out there probably see the majority of code contributions come from GNU, but lets take into account the 2 LARGEST differences: scope and licensing. As a non-technical user, I can't really comment too much on scope. I would imagine that Linux gets more code contributions simply because it is "spread out," but that's speculation on my part. Licensing is where it quite literally kicks ass. *BSD spawned OSX and heavily influenced Sun Microsystems (acquired by Oracle). I don't see Playstations 3-5 or Nintendo's... whatever they have... borrowing from Linux. No, they pull from FreeBSD. It is in the best interest of Sony and Nintendo to give resources back to the community to ensure a healthy code-base. It's the basic essence of open source. Android is the anomaly, but there is some push-back from security and privacy conscious people. Take the Pinephone: I have one; I wish FreeBSD would start looking into this market, but I also understand that it's not feasible at this time. *BSD is known to be stable. It should stay that way. I agree with the OP's desire to have FreeBSD independency. I use FreeBSD as a home server, but I use Fedora (the exact opposite end of the development spectrum) as a desktop just to get some newer tech to work. It's annoying as a user, I can only imagine how developers feel. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Yugen42 · 2022-01-29 15:13 I know you wrote this some months ago, but could you elaborate on this a little? I'm not sure what you mean by " "just install via Docker" mono-culture ". I'm a Linux user with a few toes dipped into BSD and I use Docker a lot professionally and personally. Are you saying Docker is getting overused in the BSD world and that that's a bad thing? ---------------------------------------------------------------------- haroldp · 2022-01-29 23:53 Many opensource projects *only* support Docker installs. They do not do anything to make their apps compatible with other systems. They do not include other init scripts. They do not document or support installation by any method but Docker. This has all of the multifarious problems of any mono-culture. It's a problem for them, and of course it is especially a problem for the BSD world because we don't really support native Docker. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- EktoHunter · 2022-02-19 23:04 I hope you step on a Lego brick and then stub your toe. God damn I don't wanna have to go back to the time when I had to compile myself. No I'm not a BSD user, I came across this randomly and just think your opinion is trash. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- EktoHunter · 2022-02-19 23:05 Just say "Linux" for crying out loud ---------------------------------------------------------------------- The_T-1776 · 2022-04-07 23:04 NetBSD supports Alpha. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- intelminer · 2022-04-07 23:17 What does that have to do with "cross-compiling is bad" ---------------------------------------------------------------------- The_T-1776 · 2022-04-10 00:50 𝔄𝔩𝔭𝔥𝔞 𝔴𝔦𝔩𝔩 𝔯𝔢𝔱𝔲𝔯𝔫, 𝔶𝔬𝔲 𝔴𝔦𝔩𝔩 𝔟𝔢 𝔰𝔬𝔯𝔯𝔶 𝔶𝔬𝔲 𝔡𝔬𝔲𝔟𝔱𝔢𝔡 𝔥𝔦𝔰 𝔭𝔬𝔴𝔢𝔯. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- llothar68 · 2022-04-26 18:35 >Frequently broken port is still preferable to no port. Thats what i say about security and packaging for normal User Application, but than i hear all possible curse words from the BSD community. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- llothar68 · 2022-04-26 18:36 Why is there no Rust to C99 compiler? ---------------------------------------------------------------------- cerka · 2022-05-19 18:45 I can't speak to what u/digifuzzy meant but to me your response stands out as a strawman. Not using snaps or flatpaks does not mean that we have to compile the packages ourselves. We can have binary packages without sandboxed deployment, like old-school debs or rpms. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Firm-Fee-9155 · 2022-07-14 13:33 I was using OpenBSD off and on since 2000. The early 2000's seemed like its heyday. I remember streaming music and surfing meanwhile updating the kernel all in an Obsd/kde environment. Now with 7.1 I can't even pkg\_add the most basic of software. I've always had the utmost of respect for Theo, but his was a mostly thankless and moneyless job. Not enough eyes ... and I certainly was just a dilettante just smart enough to install and sometimes even compile but certainly not smart enough to go through thousands of lines of code. There was a strictness and simplicity to the code that made me a huge fanboy. Today I am sad. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- biguyharrisburg · 2022-07-31 14:08 “fisher price” interface, I’m sorry Apple has perfected their user interface in a way that makes it more simple for USERS to INTERFACE with their pc like no operating system before, but isn’t that the point? If you’re looking for a convoluted closed source bug ridden monstrosity of a failed OS, I think you made a good choice moving to windows, I think the absurdity of the windows interface, and the outrageous syntax of the power shell are exactly what you’re looking for, so you should most definitely stick with that, great choice for sure! ---------------------------------------------------------------------- BullNiro · 2022-09-29 10:04 Also BSD has jails. No need for docker. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- haroldp · 2022-09-29 18:48 Unless you need a piece of software that is only distributed via Docker. Then jails are no substitute. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- BullNiro · 2022-09-29 22:13 Very true. I was thinking more from a technical standpoint. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- sharedordaz · 2023-03-24 07:54 Operative sistems represent a philosophy. Thats the thing that really gave linux (and windows) its power. Windows represents comfortable, easy, privative and universal software. Linux represents freedom, availability and customization. Even MacOs have its philosophy (being fancy and professional). What represents BSD and Solaris? Still really good for servers (Mostly big ones), but linux is filling that niche, so the easier thing to do for the BSD community is to follow linux ideas and projects. If you hate that, there should be a different software philosophy that represents BSD and use it for coding, and use that to invite developers to participate in the project. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- wysoft · 2023-03-30 05:49 I am a long time BSD user (FreeBSD since 99) and these days when I need BSD for something I usually gravitate to NetBSD. Pkgin on NetBSD is pretty comparable to apt and I've found it to work extremely well, to the point that I don't really bother with pkgsrc any longer when I use it. I just wish that there was a more stable and up to date package collection to pull from. I remember fondly the days of wanting to try the latest KDE, just blowing away my entire /usr/pkg and building from scratch rather than reconcile dependencies manually. Make sure to compile before bed and it may not even be done at breakfast