# NEVER let Freebsd become like Ubuntu



## justinnoor (Dec 26, 2018)

Ubuntu Linux is often touted as _“Linux for human beings”. _This is really interesting. The other day on an Ubuntu 18.04 machine we were struggling to setup some very basic networking configurations. Something as simple as setting a static ip on a machine turned into a science project.

A few years back, simply updating */etc/network/interfaces*, along with */etc/hosts, *would have done the trick. Not anymore. It was then discovered that, once again, there’s a new networking application on Ubuntu. Introducing netplan, a new utility which solved the problem.

Without delving into netplan, the point here is to highlight the chaos of an Ubuntu network configuration. We have:

*netplan,
network manager,
systemd-networkd*,
*systemd-resolved,
nmtui,
nmcli,
systemd service files,*
/*etc/hosts,
/etc/network/interfaces,
/etc/resolv.conf, /run/systemd/resolve/resolv.conf, /etc/stub-resolv.conf,
/etc/nsswitch.conf*,
*/etc/netplan/netcfg.yaml,*

all working together as one happy family. We can be certain there are more files but you get the point.

We pray that Freebsd NEVER becomes like Ubuntu.


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## ffrank (Dec 26, 2018)

I agree.


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## kpedersen (Dec 26, 2018)

justinnoor said:


> Ubuntu Linux is often touted as _“Linux for human beings”._



It used to be. Check out some older versions; it is quite an eye opener. It used to have very much a charming African / nature theme with sound effects and things like that. Also backgrounds and things where people were linking hands and stuff. It was fun to use.

Now it is very little more than Debian Gnome 3 with slightly more recent packages. If it didn't change so much, it would be quite "human friendly" but since Gnome 3 is in a state of flux, a non-tech savvy user is never going to be bothered to keep up with all the learning.

These days I actually blame this project for scaring new users away from Linux. I also wouldn't be surprised if it was "engineered" that way on purpose with some money exchanging hands.


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## drhowarddrfine (Dec 26, 2018)

Not wanting to get off topic but is this due to systemd or Linux distros in general? Is this network/server or desktop or both? 
I had someone just tell me about their Linux struggles and I piqued their interest into switching to FreeBSD.


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## justinnoor (Dec 26, 2018)

drhowarddrfine said:


> Is this due to systemd or Linux distros in general? Is this network/server or desktop or both?



Definitely both. Systemd is not simply an init daemon. It tentacles are in everything, essentially becoming a sub-operating system. On top of that Ubuntu insists on adding its own abstractions on top of it. A double whammy. The server edition doesn’t have the GUIs but you’re still grappling with what feels like parallel systems.


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## Sevendogsbsd (Dec 26, 2018)

My experience with Ubuntu over the past year or so have been very bad. As a huge generalization, I would say (IMHO) it is a steaming heap of cow dung. I had stability issues mainly, with crashes that required hard resets. Personally, I blame Gnome, but I have no evidence to substantiate that. I say that because my Gnome experiences over the past few years have almost always been bad: desktop lockups requiring a hard reset of the system. This has happened on ANY Linux distro I have used, which is a great many of them.

In all actuality, despite my loathing of systemd, it has never given me any trouble. My dislike of it stems from other reasons that I won't mention because they are certainly off-topic.

I don't see FreeBSD becoming something like Ubuntu. FreeBSD's goals are not to hand hold users to a desktop.


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## justinnoor (Dec 26, 2018)

kpedersen said:


> These days I actually blame this project for scaring new users away from Linux. I also wouldn't be surprised if it was "engineered" that way on purpose with some money exchanging hands.



It’s definitely pretty scary! Well, Canonical is a large organization, presumably with lots of bills to pay. They have to pay them somehow!


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## jpierri (Dec 26, 2018)

The plague named *systemd* is a disaster on CentOS too.

I discovered that, even after having the CTRL+ALT+DEL sequence disabled, if someone insists hitting it (8 times or more) the systemd thinks that you "appear" to be suffering a general freeze and then decides by itself to reboot your machine!

Who in their normal senses would think a "feature" like that may actually be a good idea?

It is good to be back on FreeBSD after a session on CentOS or Ubuntu these days.


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## gkontos (Dec 26, 2018)

*L O L*

`cat /etc/netplan/01-netcfg.yaml`


```
network:
  version: 2
  renderer: networkd
  ethernets:
    enp0s3:
     dhcp4: no
     addresses: [192.168.1.2/24]
     gateway4: 192.168.1.1
     nameservers:
       addresses: [8.8.8.8,8.8.4.4]
```


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## Sevendogsbsd (Dec 26, 2018)

Ah, google DNS.


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## justinnoor (Dec 26, 2018)

gkontos said:


> cat /etc/netplan/01-netcfg.yaml



Oops, forgot to add that file to the list! Updated post accordingly.


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## MarcoB (Dec 26, 2018)

I don't think Ubuntu is that bad. On the laptop of my 7-year old son I replaced Windows 10S (which is *really* useless) with Ubuntu and it just works out of the box. It's obviously not my thing but for most people it's really user friendly.


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## Deleted member 56079 (Dec 26, 2018)

MarcoB said:


> I don't think Ubuntu is that bad. On the laptop of my 7-year old son I replaced Windows 10S (which is *really* useless) with Ubuntu and it just works out of the box. It's obviously not my thing but for most people it's really user friendly.



Whenever I see people complaining about Ubuntu here is usually because of two things: systemd and Gnome3, one of these matter for the desktop side (Gnome3) while the other is a mixed opinion (Some people hate it, others love it, is more of a servers thing, also a matter of philosophy) Though I haven't seen anyone complaining about systemd on the desktop side which is something entirely else (You learn the hard way that the needs of desktop users are highly different from those of server sysadmins)

Gnome3 IMO is terrible, I have seen its interface and how it behaves and It has gone downhill. Way too heavy and a smartphone-like interface isn't something I can say I adore. It reminds me more of Windows 8 in execution and I heard of very few people who genuinely tolerated that version of Microsoft Windows.

I can live with its toolkit (GTK3, after all, I do like MATE and xfce) but GNOME3 is also a matter of taste and philosophy too. But you can easily avoid it, otherwise, I think if someone were to try and introduce FOSS to someone, I'd probably recommend them Linux Mint with either MATE or xfce. Very user friendly and you avoid GNOME3 while at it.


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## Deleted member 30996 (Dec 26, 2018)

kpedersen said:


> It used to have very much a charming African / nature theme with sound effects and things like that. Also backgrounds and things where people were linking hands and stuff.



I only tried the Live CD of Ubuntu and didn't care for it when I did, but that's how I remember it. Some brown and maybe orange Earth tones with an African theme.


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## Crivens (Dec 26, 2018)

jpierri said:


> Who in their normal senses would think a "feature" like that may actually be a good idea?


The ones who thought pressing escape in the screen lock password widget for 21 times would mean 'I really really forgot it. It's me. Let me back in!'?


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## sidetone (Dec 26, 2018)

Isn't that obvious? FreeBSD and other BSD's are what they are, because they aim to be efficient.

Only I see ports having the potential to go that route (of being Ubuntu-like), not the base system.



Sevendogsbsd said:


> I blame Gnome, but I have no evidence to substantiate that. I say that because my Gnome experiences over the past few years have almost always been bad: desktop lockups requiring a hard reset of the system..



I saw evidence of that in how audio/libcanberra operates for basic sounds. All it has to do is drop down directly to the sound architecture, but it somehow manages to pull in graphics dependencies. One or two dependencies can go in to that, if the option is chosen to have popups that show text with the sound, or if the program wants feedback that the sound file played. But if those options are not wanted, then it should not pull in graphics dependencies, which pull in more graphics dependencies, and those graphic or feedback related dependencies should be very basic. I remember, even not knowing about programming, trying to suggest how to clean it up, and tinkering with it, but every time, I cleaned something up, they added more complexity into it, each time. I used to like Gnome, and many graphics ports require a version of GTK, but I would say it's the latest version of Gnome. They own that and some other ports, which I don't want to criticize them, but something should be simple when it can be. Desktop users of any OS become dependent on them, because otherwise, we wouldn't have those desktop or graphical programs so readily.


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## chrcol (Dec 27, 2018)

systemd is just horrible, how that got integrated the way it as I dont know.

However ubuntu have made some good moves such as compiling base packages with exploit protection out of the box.


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## ProphetOfDoom (Dec 27, 2018)

Maybe it’s because I behave more like an end user and don’t prod around under the hood of Ubuntu, but I never heard of systemd till people started moaning about it. It does sound horribly inelegant though - like something that belongs in Windows or Android.
My objection to Ubuntu is that they went back to the crippled Gnome 3 when Unity was beautiful, elegant and productive.
I don’t get why Canonical repeatedly pours resources into things only to pull out suddenly and leave users high and dry. It’s almost as if the coders are just trying to look as if they’re doing something useful so the money keeps coming in.
A few years ago I bought a phone with Ubuntu on and then they dropped support for it, so quietly that I wasn’t even aware of this until several months later. Why waste all those man hours?!


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## justinnoor (Dec 27, 2018)

AlexanderProphet said:


> I don’t get why Canonical repeatedly pours resources into things only to pull out suddenly and leave users high and dry. It’s almost as if the coders are just trying to look as if they’re doing something useful so the money keeps coming in.



It’s called the _development trap! _Organizations have to pay bills, so they create more features, which create more bills, and on-and-on. If they lose on a feature, get rid of it and make a new one, so they can keep paying bills.


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## sidetone (Dec 27, 2018)

AlexanderProphet said:


> It’s almost as if the coders are just trying to look as if they’re doing something useful so the money keeps coming in.





justinnoor said:


> It’s called the _development trap! _Organizations have to pay bills, so they create more features, which create more bills, and on-and-on. If they lose on a feature, get rid of it and make a new one, so they can keep paying bills.


"Features" or tangled bloat? Then, FreeBSD has a better business model.


AlexanderProphet said:


> Why waste all those man hours?!


 It also wastes man-hours of those who compile it, and it wastes electricity and productivity time.


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## Sevendogsbsd (Dec 27, 2018)

Well, unity was a fork of Gnome 3 so they share code. I never had luck with any version of Ubuntu I can actually remember using. I probably used the 14 series but don't remember. All I remember is the 16 series and up hard lockups. 

As others have mentioned, I am pretty sure we don't have to worry about FreeBSD core being infected with anything related to Ubuntu. Ports, maybe, but then that is your choice as far as installing it.  It already p***es me off I have to have shells/bash installed because it's a dependency of some ports but I live with it...really, I am just whining


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## sidetone (Dec 27, 2018)

Sevendogsbsd said:


> It already p***es me off I have to have shells/bash installed because it's a dependency of some ports but I live with it...


 It depends on how portable the code is. Chances are it's not coded for portability, and will need Bash anyway, until someone takes the effort to improve the code, which could possibly be a waste of effort anyway, because upstream will go right back to using sloppy code, and tangling it up again, because they will have no reason to use it for anything other than Bash. Bash also has features that many other shells don't have, and that or external commands would be required for that code.

* Edit - I'd like Bash to not be required, and maybe it can be made into not being a requirement for some ports. What should be made optional is binutils from ports, as parts of it are in the base system, after improving or testing the code so it compiles with it.


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## Sevendogsbsd (Dec 27, 2018)

Understood, and thanks. My FreeBSD journey was to a separate from Linux but I understand Linux apps are ported to FreeBSD and there are some things that come along. I am just whining a little, no worries


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## ralphbsz (Dec 27, 2018)

chrcol said:


> systemd is just horrible,


Well, we all keep saying that, and I'm definitely one of the people who complain about systemd all the time.

HOWEVER: It does attempt to solve a real problem.  A Unix system (Linux, *BSD, all the others...) relies not just on a kernel, but on a very complicated system of daemons and services.  And to write, maintain, install, and manage services requires a spiderweb of things: a system to start and stop services (init for example), to handle their output logs (syslog, rotating), configuring them and thereby configuring the system (all the stuff in /etc/ and /usr/local/etc and zillions of other places).  Some of the system daemons (like `devd`) are vitally important, and without them, nothing will work.  The support infrastructure for daemons is very complicated, many of the designs are outdated (they date back to the early 70s), and configuration of the daemons is a scattered mess.  Just as an example: For my little vacation project over Christmas, I'm writing a new little daemon (to collect caller ID information from a modem and log it, so I can see who called), and it's taking me days to configure syslog and log rotation for it.

Once you start running a GUI (which I thankfully don't), it all gets way more complex.  Suddenly people expect devices to come and go (plug in a USB stick), with automount support, permission switching (whoever is using X windows can control sound, but others can't), and the distribution between unprivileged end users and fully privileged system administrator typically gets 

So the problem exists, and is complicated.  Someone needs to take a holistic view of the whole service/daemon system, and come up with a coherent set of solutions.  In this sense, systemd is a good attempt, going in the right direction.  However, Lennart and the current systemd implementation are all wrong.  He is a *** (insert favorite swear word for anti-social egotistical and monomaniacal person here, think "Linus" but less chubby), who is incapable of dealing with humans, and their suggestions, help, and criticism.  While he is a quick coder, he has no common sense about big system issues; he thinks the whole world is like his developer laptop.  The resulting product is not thought through, and is of low quality in many corners, plus it was pushed into production way too early.  Systemd should have been spec'ed by a set of people with a variety of experiences, ranging from $5 embedded systems (my Raspberry Pi 0W runs Raspbian which includes systemd) to the world's largest computers (both the top500 supercomputers and the giant clusters used by Alibaba/Amazon/Facebook/Google/Netflix/... run Linux, presumable including systemd).  And for the desktop/laptop market, systemd should really have looked at how the two commercial systems handle things: While we in Unix land always complain about Windows and MacOS, we have to admit that they have high market share, to a large extent because they are easy to use, which includes being easy to administer when used as a simple desktop machine.  Instead, systemd had all stages of software development (from requirements analysis through design and implementation to quality assurance) done by a madman who lacks the skill of communicating with humans.

Still, systemd exists, and is becoming the de-facto standard.  I've had to use it, and with a few hours of practice, it can be made to work just fine.  For my hobby time (of tinkering with computers, because the weather doesn't allow me to tinker with yardwork right now), I still choose FreeBSD, because it's fun.


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## Sevendogsbsd (Dec 27, 2018)

Without getting too off topic: I think the issue (at least one of mine), is that systemd tries to do EVERYTHING, which is not following the Unix philosophy: 





> The Unix philosophy emphasizes building simple, short, clear, modular, and extensible code that can be easily maintained and repurposed by developers other than its creators. The Unix philosophy favors composability as opposed to monolithic design.


 Wiki article. Yeah, Linux is not Unix but software design in general has these principles as well.

Nuff said!


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## justinnoor (Dec 27, 2018)

ralphbsz said:


> Well, we all keep saying that, and I'm definitely one of the people who complain about systemd all the time.
> HOWEVER: It (systemd) does attempt to solve a real problem.



Agreed 100%. Systemd is not all bad. In fact it has some awesome features (try journalctl), and attempts to solve some long standing Linux/Unix problems. It’s just invasive, really invasive. Distros need to be all-in or all-out, instead of shipping these hybrid configurations. The Arch Linux systemd experience is actually not bad because it’s 100% customizable.


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## ralphbsz (Dec 27, 2018)

Part of the problem of systemd is that it has to be invasive.  Matter-of-fact, to clean up the ugly mess of electrical tape and baling wire that holds a normal Unix system together, it needs to touch a huge number of components.  That means that people who do any configuration/maintenance/management of those systems will have to relearn everything.  Most people don't like change, me included.  And because that wasn't handled correctly (from a sociological point of view), it has caused a huge allergic reactions.  And unfortunately, the one person doing it is unsuitable for the task of "socializing" it, rather on the contrary, because he's such a prick.

My hope is that over the next few years, it will get cleaned up, documentation will improve, a sensible set of people (under some corporate umbrella with steady paychecks) will handle maintenance and improvement, and after a long while of cleanup, it might be a joy to use.  We're not there yet.  One of the first steps in that journey is that the "community" (meaning the CEOs of companies like RedHat and Suse) need to get rid of the narcissistic sociopaths such as Linus and Lennart.


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## Beastie (Dec 27, 2018)

kpedersen said:


> Check out some older versions; it is quite an eye opener. It used to have very much a charming African / nature theme with sound effects and things like that. Also backgrounds and things where people were linking hands and stuff.


Like this. That's what the logo stands for actually.


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## sidetone (Dec 27, 2018)

ralphbsz said:


> Part of the problem of systemd is that it has to be invasive.  Matter-of-fact, to clean up the ugly mess of electrical tape and baling wire that holds a normal Unix system together, it needs to touch a huge number of components.  That means that people who do any configuration/maintenance/management of those systems will have to relearn everything.  Most people don't like change, me included.  And because that wasn't handled correctly (from a sociological point of view), it has caused a huge allergic reactions.  And unfortunately, the one person doing it is unsuitable for the task of "socializing" it, rather on the contrary, because he's such a prick.
> 
> My hope is that over the next few years, it will get cleaned up, documentation will improve, a sensible set of people (under some corporate umbrella with steady paychecks) will handle maintenance and improvement, and after a long while of cleanup, it might be a joy to use.  We're not there yet.  One of the first steps in that journey is that the "community" (meaning the CEOs of companies like RedHat and Suse) need to get rid of the narcissistic sociopaths such as Linus and Lennart.


That's not happening. Waiting for people whose names are synonymous with certain software to leave is fruitless. If you want that, you'd have to fork it, or better yet, you're already on a good OS.

Systemd is also a bad starting point for anything. Why want to fix that?


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## Shadow53 (Dec 27, 2018)

Regarding systemd, I'm surprised no one has mentioned The Tragedy of systemd, which includes a bit about how the BSDs could learn from systemd and perhaps implement something similar but better?

Back to the OP, I'm a bit upset that I've had to go back to using Linux on my laptop just to have the things I need to work working. FreeBSD really seems to be the better-organized/developed operating system base, but it's hard to get my desktop programs set up correctly, user mounting through the file manager, power menu options, etc. There are workarounds, but they were a bit too painful for daily use. Still, FreeBSD is much simpler to configure, IMO.


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## kpedersen (Dec 27, 2018)

Shadow53 said:


> hard to get my desktop programs set up correctly, user mounting through the file manager, power menu options, etc.



The original fault of this goes to the Gnome 3 denizens who broke the sudo / hald system which used to work pretty well on FreeBSD.

However, it isn't all the fault of the Gnome guys. I suppose part of the bad decision was on the FreeBSD porting guys who unfortunately decided it was better to have a very broken bleeding edge version rather than keeping with a slightly older version of Gnome that was fully working. I personally find the "latest is greatest" mindset a little bit childish and unworkable.

The stupid thing is that keeping with the older working version would have actually been much easier too :/. Oh well, getting used to a spartan Window Manager only environment is more flexible in the long run for computer enthusiasts. It also means you can rely less on others.


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## justinnoor (Dec 27, 2018)

ralphbsz said:


> My hope is that over the next few years, it will get cleaned up, documentation will improve, a sensible set of people



Good points. Correct me if I’m wrong, Lennart, despite the controversies, was the real victim. He was trolled in extreme ways, and even recieved death threats, for which he had to go to the police. Nobody deserves that.

Also correct me if I’m wrong, in one interview Lennart hinted that Freebsd might be working on a new init daemon? That should probably be a different post!


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## Beastie7 (Dec 28, 2018)

Some say systemd is just a poor implementation of SMF from Solaris. Unfortunately, the Linux community doesn't have a developed frontal lobe - so they reinvent things poorly than adopting existing proven solutions. Solutions that solved these aforementioned "problems". Btrs, eBPF, systemd, epoll, ext4, LXC, etc, etc, are all re-invented nonsense. Almost no innovation came from Linux, but from FreeBSD or Solaris.


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## ralphbsz (Dec 28, 2018)

justinnoor said:


> Good points. Correct me if I’m wrong, Lennart, despite the controversies, was the real victim. He was trolled in extreme ways, and even recieved death threats, for which he had to go to the police. Nobody deserves that.


That doesn't make him into a good guy.  Perhaps into persecuted guy, but being persecuted is not a moral victory.  Even less does it mean that the software he worked on is well designed.  And systemd isn't the first strike; both his Avahi daemon and the sound system were similar octopus-like disasters which have tentacles in everything.

A large part of the problem with Lennart and his systems is that the Linux ecosystem has a long-standing culture of "dominating alpha-assholes".  If you are technically astute, and really obnoxious, you can take over the communication mechanisms, and make all the decisions.  Whether you have the overall system architecture and engineering skills to make big decisions or not.  A related part of the problem is that super-coders (like the young Linus, or Lennart) get decision-making credentials, even though they don't have the big picture skills.  At the same time, sensible people who know how to engineer large and sustainable systems (like Andy Tridgell) get pushed out, because they don't want to play the a**-h*** game.

I'm always hoping that as Linux gets commercialized (a large fraction of the important developers are employed by RedHat, Intel, Suse, IBM, Oracle, ...), this kind of stupidity gets made more sensible.


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## shkhln (Dec 28, 2018)

My impression is that Red Hat only cares about controlling the largest slice of Linux development. I don't think they care about code quality (at least with desktop projects) or a specific architectural direction. Oh, and Lennart deserves _everything_ thrown at him, including death threats. (No, personally I wouldn't bother.)


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## Shadow53 (Dec 28, 2018)

shkhln said:


> Lennart deserves _everything_ thrown at him, including death threats. (No, personally I wouldn't bother.)



That's a bit much, don't you think? If anyone deserved death threats, I'd imagine it would be people who have killed others. Not someone who thinks their crap software is good, even if the crap software is used more than it should be.


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## shkhln (Dec 28, 2018)

Shadow53 said:


> That's a bit much, don't you think? If anyone deserved death threats, I'd imagine it would be people who have killed others. Not someone who thinks their crap software is good, even if the crap software is used more than it should be.



I don't believe he ever was in any danger, it's just a misdirection tactic on Lennart's part. Although, as a Russian guy I wouldn't mind him being punched in the face a couple of times. Different people might have different cultural standards.


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## ralphbsz (Dec 28, 2018)

shkhln said:


> My impression is that Red Hat only cares about controlling the largest slice of Linux development. I don't think they care about code quality (at least with desktop projects) or a specific architectural direction. Oh, and Lennart deserves _everything_ thrown at him, including death threats. (No, personally I wouldn't bother.)


No, RedHat and consorts only care about making money.  Matter-of-fact, as publicly traded corporations they really have to care about making money (if they fail to do that, their shareholders have every right to sue them into the ground).  Now, they can be stupid and make money in the short run and shoot themselves in the foot for the long run, or they can be intelligent, and make money in the long run.  In my humble opinion, they are intelligent, and are trying to make money in the long run, by creating and selling good products.

Note that they don't make money by creating code: All the code in Linux and its various distributions is open source.  The code and its quality are not in and of themselves their product.  They survive (reasonably well) by selling support and services.  Having good code is a prerequisite for that business.  Note that the big ones (Suse and RedHat) make a lot of their revenue from products other than support and services, such as consulting and administrative tools (such as Ansible).

An interesting question is this: Many discussions on this forum and in the FOSS world in general are about desktop usage.  If you read this forum, it is dominated by people who run X-windows based GUIs on their FreeBSD machines, and are mostly upset about problems with desktop tools and GUIs.  But that's actually not where the FOSS market is.  The vast majority of all servers in the world run some form of Linux (a small fraction run Windows, and other Unixes have a vanishingly small market share).  The vast majority of all desktop users run Windows, with MacOS second, a small number of Linux machines, and the other desktop OSes vanishingly small.  Just think about that comparison for a while, and you recognize that the important thing in the *nix world are servers; desktops are mostly for hobbyists.  And companies such as RedHat and Suse and iXsystems can not survive on the revenue from hobbyists, because those typically don't pay for their OS.

This still doesn't answer the question: Why does RedHat allow systemd to be created, and why do they allow people like Lennart to mess things up?  I don't know for sure.  Part of the answer may be somewhat hidden in what I said above: The traditional way of managing daemons/servers in *nix is a horrible mess, and hopefully tools like systemd can eventually clean that up, and make these systems more reliable, easier to manage, and more profitable.  I think RedHat understands that to get to the long-term good state they have to go through a "valley of tears", and today systemd is in that awkward teenager phase of its life cycle.


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## sidetone (Dec 28, 2018)

ralphbsz said:


> This still doesn't answer the question: Why does RedHat allow systemd to be created


So they can make money off of customer support for something that is not reliable. That's their business model.


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## shkhln (Dec 28, 2018)

ralphbsz said:


> No, RedHat and consorts only care about making money. …



Obviously, I believe that controlling the ecosystem makes it easier to sell things built on top of it. The part where we disagree, is that it all must be comprised of good code. Mediocre and even awful projects are all very useful as long as they contribute to Red Hat's dominating position and don't make experience substantially worse for clients. Indeed, some of them might eventually mature into actually serviceable software, but it's a pretty good business as it is.


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## pyret (Dec 28, 2018)

> This still doesn't answer the question: Why does RedHat allow systemd to be created, and why do they allow people like Lennart to mess things up?  I don't know for sure.


I have to work on Linux (Redhat, CentOS) as part of my job.  There may be some innovation in Linux, but I don't know what it would be.  They invariably knock off everything that has been done before.  systemd is not any different than SRC in AIX or SMF in Solaris.  In the case of AIX, that has existed since at least 1995 when I started on it with (I believe) 3.2.5, and in the case of Solaris, since 2005.  Dynamic i-nodes were available in JFS2 in AIX 5 which was 2001.  Solaris released ZFS in 2005.

AIX has multiple page size support.
AIX has had multibos or live update support for over a decade, and then Linux came out with k-splice (another knock off).
AIX Workload Manager.
AIX Advanced Memory Expansion.
AIX Active Memory Sharing.
AIX LPARs/Workload Partitions.
Solaris LDOMs/Containers.

Those are enterprise features.

It always humors me when Linux cheers the adoption of X when it has been available for at least a decade - and sometimes two - in AIX or Solaris.

But the real question isn't "don't let Y become like Z; or why is Y like Z?", because they are both the same thing, based on X.  It is, "Where do we go from here?"

UNIX was released in 1971 which is nearing the 50 year mark.  BSD and Linux are all based on UNIX.

Plan 9 was developed in the late 80s to fix the problems with Unix like networking and graphics.  But still used Unix as the inspiration.

Then you have Windows which was released in 1985, which is nearing 35 years.

Minix based on Unix.

Akaros, NIX, Clive, Inferno are all based on Plan 9.  These four are distributed operating systems and only Inferno was released commercially and never caught on.  The other 3 are research operating systems.

Android based on Linux.

iOS part of the macOS family.  macOS originated with NeXTSTEP which was based on Unix.

OS/2 was a hybrid of Windows and Unix.

BeOS was not internally Unix, but after Apple went with NeXTSTEP, it never gained commercially.

There is nothing on the horizon to replace either Unix or Windows.  In the next 50 years are we still going to have the same thing?  Au Gratin, french fried, mashed, cheesy baked, tater tots, roasted.  However or whatever you call them, they're still potatoes.

Plan 9 was thought to be better than Unix, but Unix was just good enough.  Just good enough is what we strive for in an operating system?


----------



## Sevendogsbsd (Dec 28, 2018)

What we have now works, even windows, which has it's market share because of market flooding and certainly not because of quality, but it does a decent job for desktop users that don't know any better. 

Not sure we will ever reach computing nirvana in terms of operating systems. Maybe not in my lifetime but who knows. I am pretty happy now using FreeBSD as a desktop. I am certainly not the majority though but I have always bucked the system and done what few do because I hate being conformist. 

Despite Linux's past and direction, I do appreciate the fact it was born a "rebel" so to speak. Open source, to me, is really what is important because it is a community. I can't stand having a single OS shoved down my throat by a company that could care less about its users and whose only driving force is profit: "this is how you will use your computer, and you will like it!" Open source represents freedom to me, and gives us all choices, which we didn't have prior to its inception. Sure, there may be quality issues but I can say I have had fewer issues with open source projects than I have had with commercial ones, because if I don't like something there are 14 other apps to choose from. 

Computing to me, is a very large part of my life. I spend a tremendous amount of time behind the monitor and have done so for 20+ years. That I have moved of to a small corner of the computing world in FreeBSD is fine with me. I have changed the way I do some things fundamentally so I could embrace FreeBSD because I like it and appreciate what it is. Thank you to all the folks that have made it possible. 

That was a bit of a digression but my mind works that way


----------



## Ogis (Dec 28, 2018)

justinnoor said:


> Agreed 100%. Systemd is not all bad.


Unfortunately, I do not agree with this statement. I'll look at it from my belfry and mention Debian. This situation prospects a lock in systemd dependencies which is de-facto threatening freedom of development and has serious consequences for Debian, its upstream and its downstream. This situation is also the result of a longer process leading to the take-over of Debian by the GNOME project agenda. Considering how far this has propagated today and the importance of Debian as a universal OS and base system in the distribution panorama, what is at stake is the future of 
GNU/Linux in a scenario of complete homogeneization and lock-in of all base distributions. Init Freedom is about restoring a sane approach to PID1, one that respects diversity and freedom of choice.

P.S.

If any of these claims are offended or turned out to be trolling, please forgive me and not be disappointed.


----------



## Vull (Dec 28, 2018)

Devuan aspires to be Debian without systemd and, if I didn't have FreeBSD, I would probably be in a bigger hurry to check out Devuan, but I do have FreeBSD, thankfully.

Was impressed with Ubuntu at first, but very disappointed when I discovered "unattended-upgrades" or whatever it's called, running in the background the moment X gets started. Attempting to shut down the host, one discovers that Ubuntu has the same sort of daddy-knows-best dialog as Windows Update, saying something like "Don't try to turn off your computer, because I won't let you shutdown until I've finished my automatic updates, which are far more important than whatever trivial task it was that you bought this computer to do." Bad juju for me. Linux Mint has a similar auto-upgrade feature, but at least there it's easy to deactivate. Ubuntu is prettier, but Linux Mint has better manners.


----------



## Ogis (Dec 28, 2018)

Vull said:


> Devuan aspires to be Debian without systemd and, if I didn't have FreeBSD, I would probably be in a bigger hurry to check out Devuan, but I do have FreeBSD, thankfully.


Yes, you are absolutely right. Devuan is what Debian should be.


----------



## jpierri (Dec 28, 2018)

sidetone said:


> So they can make money off of customer support for something that is not reliable. That's their business model.


Yeahh, and to ensure that customer support contracts keep being sold, it is essential to break things systematically or else customers will eventually learn how to fix stuff themselves.


----------



## Spartrekus (Jan 6, 2019)

justinnoor said:


> Ubuntu Linux is often touted as _“Linux for human beings”. _This is really interesting. The other day on an Ubuntu 18.04 machine we were struggling to setup some very basic networking configurations. Something as simple as setting a static ip on a machine turned into a science project.
> 
> A few years back, simply updating */etc/network/interfaces*, along with */etc/hosts, *would have done the trick. Not anymore. It was then discovered that, once again, there’s a new networking application on Ubuntu. Introducing netplan, a new utility which solved the problem.
> 
> ...



It will. Law of Moore.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore's_law
More transistors, more energy, and looks like computers are "slower" as ever 

The longer it takes, the larger the number of source code lines.

If you want to keep it clean and like Unix, you need to develop a new kernel and stick to Unix Originals, like they do:
https://github.com/DoctorWkt/unix-jun72


----------



## kpedersen (Jan 6, 2019)

More and more do I appreciate that 99% of things can be configured in one place on FreeBSD (rc.conf).

On Linux it is becoming more and more inconsistent and eclectic than ever. These days I highly recommend doing everything (albeit manually) in /etc/rc.local and if they have removed that, then just do it under the root @reboot cron entry haha.
This is probably bad advice but I just cannot be arsed with Linux any more. They may have systemd but I notice that every distro (and release) now does networking differently and... messy quite frankly.

The big one for me is that on Debian the "long interface names" feature (i.e wl023spd32 instead of wlan0) has long since broken wpa_supplicant making wifi useless. And yet they haven't fixed it for multiple releases (just a slightly out of date bug report). Leading me to believe that Linux desktop / laptop usage is actually miniscule. Again I blame Gnome 3+ and KDE 4+ for being unfit for general purpose.


----------



## Spartrekus (Jan 6, 2019)

kpedersen said:


> More and more do I appreciate that 99% of things can be configured in one place on FreeBSD (rc.conf).
> 
> On Linux it is becoming more and more inconsistent and eclectic than ever. These days I highly recommend doing everything (albeit manually) in /etc/rc.local and if they have removed that, then just do it under the root @reboot cron entry haha.
> This is probably bad advice but I just cannot be arsed with Linux any more. They may have systemd but I notice that every distro (and release) now does networking differently.



It is getting maybe not Unix, really, like it was. Or Unix is evolving. Depends on opinion.


----------



## kpedersen (Jan 6, 2019)

Well I guess Linux *is* just a kernel so we cannot use it to say UNIX has changed.
I think GNU/Linux may be kinda trying to fork.

GNU/Linux/SysV-like
and
GNU/Linux/Systemd

But the sad truth is it isn't really forking. Due to the tightly bound nature of GNU software, it isn't really able to fork and most distros will have to be pulled away from SysV.

Though Spartrekus, this is *not* a bad thing. I think GNU/Linux has too long muddied up UNIX philosophy and if we can almost see Linux as just another free OS (Like Haiku) rather than a UNIX-like OS then that will allow a true UNIX-like OS to take center stage and do things correctly. Remember, if BSD got their licensing shite together back in the day, Linux and the GNU mentality* might not have bloated out almost every bit of software created.

After all, "GNU is not Unix". It is almost not fair that it is leading the way for typical open-source UNIX-like software. I think it could potentially be doing everyone a disservice because it has very different goals and outlook. For example, all these big online-dependent package managers requiring large infrastructure and "community" is not actually a very UNIX-like philosophy of keeping things small and simple or doing one thing and one thing well.

* For the record, I think the GNU license is extremely important and great. Whereas the sloppy dependency mindset of GNU developers is terrible. As it stands, typical GNU/Gnome style software is almost on par with closed-source software in terms of digital preservation!


----------



## Beastie (Jan 6, 2019)

kpedersen said:


> I think GNU/Linux has too long muddied up UNIX philosophy and if we can almost see Linux as just another free OS (Like Haiku) rather than a UNIX-like OS then that will allow a true UNIX-like OS to take center stage and do things correctly.


^ This, x1000.



kpedersen said:


> Remember, if BSD got their licensing shite together back in the day, Linux and the GNU mentality* might not have bloated out almost every bit of software created.


Nay, Linux wouldn't have existed in the first place. "If 386BSD had been available when I started on Linux, Linux would probably never have happened." -- Linus Torvalds, 1993
Maybe Hurd would've taken over its role as default kernel. Maybe the entire GNU thing would've had a totally different face. No one can really tell, but for sure it would've been a very different world.



kpedersen said:


> For the record, I think the GNU license is extremely important and great. Whereas the sloppy dependency mindset of GNU developers is terrible. As it stands, typical GNU/Gnome style software is almost on par with closed-source software in terms of digital preservation!


For end-user products at most, some may argue...


----------



## kpedersen (Jan 6, 2019)

Beastie said:


> Nay, Linux wouldn't have existed in the first place..


Exactly.

I wonder what would have become the most common FOSS if neither BSD or Linux were around?
My vote would be Minix or Plan 9 but both were still quite encumbered back then. Perhaps GNU/Hurd would have finally found the sheer number of developers needed to "fix her up" .

Either way, I'm glad something appeared. I would hate to be stuck on Windows these days. That would be a very dangerous position to be in.


----------



## drhowarddrfine (Jan 7, 2019)

Spartrekus said:


> It is getting maybe not Unix, really, like it was.


We used to consider Linux a distant cousin. No more. Linux is now a black sheep and the more distant the better.


----------



## Spartrekus (Jan 7, 2019)

kpedersen said:


> Either way, I'm glad something appeared. I would hate to be stuck on Windows these days. That would be a very dangerous position to be in.



why actually? many still use it as main OS.


----------



## Sevendogsbsd (Jan 7, 2019)

Spartrekus said:


> why actually? many still use it as main OS.



Because they don't know any better and feel they have no choice. Or they don't care. Microsoft flooded the market with it so it's the dominant player.


----------



## kpedersen (Jan 7, 2019)

Spartrekus said:


> why actually? many still use it as main OS.


Basically for all intents and purposes Windows is "complete". Its not going to get any better, they are just going to keep dressing it up, cause breakages and most of all, monetize.

These monetization schemes are going to get crazy, you just wait and see 

And the best thing is that the idiots just accept them!



			
				Idiot User in 2025 said:
			
		

> Of course I should have to pay £100 a month to use Windows. Microsoft needs to be paid for their good work and support





			
				Idiot User in 2029 said:
			
		

> I am saving lots of money by only subscribing to weekend-Windows. This means I only have to pay £250 over the year instead of £1000.





			
				Idiot User in 2035 said:
			
		

> No, I'm not moving out of the city. My work requires I use a computer and obviously I cannot stream my Windows OS outside the city limits.





			
				All of us in 2050 said:
			
		

> It sucks that I am not legally allowed to buy a physical computer to do work on and play with and stuff





			
				Idiot User in 2065 said:
			
		

> Kill him!, I saw him use a computer once, he is a criminal!


----------



## Spartrekus (Jan 27, 2019)

The longer there are similar source code for things like graphical applications, ... and so on.
There could be some possibilities that things look the same. scrot, feh,.....

But...

There is however the crucial thing is that kernel and base are not common at all and quite different from Linux world.
it protects BSD from ubuntu spywares and stuffs.

BSD is not dedicated for the desktop, luckily.

You wrote....


> Microsoft flooded the market with it so it's the dominant player.


Actually, by installing and using Linux Ubuntu, maybe, the user want to use a sort of *Free* Windows Desktop. They are using the Ubuntu desktop without knowing the console, because of Microsoft OS habits.

You wrote... about years and possible changes.
Maybe in 100 years, it won't be allowed to use opensource operating systems - for X whatever reason(s).

Apple, Android Google, Microsoft rule the market.

Why to buy a notebook, phone,... running a (fully or /partially) closed source operating system? Best example: Android or Apple phones.


----------



## hruodr (Jan 27, 2019)

Windows has a very important role and we must be glad it is there: becoming always fatter, needing always more resources, and hence creating continuously demand for always more powerful hardware that is responded with more supply and lower prices.

Without windows, we would be running FreeBSD on very expensive computers with 80386 processors (and the rest DOS).


----------



## Spartrekus (Jan 27, 2019)

hruodr said:


> Windows has a very important role and we must be glad it is there: becoming always fatter, needing always more resources, and hence creating continuously demand for always more powerful hardware that is responded with more supply and lower prices.
> 
> Without windows, we would be running FreeBSD on very expensive computers with 80386 processors (and the rest DOS).



Indeed.  I read this today on a bottle of shampoo:
** Be smarter save water and energy **


----------



## yuripv (Jan 27, 2019)

While I agree with all the shortcomings and aggressive marketing of Windows land, I'm still using it on my "desktop", as it's just more usable than anything linux world did come up with to this moment (I'm talking about desktop stuff and that's exactly what we have in ports).

The Ubuntu bug #1 is the worst mistake IMO in linux land.  You don't need or want to be fighting windows, you need to provide usable solutions.  Instead of that we have zounds of incompatible UI toolkits, all looking so different, zounds of DEs, a lot of "desktop" bloat just to be like windows.

I absolutely love FreeBSD internals, but once I do a "startx" I just keep coming back to Win10 (only for the "desktop", of course).


----------



## Spartrekus (Jan 27, 2019)

yuripv said:


> While I agree with all the shortcomings and aggressive marketing of Windows land, I'm still using it on my "desktop", as it's just more usable than anything linux world did come up with to this moment (I'm talking about desktop stuff and that's exactly what we have in ports).
> 
> The Ubuntu bug #1 is the worst mistake IMO in linux land.  You don't need or want to be fighting windows, you need to provide usable solutions.  Instead of that we have zounds of incompatible UI toolkits, all looking so different, zounds of DEs, a lot of "desktop" bloat just to be like windows.
> 
> I absolutely love FreeBSD internals, but once I do a "startx" I just keep coming back to Win10 (only for the "desktop", of course).



It is physics maybe to get fatter and slower.

Evolution of Linux looks similar than Windows.
Today modern KDE is slow and heavy, compared to original kde 1.1.2.


----------



## shkhln (Jan 27, 2019)

yuripv said:


> Instead of that we have zounds of incompatible UI toolkits, all looking so different, zounds of DEs, a lot of "desktop" bloat just to be like windows.



"zounds"?


----------



## Spartrekus (Jan 27, 2019)

_*"desktop" bloat just to be like windows.*_
sounds possible.


----------



## shkhln (Jan 27, 2019)

Spartrekus, can you please refrain from upvoting my posts? You are adding too much noise to that metric.


----------



## Spartrekus (Jan 27, 2019)

shkhln said:


> Spartrekus, can you please refrain from upvoting my posts? You are adding too much noise to that metric.


ok


----------



## yuripv (Jan 27, 2019)

shkhln said:


> "zounds"?


OK, "insane amount"


----------



## Spartrekus (Jan 27, 2019)

yuripv said:


> OK, "insane amount"



When did you program for first time? Visibly, you do care about resource, memory usage,... 

Btw, right now, I use evilwm.


----------



## yuripv (Jan 27, 2019)

Spartrekus said:


> When did you program for first time? Visibly, you do care about resource, memory usage,...
> 
> Btw, right now, I use evilwm.


End of '80s, I guess, learning asm on zx spectrum (it was very popular in USSR back then).

But it's not really about resources or memory usage, it's about control -- if I want a "desktop" with all the bells and whistles, I just use Windows or MacOS.  I don't need yet another one running on FreeBSD.  And WM is just WM, you still need lots of other software to glue it all together, and repeating myself, once I do that, I no longer understand why I need all those packages installed (partly influenced by NIH syndrome so popular among linux developers) and all those services running.

I'm really not into the long posts as I feel what I'm writing is hard to follow already, so to stay on topic -- I'd rephrase the subject as "Never let FreeBSD make the same mistake as linux trying to win over some other OS" because "_if you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you_".


----------



## hruodr (Jan 27, 2019)

*yuripv*, it would be interesting to know, what is in Windows that you miss in FreeBSD. Do you find no alternative?


----------



## shkhln (Jan 27, 2019)

While we are at it, any decent alternatives to HxD?


----------



## Spartrekus (Jan 27, 2019)

ncurses hexedit  -  nice over ssh.


----------



## yuripv (Jan 27, 2019)

hruodr said:


> *yuripv*, it would be interesting to know, what is in Windows that you miss in FreeBSD. Do you find no alternative?


Don't get me wrong, almost all of my hardware works with FreeBSD (except bluetooth, but I don't have any real usage for it), if it doesn't I can (hopefully) fix it; almost all of the programs I need for work are the same (firefox, thunderbird, terminals, ...).  It's just that windows looks like "complete solution" (I'm well aware of the costs), I don't need any magic for scaling to work on a 4K monitor, I don't need to enter cli commands to connect to another wifi AP (the long list of usability stuff follows) -- now if I try to do the same on FreeBSD, I need a lot of bloat from ports, and it all feels clumsy and amateur compared to windows.  You can say that I'm just lazy and spoiled by windows, and that would be correct; sometimes I just hate I don't have any real issues there and there's nothing forcing me to use FreeBSD only.


----------



## shkhln (Jan 27, 2019)

Spartrekus said:


> ncurses hexedit  -  nice over ssh.



TUIs have _much worse_ information density and readability.


----------



## hruodr (Jan 27, 2019)

*shkhln*, `emacs` has an hexl-mode. Did you try it?

*yuripv*, if you do not want to use cli and want to have all in GUI, it is perhaps indeed as you say.

I, for example, write text with plain TeX, other may use `troff`, it is perhaps much more work than to use MS word, but it is the habit of years of writing text in this "complicated way". The same with the cli.


----------



## shkhln (Jan 27, 2019)

hruodr said:


> `emacs` has an hexl-mode. Did you try it?



Should I? It seems to be pretty basic: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/34658150/copying-sections-in-hexl-mode, https://emacs.stackexchange.com/questions/46492/how-to-search-for-a-sequence-of-bytes-in-hexl-mode.



hruodr said:


> *yuripv*, if you do not want to use cli and want to have all in GUI, it is perhaps indeed as you say.



It's probably little things like automounting.


----------



## hruodr (Jan 27, 2019)

No, I just asked, because `emacs` is a typical editor that programmers use.

Yes, something so simple like cli mounting and umounting can be disturbing if one is not used to it.


----------



## yuripv (Jan 27, 2019)

hruodr said:


> *shkhln*, `emacs` has an hexl-mode. Did you try it?
> 
> *yuripv*, if you do not want to use cli and want to have all in GUI, it is perhaps indeed as you say.
> 
> I, for example, write text with plain TeX, other may use `troff`, it is perhaps much more work than to use MS word, but it is the habit of years of writing text in this "complicated way". The same with the cli.


being a tester (with a bit of development) at work, I actually spend 2/3 of the time in CLI, so I'm only talking about my "work" laptop that I'm carrying with me.  If I was paid to work on FreeBSD problems, then Windows would go out of it immediately, but as I'm working on illumos, I simply can't spend time on all the issues I'm having using linux "desktop" stuff.  As for FreeBSD itself, being a newbie committer, I occasionally do simple fixes; it's just that at the moment I'm so burned out by $work stuff I barely want to look at anything else in free time (forums being exception, I guess  )


----------



## hruodr (Jan 27, 2019)

Without the desktop, linux is more similar to illumos than to FreeBSD. You could also use illumos for everything ...


----------



## yuripv (Jan 27, 2019)

hruodr said:


> Without the desktop, linux is more similar to illumos than to FreeBSD. You could also use illumos for everything ...


Except that I was using FreeBSD long before I started to work on illumos


----------



## Deleted member 9563 (Jan 27, 2019)

Ubuntu ceased to be "for humans" ten years ago when I gave it the boot. I say that because _I'm_ human, but I can't vouch for others in that regard. 

That said, I remember the only way for "humans" to use Ubuntu was to uninstall networkmanager, since it would invariably fail or simply act in a rude manner - such as default to DHCP. I don't think systemd solved that problem, but I'll probably never know.

I do think that ultimately Ubuntu has done a lot to help Linux move into the mainstream and achieve the high level of usage it sees today.


----------



## pyret (Jan 28, 2019)

hruodr said:


> it would be interesting to know, what is in Windows that you miss in FreeBSD. Do you find no alternative?


1) Netflix and Hulu.  
2) Connect my iPhone.  
3) Connect my Nikon D7000.  
4) Connect multiple monitors without having to mess with xrandr or config files.  
5) Connect my drawing tablet.

Windows was designed from the beginning to be a desktop and FreeBSD was designed from the beginning to be a server.  Can they both function as the other?  Sure.  You can use your Ford Focus as a pickup by hitching a trailer to it (and ruin your transmission) and you can use your Chevy Colorado as a passenger vehicle to haul 10 people (but they're going to be uncomfortable).


----------



## Sensucht94 (Jan 28, 2019)

pyret said:


> Windows was designed from the beginning to be a desktop



While this maybe true for MS-DOS  and Windows 3.x/9.x, NT was first designed to run on servers and workstations (MS wouldn't have ported NT 4  and 2000 too to DEC Alpha otherwise):


			
				Windows FAQ: ASCII format said:
			
		

> 2.7.  Windows NT 3.1
> ====================
> Microsoft Windows NT, scheduled for release in the first half of 1993, is
> Microsoft's platform of choice for high-end systems.  It is intended for
> ...



NT first really made its way into the desktop business with XP, no sooner did Netburst Pentium IV become cheap enough for the casual user (486[D/SX]/PentiumM-III as opposite was not something you used to see on low-end PCs). It should also be noticed that, unlike FreeBSD, Windows NT Server in late '00s used to run on some top500 supercomputers up until 2015, and that Windows  still has a huge server market share (~30% of network traffic); MS wouldn't have made it scriptable with PowerShell, developed Containers, Hyper-V, Azure Cloud, WSL, and ReFS, as well as implement all those exploit mitigations,  if that hadn't been the case


----------



## Deleted member 30996 (Jan 28, 2019)

yuripv said:


> It's just that windows looks like "complete solution" (I'm well aware of the costs), I don't need any magic for scaling to work on a 4K monitor, I don't need to enter cli commands to connect to another wifi AP (the long list of usability stuff follows) -- now if I try to do the same on FreeBSD, I need a lot of bloat from ports, and it all feels clumsy and amateur compared to windows.  You can say that I'm just lazy and spoiled by windows, and that would be correct; sometimes I just hate I don't have any real issues there and there's nothing forcing me to use FreeBSD only.



Sleep tight. Microsoft will take good care of you and make sure you get everything they think you need whether you think so or not.

I prefer to make my own decisions and FreeBSD meets my standards as a complete solution for a desktop OS. I'm not sure what bloat you think is in ports you won't find in any other version of the same program on other platforms but it feeling clumsy and amateurish is your opinion only and not my experience at all.

But to each their own. As long as you're happy that's what matters.


----------



## hruodr (Jan 28, 2019)

What is the problem with the iPhone and Camara? Wlan or USB is not enough? Bluetooth is working in FreeBSD and I use it eventually for a keyboard. Connecting the two monitors is something that is done once, like installing the OS.

Yes, not all hardware will work on every OS. And commercial services tend to offer only for Windows and eventually Mac and ignore others.


----------



## cynwulf (Jan 28, 2019)

yuripv said:


> The Ubuntu bug #1 is the worst mistake IMO in linux land.  You don't need or want to be fighting windows, you need to provide usable solutions.  Instead of that we have zounds of incompatible UI toolkits, all looking so different, zounds of DEs, a lot of "desktop" bloat just to be like windows.


Yes, freedesktop.org, systemd, etc is just what amounts to bad Windows or macOS reinvention.  Many Linux fans just don't see that by embracing crap in order to ape Windows that their chosen OS is becoming more and more like it, more complex and confusing and less "UNIX like" as time goes by.

The people making money out of Linux are generally not making it from any of that stuff.  Canonical/Shuttleworth, tried and failed to monetise the Linux desktop.  Almost all the  homegrown Canonical software has been a failure and/or ditched in favour of free upstream projects (just look at upstart and unity for example).

One could argue that the only company which has successfully monetised "consumer Linux" is google - and they did that by avoiding most of the freedesktop.org crap, systemd, etc...  and one can quite easily state that more than 99% of their users don't even know nor care that they're running Linux anyway.

One of the stated goals of Android was to "layer" more permissive licenced software between GPL and proprietary apps to protect proprietary IP.  Canonical could not do any of this early on because it enraged their "community".


----------



## Crivens (Jan 28, 2019)

I think it is time to call for a last round of input for this thread.


----------



## Deleted member 9563 (Jan 28, 2019)

Crivens said:


> I think it is time to call for a last round of input for this thread.


I will take that opportunity then.



Trihexagonal said:


> I prefer to make my own decisions



This. Apart from discussions of proprietary and open source, there is one thing I will not tolerate and that is being told what to do. I'm the one that makes the decisions around here and FreeBSD allows me to be me.


----------



## Spartrekus (Jan 28, 2019)

hruodr said:


> *shkhln*, `emacs` has an hexl-mode. Did you try it?
> 
> *yuripv*, if you do not want to use cli and want to have all in GUI, it is perhaps indeed as you say.
> 
> I, for example, write text with plain TeX, other may use `troff`, it is perhaps much more work than to use MS word, but it is the habit of years of writing text in this "complicated way". The same with the cli.



I use vim for plain text, and I convert it to TeX with a tiny C code.
Usually, and it is always compatible.  Ever for ever


----------



## hruodr (Jan 28, 2019)

*Spartrekus*, I was speaking about a substitute of Word. I leave plain text as ASCII / UTF.

I also wanted to say that bloated OpenOffice or LibreOffice is not the solution, they are perhaps a bad imitate of word and worse that it, as *yuripv* noted about the desktop features of linux.


----------



## Crivens (Jan 28, 2019)

Try abiword...


----------



## kpedersen (Jan 28, 2019)

hruodr said:


> I also wanted to say that bloated OpenOffice or LibreOffice



I agree. Its sad that Microsoft Office in Wine pulls in less dependencies than these packages. Though yes, x86[_64] only on Wine is quite an annoying dependency .

Office 97 running on Windows 95 running inside a DosBox VM is probably the fastest and lightest at starting up, even though it is fully emulated. Again, probably less dependencies too.

But yeah, Abiword, TexLive or Markdown (via discount (https://www.pell.portland.or.us/~orc/Code/discount/)) is possibly what I would use.


----------



## hruodr (Jan 28, 2019)

*Crivens*, I do not need abiword or any other word imitate. TeX is much better and simple. troff is an alternative that should be in every Unix/BSD system.

Unfortunately, to compile the meager TeX is a story: it is written in a pascal dialect not supported anymore.

The package texlive is a big bloat, but not the TeX in it.


----------



## Deleted member 9563 (Jan 28, 2019)

Actually I find the discussion about bloat to be a bit weird. I do a lot of writing in DOS using an editor that's 3K with no dependencies. My second choice is *ne* running in FreeBSD and it's 300K. Frankly, being a DOS user I think anything else, including FreeBSD, is bloated, because that 100x ratio is just the tip of the iceberg.


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## shkhln (Jan 28, 2019)

OpenOffice/LibreOffice isn't in a direct competition with TeX. For example, Writer is totally incapable of placing inline formulas at the same baseline as regular text. IMO, it is perfectly fine if you are not trying to write a paper or a book. (And, anyway, Calc is probably the most important part of the package.)


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## Sevendogsbsd (Jan 28, 2019)

So, this is off-topic but prompted me to build editors/abiword and install, test a *.doc and a *.odt. Visually, there is something very wrong with editors/abiword at present: the screen it displays is black and flickers when you resize. Opening an *.odt caused editors/abiword to promptly core. Opening a *.doc made the editors/abiword screen turn black and the document underneath this to be unreadable except through the flashing screen. Not usable in its present state, in my opinion. 

Staying on LO until I am comfortable enough with TeX (LaTeX ?)


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## shkhln (Jan 28, 2019)

Sevendogsbsd said:


> Visually, there is something very wrong with editors/abiword at present: the screen it displays is black and flickers when you resize. Opening an *.odt caused editors/abiword to promptly core. Opening a *.doc made the editors/abiword screen turn black and the document underneath this to be unreadable except through the flashing screen.



Hardly a surprise. There is _always_ something wrong with Abiword, it's been like that for as long as I can remember (well, roughly 10 years).


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## hruodr (Jan 28, 2019)

*OJ*, I could live with minix or plan9. But is there a modern WEB browser?

*Sevendogsbsd*, to be comfortable is the problem and we are back to the point of *yuripv*. It is like programming for writing text. Perhaps is always more comfortable to see what you write, but inspite of it, it is what I use.  I have my "templates" for different kind of text for making my life easier, but from time to time I must consult the TeX book.

There is an interesting alternative to TeX and troff: to write directly postscript. Perhaps to have some templates for making it easier? I never tried it, but it should be possible, and practical for drawing.

TeX generates dvi that is much lower level than postscript, then it is normally converted to postscript for printing. By writing directly postscript one can exploit it better.


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## shkhln (Jan 28, 2019)

hruodr said:


> There is an interesting alternative to TeX and troff: to write directly postscript.



No way. Do you really want to specify x,y coordinates for each word separately?



hruodr said:


> Perhaps to have some templates for making it easier?



No.



hruodr said:


> I never tried it, but it should be possible, and practical for drawing.



That should work.


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## Deleted member 9563 (Jan 28, 2019)

hruodr said:


> *@OJ*, I could live with minix or plan9. But is there a modern WEB browser?



No. But you don't need it because you can install a modern web browser on FreeBSD. Networking works fine on a DOS box, even if just running on a single floppy without a HDD, so your files can go back and forth like with anything else.

Yes, I know there is a whole crowd of one bowl, one laptop, thinkers. I personally run a bunch of machines, each for a different purpose. That's one of the advantages of not living in a van.


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## Crivens (Jan 29, 2019)

Well, abiword once saved my behind by being able to load .doc files and exporting to LaTeX. But that is a long time ago. No idea how it is today, I'll need to check.


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## ProphetOfDoom (Jan 29, 2019)

WRT Windows. It seems to me that Microsoft started off by trying to make a great new OS without reference to anything that had gone before. And the thirty year + history of the product is a tale of Microsoft slowly realising that Unix was _better. _They've gradually added all kinds of Unix features over the years: msvcrt, POSIX threads, multiple user accounts, a decent shell, a proper terminal emulator, and now this monstrous-sounding Windows Subsystem for Linux thing... all that time and effort wasted because they decided to throw an OS together instead of _designing one._


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## shkhln (Jan 29, 2019)

AlexanderProphet said:


> It seems to me that Microsoft started off by trying to make a great new OS without reference to anything that had gone before. And the thirty year + history of the product is a tale of Microsoft slowly realizing that Unix was _better._



No, just no.



AlexanderProphet said:


> They've gradually added all kinds of Unix features over the years: msvcrt



msvcrt = Microsoft Visual C runtime, which provides basic facilities like _printf_. It's, of course, a Unix thing, but you can't introduce C runtime libraries in a gradual fashion; it has been there from the start.



AlexanderProphet said:


> now this monstrous-sounding Windows Subsystem for Linux thing



You should read up on Interix.



AlexanderProphet said:


> all that time and effort wasted because they decided to throw an OS together instead of _designing one._



Window NT is generally considered to be very decent. It is certainly better designed than Linux, which _is_ an actual thrown together OS. Now, win32 API is neither particularly good nor bad in my opinion. Various COM interfaces, half-assed GUI tools and obscure registry keys are indeed very annoying.


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## hruodr (Jan 29, 2019)

I do also believe that the Windows NT kernel cannot be that bad because it was developed by someone with experience. Another thing is what the whole system is. The same can be said about Linux Kernel and Ubuntu.

I said before that Windows has an economical role. Ubuntu has also a role: to win Windows Users for Linux. A Windows user needs a Windows imitate when he uses Linux as many vegetarian people need meat imitates.

But what is so bad in Ubuntu (apart from systemd)? The most programs there are the same many people use on FreeBSD. There are a lot of elementary software for Windows for which we do not find a free software equivalent. First with tesseract we got a decent OCR program. I do not know a decent free bookkeeping program (Gnucrash is awful bloat), I had to write my own.


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## kpedersen (Jan 29, 2019)

shkhln said:


> Window NT is generally considered to be very decent.


Exactly and took a lot of inspiration (and developers) from VMS which although is not UNIX, has both a POSIX layer and Unix compatibility. If anything it was more Unix-like than Linux.

The NT kernel is pretty good. It is all that spyware they load ontop


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## Vull (Jan 29, 2019)

The disk bloatation in Windows is sky-high. For instance, I don't normally ever run Windows but I bought a cheap laptop, new, with a 30 GB drive, which was an HP Stream intended and marketed expressly for Windows 8, for the sole purpose of running MagicJack to provide me with a VOIP telephone line. Within a month of pressing it into service they crammed the Windows 10 upgrade down my throat and the 30 GB drive ran out of space. Brand new computer obsoleted by Microsoft almost as soon as it came out of the box. No other OS I ever used needed so much disk space for just the basic OS software plus one tiny VOIP application.

Everything is bloated in Windows. My Acer Aspire was a multi-boot job on which I installed FreeBSD and Linux Mint after shrinking the preinstalled Windows 10 partition. It always ran quietly when I booted FreeBSD regardless of whatever desktop or server software I was using. It was a different story, though, when I booted Windows 10, and the cooling fan would start gunning itself like a race car at the starting line. It fought with me to install it's huge, monstrously and obscenely bloated, unattended updates and upgrades. Got angry if I tried to shut it down too quickly, and often put the computer into an unusable state while it gorged itself on the updates. Ubuntu has very similar behavior when it comes to force-feeding you with unwanted unattended upgrades.

Linux Mint is almost as bad about unwanted updates, but at least it provides a way to prevent the update daemon from starting automatically, whereupon it will run almost as quietly as FreeBSD. There might be a way to do the same thing in Ubuntu, but if so I never figured it out. Ubuntu in my opinion is almost as bad as Windows. Out of the handful of systems I've tried, only with FreeBSD or Debian can I control the timing of my upgrades, and only with FreeBSD do I feel confident that I really know what the computer is doing at any given time, or that I'm actually even in control of the hardware that I paid good money to "own." When I run Ubuntu or Windows, I'm never sure who's in charge of the thing, but it obviously isn't me.

Edited to add: Mac OS X also let me control the timing of upgrades-- they also wanted more money for them after a certain point, but that's a separate and unrelated issue, more or less...


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## Crivens (Jan 29, 2019)

And with that, I declare this thread to be finished.


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