noise dept.
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oozey mess
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titsay
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sheepfilms
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taylor price
Not today Justin
pixel skylines
Keni
Monterey Bay Aquarium
d e v o n
Xuebing Du
Lint Roller? I Barely Know Her
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Show & Tell
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@myzanilred
I think I should write more.
I don't just mean my educational articles, but stories, with actual characters and narrative.
I just don't know what I would do with a story if I did write it, or who my audience would be, or how I would reach them.
US corporate retail jobs: "We're like a family here. We're in the business of taking care of our employees. Your physical and mental well-being is our top priority."
"Anyway, here's your write-up for attendance. Stop being unwell and needing time off, or you'll have to be promoted to customer! Hahahahaha!"
Me: "I accept any pronouns. I really don't care."
Everyone: "He."
Boring! Always! Why?!
I hate it. My pronouns, until further notice, are "not he/him".
There's always a Wikipedia article about something Linux does but never anything about FreeBSD, let alone any other BSD. FreeBSD forums + ycombinator hacker news can only answer so many questions.
My questions in no particular order:
Why does FreeBSD get all the attention???
What is os108?
Why are there still projects for "user friendly BSD" when Linux is taking all of the oxygen for itself?
Was there an enterprise BSD company like RedHat/SuSE on Linux?
How was the mood for BSD users when Linux was taking off/unavoidable
What's the relationship between BSD, Illumos, and Linux (and OpenSolaris when they were still around)
In the BSD community, was the general consensus about GNU Hurd and Minix when those were still relevant?
What was the reaction to systemd's introduction? Was it apocalyptic or did they not know yet?
(When I say BSD, I mean really mean 386BSD derivative)
Why does FreeBSD get all the attention?
To really understand what's going on with the various BSDs, it's helps to clarify what the difference between a "distribution" and a "variant" is. There's no strict definition of either, and some use them semi-interchangibly, a distro is a downstream branch of a system, while a variant is a fully independent fork.
With Linux, we almost exclusively talk about distributions build from the Linux kernel, as maintained by Linux Torvalds and the Linux Foundation, and typically, the GNU userland libraries and tools. Because these projects don't, ultimately, maintain their own kernel, or userland systems, even if do manage local forks of those systems, they aren't fully independent of the original projects they draw from. This is what makes them distributions.
However, outside of the Linux world, things tend to work a bit differently. Both UNIX, as a whole, and many individual forks of UNIX have branched out into complete OSs, which are maintained independently of one another. These independent forks are known as variants.
FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, and DragonflyBSD, are all variants of the BSD family, branched, in some way or another, from Net/2 BSD, and 4.4BSD-Lite which removed the remaining AT&T code, out of copyright concerns, making modern BSD variants the Unix of Theseus. However, despite sharing that root, and often sharing changes between one another, they are completely independent project, with their own goals and directions, maintaining a complete and unique version of the BSD operating system, each with it's own unique and subtle differences from the others.
FreeBSD just happened to be in the right position, with the right people in charge. They've managed to build a BSD variant with features similar to other contemporary OSs. They have excellent driver support, and support for third party software (Did you know they have their own port of NVIDIA's proprietary driver, and have for years?). They're even continuing to work on binary compatibility with Linux, so that they can offer a fully-compatible, alternate platform. There are even distributions of FreeBSD trying to offer complete desktop-ready systems, though they're not especially mature.
What is os108?
I can't say I've ever used it, but it seems to be a NetBSD distribution, like GhostBSD is to FreeBSD, which is a rather curious decision.
Why are there still projects for "user friendly BSD"?
Part of it is that diversity is good, and making a diverse ecosystem as widely, and easily, available as possible means that diversity has a better chance to continue. No one chooses a system they can't figure out, but if you hand someone a ready-to-go system and get them to decide that this strange other system they didn't even know about meets their needs just as well, or better, than other existing options, that's more reason for others to support that as an option.
It also just makes life easier for all those involved. While some might enjoy manually installing and tweaking everything themselves, every time they do a fresh install, sometimes you just want to press a few buttons, and have a working desktop.
Was there ever an enterprise BSD?
Yes! BSD/PC.
While there aren't (to my knowledge) any modern, general purpose commercial BSD distributions/variants, there are some special purpose distributions that have become commercial projects, like pfsense, and TrueNAS, prior to it's change to Debian Linux.
Additionally, some proprietary system's like the OS for current PlayStation consoles (starting with the PS3), are (or appear to be) based on modern BSD variants, like FreeBSD and NetBSD.
How was the mood for BSD users when Linux was taking off?
For this one, if you want a definitive answer, your best bet would likely be to approach the various communities directly, and see if you can get some comment from some of their more senior members.
I can only speculate, but I imagine there were a lot of mixed feelings about both past, and current situations. Seeing as many of the BSDs we know today grew directly alongside Linux, I doubt anyone could have predicted how things turned out.
What's the relationship between BSD, Illumos, and Linux?
There's not a clean, direct relationship between them. It's more a matter of history.
I've already mentioned a bit about the history of modern BSD, but the BSD family itself dates all the way back to Bell Lab's Research UNIX, version 6(ish). Because AT&T was forbidden from marketing their own OS, do to the contract they signed when they were working on Multics, they instead licensed the source. The CSRG at UC Berkeley bought a source license, and created their own, heavily modified UNIX variant, which they also redistributed as the Berkeley Software Distribution, and become one of the earliest major variants. It's one of the oldest branches of the UNIX family of operating systems. Because it's so old, many of the features we're so familiar with today got their start on the BSD fork of UNIX, particularly features related to networking and sockets.
Illumos is what's left of OpenSolaris, after Oracle acquired Sun Micro, and closed the Solaris source code again. The remains of the project were picked up by community volunteers, and forked into Illumos, and a few distributions of it, like OpenIndiana.
Solaris itself is also still very much available, for free, though you do have to agree to Oracle's draconian license terms. If you want to play with a (relatively) modern System V Unix variant, either Solaris, or an Illumos distribution might be a good choice. Like BSD, both Illumos, and Solaris, have a direct lineage to true UNIX. Likely more so than modern BSD!
Linux, unlike the others, isn't a true UNIX system. Instead, it was built, from scratch, with the intention of being Unix-like. It has no direct link to any of the true UNIX families, and does not contain any meaningful UNIX source. It was started as a hobby kernel project by Linus Torvalds, as a reaction to the lack of affordable Unix-like options on desktop systems of the time (modern BSD variants wouldn't become available until a few years after he'd started the project), and eventually got help from GNU to help create a complete OS, as their Mach-based Hurd microkernel was taking too long to get off the ground.
I'd like to give Minix an honorable mention here, as it helped to inspire Linux, as the only real affordable Unix-like system available to anyone at the time. However, it was never intended as a complete OS, but rather, as an educational tool for teaching OS design principles. The source code and license for the OS originally came with Tanenbaum's book Operating Systems: Design and Implementation.
In the BSD community, what was the general consensus about GNU Hurd and Minix?
Again, you might want to ask them this directly, but Hurd, at least, does have a more meaningful link. Minix, as mentioned above, was never intended as a competitor, so I doubt they really though much about it.
When picking the GNU kernel, the choice was split between a 4.4BSD-Lite-based kernel, and the MIT Mach research kernel. Ultimately, there has been mention of regret about the decision to choose Mach over BSD, as it severely slowed the project's development, and is likely the main reason the Linux kernel was able to take over. Ultimately, I don't think Hurd ever became relevant enough to have widespread consideration. However, it's worth mentioning that Mach itself has a direct relation to BSD. It got its start when some researchers at Carnegie Mellon University decided to implement a microkernel architecture by slowly stripping a BSD kernel down, and replacing it's components with userland services until, effectively, all BSD kernel code had been removed.
GNU also isn't the only OS to use a Mach kernel. Despite misconceptions that macOS is based on FreeBSD, it's actually based on Apple's own XNU Mach implementation, along with their Darwin toolchain. It does borrow some code from FreeBSD, but to say that they're directly related would be inappropriate.
What was the reaction to systemd's introduction?
I have a lot of personal opinions regarding systemd. I think it's a good idea that was taken too far, and I doubt I'm the only one who thinks that.
When it was initially introduced, it wasn't nearly as big of a deal as it is today, so I very much doubt that anyone knew what would become of it. It's design is similar to macOS's launchd, which I have no doubt lead to mixed opinions, even at the time.
Personally, I don't think systemd, as an init service, deserves the level of vitriol that it often sees. But, it's not really the init service alone that's the issue. Sorry it took so long. It's a lot of information, and I always try to fact-check myself, as much as possible.
Quick question before I fully commit to switching to Linux: is there a possibility of like, fully killing my pc? Like, assuming I back up my files and everything properly of course, will I always be able to revert back if things go wrong or is there a chance I'll have to actually replace the whole thing if I screw up?
No. Barring you doing a firmware upgrade while you're using it, which always has the risk of bricking your device, there is no operating system, Linux or otherwise, that can do anything to permanently brick a modern PC. That doesn't mean that you can't brick the OS, or the partition table of your storage, and loose your data. But, you will always be able to reinstall another OS, assuming you have the tools set aside to be able to do that. Don't be afraid to try whatever OS you want. It takes an extraordinary effort to actually make a PC unusable.
Thanks for answering! Most of my practical computer knowledge comes from a laptop thats more comparable to a sickly horse, so I was nervous about seriously messing around with the new(ish) pc. Having people tell me that I wouldn't permanently fuck anything up was very reassuring.
I did it, and honestly? It was so much easier than I expected?? Really my only issue was getting the gpu driver to work, but I found a forum that already solved that and it only took like 20 minutes to work it out. Now on to figuring out how to install apps and programs 👍
Does this laptop, per-chance, have fewer than eight gigabytes of RAM? Or, perhaps, it's using spinning rust (a mechanical hard drive), or an especially old SSD?
Quick question before I fully commit to switching to Linux: is there a possibility of like, fully killing my pc? Like, assuming I back up my files and everything properly of course, will I always be able to revert back if things go wrong or is there a chance I'll have to actually replace the whole thing if I screw up?
No. Barring you doing a firmware upgrade while you're using it, which always has the risk of bricking your device, there is no operating system, Linux or otherwise, that can do anything to permanently brick a modern PC. That doesn't mean that you can't brick the OS, or the partition table of your storage, and loose your data. But, you will always be able to reinstall another OS, assuming you have the tools set aside to be able to do that. Don't be afraid to try whatever OS you want. It takes an extraordinary effort to actually make a PC unusable.
why dont linux distros make the kernel a microkernel with a translation layer man i want my microkernel os
Actually, this is a fun question that I'm sure many have asked at some point, in some form or another.
At that point, it wouldn't exactly be Linux anymore. The thing that makes a Linux distro a Linux distro, is the the Linux kernel. Not to say there haven't been/aren't attempts to try and replace it with something else.
To start with, the Linux kernel is incredibly complex. The many interfaces and subsystems it provides make building a complete compatibility layer extremely difficult. Especially when it comes to features like namespaces and cgroups. This is why the original Window's subsystem for Linux (which did use a sort of compatibility layer) never quite took off, and why FreeBSD's Linux binary support is still incomplete. The speed at which the Linux kernel changes doesn't help things either.
Additionally, in order for another kernel, of any kind, to effectively take the place of the Linux kernel, in the real world, it would need to have decent parity with Linux's hardware support. This means that the device drivers that allow Linux to be so usable would need to be ported to, or rewritten for, this new system. For a microkernel architecture, this would require many of the driver to be redesigned as userland services or modules, that can function as standalone units. This would likely be a large portion of the work, and the reason that so few other kernels are so widely used, as specialists on specific hardware who write many of those drivers tend to be few and far between, and are likely already working on Linux, or another existing kernel. This is why Hurd still hasn't changed much. It simply lacks the broad support from devs who have both the time and domain-specific knowledge to really move it forwards. It's the eternal Catch-22 of OS development: If your kernel doesn't support real hardware, why would anyone use it, and if no one's using it, who's going to want to work on it?
Simply put, OSs are big, complex beasts that exists outside of what most programmers are familiar, or comfortable with, and making software for one fit seamlessly into another is a special type of hell (ask any Wine dev). It is very much a case of, "If it were that easy, someone would have done it by now."
You may be able to make a home made kernel that works on your specific hardware with enough time and effort assuming you don't have any hardware with closed specs like nvidia graphics, but getting it to work on literally any other computer would be that much work again.
One of our other coding inclined alters made a simple OS for intel gallieo development boards (it seems to have been done for fun, not as a serious project). I doubt it would even boot on any other hardware.
The linux kernel runs everything from the previously mentioned galleo board, to your phone, your tablet and the servers this website runs on to the computer i'm typing this on.
At this point Linux is THE kernel, it has become an unstoppable force. There is a reason that android and chrome os used the Linux kernel and didn't try to develop their own kernel and that's with Google's resources.
Making OSs portable is a massive topic in and of itself. So much so that Linus Torvalds wrote his Master of Science thesis on the work involved in turning the Linux kernel, which was originally designed to run exclusively on the Intel 386 platform, into the portable giant that it became. I highly recommend giving it a read, for those who haven't already. It is a rather technical read though, and may be difficult, especially for those not familiar with OS development. That said, having a portable kernel alone isn't enough. One of Linux's great advantages are the many distros that have made the process of setting up a Linux system approachable. This has made the Linux OS, as we know it, much more widely supported, well documented, and well understood, despite other OS kernels having varying degrees of the same hardware support. I would argue that FreeBSD has nearly the same level of hardware support as any Linux distro. However, it's not nearly as friendly to an outsider as, say, Linux Mint, which quickly provides users with little to no experience a solid, ready-to-go system that they can start to understand, without needing to dig through documentation to figure how to get a working desktop environment. Being approachable is just as, if not more important, than hardware support. Linux was in the right place, at the right time, and was picked up by the right people to become what it is today. Had things turned out slightly differently, we might all be talking about BSD, Illumos, or even Hurd. There's also nothing to stop another OS from, eventually, reaching parity with Linux, and taking over the market. I often think about this, and what such a system might look like. One day, Linux, as we know it, may be as distant and archaic as research UNIX is to us now. It's a thought warranting, if nothing else, a moment's contemplation.
why dont linux distros make the kernel a microkernel with a translation layer man i want my microkernel os
Actually, this is a fun question that I'm sure many have asked at some point, in some form or another.
At that point, it wouldn't exactly be Linux anymore. The thing that makes a Linux distro a Linux distro, is the the Linux kernel. Not to say there haven't been/aren't attempts to try and replace it with something else.
To start with, the Linux kernel is incredibly complex. The many interfaces and subsystems it provides make building a complete compatibility layer extremely difficult. Especially when it comes to features like namespaces and cgroups. This is why the original Window's subsystem for Linux (which did use a sort of compatibility layer) never quite took off, and why FreeBSD's Linux binary support is still incomplete. The speed at which the Linux kernel changes doesn't help things either.
Additionally, in order for another kernel, of any kind, to effectively take the place of the Linux kernel, in the real world, it would need to have decent parity with Linux's hardware support. This means that the device drivers that allow Linux to be so usable would need to be ported to, or rewritten for, this new system. For a microkernel architecture, this would require many of the driver to be redesigned as userland services or modules, that can function as standalone units. This would likely be a large portion of the work, and the reason that so few other kernels are so widely used, as specialists on specific hardware who write many of those drivers tend to be few and far between, and are likely already working on Linux, or another existing kernel. This is why Hurd still hasn't changed much. It simply lacks the broad support from devs who have both the time and domain-specific knowledge to really move it forwards. It's the eternal Catch-22 of OS development: If your kernel doesn't support real hardware, why would anyone use it, and if no one's using it, who's going to want to work on it?
Simply put, OSs are big, complex beasts that exists outside of what most programmers are familiar, or comfortable with, and making software for one fit seamlessly into another is a special type of hell (ask any Wine dev). It is very much a case of, "If it were that easy, someone would have done it by now."
I replaced the lock on the one cabinet that had been missing for years. Now I have a cabinet that locks, and I can fill it with forbidden texts, like books on witchcraft and Windows software development.
The original REDGRAM language concept used dash-case, which microGRAM has inherited.
Dash-case is also know as lisp-case, as it's the case most commonly associated with lisp programs.
I swear, neither REDGRAM, nor microGRAM, are related to lisp! They don't directly borrow from lisp. They aren't connected in any way! They are destinct languages!
Apparently, John McCarthy is sending me ideas from beyond the grave. Please, send help.
Of all the language designs that I've toyed with, microGRAM is probably the most normal, yet it's still goofy as hell.
Want to generate a sublist of specific indexes, in a specific order, from an existing named list? You can do that.
list(0, 2, 1, 1)
Want to go the other way, and use a named list to generate a sublist from a constant list? You can do that too!
(1, 1, 2, 3, 5)list
Want to perform an integer operation across the characters of a string? No problem.
xor "string"
It seems that, the simpler you try to make things, the weirder they get.
This month has has been very difficult. Not much got done, as far as my major projects. I think I'm just going to call it a wash, and carry things over into next month.
I am worried I may continue to struggle though. I need to either work things out with my current medical clinic, of find a new one. Ever since my previous doctor left, it's felt like they don't really care. Even just getting refills for my prescriptions has been a massive hassle. I'm nearly out of all my medications, including my antidepressants, which isn't making things any easier.
I despise my miserable-ass job.
"Why wasn't this done? You didn't have anything else. Nothing should have been left behind."
I don't know. Maybe because your expectations are obscene, and unrealistic, and anyone in my position who's managing to adhere to them is undoubtedly making compromises that I'm not willing to make? Oh, but that's not what you want to hear, so clearly it's just an excuse, because any reason you don't like is "an excuse". It's never a real reason, and I have no defense, because you've already decided that I'm wrong, and that I'm just not doing enough. It's never enough, is it?!
I hate it here.
I'd like to submit a complaint.
The quality control on this stupid flesh body is terrible. It overreacts so violently to a single drop of its own saliva that it nearly asphyxiates, then takes upwards of an hour just to recover.
I spent far too long trying to fix my development system. The logs revealed nothing. There was no crash, or any clear error logged, either in the system logs, or in any specific log files that I could find. The system would attempt to start Xorg, only for some unlogged process to exit with an error, and everything else to decide, "Sounds like a good idea to me!", and do the same, causing it to drop me right back to the greeter.
The only thing I know is that the problem existed somewhere in my home directory. I only discovered that using brute force, by reinstalling while preserving my home directory, which failed, then trying a clean install, which finally resolved the issue. If I start re-adding the files from my old directory, and it breaks, I'll finally have some hint of where the issue is, but I can't trace silence to its source.
This is really inconvenient, as it's going to delay things while I get the system back to where I can start using it again.
My development system ate shit after upgrading from Fedora 43 to Fedora 44.
It refuses to elaborate what exactly the issue is, but it won't proceed past the greeter. While I could probably sit here and dig deep into the logs to find why it's not starting i3 for my user, I really don't want to deal with this crap.
I'll try for a little while longer, to see if I can find some trace of the actual problem. But, if I can't find some substantial lead of why it's not working, I'm reinstalling. I'm currently backing up the home directory.
This is annoying.
People do this crap your entire life, then have the gall to ask shit like, "WhY dO yOu NeVeR tAlK tO aNyOnE?"
Maybe because I've been conditioned to believe that I'm a weird, annoying, socially inept, failure by all the "normal" people I've met? And if that's the sort of reaction I should expect, why would I want to talk to you? Why don't you go to hell? Does that sound like fun? Because that's how it feels to talk to you!
