18 Jan
2023
18 Jan
'23
10:48 p.m.
I've been waffling between Linux and FreeBSD as a main driver the past few years.
While I generally find Linux to be all around more responsive and compatible with
hardware, I find configuration and system maintenance much more cut and dry on BSD's
in general. /etc feels a bit less like a jumbled mess and I can usually expect things to
just "work" whereas Linux sometimes there's some hefty finagling to figure
out where distro author X decided to put feature or file Y despite 30 other distros and
other UNIXes even putting it in the same place. To be fair, BSDs only win out here due to
numbers, of course more Linux distros = more entropy.
This is largely the phenomenon that pushed me into building my systems up from scratch
moreso then not. Then the only people deciding how my system works are myself and the
package authors, not some middle layer of distro managers that all seem to have
conflicting ideas of how a UNIX system should work and present itself. If I can do all
sorts of fancy desktop things but can't even expect ed(1) and vi(1) to be around, how
can it be called a UNIX-like?
- Matt G.
------- Original Message -------
On Wednesday, January 18th, 2023 at 8:19 AM, Larry McVoy <lm(a)mcvoy.com> wrote:
Pretty unrealistic to expect the users to suddenly
have the time to do
kernel dev. Solaris opened sourced itself and it's dead.
It's a lot of work to maintain and evolve an OS. Windows, MacOS, and
Linux seem like the future.
As for BSD, they pretty much killed themselves by all the in-fighting and
the lack of someone like Linus. That was obvious 30 years ago and it
hasn't changed. That's why I switched from BSD to Linux.
On Wed, Jan 18, 2023 at 04:10:34PM +0000, segaloco wrote:
I just hope we'll see some attempts at
opening up these code bases as time goes on. Seeing as they're no longer going to be
pushing new copies and will eventually ramp down maintenance releases, opening up the
source would give their end users the ability to potentially float their own improvements
if they can't immediately migrate to Linux or BSD. That said, security implications
of course, don't want to just hand bad actors a code base to comb for memory unsafety
in.
Also this article is BSD erasure :(, no mentions of the big three save that OpenServer
and Darwin have chunks of FreeBSD in them. I guess Berkeley is just chopped liver...
- Matt G.
------- Original Message -------
On Wednesday, January 18th, 2023 at 7:14 AM, Larry McVoy lm(a)mcvoy.com wrote:
> It makes perfect sense, it's a repeated story, commercial loses out
> to free.
>
> On Wed, Jan 18, 2023 at 08:13:13AM -0700, arnold(a)skeeve.com wrote:
>
> > Interestingly enough, Phil Hughes, who founded Linux Journal
> > in the early 1990s, predicted that this would happen one day.
> > This was in a private conversation we had. I thought he
> > was crazy, but he was right.
> >
> > arnold(a)skeeve.com wrote:
> >
> > > https://www.theregister.com/2023/01/17/unix_is_dead/
> > >
> > > FYI.
> > >
> > > Arnold
>
> --
> ---
> Larry McVoy Retired to fishing http://www.mcvoy.com/lm/boat
--
---
Larry McVoy Retired to fishing http://www.mcvoy.com/lm/boat