Linux is bad doesn t tell us why we should use BSD
Migrate Everything from Linux to BSD
121–130 of 169 posts
Re: Migrate Everything from Linux to BSD
#122Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's horrible for environments with split horizon DNS. It presumes that the only network that should exist are home users consuming public Internet cloud services. For privacy it's a discussion of do I trust my obnoxious non-US ISP or a US based .com with seeing all my browsing habits based on DNS queries. At least I could have legal recourse with my ISP in my own country, and there is slightly better privacy laws.
Split DNS is a stupid, stupid idea. But DoH doesn't sound like an improvement.
It was a fine simple solution until DoH. In some internal environments the internal traffic volume can be much higher than the few services that might be publicly exposed.
Sure lots of ways you could do it - get a fat edge firewall to hairpin the traffic + support Internet access but you end up paying a lot more for all the threat licenses on the oversized edge. Could add many more tiers, maybe more translations or overlays... but why bother with a lot more complexity or especially more cost just because someone saw a threat in another country and are trying to solve a problem that does not apply to most.
Further more there can be internal only host names that are now getting probed and exposed externally. Exfiltration to a US company in the name of "security"
Re: Migrate Everything from Linux to BSD
#123Earlier quoted context omitted.
Running a distro is a ton of work. Writing your own one off init scripts per package is even more work. The short answer is...Red Hat has money and threw it behind systemd. Like them or hate them, they are in many ways the deciding fate of Linux systems. So, other distros fall in line. Ubuntu is a contender, but gave in and followed suit too. Void and Solus are both good distros that don't use systemd. I'd go as far…
You're half right, but writing init scripts is by far the easiest part of not running systemd. As a sibling comment lightly puts it - "various shims exist".
Writing a few is super simple. But distros have tens of thousands of packages. Most people use it or a derivative of Ubuntu, RedHat, or Arch. All provide packages with systemd files. Heck, even most upstream packages are.
Re: Migrate Everything from Linux to BSD
#124Earlier quoted context omitted.
I really don’t get the weird cult of people seemingly obsessed with Lennart. The man sets out to solve really hard problems in the Linux desktop space, isn’t afraid of tackling complexity when it shows up in the problem domain, and is obsessed with correctness. That last one gets him in trouble from people who want him to be more pragmatic but I personally really appreciate it. I really admire him for being the poste…
I can agree with not taking things personally but "obsessed with correctness" is not how I would describe systemd or PA
One thing I’ve never understood is how network-manager relates to all this brokenness: on every single Linux distribution I’ve run, I’ve had to hack around network-manager to avoid random broken stuff. Similarly, whatever was wrong with ifconfig and friends? ip might be “better”, but its documentation has been horrible and it obsoletes my 20 or so years of experience with Linux networking for no real gains
Re: Migrate Everything from Linux to BSD
#125I've been using Linux as a daily driver on laptops for about the last 12 years. I mostly do backend service development, having code that ultimately runs on a Linux server, so it's been quite easy for me to adopt. I would have installed BSD on one of my primary dev laptops by now, but there's one huge software compatibility missing for me: https://wiki.freebsd.org/Docker Docker's currently broken. It's not that I nee…
You can use Bhyve and run Docker in a Linux virtual machine. Docker works similarly under MacOS using the Hypervisor Framework. FreeBSD would need to radically change in order to implement Docker natively.
Re: Migrate Everything from Linux to BSD
#126Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Systemd is a replacement for Unix... I suppose that in 10 years a linux kernel + systemd could be a complete system, with little need for other userland. 'Doing many things, none of them well' is actually the opposite of UNIX. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_philosophy
Sometimes you want a different balance — say, in embedded systems. If you think about busybox, it does something similar, only doing a better job at looking like the traditional userland. There is nothing bad about it. What I find bad is forcing everyone to jump on the same bandwagon, no matter which bandwagon. If I wanted choices made for me, I'd buy a Mac.
ugh, I was so excited when my POWER9 arrived... and then I started looking at the OpenBMC stack.
Re: Migrate Everything from Linux to BSD
#127Earlier quoted context omitted.
Honest question, if nobody likes systemd, then why is it still around and why is it so difficult for me to find a distro that hasn't adopted it?
I was careful not to include any value judgements in my comment. I simply wanted to lay to rest this "init system" business. However, you ask a good question. Lots of people do like it, supposedly. But I think there's a large clue to its controversial nature in that people still call it an "init system", and pointing out that it isn't is interpreted by some as an attack. Basically, it started out as an init system, w…
> Basically, it started out as an init system... But systemd started to expand into its "middleware" position, absorbing vital system functions like udev.
Not true. From the start it was positioned as much more than an init system. This is clear just skimming the blog post announcing systemd http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/systemd.html
Among other things, it talks about:
-deferring launch of some services until they are needed, to speed up boot
-launching additional services and shutting down others in response to hardware changes (e.g. adding a usb device).
-taking some or all socket management away from daemons so that sockets can be ready before daemons are live or daemons can be shut down when there is no activity
-“babysitting” services including through cgroup based process management
-managing (some of the) access to /home and other directories
It’s quite a broad scoped announcement. Toward the end there is a “short list of other features”, numbered, ending at 20. Under “Where is this going?” he writes, “ The feature set described above is certainly already comprehensive. However, we have a few more things on our plate.”
systemd clearly started out as a broad based solution, and reading through that post, looking at the problems it addresses, and considering that launchd and upstart tackled similarly many issues, it’s clear why it is so broad - the world has changed. In the 70s on a pdp 11 it was sufficient to launch some daemons at boot, keep an eye on getty, and call it a day. Maybe ~50 years later a new, more comprehensive system makes sense? When Linux runs laptops and phones that are endlessly reconfiguring themselves in response to network, Bluetooth, usb, when systems are sleeping and waking routinely, when vastly more services run on a single machine, when conserving battery is important, when boot time can be reduced to seconds if things are better orchestrated? “standard ways of doing things” have changed in every other sector of society, basically, why wouldn’t they finally change in OS service management?
Re: Migrate Everything from Linux to BSD
#128Earlier quoted context omitted.
I just can't get myself worked up over systemd. Every in-principle objection I have to systemd also applies to the Linux kernel itself—but orders of magnitude "worse." Principles aside, in reality, systemd has been a complete non-issue for me and a massive quality of life improvement for Linux as a desktop operating system.
That’s kind of where I am. I have yet to run into issues with systemd in practice. I suppose I did run into two but they both came down to old style init scripts that didn’t work right and so systemd couldn’t make sense of them. Is it not possible to turn off things like systemd’s DNS server, etc? I imagine if you care about such things you should be able to reconfigure your OS to use something else instead.
I run it in practice but I don't trust it enough to run critical services under it (instead I use runit started from systemd) and it does have to much overreach which bit me several times. For instance setting the number of open files and other resource limits. Let's just say I'd rather use runit or even openrc instead.
It is possible to disable stuff like systemd-resolved or systemd-timesyncd but it takes extra work which should be done by installing another package that accomplishes the same task (unbiound, chrony) just like as one MTA replaces another on Debian.
Re: Migrate Everything from Linux to BSD
#129This article insight is GPL 'virality' forces commercial developers to modify and maintain
Linux components as open-source which results in Linux being developed for the commercial developers benefit, vs BSD license allowing commercial developers to keep their modifications to themselves. The latter prevents companies from directing/pressuring OS development and removes incentives to meddle in design - while it does lose 'progress' it retains more freedom in choosing the direction of progress.
Re: Migrate Everything from Linux to BSD
#130Earlier quoted context omitted.
Honest question, if nobody likes systemd, then why is it still around and why is it so difficult for me to find a distro that hasn't adopted it?
I was careful not to include any value judgements in my comment. I simply wanted to lay to rest this "init system" business. However, you ask a good question. Lots of people do like it, supposedly. But I think there's a large clue to its controversial nature in that people still call it an "init system", and pointing out that it isn't is interpreted by some as an attack. Basically, it started out as an init system, w…
> This wasn't considered a particularly invasive change at the time.
It was pretty invasive - I tried to keep using Debian without systemd, but indirect dependencies always brought it in. Until I switched to Devuan.
And the dependencies brought in EVERYTHING. You could no longer mix and match, pick one part from here if it worked for you, and another part from there.
Which lead to the criticism that "systemd is not modular". Which Poettering denied, pointing out that there are modules at systemd-compile time, completely missing the point.
> So, more or less, people resent systemd because it's difficult to find - or build - a distro without it.
And I wouldn't have minded systemd as an INIT SYSTEM - the existing scripts WERE pretty bad. But systemd is like the Borg - it tries to assimilate everything. And it broke quite a bit of existing functionaility along this path.