91–100 of 254 posts
Why would you punish yourself with various *BSDs when you can have OpenRC and more advanced ports on Gentoo? Do people really associate systemd, Gnome and other nuisances with Linux?
I don't care about systemd, as I want to use OSes that embrace modern architectures, unikernels, containers, safer programming languages, improved UI stacks,.... This rant is a good example how luddite users rather stay stuck in a UNIX System V world with their green phosphor VT100 terminals.
Those kinds of people will always exist - they've spent many hours learning it the good old hard way, and I'm damned if you kids are going to make it any easier! You lazy so-and-sos.
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I'm not a professional sysadmin, but as a developer with a bunch of virtual servers systemd has only made things far easier. Writing init scripts used to be a real pain, now I can set up a unit file in two minutes and it works... Maybe there's something to be said for "sysadmins who want to be able to model the entire boot process and run-state in their head" but with correct information about dependencies and so on,…
> Writing init scripts used to be a real pain, now I can set up a unit file in two minutes and it works... This. I'm not saying systemd is the best answer, but I really think sysadmins could learn a thing or two from developers. Nearly every custom init script I've ever seen has bugs, and isn't portable between systems. Where are the unit tests? Code reuse? Focus on maintainability/readability? Shell scripting used t…
I don't "hate" systemd either, I just think it's a bad approach. It flies in the face of the "open architecture" concept and stifles innovation. It discourages users from learning about how their operating system works, and it unnecessarily puts too much control of a fundamental component of the OS in the hands of a too-small number of people. None of these reflect the Linux I grew up with. Thus, I am not a fan of sy…
ossreality you are [dead]
I'm one of the people who jumped ship to OpenBSD in the last year or so. I think I first touched a Linux machine in 1997 or 1998. systemd has been part of the reasons I did that for precisely the same reason. There is a lot of development in the ecosystem dominated by Freedesktop.org, Gnome and (to some degree) large commercial players like RedHat and SUSE. It's more efervescent than it's ever been. Fifteen years ago…
> I'm one of the people who jumped ship to OpenBSD in the last year or so. Ha. FreeBSD here. And so long as you get the right hardware, I find BSD to be far simpler than linux distributions out there. Ports? Beautifully elegant and simple. Configurable. Magnitudes easier than configuring rpm/debs. Getting a package approved in debian? Alioth? No offense, the wiki, all these pages on the debian website - they have no…
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I've occasionally used {Net|Free|Open}BSD over the past few years (in fact, I think my Jornada in the back of the closet still runs NetBSD). I kept sticking to Linux partly because I was using it at $work, partly because it was simple enough and I'm kindda lazy. But yeah: > I find BSD to be far simpler than linux distributions out there. The way OpenBSD handles WiFi configuration is a good example of this. Want to co…
While I don't disagree that wpa_supplicant has been spawned from hell, I find it strange that the existence and popularity of NetworkManager is given as a clue for why {Net|Free|Open}BSD is better. You know, connecting to a WPA protected Wifi network is not the only problem users have. For example, another one would be connecting to a VPN, a task that NetworkManager greatly simplifies, assuming that such integration…
What this did though is pretty much make it where Gnome was the only usable option, or you had to fight a good deal to make something else usable.
as Fedora's desktop choices seem particularly rough, and have pretty much left me with using Linux in VM environments from Macs.
This is very quickly becoming the default for most developers I know, with a few exceptions here and there.
I don't think systemd hurts too bad in the service statup environment once you rememer the commmands are all different, but I don't like what it's doing with creeping into other areas, like what it does with logging.
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> For example, another one would be connecting to a VPN, a task that NetworkManager greatly simplifies, assuming that such integration is available of course (e.g. if you think connecting to a Wifi network is problematic, try connecting to a L2TP over IPSec VPN). That's because there is equally no uniform and simple way to connect to use those, either. The problem is that the "simplification" that NetworkManager prov…
Network Manager still has problems. I've had a lucky streak for a few years where it hasn't given me problems, but the other day the GUI decided not to save my settings anymore. It looks like it does, but it doesn't. If I kill the beast and tap in the commands it just works, but if I run the daemon it keeps feeding the backends with old settings. How do I debug this? There's just sockets and layers of GTK. I'll proba…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've occasionally used {Net|Free|Open}BSD over the past few years (in fact, I think my Jornada in the back of the closet still runs NetBSD). I kept sticking to Linux partly because I was using it at $work, partly because it was simple enough and I'm kindda lazy. But yeah: > I find BSD to be far simpler than linux distributions out there. The way OpenBSD handles WiFi configuration is a good example of this. Want to co…
actually, wpa_supplicant isn't that hard to configure as long as you only use the GUI. just scan for APs, double-click on the network, and type in the PSK. no documentation-reading required.
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> I'm one of the people who jumped ship to OpenBSD in the last year or so. Ha. FreeBSD here. And so long as you get the right hardware, I find BSD to be far simpler than linux distributions out there. Ports? Beautifully elegant and simple. Configurable. Magnitudes easier than configuring rpm/debs. Getting a package approved in debian? Alioth? No offense, the wiki, all these pages on the debian website - they have no…
I've occasionally used {Net|Free|Open}BSD over the past few years (in fact, I think my Jornada in the back of the closet still runs NetBSD). I kept sticking to Linux partly because I was using it at $work, partly because it was simple enough and I'm kindda lazy. But yeah: > I find BSD to be far simpler than linux distributions out there. The way OpenBSD handles WiFi configuration is a good example of this. Want to co…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
While I don't disagree that wpa_supplicant has been spawned from hell, I find it strange that the existence and popularity of NetworkManager is given as a clue for why {Net|Free|Open}BSD is better. You know, connecting to a WPA protected Wifi network is not the only problem users have. For example, another one would be connecting to a VPN, a task that NetworkManager greatly simplifies, assuming that such integration…
> For example, another one would be connecting to a VPN, a task that NetworkManager greatly simplifies, assuming that such integration is available of course (e.g. if you think connecting to a Wifi network is problematic, try connecting to a L2TP over IPSec VPN). That's because there is equally no uniform and simple way to connect to use those, either. The problem is that the "simplification" that NetworkManager prov…
That's not true. OpenBSD developers want this. There are several ideas floating around about making the kernel cache wifi passwords, scan and re-connect automatically when it lost link to the AP. This topic keeps coming up during hackathons.
For various reasons it's not as easy to do as one might expect.
The net80211 layer and wifi device drivers don't keep track of link state to the AP at present. This would need to be implemented first. It is essentially client-side roaming support. One way of doing this is to count missed beacons and assume the AP is out of range if no beacons have been seen for a while. Some devices provide such counters in hardware, some don't. The biggest part of the challenge is to make this work seamlessly with _every_ driver.
Then there's a risk of feature bloat. Add too much automation and you end up with something opaque like network manager which just pisses many people off. Add too little automation and you don't cover many use cases. And networking is not just about wifi, it's at least about ethernet and VPN as well. Some tools already exist to handle aspects of this (e.g. ifstated(8), trunk(4), interface priorities managed with ifconfig(8), a ton of ipsec tooling), and should be properly integrated in the design.
Another question is how to integrate with desktop wireless tools that come from Linux (e.g. wifi network pop-up menus for KDE4 and Gnome3) which usually require a backend using Linux-specific ioctls or dbus/NetworkManager/systemd APIs to function. But seamless integration with desktops would be outright awesome and make the system much easier to use for non-technical users.
There's probably a couple of gsoc projects worth of work in this. If someone is seriously interested ("no talk without diffs attached" kind of serious) in pursuing this I might be available to act as a mentor.