Why are FreeBSD users seen as black sheep? (+ thanks)

LibreQuest said:
Windows is also really good at malware and running slowly without a way to diagnose the reasons why. Seriously, running Windows on latest i7, DDR5, with NVMe 5.0 storage, at work and it still manages to go slow motion all the time. It's actually incredible that it's capable of making that hardware so slow. I can't imagine what magic they have going on over there at Microsoft to enable that kind of CPU, RAM and NVMe usage to actually make the system run at a snails pace frequently. And that's not even the reason I don't care for Windows. I just don't care for Microsoft. But they do have an edge on other systems when it comes to problems that consume processing power with no ability to diagnose the cause.
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Yes, I don't argue that Windows isn't the best operating system. But for me personally, having multiple operating systems means more software development contracts. I don't have a favorite operating system. I use operating systems only to make money—I use the one that allows me to make the most money right now. If I have a good contract for Windows development today, I use Windows; if I have a good contract for Linux development, I use Linux, and so on. Yes, of course, I pay attention to the performance and reliability of operating systems, but that's not my primary concern. What matters most is the contract the customer is paying for.
 
Andrey Lanin said:
Yes, I don't argue that Windows isn't the best operating system. But for me personally, having multiple operating systems means more software development contracts. I don't have a favorite operating system. I use operating systems only to make money—I use the one that allows me to make the most money right now. If I have a good contract for Windows development today, I use Windows; if I have a good contract for Linux development, I use Linux, and so on. Yes, of course, I pay attention to the performance and reliability of operating systems, but that's not my primary concern. What matters most is the contract the customer is paying for.
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I have old i5 machine with 16 gigs of ram and i installed Windows 11 22H1 on it. This machine has no internet access. It works flawlessly. It is incredible to me how reliable and stable it is just because its completely offline.
 
MrBSD said:
I have old i5 machine with 16 gigs of ram and i installed Windows 11 22H1 on it. This machine has no internet access. It works flawlessly. It is incredible to me how reliable and stable it is just because its completely offline.
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Yes, no network means no additional overhead for searching and sending personal data to Microsoft (and not receiving malware). The network isn't that important for my work (we develop operating systems for microcontrollers and libraries (in C, C++, and Java) for accessing these microcontrollers; all of this is supplied to customers who develop their applications on various operating systems: Windows, Linux, and FreeBSD).
 
drhowarddrfine said:
They aren't out there to get you. They don't make the laws. They enforce the laws. Getting upset because you broke the law and got caught is on you, not them.
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I do agree it isn't personal but for a different reason. We have police and road traffic officers and they tend to not to be that bothered by the dangers of speeding itself (we commonly have dual carriageways at 40mph and motorways at 50mph for example, so going 10% over is still well under the rest of the world). Instead, they simply want cars off the road to reduce the congestion. We have a serious road infrastructure problem here in the UK. The people in charge have failed to invest in the roads for decades.

If they can bump up the points you are given or get you off the road for that little bit longer based on the info you give them, I suspect they will take it. And yet in the UK we are so reliant on cars that if you are banned, you are a little bit screwed for a year. You can't get anywhere, the public transport is defective and the trains cost more than owning a Ferrari per mile.

Whats worse is if you have to retake your test, you will have to wait 6 months at least, just to find an available booking, so you are looking at being off the road for a couple of years. Which is why drinking whilst driving is absolutely avoided because ironically this is one of the only ways they can require you to retake your test compared to going above 12 points (where it would make so much more sense to retake a test).

In other words, the laws are being misused to solve infrastructure problems.
</offtopic_rant>
 
Andrey Lanin said:
Yes, no network means no additional overhead for searching and sending personal data to Microsoft (and not receiving malware). The network isn't that important for my work (we develop operating systems for microcontrollers and libraries (in C, C++, and Java) for accessing these microcontrollers; all of this is supplied to customers who develop their applications on various operating systems: Windows, Linux, and FreeBSD).
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From what I remember the main reason for slow down on Windows were the updates somehow cluttering the system. It wasn't the updates alone but the way they stacked on top of each other.
Why I think that?
Because the remedy was to do vanilla install and do just the one (although huge) current update....approximately every few years.
Never used rolling release i.e. Arch but what I gathered it is also good practice to do fresh install now and then. Just to de-clutter the fixes of the fixes of the fixes.....
 
DanielBowman said:
Because the remedy was to do vanilla install and do just the one (although huge) current update....approximately every few years.
Never used rolling release i.e. Arch but what I gathered it is also good practice to do fresh install now and then. Just to de-clutter the fixes of the fixes of the fixes.....
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Use Arch for years. Never reinstall on the same computer. But need to make update regularly. One time per week at least. Never use rolling release OS on a server...
 
Yeah, if anything, I get a feeling of admiration and respect from other technical people but on almost any social media platform you'll find people who will attack you no matter what you use.
 
msplsh said:
I mean, in your practical sense, you're saying it's controlled by companies paying people to work on it. This cuts both ways. Does ixSystems control FreeBSD?

Yeah, sure systemd suited RH's interests and RH paid people to work on it. Also, it solved legitimate problems at the cost of things nobody cared about as much as they cared about the entire systems that switched to using systemd.
🤷‍♀️
It could have just been RH's thing and everyone could have ignored it.

Whoever does the work gets to do the driving, so yeah, corpos paying people to do all the work. I mean, anyone's free to fork it and do the work instead!
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I'm not sure there's any worthwhile comparison between IX's involvement in FreeBSD (or Microsoft or a few others donating to OpenBSD (OpenSSH) for example) with the far larger corporate involvement in the Linux kernel. The Linux foundation board of directors and technical advisory board are mainly staffed by employees of big technology companies. They're also the ones making the largest donations, along with paying many developers. The difference is "night and day". The BSDs are tiny projects by comparison.

kpedersen said:
Indeed. Though a lot of people did weigh it up and change distros. Some distros like Devuan were even invented to avoid the breakage. BSDs also got a big boost to user-base.

The bigger issue is that diverging from common software (i.e Debian, Red Hat) creates a whole new level of problems. This doesn't in any way suggest that systemd *isn't* a problem. It simply highlights a bigger problem with Linux in general in that you are essentially pulled along by the nose by random people with random, weird ideas.

If you had to choose between chopping off an arm or chopping off a toe... You would likely go for the toe right? That doesn't mean the choice is "good". Losing scriptyness benefits was also not "good" but it outweighs being a hermit or using FreeBSD apparently.
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systemd caused a split - but as the corporate world was mainly doing the work, paying for things and making the decisions anyway, the split resulted in a lot of smaller projects, which opposed systemd, with little to no funding or support vs the likes Red Hat, Debian project and Canonical Ltd, to name a few, with all of that weight and money behind them. Those smaller projects lack developers and many were ultimately just vapour. "Hyperbola BSD", for example, was announced 7 years ago and there is still nothing tangible there. Their website seems to be mostly about activism and politics. Devuan was also supposed to be a fork. As soon as it was announced, most of us using Debian at the time had serious doubts about it and the people involved. It turned out to be a derivative distribution of Debian with some retroactive systemd removal, rather than a fork - the reality is that a fork of Debian on the same scale was never possible for a small group of people with neither the manpower nor the necessary funding. The Devuan "community" also attracts some of the same kind of people the OP referred to - not only users, but staff members as well.

Ultimately, the "anti-systemd" side lost the war and there are just a few obscure distributions and derivatives left. Almost all of these are niche, and lack developers or funding - often for good reason. Some of those venues aided systemd proponents greatly in dismissing much of the critique. I have never seen any other project expend so much energy on FAQs and myth debunking write ups, as systemd, but some of the opponents of systemd were far more helpful.
 
blackhole said:
systemd caused a split - but as the corporate world was mainly doing the work, paying for things and making the decisions anyway,
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It's just a piece of optional software. Someone who can achieve the same with only shell commands is ahead of all systemd users. Same for rc.d, btw. It's meant for people who only want to use particular applications without any technical background knowledge required.
 
The biggest problem for me with systemd is logging. No text file logging, binary files and error messages like a Windows BSOD. Trying to remember some new command to dump a binary log instead of "cat/grep/tail" (which are usually builtins even in busybox), and needing a separate computer to google "ubuntu systemd error nnnnnnnn" to find out "oh fstab had a mount of a removable device and the device was not plugged in on boot"
 
MG said:
It's just a piece of optional software. Someone who can achieve the same with only shell commands is ahead of all systemd users. Same for rc.d, btw. It's meant for people who only want to use particular applications without any technical background knowledge required.
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"Optional" for you and I maybe, but most went for the path of least resistence - not just users, but also developers - so there is far less choice as a result and hard dependencies are only increasing. Eventually avoiding it becomes much harder than just biting the bullet and using it.

While a minority can get on with just a WM and X server, the vast majority cannot - and the needs of the vast majority play the biggest role in determining what the minority find is still available to them. BSD users, very much dependent on "upstream" software, which is primarily targetted for Linux, are eventually impacted by the knock on effect of this.

Many can't just maintain their own OS and handle all of the security patching, maintenance etc - if something goes badly wrong you likely might avoid getting sacked if you were using Red Hat, you probably will get sacked if it was your own homebrew based on something unknown.
 
bda65 said:
Now, while I still don't know why FreeBSD users are seen as black sheep, I do know what they're like: friendly. ;)
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I think that FreeBSD users are seen as 'black sheep' because they're pretty open about not being fans of stuff like systemd, different package managers (RPM, flatpak, .deb, you name it). As for me, I openly expressed my own distaste for proliferation of Linux distros, how Ubuntu alone has dozens of spinoffs, all of them slightly different (and incompatible with each other), and none of them hanging around for very long before getting abandoned. I also openly expressed disappointment in how Linux would switch major components at the drop of a hat - like filesystems, networking utilities, and more. Like swapping JFS in one release to ReiserFS for the next one. Or, ditching ifconfig for ip. I was frustrated with that.
 
MG said:
Gnome has nothing to do with system service management.
What has to exist for what? It will be deleted or disabled.
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You make no sense to me. If Gnome-next-version is including hard dependency on systemd, the fork Gnome before that.

Basically anything that ADDS a dependency on systemd should be forked before that
 
mer said:
You make no sense to me. If Gnome-next-version is including hard dependency on systemd, the fork Gnome before that.

Basically anything that ADDS a dependency on systemd should be forked before that
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What file or device makes the dependency?
 
mer said:
Again, what are you asking? Are you asking "what Gnome thing makes a dependency on systemd"? If so, then I maintain "fork Gnome before that and who cares"
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It seems you don't really know what a dependency is. Try to find a program that's missing 1. You will learn. Show me Gnome not starting because of a missing dependency... :cool:
 
MG said:
It seems you don't really know what a dependency is. Try to find a program that's missing 1. You will learn. Show me Gnome not starting because of a missing dependency... :cool:
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Sorry my 40 yrs of writing software I don't know what a dependency is.

You are missing my point of:
If gnome is adding a dependency on systemd, fork gnome BEFORE the dependency. Then use the fork WHICH DOES NOT DEPEND ON systemd.

So, who doesn't understand what a dependency is?
 
mer said:
Sorry my 40 yrs of writing software I don't know what a dependency is.

You are missing my point of:
If gnome is adding a dependency on systemd, fork gnome BEFORE the dependency. Then use the fork WHICH DOES NOT DEPEND ON systemd.

So, who doesn't understand what a dependency is?
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Gnome only starts when a process called systemd is running.? What process view program does it use to find that out?
We're talking about software with a public source. You can't fake a dependency. It really has to exist and if it doesn't, it can be removed from the source.

Which part of systemd is going to be a requirement to run Gnome?
Also, a GUI messing with system processes and demanding things is close to malware...
 
MG said:
Gnome only starts when a process called systemd is running.? What process view program does it use to find that out?
We're talking about software with a public source. You can't fake a dependency. It really has to exist and if it doesn't, it can be removed from the source.

Which part of systemd is going to be a requirement to run Gnome?
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fine you win. Gnome never ran without systemd. In fact, gnome never existed without systemd.

Oh there were versions of Gnome that ran before systemd ever existed?

Maybe that is what I was talking about.
Gnome existed before systemd
Gnome advanced
At some point systemd appeared
then someone decided Gnome must depend on systemd.

Why is it so difficult to understand that there are versions of Gnome that existed BEFORE systemd and never depended on systemd?

Why is it so difficult to understand "Fork Gnome BEFORE the systemd dependency and keep it separate from systemd"

Really, why is that so difficult to understand?

Yes "gnome-current" depends on systemd but if a fork of gnome happened before systemd then "gnome-presystemd" does not depend on systemd.

Come on, think about projects, dependencies and forks. You are implying that a gnome fork must depend on systemd and frankly that is wrong.
 
mer said:
fine you win. Gnome never ran without systemd. In fact, gnome never existed without systemd.

Oh there were versions of Gnome that ran before systemd ever existed?

Maybe that is what I was talking about.
Gnome existed before systemd
Gnome advanced
At some point systemd appeared
then someone decided Gnome must depend on systemd.

Why is it so difficult to understand that there are versions of Gnome that existed BEFORE systemd and never depended on systemd?

Why is it so difficult to understand "Fork Gnome BEFORE the systemd dependency and keep it separate from systemd"

Really, why is that so difficult to understand?

Yes "gnome-current" depends on systemd but if a fork of gnome happened before systemd then "gnome-presystemd" does not depend on systemd.

Come on, think about projects, dependencies and forks. You are implying that a gnome fork must depend on systemd and frankly that is wrong.
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So, Gnome can't depend on systemd? Glad you're suddenly there. Systemd is a linux thing. Gnome doesn't require it and will never do. It also runs on other systems.
 
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