Hello world out there, Hail to yee all,
I will tell my story of getting interested by FreeBSD sort of backwards.
I am not (yet) running vanilla FreeBSD but thought I could drop a line here, because I feel I am on the verge of installing a FreeBSD based-system on one of my laptops. (And, yes, I know: I won't ask in the FreeBSD forum any support for something not quite FreeBSD. I have read the rules before writing my first post --this is the second.) The word
laptop is important, I'll explain why further. (For now, please, just mark it.) I have not had any desktop computer for years, nor do I have a landline internet connection. Because, basically, I use a computer to write, period. --Basically. More about that later.
Recently I have tried (via usb live sessions) the now well-known GhostBSD, the niche NomadBSD, helloSystem and its predecessor LiveStep, and also Airyx and CultBSD. --Probono's
helloSystem is much promising and I quite like his UX approach. Reading his papers on medium.com is always refreshing and good food for thought. Plus his refutations of the (bad) choices of most desktops is both hilarious and highly relevant. Yet, his helloSystem is not ready for production, I mean for an end-user like me: for instance, the wireless won't work, at least on my Lenovo ThinkPad X230.-- That is why I also tried (again) NomadBSD, GhostBSD and Co. Some years ago (I think it was in 2016), on a spare Dell laptop I was given, I have installed TrueOS, a system that I had been following from afar when it was still called PC-BSD. But TrueOS never worked well on any of my laptops.
Now, there is a gem that is being developed, named
CultBSD, that some of you may have heard about. (It was in the thread of CultBSD that I have posted my very 1st message yesterday.) For a desktop-oriented "
distribution" --yes, I know:
GNU/Linux terminology, not the same meaning as in the D of BSD-- for an eye-candy desktop-oriented distribution, says I, CultBSD is blazing fast! On my 2009 laptop, it flies swifter from usb than the host (Linux) OS installed on the hard drive. Amazing and quite remarkable. --What's interesting with old hardware is that it lets you notice the difference!
Previously, I have of course tried other operating systems: Haiku and many Linuces --and I do mean
many!
Like most people who switched from Windows to GNU/Linux in the 2000s, I started my journey with
Ubuntu. During several years, I was a happy user. But when the Gnome guys went insane and berserk with Gnome3, I switched to Debian-based lightweight (OpenBox)
CrunchBang (
#!). It was a superb distro. Quite logically, I broke it in no time by messing with the source-list, mixing
stable and
testing repositories. (Typical newcomer fatal mistake.) Then I heard about a confidential distro called
Arch, rolling-release and equipped with a powerful cli-package-manager called
pacman. I was not daring enough to install it from the ground up, but then appeared
Archbang, that, to put it in a few words, was to Arch what CrunchBang was to Debian. I had also tried and run other *buntus like PinguyOS, Linux Mint, ElementaryOS. More lately, I also run Manjaro, MX, Void, even some "Slackies", and many others, --the most remarkable of all having been
Obarun, some gem of a Linux distro that allows its user regain and embrace the power and versatility of Arch and pacman
without systemd. Very more recently, one week ago, I have installed
Devuan Daedalus ("testing") on a 32-bit laptop (my dear Samsung N140 netbook), the most problematic of my computers to install anything on not to work toooo slowly. (Hence, a very good test machine for lightweight and efficient systems, provided there is a 32-bit version, which is still the case of Void, Devuan, MX, Haiku and... *BSDs! And that is how I can tell that even the assumedly "lightweight" MX Linux (with Xfce) has already become too greedy 4 years ago, whereas the last Devuan (with LXQt) works quite fine.
Despite this seemingly almost pure Linuxian curriculum, as far as I remember, as soon as I had became aware of what I will call the
GPSS, the "Great Proprietary Software Swindle" (and that goes especially for Microsoft, but also for Apple and for the accomplice hardware industry, quite happy that the consumers buy a new machine every five years to run more and more resource-consuming systems), I turned my eyes on *BSDs.
I always thought that BSD was the real thing, not GNU/Linux. Especially since BSD kernels are not as HUGE as Linux is. Unfortunately, back then, in 2008, I would not dare install any *BSD --even FreeBSD-- on... a laptop! (Depending on what your hardware is, you might know what I mean.) And after all, back then, only half a dozen months before, I did not even know what a wireless driver was... Going Linux was already a big jump for me!
Let me tell some more personal things about my use of computers: I do not administrate server farms or small computer networks, I do not code, I do not write CSS or HTML, I do not even write on so-called "
social"
networks --I quite dislike these. Initially, I came to computers to
write stories and thoughts, period. (Of course, since 1994, the year I started using MS-Word to write poems and aphorisms, I have also switched to digital cameras and digital voice-recorders, hence, I now have also to manage huge amounts of pictures and sound files on my computers.)
Another concrete example of singularity: I am not a gamer. Unlike most boys of my generation, I never had any Nintendo or Atari or whatever system to play games on and hook me to machines running binaries. Ever since, I have never run any game on my computers in my life but, seldom, chess apps. --As I have already mentioned, I write, that's what I do. I also perform as an actor. What need would I have to immerse myself in a digital clumsy crappy virtual world, while I can analogically enter rich, subtle, and interactive fantasy universes, with true flesh & blood partners, often beautiful and sex-appealing?
So, once again, I basically came to computers to write and print my own words. And, although far from perfect, the Unix management of the
keyboard (compared to crappy Windows' one) was one very important of the many reasons that convinced me to go free Unix, whereas I had no previous disposition and was even hardly capable to distinguish between an application --say, word-processor MS-Word-- and an OS --say, MS-Windows XP--, although here better called a US, for Unoperating System.
Because on Unices, among other, we can enjoy the magic power of the Compose key!
(And I am a grammar and typo nazi.) It is my pleasure and delight to be able to type a letter with its diacritic directly from the keyboard, with my bare fingers --not needing to open some dedicated character map utility. This way, when I get tired of LibreOffice Writer legendary slowness, I can write correct French prose in a mere
text editor. (Some of them even allow non-breaking spaces, a very necessary feature for French typography!) All of this is quite impossible in Windows, where you cannot type a capital letter with its due diacritic! (Example:
Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité.) You have to copy-paste it from the Word "special characters" manager. (The same goes in LibreOffice Writer
as long as you use it in Windows.)
(Speaking of raw text editing, by the way, if we do lack an application in this versatile digital world, it's something as simple as
a text editor for non-coders. A text editor aimed at writing in UTF-8 all the human writings and languages and none of the computer languages. This software could be as lightweight as a feather, highly modular, and coded in a matter of weeks... Of such a software, I know not --but I might have missed it?)
Now, back to the issue of the shift between different types of OS.
If my memory serves me well, it's
Theo de Raadt who once said: "
Linux people do what they do because they hate Microsoft. We do what we do because we love Unix."
I do concur --partly. It's mainly true --just not completely. (Pero, "
se non è vero, è ben trovato!")
Because what I am glimpsing is a deep trend of
people who are going to seek shelter into *BSD (and most of them into FreeBSD, because of its user-friendly GUI and live-session capable derivatives)
out of their tremendous fatigue of GNU/Linux, after sooo many wrong decisions have been taken in the Linux ecosystem.
It is now twenty years that we are promised that
next year will be the year of Linux desktop. And it is now twenty years since the "sexy side" of the "FOSS world" ("
Linux is sexy
, dude, ya know, more than BSD"), the sexy Chosen Linux community does just the right thing in order to
not conquer the minimum desktop computer market share it could claim. Just as, for a decade, Firefox is in spectacular decline versus Chrome, the GNU/Linux battle versus Windows is obviously a big
charade.
For... Who wants to run Linux anyway? Gamers? They run Windows. Corporate bitches? Windows too, like their employer. Creatives? They buy Apple --and proudly so!
There is this joke among Debianists that goes: "
Ubuntu is South-African for 'I can't install Debian'." In the same spirit, I would dare say: "
Linux is Finno-Globish for 'I can't run BSD'." Linus Torvalds himself has somehow acknowledged it at some point!
"Who wants to run Linux anyway?", asks I. --There!: there are the ones who want to run Linux: those who
cannot afford Apple computers, those who also
hate Windows (but need it dual-booting on their 64-GB RAM computer to be able to run their stupid games) and who
are/feel unable to run BSD.--
And of course, one of the many errors of the Linux ecosystem was
letting systemd spreading all over the (already) messy
place. And then, things got even more messy.
Yee quiet people of FreeBSDland, I am solemnly
warning you that most people of the Linux crowd who don't want any of this big-kernel-inside-the-huge-kernel systemd, who don't want to be
owned/pwned by the NSA (RedHat's client, remember?), will come to FreeBSD soon or later to look for refuge. And sooner is more probable a scenario. Besides, it has already started, hasn't it? Educated people, be prepared: Eternal September is coming back upon you again.
Now, if that may be a relief to your legitimate thrown of worry, do also know that them Linuxians-to-go-BSD-a-gogo will be the bolder ones --
bold as in daring and audacious, not as in gross. As for the gross, most of the illiterate Linuxians will stay where they are, in the limbo of the systemd & Gnome3 hipster hypes, so happy to sink onboard of the Titanic of classical desktop paradigm's destruction, singing and dancing with the loveboat band. There, soaked in the maze of their own limbo, they will still be able to look with sarcasm upon the poor Windowsians --these poor creatures!-- while going on dual-booting Windows to play 3D monster kombat games.
You will have some of them knocking at your door, nonetheless. A minority of them, who are Legion, hence some serious number of them alright. (I trust you will know how to "welcome" them.) But the majority of those who will come first will be the most articulate, those who throw a lucid stare at what GNU/Linux is becoming: the Third Man between Windows and macOS.
There are two radically antagonist main ways to consider computing and computers.
One of them consists in asserting that
computers are for everybody, anybody. For quite different reasons, that is the discourse of both the GAFAM and... of the FSF, of both Steve Jobs and Richard Stallman.
Steve Jobs (and Bill Gates, and Google, and all the others) used this rhetoric in order to guarantee & enhance their sales. (Consequently, it's no sincere conviction. It's just a claim. Computers are for anybody... able to buy ours.)
Richard Stallman, for another quite opposite reason: because the rational treatment of information,
just as mathematics (says he),
should belong to everybody. It's a common good, it's commonwealth. It mustn't be copyrighted.
On the other opposite hand, one can wonder:
does (and should) anybody fly a plane? It needs so much expertise and it consumes so much fossil fuel. (When working, computers do not consume fossil fuel per se, but they are
made with rare metals and it takes much fossil fuel to extract these metals and build them machines and transport them from one side of the planet to the other. Regarding the ecological issue, they are a disaster!)
Analogically, one can wonder:
should ANYBODY run a computer?
We do not have to chose between these two extremities, the demagogic, and the elitist. We can instead consider that
computers (like Asimov's robots)
should be at the service of everyone --
without enslaving anyone with consumption of personal time, energy, and money. And in order to reach this noble aim,
we do need frugal yet effective operating systems, not bloaty CPU-consuming operating systems. If scientific and technological Progress was not but the myth of the 18th-19th ideology (easily refuted yet still prevailing), operating systems (and also the
world wide web*) would not be heavier and heavier, and slower and slower as each bloody year goes. --And that's why I accuse the hardware industry to have a collusional complicity with the main crapware publishers: the hardware vendors need the crapware to get more and more resource-consuming in order to let them, in deed, go on selling more and more powerful machines.**
Now, let us suppose one minute that this massive madness of increasingly resource-greedy OSes would stop instantly, by the virtue of some magical wish.
The (huge) problem of fixing dysfunctional www would still remain! And that is where another accomplice suspect in the collusion of this
Conspiracy of Dunces is made plain clear: the Google-Amazon-Facebook-etc consortium of crapware propagation, a
cross-platform, hardware independent, and system-agnostic crapware propagation. An
off-shore immaterial propagation, so to say! Today, internet too is a powerful crapware-invaded & invading world, whose corruption alone is able to force most people to buy more and more powerful hardware!
These are why and how, I, who basically was
NOT interested (at all!) by computers and computing, eventually came to be passionate about this question. It is not only a technological and
technical issue for engineers and nerds. It is not only a
geo-strategical issue --some countries, more than others, start fighting to regain their digital sovereignty. It is a
political issue too, in the most noble sense of tarnished word
politics. An everyday life political issue, at the both scales of each individual and whole humanity!
And yet, I do claim the
absolute human right to remain a mere END-USER! An aware and articulate end-user, but an end-user nonetheless.
Because Life has already so much to offer and fight for --and against. How can I, how can you, how can we afford spending our time troubleshooting software and hardware dumb issues!?! It's a matter of lust for life and sheer human dignity.
In these regards, GNU/Linux plays the same game as do corporations like Apple and Microsoft.
I dare hope that BSDs are not the same animal. And I want to check, learn and know.
So, in order to come back in-topic and draw a conclusion, I guess that eventually,
what brought me to FreeBSD, more than the computers (that I was
not raised in), takes its roots in the earth of...
my childhood and teenage experience of enjoyment with good ol' typewriters, starting with the budget typewriter of my grand-parents.***
Because, in the end, this hardware/software mix that we call a computer, isn't it but a digital and somehow
enhanced typewriter, receiving human input and issuing human readable output that aim at
stimulating intellect, imagination, and fancy? Like when we were swimming in the
in-fancy**** of childhood!
Truely yours,
O.
* Did you know that, already a few years ago,
between %15 and %20 of the worldwide internet bandwidth were busy with
Netflix alone? This percentage might have increased since --or decreased, following the rise of Zoom visio-conference massive home-use subsequent to the Covid!
** Cf.
May’s &
Wirth’s laws, which read, respectively: "
Software efficiency halves every 18 months, compensating Moore’s Law."; and "
Software gets slower faster than hardware gets faster."
Inspired by these insightful models, I propose this law (Soller's law): "
Software improves at sucking faster than hardware improves at blowing."
*** Even if more performant typewriters would have appeared on the market in the meanwhile, you could always use the typewriter that your grand-mummy or grand-daddy had bought 40 years before!
**** I borrow this play on words to 18th Century Scottish philosopher
David Hume, a thinker mighty worth reading.
PS. Thank you already for reading, and, thank you in advance for any feedback, even controversial!
.
