NEVER let Freebsd become like Ubuntu

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Ubuntu Linux is often touted as “Linux for human beings”. This is really interesting. The other day on an Ubuntu 18.04 machine we were struggling to setup some very basic networking configurations. Something as simple as setting a static ip on a machine turned into a science project.

A few years back, simply updating /etc/network/interfaces, along with /etc/hosts, would have done the trick. Not anymore. It was then discovered that, once again, there’s a new networking application on Ubuntu. Introducing netplan, a new utility which solved the problem.

Without delving into netplan, the point here is to highlight the chaos of an Ubuntu network configuration. We have:

netplan,
network manager,
systemd-networkd
,
systemd-resolved,
nmtui,
nmcli,
systemd service files,

/etc/hosts,
/etc/network/interfaces,
/etc/resolv.conf, /run/systemd/resolve/resolv.conf, /etc/stub-resolv.conf,
/etc/nsswitch.conf
,
/etc/netplan/netcfg.yaml,

all working together as one happy family. We can be certain there are more files but you get the point.

We pray that Freebsd NEVER becomes like Ubuntu.
 
Ubuntu Linux is often touted as “Linux for human beings”.

It used to be. Check out some older versions; it is quite an eye opener. It used to have very much a charming African / nature theme with sound effects and things like that. Also backgrounds and things where people were linking hands and stuff. It was fun to use.

Now it is very little more than Debian Gnome 3 with slightly more recent packages. If it didn't change so much, it would be quite "human friendly" but since Gnome 3 is in a state of flux, a non-tech savvy user is never going to be bothered to keep up with all the learning.

These days I actually blame this project for scaring new users away from Linux. I also wouldn't be surprised if it was "engineered" that way on purpose with some money exchanging hands.
 
Is this due to systemd or Linux distros in general? Is this network/server or desktop or both?

Definitely both. Systemd is not simply an init daemon. It tentacles are in everything, essentially becoming a sub-operating system. On top of that Ubuntu insists on adding its own abstractions on top of it. A double whammy. The server edition doesn’t have the GUIs but you’re still grappling with what feels like parallel systems.
 
My experience with Ubuntu over the past year or so have been very bad. As a huge generalization, I would say (IMHO) it is a steaming heap of cow dung. I had stability issues mainly, with crashes that required hard resets. Personally, I blame Gnome, but I have no evidence to substantiate that. I say that because my Gnome experiences over the past few years have almost always been bad: desktop lockups requiring a hard reset of the system. This has happened on ANY Linux distro I have used, which is a great many of them.

In all actuality, despite my loathing of systemd, it has never given me any trouble. My dislike of it stems from other reasons that I won't mention because they are certainly off-topic.

I don't see FreeBSD becoming something like Ubuntu. FreeBSD's goals are not to hand hold users to a desktop.
 
These days I actually blame this project for scaring new users away from Linux. I also wouldn't be surprised if it was "engineered" that way on purpose with some money exchanging hands.

It’s definitely pretty scary! Well, Canonical is a large organization, presumably with lots of bills to pay. They have to pay them somehow! :)
 
The plague named systemd is a disaster on CentOS too.

I discovered that, even after having the CTRL+ALT+DEL sequence disabled, if someone insists hitting it (8 times or more) the systemd thinks that you "appear" to be suffering a general freeze and then decides by itself to reboot your machine!

Who in their normal senses would think a "feature" like that may actually be a good idea?

It is good to be back on FreeBSD after a session on CentOS or Ubuntu these days.
 
L O L

cat /etc/netplan/01-netcfg.yaml

Code:
network:
  version: 2
  renderer: networkd
  ethernets:
    enp0s3:
     dhcp4: no
     addresses: [192.168.1.2/24]
     gateway4: 192.168.1.1
     nameservers:
       addresses: [8.8.8.8,8.8.4.4]
 
I don't think Ubuntu is that bad. On the laptop of my 7-year old son I replaced Windows 10S (which is *really* useless) with Ubuntu and it just works out of the box. It's obviously not my thing but for most people it's really user friendly.
 
I don't think Ubuntu is that bad. On the laptop of my 7-year old son I replaced Windows 10S (which is *really* useless) with Ubuntu and it just works out of the box. It's obviously not my thing but for most people it's really user friendly.

Whenever I see people complaining about Ubuntu here is usually because of two things: systemd and Gnome3, one of these matter for the desktop side (Gnome3) while the other is a mixed opinion (Some people hate it, others love it, is more of a servers thing, also a matter of philosophy) Though I haven't seen anyone complaining about systemd on the desktop side which is something entirely else (You learn the hard way that the needs of desktop users are highly different from those of server sysadmins)

Gnome3 IMO is terrible, I have seen its interface and how it behaves and It has gone downhill. Way too heavy and a smartphone-like interface isn't something I can say I adore. It reminds me more of Windows 8 in execution and I heard of very few people who genuinely tolerated that version of Microsoft Windows.

I can live with its toolkit (GTK3, after all, I do like MATE and xfce) but GNOME3 is also a matter of taste and philosophy too. But you can easily avoid it, otherwise, I think if someone were to try and introduce FOSS to someone, I'd probably recommend them Linux Mint with either MATE or xfce. Very user friendly and you avoid GNOME3 while at it.
 
It used to have very much a charming African / nature theme with sound effects and things like that. Also backgrounds and things where people were linking hands and stuff.

I only tried the Live CD of Ubuntu and didn't care for it when I did, but that's how I remember it. Some brown and maybe orange Earth tones with an African theme.
 
Who in their normal senses would think a "feature" like that may actually be a good idea?
The ones who thought pressing escape in the screen lock password widget for 21 times would mean 'I really really forgot it. It's me. Let me back in!'?
 
Isn't that obvious? FreeBSD and other BSD's are what they are, because they aim to be efficient.

Only I see ports having the potential to go that route (of being Ubuntu-like), not the base system.

I blame Gnome, but I have no evidence to substantiate that. I say that because my Gnome experiences over the past few years have almost always been bad: desktop lockups requiring a hard reset of the system..

I saw evidence of that in how audio/libcanberra operates for basic sounds. All it has to do is drop down directly to the sound architecture, but it somehow manages to pull in graphics dependencies. One or two dependencies can go in to that, if the option is chosen to have popups that show text with the sound, or if the program wants feedback that the sound file played. But if those options are not wanted, then it should not pull in graphics dependencies, which pull in more graphics dependencies, and those graphic or feedback related dependencies should be very basic. I remember, even not knowing about programming, trying to suggest how to clean it up, and tinkering with it, but every time, I cleaned something up, they added more complexity into it, each time. I used to like Gnome, and many graphics ports require a version of GTK, but I would say it's the latest version of Gnome. They own that and some other ports, which I don't want to criticize them, but something should be simple when it can be. Desktop users of any OS become dependent on them, because otherwise, we wouldn't have those desktop or graphical programs so readily.
 
systemd is just horrible, how that got integrated the way it as I dont know.

However ubuntu have made some good moves such as compiling base packages with exploit protection out of the box.
 
Maybe it’s because I behave more like an end user and don’t prod around under the hood of Ubuntu, but I never heard of systemd till people started moaning about it. It does sound horribly inelegant though - like something that belongs in Windows or Android.
My objection to Ubuntu is that they went back to the crippled Gnome 3 when Unity was beautiful, elegant and productive.
I don’t get why Canonical repeatedly pours resources into things only to pull out suddenly and leave users high and dry. It’s almost as if the coders are just trying to look as if they’re doing something useful so the money keeps coming in.
A few years ago I bought a phone with Ubuntu on and then they dropped support for it, so quietly that I wasn’t even aware of this until several months later. Why waste all those man hours?!
 
I don’t get why Canonical repeatedly pours resources into things only to pull out suddenly and leave users high and dry. It’s almost as if the coders are just trying to look as if they’re doing something useful so the money keeps coming in.

It’s called the development trap! Organizations have to pay bills, so they create more features, which create more bills, and on-and-on. If they lose on a feature, get rid of it and make a new one, so they can keep paying bills.
 
It’s almost as if the coders are just trying to look as if they’re doing something useful so the money keeps coming in.
It’s called the development trap! Organizations have to pay bills, so they create more features, which create more bills, and on-and-on. If they lose on a feature, get rid of it and make a new one, so they can keep paying bills.
"Features" or tangled bloat? Then, FreeBSD has a better business model.
Why waste all those man hours?!
It also wastes man-hours of those who compile it, and it wastes electricity and productivity time.
 
Well, unity was a fork of Gnome 3 so they share code. I never had luck with any version of Ubuntu I can actually remember using. I probably used the 14 series but don't remember. All I remember is the 16 series and up hard lockups.

As others have mentioned, I am pretty sure we don't have to worry about FreeBSD core being infected with anything related to Ubuntu. Ports, maybe, but then that is your choice as far as installing it. :) It already p***es me off I have to have shells/bash installed because it's a dependency of some ports but I live with it...really, I am just whining ;)
 
It already p***es me off I have to have shells/bash installed because it's a dependency of some ports but I live with it...
It depends on how portable the code is. Chances are it's not coded for portability, and will need Bash anyway, until someone takes the effort to improve the code, which could possibly be a waste of effort anyway, because upstream will go right back to using sloppy code, and tangling it up again, because they will have no reason to use it for anything other than Bash. Bash also has features that many other shells don't have, and that or external commands would be required for that code.

* Edit - I'd like Bash to not be required, and maybe it can be made into not being a requirement for some ports. What should be made optional is binutils from ports, as parts of it are in the base system, after improving or testing the code so it compiles with it.
 
Understood, and thanks. My FreeBSD journey was to a separate from Linux but I understand Linux apps are ported to FreeBSD and there are some things that come along. I am just whining a little, no worries ;)
 
systemd is just horrible,
Well, we all keep saying that, and I'm definitely one of the people who complain about systemd all the time.

HOWEVER: It does attempt to solve a real problem. A Unix system (Linux, *BSD, all the others...) relies not just on a kernel, but on a very complicated system of daemons and services. And to write, maintain, install, and manage services requires a spiderweb of things: a system to start and stop services (init for example), to handle their output logs (syslog, rotating), configuring them and thereby configuring the system (all the stuff in /etc/ and /usr/local/etc and zillions of other places). Some of the system daemons (like devd) are vitally important, and without them, nothing will work. The support infrastructure for daemons is very complicated, many of the designs are outdated (they date back to the early 70s), and configuration of the daemons is a scattered mess. Just as an example: For my little vacation project over Christmas, I'm writing a new little daemon (to collect caller ID information from a modem and log it, so I can see who called), and it's taking me days to configure syslog and log rotation for it.

Once you start running a GUI (which I thankfully don't), it all gets way more complex. Suddenly people expect devices to come and go (plug in a USB stick), with automount support, permission switching (whoever is using X windows can control sound, but others can't), and the distribution between unprivileged end users and fully privileged system administrator typically gets

So the problem exists, and is complicated. Someone needs to take a holistic view of the whole service/daemon system, and come up with a coherent set of solutions. In this sense, systemd is a good attempt, going in the right direction. However, Lennart and the current systemd implementation are all wrong. He is a *** (insert favorite swear word for anti-social egotistical and monomaniacal person here, think "Linus" but less chubby), who is incapable of dealing with humans, and their suggestions, help, and criticism. While he is a quick coder, he has no common sense about big system issues; he thinks the whole world is like his developer laptop. The resulting product is not thought through, and is of low quality in many corners, plus it was pushed into production way too early. Systemd should have been spec'ed by a set of people with a variety of experiences, ranging from $5 embedded systems (my Raspberry Pi 0W runs Raspbian which includes systemd) to the world's largest computers (both the top500 supercomputers and the giant clusters used by Alibaba/Amazon/Facebook/Google/Netflix/... run Linux, presumable including systemd). And for the desktop/laptop market, systemd should really have looked at how the two commercial systems handle things: While we in Unix land always complain about Windows and MacOS, we have to admit that they have high market share, to a large extent because they are easy to use, which includes being easy to administer when used as a simple desktop machine. Instead, systemd had all stages of software development (from requirements analysis through design and implementation to quality assurance) done by a madman who lacks the skill of communicating with humans.

Still, systemd exists, and is becoming the de-facto standard. I've had to use it, and with a few hours of practice, it can be made to work just fine. For my hobby time (of tinkering with computers, because the weather doesn't allow me to tinker with yardwork right now), I still choose FreeBSD, because it's fun.
 
Without getting too off topic: I think the issue (at least one of mine), is that systemd tries to do EVERYTHING, which is not following the Unix philosophy:
The Unix philosophy emphasizes building simple, short, clear, modular, and extensible code that can be easily maintained and repurposed by developers other than its creators. The Unix philosophy favors composability as opposed to monolithic design.
Wiki article. Yeah, Linux is not Unix but software design in general has these principles as well.

Nuff said!
 
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