Will systemd make FreeBSD more popular?

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I was a happy Debian user for longer than I want to think about, but here I am. I still kept a Windows box around for games, but used Linux for most other things. Just when it looked like I was finally going to be able to ditch the Windows box and use Linux for games, systemd happens.

My prediction: in about 5 years, I will be using BSD for most things, but have a Linux box for games.

I feel like bashing my head on the wall until I fall into a coma.
 
In our lab we took a leap of faith and put Red Hat 7.1 on one of new computing nodes (we run Red Hat on computing nodes and desktops while using combination of Open/Free on all other servers). So far so good. System feel completely alien not just because of systemd. My jaws dropped when I realized that there is no ifconfig and that the Red Hat has new strange firewall. First thing I did was to install network tools. Disable firewall and install iptables. All in all system seems very snappy (Having 32 cores and 384 GB or RAM as well as OS on the 600 MB/s SSD helps too). MATLAB, R, Python work as expected. Soft RAID looks the same as well configuring LDAP authentication and authorization via SSSD. I am using my old monitoring tools (monit, collectd, SNMP, rsyslog) to monitor the machine even that I heard that systemd could be used for that. As long as I am getting paid to run this shit I have no problems with it. It still feels more controllable than Windows. Once they replace broken again shell (bash for short) with Windows cmd I will be out.

New installer sucks but I tested that thing earlier so I was not trying to do anything serious with it. It is nice having root on old trusted Silicon Graphics XFS instead of that funny ext2 file system.
 
Oko, yes, ifconfig is dropped from the basic tools. It's been replaced by ip. iptables is replaced by firewalld. That one can be reversed. The installer, is one that the powers that be consider good and my suggestion on the Fedora testing list that they see if they can hire some Debian developers to redo it was treated (rightfully so), as trolling. :)

As you found, both of these things can be, at present, put back in the system. (By the way, I have a very small page on the ip command at http://srobb.net/ip.html). Working at a datacenter, several clients who originally requested CentOS or RHEL-7.x installs have asked that it be replaced with 6.x.
 
scottro said:
Oko, yes, ifconfig is dropped from the basic tools. It's been replaced by ip.
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I thought it was replaced by nmcli & nmtui . As of installer the only improvement is setting default non-root user during the installation and of course replacing clunky Ext2/Ext4 with XFS. The rest of the stuff is non-intuitive but that is beyond the point. Installing boot/root on soft RAID 0 is now royal pain and not even quite possible the way it was possible with previous installer. I don't care because I am pretty much using only single SSD nowdays for OS on my computing nodes and I am not concern if OS gets trashed. I am concern for the people's data.
 
You can still get rid of all the NetworkManager stuff, including the nm-whatevers. I am _fairly_ (though not completely) sure that I've seen that they still don't work in a variety of situations. Yeah, I think you're right that the RH way is to use the nm-blah tools instead of ifconfig, but, judging from various CentOS list and forum posts, many prefer to not do that.
 
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gkontos said:
Still, I don't understand what's wrong with ifconfig and why it had to be replaced by ip.
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Evil people would suggest that it had to be replaced because it "just worked" - but that surely is only a conspiracy theory ;)
 
Crivens said:
Evil people would suggest that it had to be replaced because it "just worked" - but that surely is only a conspiracy theory ;)
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There is a Greek saying that goes like this... "Δουλειά δεν είχε ο διάολος, γαμούσε τα παιδιά του" Now, it is kind of hard to translate but I will try....

"The devil had nothing to do, so he was fu**ng his children to kill his time...."
 
Literally Laughing Out Loud. On Monday, I will troll my Linux loving co-workers with that.

My own theories are probably too trollish to place on a public forum, but generally, it does seem that many Linux decisions are made by people who run single user laptops and don't think too deeply about production servers. In fairness, the defaults might make sense to person one and not person two. Do you figure there are kids who might be dangerous and set it to ask for a password after 10 minutes of inactivity, or figure that it's for the home user who will watch Netflix, where such a default will constantly interrupt their viewing? And where do you put that information to make it easy for the user to find?

I'm digressing (as I ran into that, to me, aggravating default the other day when setting something up for my wife.) Anyway, that line made me laugh enough to merit a thanks.

EDIT: And I think the reason it made me laugh is because it's often what I think about some Fedora decisions I see--that they just figured they better do something to show their bosses they're working.
 
scottro said:
My own theories are probably too trollish to place on a public forum
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I am often amazed, and somewhat appalled, when I try out the most evil, selfish, cynical and sometimes perverted explaination for some human actions, only to find out that I actually was only 90% there.
 
on the Linux side ifconfig was deprecated in 1999; replaced with the iproute2 family. Distros kept ifconfig around for a long time. They probably should not have as the confusion above has been a common result.

As regards firewalld, that surprised me, too. I first realised something was up when iptables -S returned a huge, foreign looking ruleset. This change I understand less well. It still drives iptables, so I couldn't really see the point. I have several Linux boxes of various flavours running iptables and I'm not going to learn firewalld as it'ls largely a RHEL/CentOS thing at the moment, and truth be told a cursory glance at the documentation didn't reveal much of use.
 
Strike another Debian refugee here. I switched to FreeBSD late last year and I am loving the friendly co-operative atmosphere and absence of political posturing which has poisoned the Linuxsphere and has seemed to have turned the userbase into a bunch of robotic zealots, not everyone mind but the frothy mouthed postings of some people and the blind hero worship of others who can do no wrong (naming no names) was just soul destroying for a veteran Linux user - nearly as long as my eldest son has been alive which is bordering on 2 decades. Damn I feel old.
 
I'd wager due to its academic and democratic background, the vibe here tends to be very civilized and/or conservative. I like the idea of FreeBSD being governed by its core committers instead of a huge flux of random people. Bazaar-like. Keeps things sane and consistent.
 
Beastie7 said:
I'd wager due to its academic and democratic background, the vibe here tends to be very civilized and/or conservative. I like the idea of FreeBSD being governed by its core committers instead of a huge flux of random people. Bazaar-like. Keeps things sane and consistent.
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This is a nice dream but in reality there simply aren't enough of core committers to keep up with the pace of the progress happening. Especially on the ports front the committers are seriously overloaded with work and most of their work is just to act as "rubber stamps" for work done by port maintainers who don't themselves have commit rights. This has resulted in many instances of ports breakage because a change was committed without thorough testing by the committer who simply didn't have time to verify the validity of the commit prepared by someone else.
 
I think that this is getting irrelevant with systemd.
Facts: Most of my clients stick so far with CentOS 6.X and nobody wants to move to 7.1 It is not only systemd that has shifted linux to a more Microsoft direction. You can't expect an OS to work the same as a server and as a desktop. The sooner people realize it, the less threads I will see here regarding FreeBSD and desktop support.

Personally, I would love to see FreeBSD to turn on a server only OS. No X, no shit.
 
MarcoB said:
Imo that would be really sad because I think FreeBSD would then lose like 80% of its users.
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Not even close, desktop/laptop users make up maybe 10% of FreeBSD users, maybe even less. The huge majority of FreeBSD are big companies, IT pros and hacker hobbyists who use FreeBSD in server environments, firewall/router applications, embedded devices etc. that have nothing to do with desktops or laptops. You could say that this majority is a silent majority because you almost never see them here and quite rarely on the mailing lists, they know how to seek support directly from the FreeBSD devs and can many times solve their problems on their own.
 
kpa said:
This is a nice dream but in reality there simply aren't enough of core committers to keep up with the pace of the progress happening. Especially on the ports front the committers are seriously overloaded with work and most of their work is just to act as "rubber stamps" for work done by port maintainers who don't themselves have commit rights. This has resulted in many instances of ports breakage because a change was committed without thorough testing by the committer who simply didn't have time to verify the validity of the commit prepared by someone else.
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Yeah I hear you. My gripe about the community sometimes is that they don't much to outreach or market themselves to rack in potential developers/volunteers. The whole structured mentor/mentee thing is nice but as far as "selling FreeBSD", iI feel they're too conservative. This is probably a Foundation issue though, not with the project itself.
 
I will have to agree with kpa here. As a power user with many server installations, my main concern is always to get uptodate drivers for controllers.
 
General purpose or server only OS I'll continue to use FreeBSD. It would personally make me sad to see desktop support dropped though. With the current pace of technology and unless more developers are roped in however, at some point, a hard choice in direction may unfortunately have to be made. That said, after playing around with systemd on Linux a bit, I still have no more understanding of it than when I started. Documentation on it is horrible as well adding to the frustration, at least in my case...
 
It puzzles me why there's more focus on trailing GNOME 3/GTK+ ports instead of contributing to Lumina development. Is it a C++ thing? Is it easier trailing behind porting upstream patches?

Starting from scratch with something better and made specifically for FreeBSD could drive that direction, IMO.
 
gkontos said:
I will have to agree with kpa here. As a power user with many server installations, my main concern is always to get uptodate drivers for controllers.
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Funnily enough as a desktop/server user the only real gripe I have had with FreeBSD since I migrated from Linux is driver support for my other laptops horrible Optimus chipset
 
kpa said:
Not even close, desktop/laptop users make up maybe 10% of FreeBSD users, maybe even less.
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It would still stink to get left behind, but then what would happen to PC-BSD? I'm sure a community derivative would still spring up to maintain a desktop version of some kind, FreeBSD is the only good desktop option if you want ZFS now that Open Indiana is pretty well dead. It still makes the most sense of any BSD or Linux as a multimedia oriented desktop OS for a power user, I think, because if you want:

1. OSS that is still well supported and not hacky like on the the few legacy Linux distros that use it.
2. ZFS for performance and data preservation (self healing software RAID) rather than being stuck with Btrfs or ancient file systems.
3. Non-obfuscated init system
4. Decent graphics drivers (yes, I know people hate NVIDIA, but when that driver works well on FreeBSD it is fantastic)

OpenBSD is just not an option for me because of the file system and lack of NVIDIA support. I could probably live with HAMMER if I switched to DragonFly, but I would hate to give up my NVIDIA GPUs and their ports selection is lacking. Honestly, FreeBSD + WINE + ZFS is a pretty winning combination for someone who just wants to play GOG games, store their data securely, and watch videos in 1080p.

Anyway, my reason for posting is that there is an interesting article on launchd and the BSDs I ran across and thought I'd post - http://homepage.ntlworld.com/jonathan.deboynepollard/FGA/launchd-on-bsd.html
 
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