Was anyone else excited about this release?
apam wrote to All <=-
Was anyone else excited about this release?
niter3 wrote to apam <=-
Haven't been following. I used to be a FreeBSD almost 20 years ago when
I worked for a small ISP.
Back in the late '90s, I ran 2 FreeBSD boxes that handled release downloads for a gaming company releasing a Tomb Raider installment, Daikatana (anyone remember that?) and Deux Ex. At one point, I got to something like 750 simultaneous FTP downloads and they *didn't* *fall* *down*.
Was anyone else excited about this release?
Always wondered what the difference was between them - freebsd, netbsd and o
On Mon Apr 1 08:09:00 2024, niter3 wrote to apam <=-
Now a days I do everything under linux and mac.
On Mon Apr 1 09:20:00 2024, poindexter FORTRAN wrote to apam <=-
apam wrote to All <=-
Was anyone else excited about this release?
I was just posting elsewhere about using NetBSD on a Sun4 box.
Always wondered what the difference was between them - freebsd, netbsd and openbsd. (I know one is heavily code security focused, but other than that...)
Is sun4 the pizza box one? or is that sun3? It's been a long time since I had my sun machines. Though at the time I found OpenBSD ran a little better - though I am sure NetBSD has improved over time too.
10 is supposed to be faster, I don't notice, 9.3 didn't seem
particularly slow to me. It also has new versions of linux DRM but as
far as I can tell amdgpu still needs some work.
Was anyone else excited about this release?
I've never got into the BSD's...
Tried them over the years, and do use truenas (also used pfsense,
opnsense in the past) [- which I know is freebsd, not netbsd].
Always wondered what the difference was between them - freebsd, netbsd
and openbsd. (I know one is heavily code security focused, but other
than that...)
Is sun4 the pizza box one? or is that sun3? It's been a long time since
I had my sun machines. Though at the time I found OpenBSD ran a little better - though I am sure NetBSD has improved over time too.
So, in the beginning was the GE645 and the Multics project.
They were mostly nice machines.
tenser wrote to deon <=-
I've never got into the BSD's...
Tried them over the years, and do use truenas (also used pfsense,
opnsense in the past) [- which I know is freebsd, not netbsd].
Always wondered what the difference was between them - freebsd, netbsd
and openbsd. (I know one is heavily code security focused, but other
than that...)
So, in the beginning was the GE645 and the Multics project.
I've "wanted" to try/use the BSDs over the years, and have tried a few times - found them aggravating and strange. With the state of Linux what it is today, I can find no valid reason to fuss with a BSD.
I've "wanted" to try/use the BSDs over the years, and have tried a few
times - found them aggravating and strange. With the state of Linux
what it is today, I can find no valid reason to fuss with a BSD.
Sometimes I've heard people say BSD is very stable and reliable, though it seems many Linux distros are as well..
Arelor wrote to Nightfox <=-
Sometimes I've heard people say BSD is very stable and reliable, though it seems many Linux distros are as well..
It depends.
Quite frankly, if you want a Linux that does not break too much,
then your picks are pretty much Debian/Devuan or Red Hat and its
clones.
Everything else is either too effort intensive to run
reliably, serves a too specific niche (ie. special distributions
for special tasks) or has unpredictable development paths.
Nightfox wrote to Gamgee <=-
I've "wanted" to try/use the BSDs over the years, and have tried a few times - found them aggravating and strange. With the state of Linux what it is today, I can find no valid reason to fuss with a BSD.
Sometimes I've heard people say BSD is very stable and reliable,
though it seems many Linux distros are as well..
Arelor wrote to Gamgee <=-
I've "wanted" to try/use the BSDs over the years, and have tried a few
times - found them aggravating and strange. With the state of Linux
what it is today, I can find no valid reason to fuss with a BSD.
They are only strange if you try to use them as you would use a
Linux, which they aren't. I got into Linux before I got into BSD
so I know some differences break your train of thought if you are
not expecting them.
Realistically, the reason to deal with a BSD these days would be
wanting to use a system that possesses the following
characteristics:
1) Third party components can be built from source and installed automatically, patched and rebuilt if need be, and integrating
your own components with the build system is trivial. ie. if you
make a program for yourself you can add it to the build system
and the build system will make and install a package for it as if
it belonged to an official repository.
2) Standard packages are still available from the repositories so
you may install a big application without having to compile,
without the need to give up on 1).
3) First-party components (aka. the core Operating System) are
developped and deployed as a block, so you can assume an install
of a given BSD fullfills a number of minimum requisites and
contains certain components. Compare this to Linux, in which a
Linux distribution is not even guaranteed to use a given libc
flavor and the filesystem hierarchy is mutable. If a third-party application is described as Linux compatible it might mean it
only works on certain distribution and fails to work on the rest.
4) It has proper release engineering and predictable roadmaps and
release schedules.
And, in the case of OpenBSD
5) Their sandboxing frameworks are much simpler to understand and
blow Linux equivalents our of the water for applications in small deployments.
6) BSD Auth makes more sense than PAM.
7) Userspace utilities just rock. OpenSMTPD allows you to set an
SMTP server in like 5 lines of configuration, OpenHTTPD gives you
a lightweight HTTP server you can run serious applications on
with minimal configuration. The reverse proxy developed in house
follows suit. A firewall can be set with way less lines that
you'd expect. And so on. This also leads to ease of maintenance
since everything is so easy to understand.
8) The installation procedure is blazing fast.
Quite frankly, for small server deployments, the real question is
why should somebody use anything other than a BSD. This question
has some valid answers, but in practical terms I suspect most
people are running with Linux because if you want to run
$some_random_blog there are plenty copypasteable tutorials for
common Linux distributions to use.
Everything else is either too effort intensive to run
reliably, serves a too specific niche (ie. special distributions
for special tasks) or has unpredictable development paths.
I think that's a little too broad. Slackware has none of those drawbacks, except possibly the variable devel/release cycles.
Also, I assume when you said "Debian" above, you included at least *some*
of it's offspring. One example I'd throw out is "MX Linux" which is Debian-based but has nice tools added, and no systemd.
5) Their sandboxing frameworks are much simpler to understand and
blow Linux equivalents our of the water for applications in small deployments.
Okay, but not something I use/need.
Arelor wrote to Gamgee <=-
Re: Re: NetBSD 10
By: Gamgee to Arelor on Tue Apr 02 2024 08:06 pm
Everything else is either too effort intensive to run
reliably, serves a too specific niche (ie. special distributions
for special tasks) or has unpredictable development paths.
I think that's a little too broad. Slackware has none of those drawbacks, except possibly the variable devel/release cycles.
Slackware is the Linux distribution I like the most, mainly
because it has a bit of a BSD feel. Still it suffers a bit from a
mix of "too effort intensive to run" and "unpredictable
development paths".
I mean, if you want to use it for anything semi-serious and base
Slackware does not have you covered, you will end up compiling
any third-party component from source alongside its dependencies
yes or yes. Slackware fans have lots of automated tools for doing
this and most work great, but having to recompile every single
updated package sucks balls. If you have a fleet of computers it
gets tedious very fast. There are nice projects that let you
build and use your own binary package repositories (look up my
article about Slackrepo in Linux Magazine) but at this point you
are in the "too effort intensive to run" category.
Arelor wrote to Gamgee <=-
Re: Re: NetBSD 10
By: Gamgee to Arelor on Tue Apr 02 2024 08:20 pm
5) Their sandboxing frameworks are much simpler to understand and
blow Linux equivalents our of the water for applications in small deployments.
Okay, but not something I use/need.
I personally think a modern, usable framework for privilege
separation and access permissions for programs is overdue in
vanilla Linux. It is a basic feature nowadays that works
automagically on stuff like Android.
On OpenBSD, firefox installs get sandboxed by default. You are
guaranteed firefox won't make any system call a web browser is
not supposed to make and you are guaranteed it won't try and
access files out of its sandbox. This is the _default_
configuration in OpenBSD and requires no effort. You just pkg_add
your firefox and you get a jailed web browser. This is how it
should work in Linux and this is what they are trying to
accomplish in Linux with mixed results.
The Linux approach is to either use packaging that includes
sandboxing (such as flatpack) or to use some mandatory access
framework (such as AppArmor). Stuff like flatpack suffers because
they usually give too much access to the programs they are
running - like they go and create a sandbox which includes all of
your $home in [!!!]). SELinux will make your head hurt very
badly. AppArmor is fine but requires you to load an apparmor
profile for your applications, and the profiles included with distributions are either too limited or outright broken. Linux distributors have this idea that they ought to have proper
privilege separation for programs but they still don't get it
quite right. You can eventually sandbox your stuff properly but
it hits the "too effort intensive" mark very fast.
I still miss my Sun Sparcstation 2, Weitek PowerUp chip, maxxed memory, accelerated graphics, type 4 keyboard and a 19" CRT. Probably my
favorite work computer ever.
So, in the beginning was the GE645 and the Multics project.
<SNIP>
What a great read! Thanks for that insightful writeup!
I've "wanted" to try/use the BSDs over the years, and have tried a few times - found them aggravating and strange. With the state of Linux
what it is today, I can find no valid reason to fuss with a BSD.
1) Third party components can be built from source and installed automatically, patched and rebuilt if need be, and integrating your own components with the build system is trivial. ie. if you make a program
for yourself you can add it to the build system and the build system
will make and install a package for it as if it belonged to an official repository.
Was anyone else excited about this release?
Funny, most Linux distros kind of feel like a toy to me.
BSD feels more like "real" Unix, but maybe that's just
because it's closer to what I grew up with, so to speak.
Funny, most Linux distros kind of feel like a toy to me.
BSD feels more like "real" Unix, but maybe that's just
because it's closer to what I grew up with, so to speak.
What makes it feel like a toy?
Okay, no argument with any of that, I guess. I think we are envisioning
and talking about two different ways of using Slackware (or BSD),
though. I was not talking about commercial or large-fleet-of type use.
For me, behind my simple home LAN, none of the above is an issue.
What makes it feel like a toy?
It's hard to articulate, as it's more a sense of "feel" than anything else. But I often find that random things either don't work, or don't work as expected, when I put together a Linux instance.
As I said in a previous reply, we may be talking about different
use-cases of whatever *nix ... My case is a simple home LAN scenario,
not commercial or large-scale. I solve privelege/access issues like
*nix always has - with user/group settings. And even that is pretty limited, as I'm basically the only user on my systems. Wife is a
confirmed Win-droid. :-)
On Wed Apr 3 12:46:00 2024, niter3 wrote to apam <=-
Was anyone else excited about this release?
Maybe it was mentioned, but it looks like they have a version for Amiga???
Come to think of it, even within the Linux world, the
situation isn't that great. Things like systemd are
similarly invasive, and systems are developing
dependencies on them (Wayland compositors recently, or
something like that).
What makes it feel like a toy?
Arelor wrote to Gamgee <=-
Re: Re: NetBSD 10
By: Gamgee to Arelor on Wed Apr 03 2024 07:43 am
Okay, no argument with any of that, I guess. I think we are envisioning
and talking about two different ways of using Slackware (or BSD),
though. I was not talking about commercial or large-fleet-of type use.
For me, behind my simple home LAN, none of the above is an issue.
My home LAN has about 15 hosts + IOT, printers, includes two
different physical locations bound together via VPN tunneling,
and features three routers from a WISP gear manufacturer.
"Hello, my name is Arelor and I am addicted to IT stuff."
Arelor wrote to Gamgee <=-
Re: Re: NetBSD 10
By: Gamgee to Arelor on Wed Apr 03 2024 07:49 am
As I said in a previous reply, we may be talking about different
use-cases of whatever *nix ... My case is a simple home LAN scenario,
not commercial or large-scale. I solve privelege/access issues like
*nix always has - with user/group settings. And even that is pretty limited, as I'm basically the only user on my systems. Wife is a
confirmed Win-droid. :-)
The thing is the traditional *nix user/group settings (which I
actually like) are designed to define what an user can and cannot
do, in an environment where multiple *nix users share the same
machine. They were created under the assumption that every
process an user launches is an agent of the will of the user, and therefore should have the same access levels as the user.
In a scenario in which 20 users are timesharing and your main
interest is preventing a rogue user from messing up with the rest
of the users, that model is fucking great.
The issue is that, as an user, you often don't want your
processes to access everything you can access yourself. I can't
think of a legit reason for a calculator app to access your SSH
and GnuPG keys, for example. Given that modern users run a whole
lot of untrusted code, much more than in the old timesharing
days, it makes sense to ensure it does not interfere with
anything else the user is doing.
I think this sort of privilege segmentation is one of those
things Android got actually right and Linux is struggling with.
It is not that users "need" it, but it makes for great system
hygiene and actually makes it hard for some Chinesse hacker to
read your emails because you opened a poisoned *.jpg.
Re: Re: NetBSD 10
By: tenser to niter3 on Thu Apr 04 2024 09:08 am
What makes it feel like a toy?
It's hard to articulate, as it's more a sense of "feel" than anything else. But I often find that random things either don't work, or don' work as expected, when I put together a Linux instance.
What do you mean by "instance"?
Years ago, I would sometimes try out different Linux distributions, and one thing I remember seeing with a few distributions is that one version would install smoothly and things would work out of the box on my PC,
but then I'd try to install the next version and some of the things that were working in the previous version (such as the GUI auto-detection of hardware or networking) would not work in the newer version, for
whatever reason. I haven't experienced that in quite a while though. I've been running Linux Mint on a secondary PC for about 8 or 9 years
now, and it has been very stable, and upgrades have worked without a problem.
On Thu Apr 4 15:38:00 2024, tenser wrote to Nightfox <=-
Yup, I've experienced things like that, as well. Usually
when I spin up Linux somewhere I run arch, if I can, but
some types of machines that's a pain (things like the RockPi
or whatever, then it's back to Armbian).
I put Mint on my daughter's NUC, and it's been pleasantly
stable for her.
Quoting Apam to Tenser <=-
I've been jumping around OSes the last couple of days.. NetBSD ->
Fedora -> DragonFlyBSD (my amdgpu is too new ;( ) -> FreeBSD
On Thu Apr 4 15:38:00 2024, tenser wrote to Nightfox <=-
Yup, I've experienced things like that, as well. Usually
when I spin up Linux somewhere I run arch, if I can, but
some types of machines that's a pain (things like the RockPi
or whatever, then it's back to Armbian).
BTW I run Arch! :P
(I'm sure you've seen the memes)
I tend to always come back to debian, it's quick and painless and you don't have to update the system every 5 minutes.
Mint is pretty good, although I'm more a fan of QT desktops (either KDE
or LxQT.)
I've been jumping around OSes the last couple of days.. NetBSD -> Fedora
DragonFlyBSD (my amdgpu is too new ;( ) -> FreeBSD
On Fri Apr 5 01:51:00 2024, tenser wrote to apam <=-
As I recall, this is one of the areas where systemd
assumptions are starting to impact the BSD community;
GNOME 3 dependencies on systemd for management are the
sort of thing I'm talking about. It's a shame.
I've been jumping around OSes the last couple of days.. NetBSD -> Fedora
DragonFlyBSD (my amdgpu is too new ;( ) -> FreeBSD
Cool. Give illumos a spin, too: probably the only
System V variant still actively maintained (or used in
commercial products!). I find that the breadth is
good in giving one perspective.
On Fri Apr 5 01:51:00 2024, tenser wrote to apam <=-
As I recall, this is one of the areas where systemd
assumptions are starting to impact the BSD community;
GNOME 3 dependencies on systemd for management are the
sort of thing I'm talking about. It's a shame.
I don't know that they were assumptions, but rather deliberate. While I suspect impacting the BSD community was not on their radar, a lot of the linux community didn't like systemd either - and what better way to
force your thing than make it required for the new shiny things.
I seem to remember mailing list posts with GNOME developers activley refusing interoperability patches (i think the one I remember was in regards to musl)..
Yes, I'm a big fan, but unfortunatly don't have an nvidia card, i think openindiana had i915 sort-of-working at one point, but seems the only
way to get a reliable desktop is with nvidia. I have an AMD radeon.
I'm back on debian too :( FreeBSD kept rebooting itself when using the GPU. Oh well.
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