Was anyone else excited about this release?

Andrew

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Was anyone else excited about this release?

Haven't been following. I used to be a FreeBSD almost 20 years ago when I worked for a small ISP.

Now a days I do everything under linux and mac.

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apam wrote to All <=-

Was anyone else excited about this release?

I was just posting elsewhere about using NetBSD on a Sun4 box. I'd like
to go back to a traditional *nix, I have a 32-bit Intel box I might want
to try it on (i think they still support x86...)



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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*.



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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*.

Yes, from my experience they were rock solid systems. Except when I was playing with some exploits and decided to test on or production website box. :)

Opps!

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Re: NetBSD 10
By: apam to All on Mon Apr 01 2024 08:57 pm

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...)


...δεσ∩
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Re: NetBSD 10
By: deon to apam on Tue Apr 02 2024 09:12 am

Always wondered what the difference was between them - freebsd, netbsd and o

NetBSD is developped very aggressively, so they get a lot of features but they are not always packaged in a way which is easy to consume by end users. Yeah, FDE support is present butif you need to install a FDE system you will need to do all the manual work yourself.

OpenBSD is pretty much a system designed by the developers for their own use. Development is slower but stuff is much more likely to work from the get go since stuff is designed to go into production directly (even if just on some developer's server). This is the reason why OPenBSD's sandboxing framework was applied to most of the system as soon as it was developped. THEY CREATED IT
because they wanted to use it, therefore they ensured it was ready for use.

FreeBSD is prety much a BSD Licensed Linux distribution :-) It caters to corporate use and aims at being compatible with mainstream stuff even if that stuff is not very BSDy.

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On Mon Apr 1 08:09:00 2024, niter3 wrote to apam <=-

Now a days I do everything under linux and mac.

So do I, but still love netbsd.

I've been having fun setting it up on a hp usff pc i had, have lxqt set up and some other fun things.

I have been using my iMac for the past few weeks, but everything just kind of works there, and was getting a little bored.

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.

Andrew

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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.

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.

Andrew

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Re: NetBSD 10
By: deon to apam on Tue Apr 02 2024 09:12 am

Always wondered what the difference was between them - freebsd, netbsd and openbsd. (I know one is heavily code security focused, but other than that...)

It looks like someone answered this. I wanted to add that Mac OS is basically another BSD-type OS, as it's based on Darwin, which has BSD roots.

Nightfox
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Re: Re: NetBSD 10
By: apam to poindexter FORTRAN on Tue Apr 02 2024 09:06 am

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.

Sun 4 was the microsparc architecture, if memory serves. The "shoebox" Suns like the Sparcstation LX, the pizzabox Sparc 2/5/10/20 all were Sun4 architecture. Mine was a Sparcstation 2 - I loved the dimpled case and the type 4 keyboard.
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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.

I'll have to look into this again one day.. To many other projects on the go. :>

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Was anyone else excited about this release?

I'm not too sure when it was released, but know I've been using it for at least some months...

It's a killer version; I like it b/c it still has i386 versions - even if floppy disks are needed. :P



|07p|15AULIE|1142|07o
|08.........

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On 02 Apr 2024 at 09:12a, deon pondered and said...

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.
And Multics was good. But it was expensive and Bell Labs
dropped out of the project and went back to wandering in the
desert of batch systems. Then the prophet ken made a bargain
with some acoustics people to use an obsolete PDP-7, and UNICS
was born. The faithful gathered round and built a temple,
eventually being successful in proselytizing to management
to fund a PDP-11, and UNICS was moved to that machine, and
became Unix in the process. Then the prophet ritchie came
in from the cold, and took some of the early writings of ken
and from those beget C, and Unix was reborn in its own image.
Then ken went on a pilgrimage to his alma mater, Berkeley,
and took Unix with him, wherefrom it was installed on a PDP-11
in Cory Hall. Then, a few years later, lo, the great empire
DEC created a new vessel for computation, the VAX. And a
VAX was sent to Bell Labs, and Unix was moved to it, and then
that was put on a tape (with a holy book titled, "32/V") and
that tape was sent to Berkeley, where the prophet joy and
some of his acolytes began assembling the cool programs they
had written and sending them out on tapes to anyone who wanted
a copy: the Berkeley Software Distribution (shells, editors,
and a Pascal system were on those early tables). Thus, BSD was
born.

Many years passed, and BSD became both mighty and well-known,
with large representation on USENET. Eventually, the VAX fell
from favor, but BSD went on. Then it was that a wandering
heretic known as Bill Jolitz, together with his wife, Lynn,
ported BSD to the 80386 microprocessor, with the saga of this
adventure told in the pages of Dr Dobbs Journal. Thus, 386BSD
was sent off into the world.

But it was buggy, and slow, and crashed a lot. So people started
writing patchkits for it. Jolitz, more a mendicant than a
preacher, was loathe to take these patches, so NetBSD and FreeBSD
both independently sprang up to carry forward the BSD way. FreeBSD
was, "turning PCs into workstations" before it acquired, "The Power
to Serve." NetBSD started cleaning up the BSD code and porting it
more widely (such as to the Alpha!).

But hark that, at this time, some of the acolytes from Berkeley
formed a company: BSDi, and released their own fork of 386BSD
called BSD/OS. Their phone number was "1-800-ITS-UNIX". However,
AT&T, which owned the rights to Unix, claimed vile heresy and
sent them commissars to the Bay Area to tell BSDi to knock it the
hell off. This led to a lawsuit, at which point it was realized
that AT&T had taken a bunch of BSD code and copied it into System
V Unix while removing the copyright due to the Berkeley regency.
A countersuit was mounted.

As this wound through the courts, a Finnish programmer named Linus
Torvalds started a little project for his own education that he
called "Linux." Everyone who wanted Unix at home but didn't want
to tango with lawyers started running that.

Finally, the great war between AT&T, BSDi, and UC Berkeley ended,
with no victors. The descendants of 386BSD continued on, but UCB
itself stopped working on it (everyone involved having finally
graduated or gone on to a startup).

Then one day, Theo de Raadt, a world class flaming asshole, shouted
at someone in email to "stop ramming your cock down my throat" and
was kicked out of NetBSD. In spite, he created his own project:
OpenBSD, that focused on security first and foremost.

Many years later, FreeBSD tried to do down a path of M:N scheduling
that is paved with treachery, and Matt Dillon forked off Dragonfly
to explore another route for kernel-level parallelism.

And that brings us to the present day: Linux won the Unix wars, the
BSDs are a shadow of their former selves.

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On 02 Apr 2024 at 09:06a, apam pondered and said...

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.

Sun4, sun4c, and sun4m all refer to variants of the 32-bit SPARC
architecture. For that matter, so does sun4v, but you're unlikely
to run across one of those machines unless you've got a lot of
space and a big budget for power. This is distinct from sun4u,
which was the 64-bit UltraSPARC architecture. Often when someone
says "sun4" they're informally referring to the 32-bit machines;
these came in a variety of form-factors: the famous "pizzabox"
machines like the SPARCstation 1, SS1+, SS2, SS10, etc; the "shoebox"
like the LX, IPX and IPC, a deskside format like the Sun 4/280, a
variety of rackmountable server configurations that could also be
floor standing (the 670 and others). There were some that were
diskless (they booted off of the network) and had integrated black
and white monitors: the SLC and ELC.

They were mostly nice machines.

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So, in the beginning was the GE645 and the Multics project.

Epic tape of BSD history, thanks for the great read!!


Chris/akacastor

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Re: Re: NetBSD 10
By: tenser to apam on Wed Apr 03 2024 08:10 am

They were mostly nice machines.

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.
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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.

<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.



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Re: Re: NetBSD 10
By: Gamgee to tenser on Tue Apr 02 2024 04:53 pm

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..

Nightfox
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Re: Re: NetBSD 10
By: Gamgee to tenser on Tue Apr 02 2024 04:53 pm

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.


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Re: Re: NetBSD 10
By: Nightfox to Gamgee on Tue Apr 02 2024 03:02 pm

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.


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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.

Or Slackware... Known for stability/reliability. ;-)

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.


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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,

I've heard that too, and fully believe that it's true.

though it seems many Linux distros are as well..

Certainly. Some more than others, maybe, but most any mainstream distro
is stable enough for nearly anything.


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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.

Fair enough - I admittedly did not spend enough time on my experiments to
get past that.

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.

Okay, that sounds attractive. Just for clarity, all of my comments here
and below are mostly in regards to Slackware Linux, which I've used extensively and know the best. For the above paragraph, I can do that
with Slackware (think Slackbuilds.org).

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).

Same, again with Slackbuilds (which of course is compiling, but
automated), and from places like AlienBob.

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.

I think Slack is pretty standardized and includes all "standard stuff" by default.

4) It has proper release engineering and predictable roadmaps and
release schedules.

Admittedly, the Slackware release cycle is quite variable. It's never released too early, though. ;-)

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.

Okay, but not something I use/need.

6) BSD Auth makes more sense than PAM.

Don't know much about this, but not super important in my use cases.

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.

That all does sound good.

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.

Very good insights, and thanks for your post.


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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.
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Re: Re: NetBSD 10
By: Gamgee to Arelor on Tue Apr 02 2024 08:06 pm

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.

I tend to count close relatives as the main distribution in my head :-)
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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.

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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.

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.



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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.

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 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.

Not something I would need.

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.

Have never used (or needed) anything like that. <SHRUG>


... So easy, a child could do it. Child sold separately.
=== MultiMail/Linux v0.52
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* Origin: Palantir * palantirbbs.ddns.net * Pensacola, FL * (21:2/138)

On 02 Apr 2024 at 12:46p, poindexter FORTRAN pondered and said...

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.

Yeah, I had a similar thing for a while: a SPARCstation 1+ maxed
with 20 MiB of RAM and a large CRT. It was a nice environment,
running SunOS 4.1.3.

--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A48 (Linux/64)
* Origin: Agency BBS | Dunedin, New Zealand | agency.bbs.nz (21:1/101)

On 02 Apr 2024 at 04:53p, Gamgee pondered and said...

So, in the beginning was the GE645 and the Multics project.

<SNIP>

What a great read! Thanks for that insightful writeup!

Thanks!

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.

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.

--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A48 (Linux/64)
* Origin: Agency BBS | Dunedin, New Zealand | agency.bbs.nz (21:1/101)

On 02 Apr 2024 at 06:46p, Arelor pondered and said...

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.

The big problem with the BSD world these days is that
Linux has become the mean, median, and mode of systems
that open source developers target by default. As
such, many (most?) of the important standards to ensure
that programs are "portable" across variants of Unix-y
systems are mostly irrelevant, so many Linux-isms creep
in. It can be a huge pain to transport non-trivial
programs to any of the BSDs. This wasn't the case back
in the day, of course, but it is now.

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).

--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A48 (Linux/64)
* Origin: Agency BBS | Dunedin, New Zealand | agency.bbs.nz (21:1/101)

Was anyone else excited about this release?

Maybe it was mentioned, but it looks like they have a version for Amiga???

... Inside every cynical person, there is a disappointed idealist.

--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A49 2023/04/30 (Linux/64)
* Origin: Clutch BBS * telnet://clutchbbs.com (21:1/199)

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?

... I put a dollar in one of those change machines. Nothing changed.

--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A49 2023/04/30 (Linux/64)
* Origin: Clutch BBS * telnet://clutchbbs.com (21:1/199)

On 03 Apr 2024 at 12:47p, niter3 pondered and said...

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?

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. Things that _should_ be simple
are over-complicated (like the boot loader, or systemd)
or don't work (lookin' at you, AX.25 and NET/ROM, or a
number of older network utilities like `talk`). A lot of
things like traditional Unix stuff like man pages are
incomplete (or even worse) references to other things. I
find the graphics stuff over complex and ugly. Things
like dbus tend to break all the time. Ugh.

The old joke was BSD was what happens when Unix people port
to the PC, and Linux is what happens when PC people try to
build a Unix. It's not a terrible analogy.

--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A48 (Linux/64)
* Origin: Agency BBS | Dunedin, New Zealand | agency.bbs.nz (21:1/101)

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."
--
gopher://gopher.richardfalken.com/1/richardfalken
--- SBBSecho 3.20-Linux
* Origin: Palantir * palantirbbs.ddns.net * Pensacola, FL * (21:2/138)

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't 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.

Nightfox
--- SBBSecho 3.20-Linux
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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.
--
gopher://gopher.richardfalken.com/1/richardfalken
--- SBBSecho 3.20-Linux
* Origin: Palantir * palantirbbs.ddns.net * Pensacola, FL * (21:2/138)

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???

I think they've had amiga versiond for a long time.

Andrew

=== TitanMail/linux v1.2.4

--- Talisman v0.53-dev (FreeBSD/amd64)
* Origin: Smuggler's Cove - scove.talismanbbs.com:2323 (21:1/182)

Re: Re: NetBSD 10
By: tenser to Arelor on Thu Apr 04 2024 03:15 am

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).

I don't think SystemD is the biggest threat to Linux interoperatibility. That prize goes to programming languages that feaure package pseudo-management and make extensive use of pre-compiled dependencies.

I am talking about stuff like Node.js, which will try to install a big bunch of node dependencies if you try to run some project, but which has a build process so fragile it is not guaranteed to work outside the distributions the developers have tested on directly.

I don't think it is a coincidence that developers of such projects always recommend you to use their Docker deployment instead.


--
gopher://gopher.richardfalken.com/1/richardfalken
--- SBBSecho 3.20-Linux
* Origin: Palantir * palantirbbs.ddns.net * Pensacola, FL * (21:2/138)

Re: NetBSD 10
By: niter3 to tenser on Wed Apr 03 2024 12:47 pm

What makes it feel like a toy?

I can't speak for him.

For me, out of heavy duty distributions and laser-focused specialist distributions, most Linux distributions feel like somebody's Hobby project.

* Lots of distributions lack support schedules. You don't really know how long the distribution will be supported.

* Many distributions have a small number of actual developers doing the supporting, so only the most popular packages get good support. Every other component is hit or miss. This is also true with some BSDs to a lesser extent, but then BSDs prefer to remove dead code rather than let it rot in the ports tree.

* Many distributions are released with minor usability issues that would never get a pass in a production-ready system, and get discovered within 30 minutes of regular use. For example, installers that have hundreds available language packs, but the list in which you are supposed to select the language you want is unordered and has no search function, forcing you to wade throuought the whole list (which takes a good while).

* No supply chain guarantees. Serious distributions have some build system and build their repositories from source code themselves. Many hobby distributions take binary submissions and incorporate them directly.

And then there are the countless distributions that are toolkits rather than actual distributions. I am talking about stuff such as KISS Linux, or Carbs, or Crux, or Funtoo if you press me. Those are for people who love to tinker with their systems and discover something new everytime they want to install a library. I love this kind of system, but in the end of the day I want to do my accounting on a well supported distribution rather than on some clustermess I duct-taped together for fun without knowing how.
--
gopher://gopher.richardfalken.com/1/richardfalken
--- SBBSecho 3.20-Linux
* Origin: Palantir * palantirbbs.ddns.net * Pensacola, FL * (21:2/138)

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.

Yes, that is more involved than what I am doing.

"Hello, my name is Arelor and I am addicted to IT stuff."

Hahaha, OK, it does sound like it. There is help available. ;-)



... Toto, I don't think we're in DOS any more...
=== MultiMail/Linux v0.52
--- SBBSecho 3.20-Linux
* Origin: Palantir * palantirbbs.ddns.net * Pensacola, FL * (21:2/138)

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.

Yes, I can see that.

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.

ACK.

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.

That makes good sense, although I will admit to never really thinking of
it like that.

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.

Agreed and understood. Again something I haven't thought much about, and indeed don't worry too much about.


... Beauty is only skin deep, but ugly goes all the way to the bone.
=== MultiMail/Linux v0.52
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On 03 Apr 2024 at 03:54p, Nightfox pondered and said...

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"?

Basically, an installation of some distro on a
single machine, either hardware or virtual.

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.

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.

--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A48 (Linux/64)
* Origin: Agency BBS | Dunedin, New Zealand | agency.bbs.nz (21:1/101)

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.

I put Mint on my daughter's NUC, and it's been pleasantly
stable for her.

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

Andrew

=== TitanMail/freebsd v1.2.4

--- Talisman v0.53-dev (FreeBSD/amd64)
* Origin: Smuggler's Cove - scove.talismanbbs.com:2323 (21:1/182)

Quoting Apam to Tenser <=-

I've been jumping around OSes the last couple of days.. NetBSD ->
Fedora -> DragonFlyBSD (my amdgpu is too new ;( ) -> FreeBSD

I've settled. I used to do that but it seems I've settled on windows and
WSL now. Seems to be the best of both worlds, I have windows for the games
and the easy driver setup, and WSL for when I want to mess aboot. ;)

Shawn
___ Blue Wave/386 v2.30
--- SBBSecho 3.20-Linux
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On 04 Apr 2024 at 02:48p, apam pondered and said...

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)

Haha, yeah. I try not to be one of those people. :-)
For a while when people wanted to one-up one another
about what OS they ran, I'd pull out my, "sorry, I run
Plan 9..." card. :-)

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.

I hear that, but I wanted something minimal, with
rolling updates. I pretty much never sit in front of
a computer running Linux anymore, and rather just treat
it like a server that I log into remotely and do
development on.

Mint is pretty good, although I'm more a fan of QT desktops (either KDE
or LxQT.)

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.

--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A48 (Linux/64)
* Origin: Agency BBS | Dunedin, New Zealand | agency.bbs.nz (21:1/101)

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)..

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.

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.

Andrew

=== TitanMail/linux v1.2.4

--- Talisman v0.53-dev (FreeBSD/amd64)
* Origin: Smuggler's Cove - scove.talismanbbs.com:2323 (21:1/182)

Just downloaded the ISO, fired it up in Proxmox. Running into mouse issues, which I won't run into if I run it bare metal. I'm tempted to take my box that won't run Windows 11 and convert it into *something*.

... Use an unacceptable colour.

--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A48 (Linux/64)
* Origin: 2o fOr beeRS bbs>>>20ForBeers.com:1337 (21:2/150)

On 05 Apr 2024 at 08:57a, apam pondered and said...

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)..

I'm shocked. Shocked to discover that this sort of thing
goes on....

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.

Huh. I run pretty much all of my illumos stuff headless, or
with just a serial port for the console. For Helios, we can
run the UART at 3MBAUD, which is fast enough for most things,
though once it's up I just login over the network.

Shame about the GPU thing, but it sort of reinforces my thesis:
the world assumes Linux. :-(

--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A48 (Linux/64)
* Origin: Agency BBS | Dunedin, New Zealand | agency.bbs.nz (21:1/101)