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“I usually steer away from projects which are defined by what they are not. It seems to build a community whose roots are based in hostility.” This is a somewh

“I usually steer away from projects which are defined by what they are not. It seems to build a community whose roots are based in hostility.” This is a somewhat ironic indictment of a project opting to avoid GNU. In fact, your quote could serve as a valid argument to avoid GNU. I cannot think of a project more completely defined by what it is not. I would certainly find it difficult to argue that GNU and its founder have not been a source of discord and hostility. The Open Source movement is a direct response to the hostile politics of GNU and Free Software. In the case of Chimera Linux though, the founder has been pretty clear that they made their choices for engineering reasons and not political ones. There are lots of GNU packages in Chimera if you want them.

xcv123 3y ago
GNU is defined as what it is; that it is an operating system and that it is free software. "What is GNU? GNU is an operating system that is free software—that is, it respects users' freedom." https://www.gnu.org https://www.gnu.org Although GNU stands for "GNU is NOT Unix" that doesn't count as its a boomer hacker meme that started before GNU.
- akosoaaafjdr 3y ago
  I'll add that most anti-GNU people I know in the BSD space and related projects are not at all against GNU politically speaking or it's ideals or the free software movement. We mostly think that a variety of terrible technical decisions have been made and allowed to metastisize over the years, and that they are largely unfixable so long as Linux remains an operating system devoted primarily to ease of use, popularity, and packaged for non-professionals. A lot of this happened rather early on due to the influx of hobbyist programmers from the PC space, and so I think the GNU userland was mostly doomed from the beginning due to the qualifications (or lack thereof) of its programmers when important foundational design choices were made (they are better programmers and more professionally qualified these days, but they aren't about to roll back most of these foundational mistakes because it would collapse the whole thing like a tower of Jenga blocks). Those goals actually align a lot with the GNU philosophies and so I support the Linux community fully in that way and for making free software available to as many as possible. But technically speaking, GNU userland is a pile of dog shit, and you've really got to rip it out and start from scratch like Chimera is doing as a bare minimum to actually make any kind of progress there.
  - cycomanic 3y ago
    Your statement is incredibly handwavy. GNU userland was doomed because the programmers were not professionals? Apart from the fact that many of the programmers were actually professionals, what were the design decisions that were made, keeping in mind that much of the userland design is essentially governed by posix. Also if I look at many of the "professional" unixes userland tools I'd choose GNU userland any day, because the userland tools are incredibly handicapped, e.g. name one Solaris (or even better hp ux) core userland tool that is better than it's GNU equivalent.
  - musicale 3y ago
    What are some good examples of where a BSD userland is much better than GNU userland? One thing that possibly comes to mind for me is macOS' launchd, which doesn't seem to give me the same headaches as systemd even though they're kind of the same thing (see also: windows services manager.) Another is/was clang/llvm vs. gcc, but gcc seems to have improved since clang originally came out. And clang is readily available on linux distros. BSD pioneered containers with jails (and zones on Solaris), but I have gotten used to (and perhaps come to appreciate) Linux's a-la-carte namespace/cgroups design. I don't really enjoy working with docker and kubernetes though. One thing I like about FreeBSD is its documentation, which seemed (to me at least) to be reasonably clear, complete and well-organized. I've liked NetBSD for a variety of reasons (somewhat coherent classic BSD organization, synchronized kernel and userland releases, great multiplatform support, support for classic systems and architectures, pkgsrc which works nicely across platforms and without root access, /usr/games, and just having a different kernel implementation) but I'm not sure I can point to individual utilities being better than their GNU alternatives.
    - petre 3y ago
      > One thing that possibly comes to mind for me is macOS' launchd, which doesn't seem to give me the same headaches as systemd even though they're kind of the same thing (see also: windows services manager.) XML definitions for service startup and inconsistent switches. Launchd is worse than systemd in those regards. I was quite happy to let go of my work iMac and do development on Linux.

xcv123 3y ago

GNU is defined as what it is; that it is an operating system and that it is free software. "What is GNU? GNU is an operating system that is free software—that is, it respects users' freedom." https://www.gnu.org https://www.gnu.org Although GNU stands for "GNU is NOT Unix" that doesn't count as its a boomer hacker meme that started before GNU.

akosoaaafjdr 3y ago
I'll add that most anti-GNU people I know in the BSD space and related projects are not at all against GNU politically speaking or it's ideals or the free software movement. We mostly think that a variety of terrible technical decisions have been made and allowed to metastisize over the years, and that they are largely unfixable so long as Linux remains an operating system devoted primarily to ease of use, popularity, and packaged for non-professionals. A lot of this happened rather early on due to the influx of hobbyist programmers from the PC space, and so I think the GNU userland was mostly doomed from the beginning due to the qualifications (or lack thereof) of its programmers when important foundational design choices were made (they are better programmers and more professionally qualified these days, but they aren't about to roll back most of these foundational mistakes because it would collapse the whole thing like a tower of Jenga blocks). Those goals actually align a lot with the GNU philosophies and so I support the Linux community fully in that way and for making free software available to as many as possible. But technically speaking, GNU userland is a pile of dog shit, and you've really got to rip it out and start from scratch like Chimera is doing as a bare minimum to actually make any kind of progress there.
- cycomanic 3y ago
  Your statement is incredibly handwavy. GNU userland was doomed because the programmers were not professionals? Apart from the fact that many of the programmers were actually professionals, what were the design decisions that were made, keeping in mind that much of the userland design is essentially governed by posix. Also if I look at many of the "professional" unixes userland tools I'd choose GNU userland any day, because the userland tools are incredibly handicapped, e.g. name one Solaris (or even better hp ux) core userland tool that is better than it's GNU equivalent.
- musicale 3y ago
  What are some good examples of where a BSD userland is much better than GNU userland? One thing that possibly comes to mind for me is macOS' launchd, which doesn't seem to give me the same headaches as systemd even though they're kind of the same thing (see also: windows services manager.) Another is/was clang/llvm vs. gcc, but gcc seems to have improved since clang originally came out. And clang is readily available on linux distros. BSD pioneered containers with jails (and zones on Solaris), but I have gotten used to (and perhaps come to appreciate) Linux's a-la-carte namespace/cgroups design. I don't really enjoy working with docker and kubernetes though. One thing I like about FreeBSD is its documentation, which seemed (to me at least) to be reasonably clear, complete and well-organized. I've liked NetBSD for a variety of reasons (somewhat coherent classic BSD organization, synchronized kernel and userland releases, great multiplatform support, support for classic systems and architectures, pkgsrc which works nicely across platforms and without root access, /usr/games, and just having a different kernel implementation) but I'm not sure I can point to individual utilities being better than their GNU alternatives.
  - petre 3y ago
    > One thing that possibly comes to mind for me is macOS' launchd, which doesn't seem to give me the same headaches as systemd even though they're kind of the same thing (see also: windows services manager.) XML definitions for service startup and inconsistent switches. Launchd is worse than systemd in those regards. I was quite happy to let go of my work iMac and do development on Linux.