14 ms·

I'm one of the people who jumped ship to OpenBSD in the last year or so. I think I first touched a Linux machine in 1997 or 1998. systemd has been part of the r

by weland 11y ago

I'm one of the people who jumped ship to OpenBSD in the last year or so. I think I first touched a Linux machine in 1997 or 1998. systemd has been part of the reasons I did that for precisely the same reason. There is a lot of development in the ecosystem dominated by Freedesktop.org, Gnome and (to some degree) large commercial players like RedHat and SUSE. It's more efervescent than it's ever been. Fifteen years ago, I'd have been ecstatic to see so much development being done. Yet for all this fierce code churning, there's absurdly little innovation. Even in systemd, there's a lot of focus on non-issues like booting without needing a shell, while still inventing service startup notification types because none of the gazillion startup notification types already existent can actually solve precisely the problem systemd claims it solves -- managing complex startup chains. In the last three or four years, my Linux systems have become increasingly blackboxed, and consequently harder and harder to configure, let along debug when they stop working. Over the span of six months, a tool you just got to learn how to work with (mostly because the documentation seems to have been written by very bored and very verbose monkeys who had only a typewriter to pass the time with) becomes obsolete or is revamped to be unrecognizable. Which would be fine if that actually solved any problems. Instead, it replaces the old set of problems with a new, even more complicated set of problems that developers claim you shouldn't have, while insisting that the old problems were simply due to the old architecture and we'll have none of that now that we have this shiny new thing. Ironically, systemd is actually one of the better pieces of software to come out of that ecosystem. No, seriously. It's decently documented and as long as you don't need anything more complex than "here, start this daemon after this other daemon started", it does its job. If you want to peck at something, have a look at Polkit, where someone brilliantly figured out that the best way to configure policies is to write basically undebugable JavaScript code in .rules files.

anon3_ 11y ago
> I'm one of the people who jumped ship to OpenBSD in the last year or so. Ha. FreeBSD here. And so long as you get the right hardware, I find BSD to be far simpler than linux distributions out there. Ports? Beautifully elegant and simple. Configurable. Magnitudes easier than configuring rpm/debs. Getting a package approved in debian? Alioth? No offense, the wiki, all these pages on the debian website - they have no concept they have of "Handbook", in the sense FreeBSD has. It's so adhoc, they're healthy, but they're in denial about how hard they make it for new people. By the time you've taken to time to learn Debian's dev warts, you're apart of the convent and no longer care about fixing the onboarding problems. But to be fair. I have day to day gripes with FreeBSD just because we're short on the manpower Linux distributions have in excess: On FreeBSD 10.1, chromium crashing easily, settings doesn't work. Firefox just clogs up and stops working. No skype (CURRENT will be in a better position to since epoll support has been added). No Dropbox (as of now, we don't have inotify, and kqueue may not be able to handle it, don't quote me on that). I do my 90% of daily routines simpler and better on FreeBSD. If only Google / Mozilla (with all the resources they have) gave someone who could work to fix this stuff.
- weland 11y ago
  I've occasionally used {Net|Free|Open}BSD over the past few years (in fact, I think my Jornada in the back of the closet still runs NetBSD). I kept sticking to Linux partly because I was using it at $work, partly because it was simple enough and I'm kindda lazy. But yeah: > I find BSD to be far simpler than linux distributions out there. The way OpenBSD handles WiFi configuration is a good example of this. Want to connect to a wifi network? ifconfig <interface> <ESSID> <passphrase>. If you need some other fancy flags for those 0.1% of hotspots in the world, you can do those, too (also through ifconfig) but it's that simple. In contrast, after everyone agreed that wpa_supplicant is probably what happened after Stalin's ethereal spirit had mad sex with Hitler's ethereal spirit and their ethereal baby was incarnated, what did we do to alleviate things in Linux land? Why, we wrote NetworkManager, of course! Conservatively, 90% of today's deployments of NetworkManager exist because no one can figure out how to set up wireless without it, and we put up with its crap because wicd is waiting for us at the other end. Better yet, this is all nicely documented in the manpage. If you search for "wireless" in ifconfig's manpage, you find out all you need to know. Just for fun, compare that to man networkmanager. > On FreeBSD 10.1, chromium crashing easily, settings doesn't work. Firefox just clogs up and stops working. No skype (CURRENT will be in a better position to since epoll support has been added). No Dropbox (as of now, we don't have inotify, and kqueue may not be able to handle it, don't quote me on that). I haven't had crashing things on OpenBSD, but yeah, a bunch of things don't work. Fortunately, they're things I don't use. If I ever need them -- OH THE HORROR AND THE BLASPHEMY -- I have a Windows laptop, which for all intents and purposes is by now about as closed and as hard to wrestle with as Fedora, but at least it doesn't hopelessly break every six months. There are Linux-only things that I sometimes need because at some point between 2003 and 2013, "portable" ended up meaning "we can probably work if you have bash in a non-standard location but that's about it" (eh, Yocto?) for which a cheap VPS is more than enough. When it breaks, I don't have to spend days trying to find out exactly what part of PolicyKit broke or where my devices are mounted this week -- I just wipe everything and reinstall.
  - anon3_ 11y ago
    What are some things on OpenBSD that don't work for you? What sort of hardware are you running? What about Adobe Flash on OpenBSD?
pjc50 11y ago
Polkit is a nightmare. And I agree with you on the churn. There was a time when Linux administration changed less frequently than Windows, round about the 95-XP-Vista era.
- groks 11y ago
  http://smcv.pseudorandom.co.uk/2015/why_polkit/ http://smcv.pseudorandom.co.uk/2015/why_polkit/
  - digi_owl 11y ago
    I can't tell the difference between sudo and polkit, except that the latter comes with some XML based presets and can be talked to via RPC (dbus).
    - groks 11y ago
      The difference appears to be that the sudoers file supports the finite set of access checks the authors of sudo anticipated. If you need something more elaborate than that, write arbitrary javascript to the polkit api.
  - weland 11y ago
    Polkit is a great idea, don't get me wrong. However: * Like pretty much anything from freedesktop.org, the documentation is a joke. * The security system implemented through it is next to impossible to debug. It's very easy to add "allow <this thing> to happen", but I can't do things like "ok, tell me who can mount filesystems" or "give me a list of all things that users in the wheel group are allowed to do". Normally this would be trivial to implement by parsing the rule files, except that the rules are written in JS (I have no idea why) and parsed in a particular, cumbersome order. * Probably also as an artifact of having to execute JS code to add rules, many errors are silent, incomprehensible, or occur only when a particular action happens. * polkit doesn't have a textual interface, it only works through D-Bus. This makes it useless for scripting.
    - 11y ago
digi_owl 11y ago
> There is a lot of development in the ecosystem dominated by Freedesktop.org, Gnome and (to some degree) large commercial players like RedHat and SUSE. Yeah, i've been thinking the same recently. The current development above the kernel seems to either be from the desktop down, or from the point of view of managing 1000s of headless instances in a "container" farm. This with a side-order of Windows-isms demanded from corporate/government clients looking for a way to get away from MS while retaining their centrally controlled fine grained access control.

by weland 11y ago

anon3_ 11y ago

> I'm one of the people who jumped ship to OpenBSD in the last year or so. Ha. FreeBSD here. And so long as you get the right hardware, I find BSD to be far simpler than linux distributions out there. Ports? Beautifully elegant and simple. Configurable. Magnitudes easier than configuring rpm/debs. Getting a package approved in debian? Alioth? No offense, the wiki, all these pages on the debian website - they have no concept they have of "Handbook", in the sense FreeBSD has. It's so adhoc, they're healthy, but they're in denial about how hard they make it for new people. By the time you've taken to time to learn Debian's dev warts, you're apart of the convent and no longer care about fixing the onboarding problems. But to be fair. I have day to day gripes with FreeBSD just because we're short on the manpower Linux distributions have in excess: On FreeBSD 10.1, chromium crashing easily, settings doesn't work. Firefox just clogs up and stops working. No skype (CURRENT will be in a better position to since epoll support has been added). No Dropbox (as of now, we don't have inotify, and kqueue may not be able to handle it, don't quote me on that). I do my 90% of daily routines simpler and better on FreeBSD. If only Google / Mozilla (with all the resources they have) gave someone who could work to fix this stuff.

weland 11y ago
I've occasionally used {Net|Free|Open}BSD over the past few years (in fact, I think my Jornada in the back of the closet still runs NetBSD). I kept sticking to Linux partly because I was using it at $work, partly because it was simple enough and I'm kindda lazy. But yeah: > I find BSD to be far simpler than linux distributions out there. The way OpenBSD handles WiFi configuration is a good example of this. Want to connect to a wifi network? ifconfig <interface> <ESSID> <passphrase>. If you need some other fancy flags for those 0.1% of hotspots in the world, you can do those, too (also through ifconfig) but it's that simple. In contrast, after everyone agreed that wpa_supplicant is probably what happened after Stalin's ethereal spirit had mad sex with Hitler's ethereal spirit and their ethereal baby was incarnated, what did we do to alleviate things in Linux land? Why, we wrote NetworkManager, of course! Conservatively, 90% of today's deployments of NetworkManager exist because no one can figure out how to set up wireless without it, and we put up with its crap because wicd is waiting for us at the other end. Better yet, this is all nicely documented in the manpage. If you search for "wireless" in ifconfig's manpage, you find out all you need to know. Just for fun, compare that to man networkmanager. > On FreeBSD 10.1, chromium crashing easily, settings doesn't work. Firefox just clogs up and stops working. No skype (CURRENT will be in a better position to since epoll support has been added). No Dropbox (as of now, we don't have inotify, and kqueue may not be able to handle it, don't quote me on that). I haven't had crashing things on OpenBSD, but yeah, a bunch of things don't work. Fortunately, they're things I don't use. If I ever need them -- OH THE HORROR AND THE BLASPHEMY -- I have a Windows laptop, which for all intents and purposes is by now about as closed and as hard to wrestle with as Fedora, but at least it doesn't hopelessly break every six months. There are Linux-only things that I sometimes need because at some point between 2003 and 2013, "portable" ended up meaning "we can probably work if you have bash in a non-standard location but that's about it" (eh, Yocto?) for which a cheap VPS is more than enough. When it breaks, I don't have to spend days trying to find out exactly what part of PolicyKit broke or where my devices are mounted this week -- I just wipe everything and reinstall.
- anon3_ 11y ago
  What are some things on OpenBSD that don't work for you? What sort of hardware are you running? What about Adobe Flash on OpenBSD?

pjc50 11y ago

Polkit is a nightmare. And I agree with you on the churn. There was a time when Linux administration changed less frequently than Windows, round about the 95-XP-Vista era.

groks 11y ago
http://smcv.pseudorandom.co.uk/2015/why_polkit/ http://smcv.pseudorandom.co.uk/2015/why_polkit/
- digi_owl 11y ago
  I can't tell the difference between sudo and polkit, except that the latter comes with some XML based presets and can be talked to via RPC (dbus).
  - groks 11y ago
    The difference appears to be that the sudoers file supports the finite set of access checks the authors of sudo anticipated. If you need something more elaborate than that, write arbitrary javascript to the polkit api.
- weland 11y ago
  Polkit is a great idea, don't get me wrong. However: * Like pretty much anything from freedesktop.org, the documentation is a joke. * The security system implemented through it is next to impossible to debug. It's very easy to add "allow <this thing> to happen", but I can't do things like "ok, tell me who can mount filesystems" or "give me a list of all things that users in the wheel group are allowed to do". Normally this would be trivial to implement by parsing the rule files, except that the rules are written in JS (I have no idea why) and parsed in a particular, cumbersome order. * Probably also as an artifact of having to execute JS code to add rules, many errors are silent, incomprehensible, or occur only when a particular action happens. * polkit doesn't have a textual interface, it only works through D-Bus. This makes it useless for scripting.
  - 11y ago

digi_owl 11y ago

> There is a lot of development in the ecosystem dominated by Freedesktop.org, Gnome and (to some degree) large commercial players like RedHat and SUSE. Yeah, i've been thinking the same recently. The current development above the kernel seems to either be from the desktop down, or from the point of view of managing 1000s of headless instances in a "container" farm. This with a side-order of Windows-isms demanded from corporate/government clients looking for a way to get away from MS while retaining their centrally controlled fine grained access control.