sidkshatriya

6 ms·

31.
by sidkshatriya 7mo ago
> People inside Microsoft are fighting to drop mandatory Microsoft Account This is the minimum peace offering acceptable to your long suffering users.
32.
by sidkshatriya 7mo ago
I've used macOS for years and still don't understand their windows minimize/restore logic. I'm always hunting for my minimized window. Yes, the fault probably lies with me. OTOH the Windows UI is far better well designed
33.
by sidkshatriya 7mo ago
Decline often happens slowly, gradually and then suddenly. Could anybody imagine Intel where it is now ? This could happen to Microsoft and is probably already happening as we speak.
34.
by sidkshatriya 7mo ago
> sad to see how the fully AI generated "why this matters" section in the blog gives a lingering vibe of slop. I am quoting this verbatim from offending section: Why this matters The traditional eBPF workflow is: write C for t
35.
by sidkshatriya 7mo ago
FWIW... I have modified packages on Fedora and installed them. The workflow is very simple... of course, not as simple as NixOS but here goes: # clone the package definition $ fedpkg clone -a <name of package> $ cd <name of package
36.
by sidkshatriya 7mo ago
You're right ... you cant check that snapshot into version control and share with your machines etc. When you need that level of control and need to scale your configuration to other machines NixOS sounds like the right choice. If it&#
37.
by sidkshatriya 7mo ago
I like your analogy and it does make sense. But note that I did caveat my suggestion: "Of course, a declarative and textual rendition of the configuration is better than bash commands entered on the command line but sometimes you don&#
38.
by sidkshatriya 7mo ago
Here is a simple workflow with mutable systems like Fedora that I think a lot of people are missing. AI could be brought into this workflow also for those who want that: (1) Take a snapshot of your current system (snapper+btrfs on Linux, be
39.
by sidkshatriya 7mo ago
[From the article "Why I love NixOS"] > There is also community-maintained support for FreeBSD, though I have not used it personally I have tried to use the nix package manager on FreeBSD recently. I tried doing some basic thin
40.
by sidkshatriya 7mo ago
+1, Guix is quite good with some tricks up it's sleeve compared to Nix. I am not a fan of S-expressions but using scheme is more reasonable than nix+bash to me. On the negative side, guix can be slow. It is also not a very pragmatic os
41.
by sidkshatriya 7mo ago
Excellently explained writeup. Kudos on explaining the shockingly multiple kernel bugs in a (a) simple (b) interesting way. TL;DR the main issue arises because the context switch and sampling event both need to be written to the `ringBuffer
42.
by sidkshatriya 7mo ago
Usually workarounds/quirks need the highest level understanding of the device driver and the device. There are few people in the world with such mastery and fewer people capable of translating this to another operating system. In conce
43.
by sidkshatriya 7mo ago
> but real life workload are not "Geometric Mean". A good benchmark suite consists of good benchmarks chosen carefully. These benchmarks are not chosen randomly. They represent diverse ways to "stress" or exercise the
44.
by sidkshatriya 7mo ago
ZFS is worse than btrfs in performance. Check out https://www.phoronix.com/review/linux-617-filesystems/5 "Geometric Mean of all test results". You will find that OpenZFS is ~35% slower than btrfs. I lov
45.
by sidkshatriya 7mo ago
> There is one advantage of Linux over FreeBSD, which is not widely known. Linux has a huge database of known bugs in various peripheral devices, including Ethernet NICs, and when one of those is recognized it applies workarounds for the
46.
by sidkshatriya 7mo ago
Why not create a boot environment and try out FreeBSD 15 with pkgbase ? If the experiment is successful just make the boot environment the default otherwise throw it away... With such powerful tools I find it fascinating that FreeBSD users
47.
by sidkshatriya 7mo ago
btrfs is suffering from a lot of old bad publicity and some poor design decisions around RAID. But by now it is a great file system if you don't go near RAID5/6. btrfs has its flaws (ZFS has its own flaws!). However: - It's u
48.
by sidkshatriya 7mo ago
> But the downside is enormous bloat If you think Linux can have "enormous bloat" then Windows bloat by the same standards is terrifyingly humongous (and slow!).
49.
by sidkshatriya 7mo ago
you can use snapper + btrfs and the end result is like `bectl`. However it not as simple/integrated as ZFS Boot environments on FreeBSD
50.
by sidkshatriya 7mo ago
> Doesn't linuxulator + podman suffice? No it is not reliable enough. Some syscalls not implemented, there are edge case issues with procfs etc. Best to execute in a Linux VM.
51.
by sidkshatriya 7mo ago
Thanks for the detailed response. Gives me a list of some cool things to explore and learn about ! Every year in various conferences and every new major Linux cycle there are new innovations in the Linux network stack too. To do a true comp
52.
by sidkshatriya 7mo ago
I don't know why I was downvoted here. One day, I was experiencing weird compilation errors. Clearing the `ccache` C/C++ compiler cache helped get past the problem. Yes, I could have investigated in detail what was the issue and i
53.
by sidkshatriya 7mo ago
I am impressed by the achievements of the Zig team. I use the ghostty terminal emulator regularly -- it is built in Zig and it is super stable. It is a fantastic piece of software. This makes me feel that the underlying technology behind Zi
54.
by sidkshatriya 7mo ago
> The biggest issue I face daily are silent compiler errors (SIGBUS) for trivial things, e.g. a typo in an import path. I don't use zig. My experience has been that caches themselves are sources of bugs (not talking about zig only,
55.
by sidkshatriya 7mo ago
P.S. As -current is essentially running the latest master branch commit it should be evident that FreeBSD will be unstable, liable to break at any point and may have horrible bugs. So -current is good for experimentation but probably not to
56.
by sidkshatriya 7mo ago
> Translation: whatever investments in time, tooling, training and documentation you made for 14.x, they were useful for about 18 months. Don't agree. Not too many differences between 15.0 and 14.x -- there are some changes -- mostl
57.
by sidkshatriya 7mo ago
Yes, within Linux there is diversity -- I was not talking about that. The server space in 2026 is dominated by Linux. Solaris ? Gone* WindowsNT ? Niche. HP-UX ? Gone* AIX ? Gone* macOS ? Not in server. FreeBSD ? Niche (smaller than WindowsN
58.
by sidkshatriya 7mo ago
Are you using pkgbase on 15 now or still using the old approach ?
59.
by sidkshatriya 7mo ago
>> and approaches Linux performance in some areas (e.g. Networking) > FreeBSD has been the gold standard for networking features and performance for decades; not sure I'd agree. This is the accepted wisdom. But reality on the
60.
by sidkshatriya 7mo ago
The networking subsystem is probably the place where FreeBSD is most competitive with Linux. Linux just supports so much more hardware capabilities and fancy ways of doing things (e.g. io_uring, bpf logic in kernel etc.) that an expertly se

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