Which Linux distro do you use?

[bd139]

PatchCRT 

[radioactive]

Regarding systemd:

Debian May Need To Re-Evaluate Its Interest In 'Init System Diversity'
https://linux.slashdot.org/story/19/09/21/042213/debian-may-need-to-re-evaluate-its-interest-in-init-system-diversity#comments

Some interesting comments in there.

[bd139]

Thanks for that. That means I might sleep another few minutes tonight! 

[Black Phoenix]

It felt like what you were producing was going to be robust and it was!

Except for the division-by-zero fatal error bug on faster machines.

Yeah, I liked Turbo Pascal, too.  Even did my first commercial software job on it, in early nineties.

One of my colleagues at school, a very smart guy in programming made a clone of PacMan in Visual Turbo Pascal, with subprograms and routines, were even the eyes of the ghosts follow the main character. Even bonus stage and effects had.



It was is final 2 year project, and enough to say that it was the best one rated. Here is some video he published in Youtube showing the game itself. Currently he works in the Miniclip Development company, know in the end of 90 and 2000 by their time wasting flash games.

Other project he had was a clone of Super Mario Bros 3 but with Knuckles instead, called Super Marcolino:



His youtube channel also have some more stuff, specially a program he created that can change sprites animations for the original Genesis / Mega Drive Streets of Rage and some more stuff he experiment with, including but not limited to machine learning.

https://www.youtube.com/user/gsaurus4/videos

[bd139]

That’s really cool that is. Thanks for posting 

[SiliconWizard]

Regarding systemd:

Debian May Need To Re-Evaluate Its Interest In 'Init System Diversity'
https://linux.slashdot.org/story/19/09/21/042213/debian-may-need-to-re-evaluate-its-interest-in-init-system-diversity#comments

Some interesting comments in there.

Indeed. This one, flagged "insightful", looks particularly well documented:

Easy. Drop SystemD (Score:4, Insightful)
It is after all a load of shit.

 

[legacy]

I spent days leaving the big iron machine compiling stuff in its corner, ... now Erlang is up and running.

If you don't care about leaving the machine in a corner, then Gentoo is the only distro that can serve the evil purpose of supporting these old Unix big irons.


To summarize
- Erlang is now on x86, PPC, and now even on HPPA.
Next challenge: Erlang on MIPS!

[bd139]

Only problem with gentoo is the electricity bill 

[SiliconWizard]

Only problem with gentoo is the electricity bill 

Wasted time and energy. That's why I finally chose Arch. Close enough in spirit, but binary-based.

[Ampera]

My only gripe about Arch is the lack of 32bit support.

https://archlinux32.org/

Thank me later.

I would agree with you, however the time you and I spent installing it was significant. You know me and I'm far from an average user, but if/when I need to reinstall this on another or new machine, it involves quite a bit of dicking around.

Arch is great if you truly want a minimalist OS and for me so far it has been just fine.

I installed a test system at work and quite enjoy it. You've already converted me to Arch Ampera, let me have this little thing ;-)

You get faster and better at setting it up the more and more you do it. I can set up an entire Arch system from booting the install stick to being at a usable desktop in about 30 minutes. (with all the programs I want).

Honestly if I had a choice I'd run FreeBSD and to hell with Linux.

I do have a choice, and I am almost behind you with that, but I'd need them to update the linux kernel modules, because I need my Linux programs (some proprietary stuff I can't just recompile for FreeBSD, like Steam.)

[AngusBeef]

My only gripe about Arch is the lack of 32bit support.

https://archlinux32.org/

Thank me later.

I guess I could've done a 5 second google search and discovered it, but my stupid self just went off the official page.  Thanks I think this will come in handy!


I've never touched any of the BSD based operating systems but all the gurus seem to rave about OpenBSD and even more about FreeBSD. Coming from a Windows background and just getting into the Linux systems, how many weeks/months/years would it take to grasp enough concepts to make a switch worthwhile?

I have heard a lot about Jails with ZFS under FreeBSD, but all of my reading simply tells me it's virtualization (though not at the kernel level) and that it enables people to setup multiple configurations of similar software packages easily. But I don't quite understand what the situations are where it would be applicable and all the articles I read are about procedures to establish a jail but not the situations that would be resolved with using them.

[bd139]

Jails are best described as a namespace. Ideal for shared hosting companies etc. You can give someone a whole machine to cock up without the overheads of a VM. Also for complete application isolation.  The last freebsd machine I used in production was a veritable monster with 16 cores and 8Gb of RAM (a lot at the time). It had 200 users (!) running in jails.

OpenBSD I haven’t used for a number of years. It was obtuse but very well documented.

Learning curve, depends. Experienced sysadmin, a few days. End user, a few months.

[AngusBeef]

Jails are best described as a namespace. Ideal for shared hosting companies etc. You can give someone a whole machine to cock up without the overheads of a VM. Also for complete application isolation.  The last freebsd machine I used in production was a veritable monster with 16 cores and 8Gb of RAM (a lot at the time). It had 200 users (!) running in jails.

OpenBSD I haven’t used for a number of years. It was obtuse but very well documented.

Learning curve, depends. Experienced sysadmin, a few days. End user, a few months.

Thanks for the description - is there any advantage for an end user to run FreeBSD vs a flavor of Linux? Unless I put together something like a thin client for a small business I doubt I'll have multiple users on a single server.

Edit: I guess you could create "portable" versions of your workspace for each part of a workflow in a jail and take it back and forth between multiple machines...similar to a VM but as you said without as much overhead since it doesn't virtualize the kernel

[bd139]

Not really for an end user unfortunately. Best to go with the flow. Hence why I use windows 10

You could do that. I’m not sure I’d bother though. I religiously avoid complexity where possible.

[eugenenine]

I use windows 10
 I religiously avoid complexity where possible.

you appear to be contradicting yourself here

[Nominal Animal]

Nah, bd139 is just using funny words to describe his personal preferences; nothing unusual.

It's the underlying reasons for those preferences that are interesting, although they are difficult to suss out, because people don't usually know.  I don't know if bd139 knows, but I bet there are interesting relevant experiences and anecdotes he could share -- even if I happen to personally disagree at this moment.

[bd139]

Everything I have said is backed up with plenty of anecdotes but fundamentally the points for me are:

1. you need a smooth desktop experience and for the most part of its existence, windows works pretty well once you've turned off all the shitty bits. It supports disparate development tools reasonably well, every piece of client software on the market therefore it allows me to seamlessly interoperate with many diverse businesses. You can drive it entirely with a keyboard too, consistently and reliably. On top of that, a well put together windows laptop (I use thinkpad T-series) has superior and considerably more reliable power management than Linux. Plus you have decent TPM and UEFI integrated full disk encryption with bitlocker. And the "time to recovery" if there is a failure is literally an order of magnitude less than futzing with systemd and md and luks etc. These are very very very important.

2. when I need to solve a problem or create something new, linux tends to work rather well there because it's easy to automate, consistent and has by far the best repeatability of any platform. That doesn't mean I need a GUI for it though. I work with it quite happily via PuTTY

So I can sit here streaming Apple Music from iTunes with full fat Visual Studio in the background, a PuTTY session open to AWS where I'm building RPM packages based on a spec open in Word. Win win.

Edit: I'm actually slacking on here eating a bacon sandwich at the moment though 

[Ampera]

Honestly the reason I like FreeBSD is that, in my experience, it tends to be a bit more refined than some Linux distributions. It's mostly a userland tools thing, in that the stuff you're given for things like package management just tend to work better. Somewhat annoyingly the place where things are put for programs (like configs) is almost always completely different in FreeBSD, but it's different among different Linux distros anyways. My only gripe is the lack of software support, because while most open source Linux tools can be easily ported, not all are, and a lot of proprietary software is not.

FreeBSD jails are very similar to the concept of a Linux chroot. The idea is that, within a single unified file system branching from a root directory, you can have another root directory usable for an entirely different userland containing different programs that shares the hardware and kernel scheduling with the rest of the system. FreeBSD and OpenBSD have very very secure implementations of this, which why people like it so much, even though it's not as polished as something like Linux's Docker which has a similar use. The more differences are something I'm not aware of because I've never used either, and I personally have never had a need to segregate different programs into different userlands.

As for experience, it's not really /harder/ it's just different. If you're used to Arch Linux or similar, you can likely pick up FreeBSD's quirks easily, just understanding that the documentation tends to not be that great, particularly for installing things like the nvidia driver port. The only other thing to say about FreeBSD is that the bootloading sucks ass. The actual design is pretty slick and simple to deal with, but the implementation breaks on a /lot/ of computers, making FreeBSD unusable even if the kernel and everything else runs perfectly fine. Don't even get me started on FreeBSD via PXE...

[mrflibble]

Note that eudev is a fork, and not part of systemd.  It provides both the daemon and the udevadm utility, and is standalone service.  I use it/udev mostly to create symbolic links and manage the owner/group and permissions of various USB-connected devices (microcontrollers, mostly), and it works well for that.  For me, it is complementary to the kernel: it applies my userspace policy for me.

Yup, same here. It applies whatever rules I have set for the various hot-pluggable devices. And indeed create symlinks, which is especially convenient when you have multiple USB connected dev-boards of the exact same type (same vendor & product ID) and you want an easy way for userspace applications to connect to the right one. None of that /dev/bus/usb/005/042 in userspace config. I prefer /dev/msp430thingy-used-for-xyz with proper permissions and ownership.

Also, systemd is a huuuuuge pile of something. Not quote sure yet which word to pick. To be fair, sysv-init could do with a bit of modernization. But overall, it is nice , simple and small. My main gripe with it is managing the more complex dependencies. Of course it can be done, and has been done in the past, but not as clean as I'd like. Unfortunately systemd is overkill and above all overreaching. I tolerate it on a few machines, so I can see how bad it is, and get some exposure. But on serious machines it seriously needs to die. Preemptively. by never getting installed in the first place. Did I mention yet that dbus needs to die die diiiieee? No? Well pardon me for that oversight. D-Bus needs to die!!! Not much of a bus if shit keeps losing connections, now is it? What's that little client? You lost connection and try to reconnect? Naaaaahh. 

TLDR: udev, yay! systemd, booh!

[Nominal Animal]

I prefer /dev/msp430thingy-used-for-xyz with proper permissions and ownership.

Exactly.  When you have a dozen microcontrollers, a few vinyl cutters, and a couple of experimental USB serial devices for 3D printer development, those symlinks and permission management come in extremely handy.

To be fair, sysv-init could do with a bit of modernization.

Funny thing is, the entire init thing is much better solved completely differently, using a small library that communicates with a trivial service manager, with a trivial interface to express prior service availability requirements, services provided, and current status (starting/stopping/restarting/reloading); having an entire bus for this purpose is just insane.  Sure, each service daemon needs a few lines added to their sources, but they're trivial to stub out on other inits/OSes, and they solve the ordering and parallel startup issues in one single whoop, with minimal runtime overhead.

Yeah, I really don't like how d-bus claims to solve any problems; it just makes them different.  Uglier.

[isometrik]

Debian for headless servers. Manjaro for desktop use.

[Circlotron]

My local pharmacy uses some sort of Linux.
Having a bit of a bad hair day though.

[blacksheeplogic]

Debian, I use the console/command line exclusively. I do have a system with Ubuntu/xfce when I need X-windows (qemu for example).

[scatterandfocus]

I didn't vote, but I use Manjaro on my desktop, just because it has been cutting edge and painless.  But I like Debian and Arch too.  Or I should say that I liked my past Debian and Arch installs.  Debian is always lagging behind (intentionally) in some ways for a gui desktop, and Arch requires more keeping up with things than I like to tend to these days.