Bye bye BSD, Hello Linux: A Sys Admin's Story

[LightBit]

Care to provide an example gens and backup your claims?

https://gist.github.com/dchest/1091803

[endman]

endman you little troll, are you still doing this? I have read countless posts from you whining about BSD and all the latest problems it causes you. If you don't like the darn OS, why are you still investing so much time in running it to experience these issues?

If anyone wants a bit of a giggle, check out the OP's profile to see someone with a real BSD flavoured chip on their shoulder. Almost every single thread and post they have made is against BSD rather than anything actually constructive lol.

A troll? No no no....

It's a form of public service done out of my own good will to inform people about things that they should really avoid because it would affect their freedom and productivity. I really care for these sorts of things and I'm out raged by the existence of proprietary software and BSD role in helping tyrants achieve that. I also love our children and grand-children and I want them to live in freedom from proprietary companies like M$, Apple and $un Micro$ystems that's why I'm focusing on BSD because with BSD licensed code there will be more proprietary slaveware in the future that our childern will be forced to use. At least with proprietary, there be about the same or less proprietary slaveware in the future.

I vote to get this thread title changed to "Bye bye OS, Hello similar OS: A little troll's Story"

You're a troll when you say this because the user experience of BSD is vastly different from the user experience of Linux. For one, Linux is furiously fast while BSD is shitting slow. Also, commandline tools in BSD are useless.

`ls <directory with lots of contents>` does not work why on GNU+Linux it does.

[Marc Driftmeyer]

Funny you said this, because I actually emailed a suggestion about 2 years ago urging Apple to drop all *BSD as its backend and move on with Linux ahead. That would be Tim Cook's mark on Apple, but I have serious doubts as to his assertiveness, vision and chutzpah of the kind that Jobs had, to pull something like that off. Cook, IMHO, can be whipped into submission by his board, shareholders... He does not have the balls to stick his neck out the way Jobs did when he got sidelined ("fired") prior to his departure and establishing NeXT.

Clearly, from a technical standpoint, it would be hard for Apple to justify such a move - OS X, with its BSD roots, works well as it is. And even if it doesn't, Apple could afford to hire kernel hackers out the wazoo, to literally re-do each portion that might not be up to snuff...

I've always maintained that if someone like Microsoft, or perhaps now Apple - adopted Linux... they will have a financial as well as a technical renaissance assured for the next 20+ years.

The very source of Apple's success since Jobs took back the reigns was these two and only these two things - the paradigm shift from OS 9 to OS X (incorporating BSD/UNIX/Mach as the OS driving their new platform), and the second, equally as important event - moving away from PPC to Intel. These events introduced the pivotal moment, the paradigm shift that gave rise to the new Apple.

Cook could do the same - but I'm not yet seeing how Linux would make an equally great impact in their already successful OS/hardware portfolio, particularly when you consider they have resources to turn Mach or whatever BSD aspect of the underlying OS they want, inside out.... One thing I'd love to see is the death of Windows hastened as much as possible... so maybe something along them lines.... not sure...

This is one of the most myopic statements about ``What Apple should do'' I've read, and one that has been repeated since 1996.

OS X's XNU Hybrid Kernel is a merging of I/O Kit which was designed with C++ and Mach which is optimized and designed for Objective-C.

Linux was suggested back in '96 and we laughed then, as nothing about Linux would mesh with NeXT Foundations of APIs, Toolkits, the works. Then a certain punk suggested it again for the iPhone/iPad and thus be the basis for iOS.

Again, a dead-end, but then again the only fools suggesting it don't know a goddamn thing about the entire Cocoa Frameworks, the toolkits, etc., etc.

OS X WILL NEVER BE BASED ON GODDAMN LINUX. And this is good for Apple and the Linux Communities, not to mention the FreeBSD/BSDs.

OS X and Linux co-habitate quite well, along-side FreeBSD.

OS X has 25 years of mature and proven Frameworks invested with Objective-C/C/C++ and Objective-C++ that goes back to 1989 and making Lotus Improv on NeXTSTEP.

Enjoy your options.

[endman]

BSD commandline tools suck worst then UNIX. It can't compete with GNU.

GNU tools were designed to way outperform UNIX tools. Actually, GNU tools are used in both Mac OS X and Solaris because their own commandline and BSD tools were incapable of meeting users needs.

[endman]

if you are talking about core-utils, BSD ones are way cleaner then GNU's (idk OSX)

Care to provide an example gens and backup your claims?

[gens]

That's my $0.02, anyone else have thoughts on this?

if you are talking about core-utils, BSD ones are way cleaner then GNU's (idk OSX)

mmm.. are the GTK tools your problem there ?
(GTK is GimpTK, not GNU)

[DMJC]

I'm not going to weigh in on which OS is better, has more features stability etc out of BSD and Linux I personally use Linux the most, and I love it's commandline environment and it's rich driver support.

You will never convince Apple to move to Linux. Just look at the sourcecode for the different kernels and you'll see why. Apple's kernel is C++ based. their drivers are very easy to read and use approximately 1/3rd the code that Linux uses to create a PCI Soundcard driver. I was looking to implement a sound blaster Live! driver for Mac OSX last year. Just on code size the OSX drivers are tiny compared to Linux. There's a ton of boilerplate code that exists in the Linux drivers to initialise PCI and handle hardware interrupts. On OSX it's very straightforward and they reuse the same code across all their drivers. I don't know enough about PCI and interrupts to know if that stops OSX from having some capabilities with older hardware, or non-Macintosh hardware. But from a code maintainability view, there's no way Apple will ever switch to Linux. A sound driver that's 700kb on Linux achieves the same featureset on Macintosh in under 200kb of code. I'm sure Apple also has a lot of customisations at the kernel level that tie directly into Quartz/Aqua.

What I would like to see done on OSX is the removal of the BSD commandline environment, and replace it completely with the GNU tools. Right now OSX is a total pain to install applications/utilities such as glib, gtk, gnome, and related libraries, because the BSD commandline tools clash with the GNU tools. Both Linux and OSX have their merits. I prefer the Apple UI, but I hate trying to port my GTK based Linux apps to OSX (because I can't setup GTK/GLIB on OSX to start with compilable code, before I remove the GTK parts to replace with Apple parts.). I love programming on Linux, it's easily got the best development environment in terms of commandline compilers, text editors etc.

That's my $0.02, anyone else have thoughts on this?

[kpedersen]

<verbal diarrhoea>

endman you little troll, are you still doing this? I have read countless posts from you whining about BSD and all the latest problems it causes you. If you don't like the darn OS, why are you still investing so much time in running it to experience these issues?

If anyone wants a bit of a giggle, check out the OP's profile to see someone with a real BSD flavoured chip on their shoulder. Almost every single thread and post they have made is against BSD rather than anything actually constructive lol.

For the record, I like BSD and I like Linux. However I don't like little trolls like endman.

Edit:
I vote to get this thread title changed to "Bye bye OS, Hello similar OS: A little troll's Story"

[Del_]

But one must admit that v2 or 'lesser' suits businesses more (and business is generally inherently focused on getting things done as cheap as possible and as fast as possible, prefferably without letting concurency free pass to their technology).

What makes you reach that conclusion? I have just explained to you the difference between v3 and v2. Why do you see v3 as problematic compared to v2? Business is a pretty broad term, most of them embraces more modern licenses than v2 since most businesses wants as little hassle as possible from patenting litigation. That is why Apache 2.0 is widely more popular than BSD right now. Stop mudding the waters, if copy-left is your problem then be honest about it. If not, explain your issue. Aaand, please stop making wide ranging statements about businesses unless you can back it up.

But if you have 2 equally suited pieces of software to get the job done, you go for the one with BSD license (which is more 'free' when circumstances change).

Freedom is an ambigous term, your statement has no value without qualifiers. Freedom to do what? Freedom for who? It all depends on what you want to accomplish. One thing that is overwhelmingly clear today is that we would have no free desktop without copy-left. For some of us, that is pretty important, also freebsd users.

I have no interest in being dragged into this mud-slinging contest, but your statement needs to be answered since it seems to be the most popular astroturfing bullshit on the net today, and left un-checked will leave readers with the impression that it is true.

There is no question that you have some enterprise forces not particularly fond of GPL, and that v3 provided a nice opportunity for those forces to play on chisms in the communitiy. Apple comes to mind.

There are only two significant differences between GPLv2 and GPLv3. Those are the anti-Tivo clause and the patent protection. The patent protection is a no-brainer, it is basically the same as what you find in Apache 2.0 and widely adopted in enterprise (except for Apple and a couple of other patent trolls). The anti-Tivo clause is basically only potentially problematic for vendors of embedded devices, so a rather small part of the enterprises of this world, and even for them it seems only problematic for the low leve code (none of them have issues with Samba using GPLv3, and why should they).

I have brought GPLv3 up in many meetings and never been laughed at.

Its true that this is more complicated than meets the eye, when you can use GPLv3, by all means, do it (assuming you merely use software and don't need to modify it). Also there is the 'problem' of copyleft, but that's just the formality.
But one must admit that v2 or 'lesser' suits businesses more (and business is generally inherently focused on getting things done as cheap as possible and as fast as possible, prefferably without letting concurency free pass to their technology).
But if you have 2 equally suited pieces of software to get the job done, you go for the one with BSD license (which is more 'free' when circumstances change).

Overall, I like to say that GPL is moving towards 'enforcing freedom' (oxymoron).