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Comment by pshirshov | Hacker News Reader

No 802.11ac, no declarative configurations (like in Nixos).

What's the point?

Not everybody got 802.11ac at home already and most people are fine with 802.11n speed for their personnal usage. I would say this is irrelevant for a large fraction of the population.

Also not everybody need declarative configuration, especially when talking about a monodevice scope.

802.11ac came out 2013.

And a lot of people only get a new access point when they either receive a new router from their providers or change providers.

This is not uncommon to have the same wireless access point for a decade or so and people are generally fine with it. Also most people don't even know there are different revisions of the wifi standard and if you say 802.11 they will just look at you with clueless eyes.

I am not saying it is ok for any OS to not support it but it doesn't necessarily affect everyone's life.

Some work is done on that front though: https://wiki.freebsd.org/WiFi/80211ac

Sure most people don't upgrade their router very often but those people probably aren't the ones interested in using freebsd as their desktop, I doubt they have even heard of freebsd or would care to hear about it.

The type of person that will install freebsd on a laptop and then setup all the configuration is probably very techy and would want the best tech, os, wifi.

Hm, as far as I can tell FreeBSD has drivers for ac cards, but they only support WiFi 4 at the protocol level?

It's not just about speed. I live in an apartment block where so many people have got WiFi networks and Bluetooth devices that the 2.4GHz band has become heavily congested. These days, I need 802.11ac on the 5GHz band just to get a connection on my tablet in the bedroom to the router in the hallway ...

There is 5GHz N. Not as common in devices or routers though.

I'm not sure I've ever seen a 80211n device that _didn't_ support 5GHz.

A lot of low end consumer devices don't. For example the PS Vita supports N but not 5GHz, nor do most kindles until the latest Paperwhite. It was also super common for cheap $400 laptops in 2011 to have N but not 5Ghz support.

I believe Nintendo didn’t support it until the Switch, surprisingly - the WiiU was 2.4 only.

Not for the internet but Wii U uses 5GHz for streaming to the gamepad.

Guess that explains the poor range issue people cited back in its heydey.

I think the point is that the big two personal computer operating systems have become so user hostile that alternatives are looking good.

FreeBSD wouldn't be my choice either but for a mac refugee it makes sense.

What do you mean by hostile?

Subverting user’s intentions by doing things like resetting the default browser on every update, or forcing you into their App Store ecosystem by making it like pulling teeth to download an app from the internet and run it.

Doesn't sound critical at all.

How is Linux hostile?

Windows and OSX, not linux.

All the stupid stuff they force down your neck: must be a registered user in their system rather than just a local user. The app stores. The deprecation of perfectly good hardware. Forced updates on their schedule. Monitoring of user actions turned on by default. Changing preferences without asking.

All of it is getting in the way of you actually using your own device on your own terms.

Can someone explain to me why FreeBSD doesn't support 802.11ac?

Because blobs,almost certainly. Binary blobs which expect certain syscalls which Linux does and writing the FreeBSD equivalents is time consuming and expert knowledge driven.

A guess, is all.

No particular reason, really; it's being worked on: https://www.freebsd.org/status/report-2021-07-2021-09/#_inte...

>no declarative configurations (like in Nixos)

OpenBSD autoinstall and two scripts for desktop packages and daemons. The whole user config is a TGZ. Done, and much faster than setting up Nix OS env.

What about maintenance?

Almost nil. Upgrades: download bsd.rd from the new release, place it under /, reboot, boot bsd.rd, press U for (U)pgrade, wait, reboot, pkg_add -U && pkg_delete -a (to crack down orphans). Done.

How about ZFS?

It's easy to use zfs on Ubuntu.

It also integrates great with LXD (a nicer way to use containers).

To desperately cling to the past out of fear of the future.

While I'm sure we all understand your sentiment, I think you're missing the point. This isn't the future we /users/ want. It's the future that corporations, silly commities and greed-/arrogance-/bling-motivated decision makers are dictating to the rest of the world.

What we're witnessing in these Thinkpad, right-to-repair, yEaR oF tEh nix dEsKtop conversations, is people taking back control of the devices we own. At the cost of compromises the same decision makers are not willing to allow you to make.

It's easy to look at these case studys as outliers or edge cases as someone who probably lives in the first world, adding to the pile of e-waste by perpetuating and encouraging the behaviour supporting companies like Apple.

What I see as an IT engineer at mid-size MSP is the SMB/SME market and their staff struggle with adapting to the ever-changing technologies. I feel their pain, because I'm the one that has to make old work with new. Privateers and coders get to choose their environment for the most part. Businesses have baggage, standard operating procedures and a mix of requirements. And then you get people like Apple thinking we can all live wirelessly or with exorbitantly priced adapters and less choice as consumers of their products... it's arrogant and user-hostile.

One day you'll understand that everything it's cyclic. Flat interfaces will be toshed out for semi 3D interfaces such as the ones from Aqua/Haiku/Windows 9x and so on.

Most of the Linux solutions are overengineered, btw. They had to release Pipewire for everything as OpenBSD did with sndio. And yet ALSA adds a layer of cruft and complications. Sndio+OSS just works.

So, I think keeping yourself on a simple design path makes the future much easier.

For example, MTP on phones suck, up to the point that using SFTP with some server from FDROID makes the data sharing back and forth much, much better.

Ditto with rclone vs 200 providers with their own GUI for everything.

Or age and/or signify vs OpenSSL or GPG2 being used to encrypt files where those have options for everything encrypting/signing related.

MTP (not a Linux solution anyway) is several orders of magnitude simpler than SFTP, though (no encryption to begin with, albeit there is XML which sadly may compete in complexity).

Eh, MTP often doesn't work and USB stacks are far more tricky than Eth.

On transferring files sftp/mc works fine, while MTP often hangs.

That is my point; it is simpler and yet more problematic. "Simplicity rules" only works up to a point.

The future, as defined as what's a hot topic during next quarter's hype cycle.

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