Comment by nonrandomstring | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nonrandomstring | Hacker News Reader

nonrandomstring

Choose a job. Choose life. I chose Debian.

Now, what I mean is; I made a commitment.

As Linux strains under complexity I am wondering whether to make a full-commitment life switch to BSD. But it's been 20 years with Debian and it's like a relationship I almost feel afraid to leave.

Operating systems are something I know a little bit about. After going through the whole build Minix for 68000 from AT's book, then Linux From Scratch and compiling kernels thing, and building Slackware over a whole weekend, once I matured into needing a practical operating system in my 30s I was attracted to Debian by its social contract and "wholesome family atmosphere of Debbie and Ian."

I ended up building distros myself, learning the ropes of Debian development (though I never actually joined the DD community). It's been a rodeo ride. I loathe systemd and the whole "mother knows best" Poettering schism. The CoC dramas and virtue parades in front of the neighbours are just embarrasing. And then there's Uncle Ubuntu who sometimes touches us inappropriately.

But in the end I keep coming back "to the family", because in the end all families are dysfunctional and weird, so may as well pick one and try to work with it.

So I agree with the OP's admonition of distro hopping. It feels like restless promiscuity. Whenever I need to install a new OS I pick the latest minimal Debian and go from there.

> But it's been 20 years with Debian and it's like a relationship I almost feel afraid to leave.

I was shipping Debian 1.2 CDs by the hundreds in the nineties!

I'm using Debian or derivaties/forks everywhere (desktop / laptop / server / Raspberry Pi (raspbian).

> It's been a rodeo ride. I loathe systemd and the whole "mother knows best" Poettering schism.

A few months ago I switched my main desktop to "Devuan" (a Debian fork without systemd) and I do really dig it.

I'm still running Debian on servers, on the laptop, on the other desktop, etc.

But honestly: Devuan, for my use case on my dev machine, is really just Debian without the Poettering stuff and it works fine. YMMV.

I was actually debating Devuan, but I am kinda afraid of jumping ( maybe I will put it in VM first ). How difficult(long it took to) was it to create a good working environment for you?

I tried. Maybe too close to the debacle when Devuan was newborn. Ran just like a regular Debian, without init-hijack as advertised. But I soon ran into maintenance problems. The box I put it on soon couldn't be upgraded and (through my own fault of pulling in dubious backports and fsking my apt-sources file) I ended up back in the ninth circle of systemd. Probably due for a fresh try.

I'd like to try Devuan, but I'm assuming a lot of software these days assumes the presence of systemd?

Most software is below the level of systemd and agnostic to what you are running. Even services are only systemd specific insofar as they provide a systemd unit file which amounts to calling an executable with certain arguments which is convertible to a different system in about 10 seconds.

Presumably like void Linux this has been done for you.

The systemd haters are right about their complaints, but there's a ton that systemd does right, like making the interface expected of a daemon "Run forever and send output to stdin and stdout" rather than "Double fork and rotate your own logfiles" while also having support for the latter.

> The systemd haters are right about their complaints, but there's a ton that systemd does right

Yes. A fair and balanced technical analysis of systemd would have to concede it does a lot of good things, and well - if you subscribe to its paradigm [1].

My beef was with the disruption and bonfire of social capital caused by a heavy-handed, undemocratic, vocal group imposing upon others. It was an ugly episode and seemed to go against all the values I believed Debian stood for. And it came from all sides. The personal attacks on Poettering were inexcusable.

[1] I don't. I believe it's a solution that trades away system security and reliability to get userspace convenience.

Isn't that the "interface" which djb's daemontools, runit, and later s6 also promotes?

Anyway, that question was mostly rhetorical. You don't want to get into the midst of "yet another systemd flamewar" thread (and I don't blame you, neither do I).

Just pointing out that non-systemd alternatives provided the abovementioned interface, long before systemd existed.

It usually paints a better narrative to compare systemd vs sysvinit and ignore the fact that runit predates systemd by 6 years. It makes it substantially easier to dismiss detractors as Luddites scared of new things.

Imagine if Windows 8 came out and people rightly dunked on its many foibles and proponents said it was clearly superior to DOS and people really ought to just learn to love the charms bar and modern UI instead of sticking with their familiar command line interface.

BSDs are very interesting, I highly recommend checking some of them out. I think the most compelling case for them is the very tightly integrated kernel & OS which is largely decoupled from the user-space packages. I have completely hosed my Linux installs to the point of being unbootable a few times (to be clear, it was my fault every time!) by making mistakes with the package manager, but this isn't really possible with BSDs since the core operating system uses a completely separate method of updating and patching.

The other thing to keep in mind is that the systems are brutally minimalist. As in, Bash is considered a "fun bonus" rather than the core part of the system that is installed in /usr/local. That can be a substantial turn-off for some who see it as archaic or old-fashioned, but there's something to be said for the "stability" not deprecating such an old piece of software :)

Something you will probably appreciate is the consistency and documentation, even with little things like manpages. Every detail is ironed-out and perfected in a way that we're not really used to as Linux users.

There are some good guides out there for installing & configuring OpenBSD on an old laptop, and it's absolutely worth a try. It's without a doubt simpler and lighter than any mainstream Linux distro, and frankly just really fun to play with!

OpenBSD makes for a fantastic desktop OS. The major issue you'll run into is the availability of software (e.g. no electron apps).

Lack of choice can often be a blessing.

Why not? Isnt there a linux compatibility layer?

It was removed before 6.0.

My file server is running FreeBSD. The biggest sticking point for using it on my dev machine is lack of docker support on BSD. These days, my dev box is running Arch.

Do you know that, on Windows and Mac, Docker runs Linux in a VM? It uses Hyper-V on Windows and HyperKit on Mac. The Linux “distribution” is created with LinuxKit. It is this VM Linux kernel that gets shared across containers.

I mention this as lots of devs happily use Mac and Windows as Docker dev boxes.

Running something like Alpine or RancherOS on bhyve ( FreeBSD hypervisor ) and running Docker on top of that is pretty much the same as using Docker on a Mac.

No real reason to avoid FreeBSD as a dev platform just because you want to run Docker.

Given the divide you describe under BSDs, I just did a search for "nix on bsd". There doesn't seem to be very much of a nix/bsd story out there, based on my search. In principle it sounds like an interesting combination.

>I am wondering whether to make a full-commitment life switch to BSD.

I tried NetBSD for a small project a while ago and was very pleasantly surprised. The documentation was great and everything worked as advertised. I've spent more time trying to figure out a single package on Linux than I did getting up and running on NetBSD for the first time.

I switched all but two active machines (I have five) from Debian to OpenBSD from 2017 to 2019.

If you can live with everything OpenBSD+ports can't offer in comparison, then switch, you won't regret it.

If you don't have the right hardware for OpenBSD then aspire to change it in the future, you won't regret that either.

> It feels like restless promiscuity.

It might be like rumspringa which might be a stepping stone before you choose your level of commitment.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com