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 From:  william (WILLIAMA)  
 To:  Drew (X3N0PH0N)     
43090.22 In reply to 43090.21 
That was *kind of* the feeling I was getting in my meandering around the topic. Not so much that I'm not interested as I don't understand what systemd is doing as it does it - or a lot of Linux these days. 

He May Be Your Dog But He's Wearing My Collar

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 From:  william (WILLIAMA)  
 To:  Drew (X3N0PH0N)     
43090.23 In reply to 43090.21 
Yeah, that's an interesting talk. I was coming round to thinking what he had to say about Lennart Poettinger, ie death threats are not cool. But at the same time, Poettinger seems like a guy who wants to corporatise the start up and management of linux, but can't abide the corporate controls (such as thoroughly logging and investigating bugs) that go with that. He also seems every bit as resistant to change that he isn't making as any change-resistant linux dev, eg changing from using Google DNS and Time servers as a fallback. I saw an exchange with somebody who raised that as an issue, pointing out that Google doesn't necessarily share the aims of every linux user, where he closed the bug report with: 
 
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Christ, what's next? You accuse us of controlling people's minds with vaccinations we get directly from Bill Gates? And that systemd uses 5G to spread CoV-2? I don't think we need the input from the script kiddie peanut gallery here.
But, whatever, a nice run through of the history and how systemd got where it is. I suspect it's there to stay judging from the pies it has its fingers in.

I'm not a big fan of the "if you don't like it write your own" argument. It's a bit disingenuous. Not many people have the resources, time, financial support to do that, and certainly not the clout to get their version incorporated into multiple distros. 

Not sure how I feel about containers, and I say that as somebody who runs nextcloud from a snap which is next door to the same thing. I thought he rather side-stepped the question from the guy who mentioned dll-hell.

 

He May Be Your Dog But He's Wearing My Collar

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 From:  Drew (X3N0PH0N)  
 To:  william (WILLIAMA)     
43090.24 In reply to 43090.23 
Yeah, generally I like that the people behind FOSS projects are actual humans with human virtues and failings. Some of them are lovely, some of them are dickheads. Rather than stepford PR pleasantness of corporations, like.

I don't like it when FOSS (or adjacent stuff) gets corporate or startuppy. The Mastodon dude leans that way.

It's nice when devs are attentive to their users but I also don't mind it when they're like: I made this, it works for me, you can use it if you like but it is what it is, I'm making the decisions.

The problem with Pottering is that he's doing that latter *within Redhat*, which, as you've said, is just kinda weird.

"Write your own" is bullshit, yeah. At least when aimed at individuals. And he *totally* sidestepped the DLL thing, yeah.

I think the interesting part of the talk was just identifying the necessity(?) for a system layer which takes care of all that semi-persistent state stuff on modern computers. I buy it *up to a point*. As soon as he gives examples he kinda loses me because he's not describing anything like how I use my computer. I *think* he's describing something like a phone.

I think flatpaks and snaps, and also wayland and systemd to an extent, are really about making Linux more friendly to corporations and proprietary software vendors. Flatpaks and snaps make no sense to me whatsoever in a package-managed system. Same with docker on servers. I use docker images when that's what's supplied but I hate doing so. It's a very unlinuxy (and inefficient and inflexible) way to distribute software.

I like containers in principle. They're a better way to do a lot of what was previously done in VMs. I know Steam makes a lot of use of containers on Linux (no idea what it does on Windows), to essentially give each game all the stuff it needs, and that makes sense - that's the neatest way to do that (but again, it's really working around the flaws in proprietary software. Games in this case).

And I like distrobox. It's a little program that lets you install and run another distro on your running kernel. so if I want to try out the Debian version of some program, or use a program that's not provided by my distro, it's an easy and pretty light way to do that.

Linux is getting more coporatey over time. And I fear that as it gets more mainstream (aided by stuff like Steam Deck), what happened to the web will happen to Linux. Or it'll become Android. As soon as I can run my games on BSD I'll probably hop over.




 
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 From:  Drew (X3N0PH0N)  
 To:  william (WILLIAMA)     
43090.25 In reply to 43090.23 
Also, re: dockers etc.

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 From:  william (WILLIAMA)  
 To:  Drew (X3N0PH0N)     
43090.26 In reply to 43090.24 
Quote: 
It's a very unlinuxy (and inefficient and inflexible) way to distribute software.
It's not even an especially new of novel idea. I mean, I struggle to see what's different in principal between say a snap, and an old windows or DOS program that installs all it's gubbins, and maybe a runtime or whatever into its own program directory. I'm not saying there aren't differences, but... 

When I started running nextcloud as a snap, of course I was impressed. I'd run owncloud for years and migrated it across boxes and reinstalled it when upgrading distros. then I moved to nextcloud because I'd hit an owncloud error which I couldn't resolve and I was at the limit of free help from the company. Then I found I needed to rebuild the box yet again and the prospect of reinstalling apache or nginx and configuring letsencrypt and all the bollox all over again seemed such a drag, so yes, one command "sudo snap install nextcloud" which did 90% of the work seemed pretty good to me. It has it's irritations, like logs being in a different place and you have to use snap commands to configure things (which I always forget), but I'm not complaining. But I imagine if you're very used to a system managed by apt or rpm etc. then it could be annoying in the extreme.

Back on the topic of systemd, yes, exactly that. I can't see how a layer to manage the launch of things that persist is anything other than a good idea. Then I think, well hang on, so how did stuff work before? Things didn't just fall over or run amok all the time (well yes, some did, but they still do). And when you look, of course there were other solutions. It's just that systemd is sweeping all away. The interesting question is "why is that happening?".
 
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As soon as I can run my games on BSD I'll probably hop over.
Or write your own kernel, operating system suite, systemd enquivalent? Call it DinLin, Drew is not linux.

He May Be Your Dog But He's Wearing My Collar

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 From:  Drew (X3N0PH0N)  
 To:  william (WILLIAMA)     
43090.27 In reply to 43090.26 
Yeah it's not a million miles away from just bundling DLLs in a directory. We'll go to great lengths to avoid the thing Linux (and BSD) is really good at and everything else is bad at: Dynnamic linking.

Yeah if I were installing nextcloud I'd go with a docker or whatever too. Anything that requires a database and a web server is a pain in the arse. It *shouldn't* be a pain in the arse, I think we fucked up somewhere and containers are a dreadful solution to the problem. But for now, it's easy and it works.

I think the need for a kinda explicit system layer comes with USB, wifi and having multiple devices. Hardware was less transient in the past so things didn't need handling in a dynamic way, really. And you didn't want to take your "account" or whatever elsewhere.

My OS will be written in 100% bash. And it'll be called Dim. Dim isn't Minix.


 
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 From:  william (WILLIAMA)  
 To:  Drew (X3N0PH0N)     
43090.28 In reply to 43090.27 
Yes, it's a different world now, and especially with the web as he said in the talk. 

Database, web server, maybe a dash of webdav and that's a recipe for something complicated that shouldn't be. I suppose it's because there are so many dependent components. I lose count of the number of times I've followed a script to install something and broken down because PHP is out of date, or 'command not found' or a folder isn't where it should be because it all changed 6 months ago. Or something. 

Anyway, Dim. That's a properly recursive acronym.

 

He May Be Your Dog But He's Wearing My Collar

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 From:  ANT_THOMAS  
 To:  Drew (X3N0PH0N)     
43090.29 In reply to 43090.27 
Love bash. Probably because it's as far as my coding abilities stretch these days.
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 From:  william (WILLIAMA)  
 To:  ANT_THOMAS     
43090.30 In reply to 43090.29 
I love rexx, although I have absolutely no way to use it these days. May as well learn python.

He May Be Your Dog But He's Wearing My Collar

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 From:  Drew (X3N0PH0N)  
 To:  ANT_THOMAS     
43090.31 In reply to 43090.29 
Bash's syntax is objectively horrible. But I kinda love that. I enjoy how weird and inconsistent it is. Cos it's just something that's gown organically over time.

But what I *really* love about bash scripting is just stringing standard commands together to do stuff. Not having to worry about libraries or frameworks or language-specific package managers.

I'm absolutely done with frameworks and languages that have their own package managers. It's always horrible.
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 From:  Drew (X3N0PH0N)  
 To:  william (WILLIAMA)     
43090.32 In reply to 43090.30 
The cool kids are into Lisp these days. The kids that are too cool for python/rust/go.

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 From:  william (WILLIAMA)  
 To:  Drew (X3N0PH0N)     
43090.33 In reply to 43090.32 
Some people should never be allowed to teach or offer tutorials  :'-D 

He May Be Your Dog But He's Wearing My Collar

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