Ubuntu ain’t what it used to be. If you want a simple distro nowadays just go straight to the source with Debian. There’s no real benefit to going with Ubuntu anymore, and community distros are just a safer bet. Corporate distros aren’t your friend.
ARM compatibility is still shit. All actually useful desktop apps are still primarily x86-64, the compatibility layer Rosetta is hit or miss, everything is proprietary and expensive, and Apple decided the Pro model should only have 8GB for a shit ton of money. Apple is overpriced trash in the '20s.
Worth every penny IMO, MacOS is super nice and so is the hardware.
Putting all my legitimate Apple/MacOS concerns/arguments aside, how can you declare a product as “Worth every penny” when you yourself have not used it for an extensive period of time? Attempted to integrate it into your workflow?
Debian uses its own version of the Linux kernel with proprietary parts removed; however, if you want to install it on a machine that does have hardware for which there are no free drivers (which is to say almost any machine out there in the market), you’ll have to install proprietary parts; in the last version, Debian 12, system does that by default.
Intel Management Engine is a CPU-level microprogram that runs with highest priority and does not have open code, so essentially every PC with Intel CPU runs some arbitrary code we cannot verify. Same for AMD Platform Security Processor by the way, so there is no simple escape.
Oh and BIOS is proprietary too, and only a few select machines can have a fully libre BIOS successfully installed on them.
Thereby even if you go to essentially libre version of Linux, there will, almost universally, be pieces of obfuscated code with no disclosure on what they’re doing there.
Isn’t that a hardware problem though? At some point you want your software to work, and years of reverse engineering for it to do so is a long time for it isn’t it?
Well, it’s obviously dictated by hardware and the software that manufacturers release for it. I’m not calling enthusiasts to reverse engineer every single driver, that’s impossible.
The point is, there is a lot of proprietary blobs in everyone’s systems, and it’s not cool. If you ask me, we should obviously shift policies to force manufacturers to open source drivers and management systems.
Didn’t knew about the Debian part I thought they said that they will ship an installer with non-free by default and another installer which you can configure.
Btw I’m on my way to build a new x220 with libreboot and GUIX can we get more free than that? Xd
IME is even worse than that. It runs on a supervisor processor in the chipset that has privileged access to the memory, peripherals, and CPU, and can run when the rest of the system is powered off. IME is how Intel AMT can serve as a KVM-over-IP, and just because you don’t have a CPU with Vpro doesn’t mean all the components aren’t there for an exploited or backdoored ME firmware to remotely log your console or inject keystrokes.
I’m actually curious what BSD provides in comparison to Linux. What does it add, do better, or worse?
The only thing I know is that they introduced some stuff way before linux did, but that’s simply due to the age. BSD jails for example have been around for a long time. Buy beyond that, it was never apparent to me why linux took off and BSD didn’t.
Yea I don’t use Linux much but both my router and nas are running BSD. Also I found out the PS5 runs BSD. Guessing the benefits are a stable OS as my router/nas often have uptime in the months with my NAS once running over a year without being restarted.
No, it’s because BSD has a permissive license, unlike Linux. You have to release source if you change the source, which is not what BSD is about. BSD says “here’s the source, do whatever you want with it”.
I would say the biggest advantage is that OpenBSD is a very security-focused distribution, in a way that I don’t think any Linux-based distro has adopted.
The other advantage is ZFS. 10-20 years ago, there was no equivalent, and btrfs was in its infancy. These days, btrfs has proven that it is pretty stable and resilient. There might still be some advantages of ZFS over btrfs, but I haven’t used either one at all, so I can’t really be sure.
Outside of that, the BSDs are basically just different distros. Back in the 90s, when there was a lot more diversity in Unix, a lot of people just started out with *BSD because there was no clear choice at the time. People just like to use what they are more comfortable with - but most new users pick Linux over BSD these days, and a lot of people who started out on BSD have assimilated onto Linux.
Still, diversity is a good, nice thing, especially with the advent of systemd. So I’m glad we still have the BSDs around, even if I disagree with their stance toward the GPL.
There might still be some advantages of ZFS over btrfs, but I haven’t used either one at all, so I can’t really be sure.
Curently, there are none. In fact, BTRFS has outperformed ZFS in every aspect in the past few years, including filesystem growth (when changing drives, put in bigger ones, something you could never do with ZFS).
Outside of that, the BSDs are basically just different distros. Back in the 90s, when there was a lot more diversity in Unix, a lot of people just started out with *BSD because there was no clear choice at the time. People just like to use what they are more comfortable with - but most new users pick Linux over BSD these days, and a lot of people who started out on BSD have assimilated onto Linux.
The main reason is more drivers and software. Sure, it might be fun compiling from source when you’re young, but at the end of the day, when you wanna get work done, you really can’t tell your customer (or boss) “look, I really can’t deal with this right now, I’m building FF from source”. Also, one of the main reasons why Gentoo and LFS have a fairly small user base.
Still, diversity is a good, nice thing, especially with the advent of systemd. So I’m glad we still have the BSDs around, even if I disagree with their stance toward the GPL.
There are distros that don’t use systemd, Void being the most prominent of them all (mainly because of the number of packages it has in it’s repo).
Bsd is a complete package and tested as such. All the software and everything. It’s like windows, when it’s released you install it and you get wordpad, edge, calculator etc. Bsd is the same that way. Linux is just a kernel, with the distributions bolting on the gnu software. I know it sounds kinda the same but it’s not.
Also the license. With Linux I think you need to cite it’s use and you can’t charge for something build with it (of course there’s exceptions, like packages you create do not need to be for example), but bsd license is the most permissive. You can charge a customer for it and dress it up however you want.
You don’t need to cite, you need to provide source code. The point of GPL is to allow the user to inspect and modify the software. You can even sell it as long as you provide the modified source code under the same license.
You get to write your own drivers from scratch, so you know for sure no one is spying on you 👍.
Linux took off because, one, it wasn’t backed up by an institution or a company, just one guy doing weird stuff with his computer, and two, because of the license. People don’t like investing time in something that others might use for free in their commercial products. And not only that, but they’re not bound by law to release the source for that. And this is the reasson why every printer out there runs a BSD variant, not Linux.
Most of the time, your grub is still there, even the link on your efi partiton. Only the evivars in uefi need to be reminded of their existance far too often.
Windows did an update once that messed up so bad that at least until I booted into a live USB, my bios couldn’t find grub or windows lol, then from the live USB I just chrooted in and reinstalled grub.
The way WSL1 worked is actually quite interesting: The NT kernel always had the capability to run multiple subsystems, with Win32 only being one of them and there were subsystems available for OS/2, POSIX and later UNIX. WSL1 was pretty much a revival of that feature. So WSL1 is indeed somewhat like Wine, but making heavy use of some features built into the kernel. So yeah, no real boot process happening.
(Also it’s kinda stupid that the ‘S’ in WSL2 still stands for ‘subsystem’, despite not using that feature anymore.)
I liked the WSL1 approach better. I find it ironic that the Windows kernel lacks so many useful features that it simply wasn’t possible to properly implement things like cgroups on top of it, so they just gave up and ran Linux in a VM for WSL2
The new PC I’m putting together tomorrow won’t go in it. It’s there only really for Skyrims external modding tools that I’ve tried to get working. I have a grandfathered lifetime nexus account, so I’d like to stick with it. LooT, nemesis and resaver, and vortex would be the ones to get working correctly.
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