A FreeBSD "Spork" With Touches of NeXT and OS X: NeXTBSD

There are a lot of open source operating systems out there; being open source, they lend themselves to forks, clones or near clones, and friendly offshoots. There are even services to let you customize, download, and (if you choose) bulk-install your own OS based on common components. Phoronix notes a new project called NeXTBSD that might turn more heads than most new open source OSes, in part because of the developers behind it, and in part because of the positive thoughts many people have toward the aesthetics of NeXTSTEP and Mac OS X. (And while it might be a fork of FreeBSD, the developers would rather call it a spork, instead.) NeXTBSD was announced last week by Jordan Hubbard and Kip Macy at the Bay Area FreeBSD Users Group (BAFUG). NeXTBSD / FreeBSD X is based on the FreeBSD-CURRENT kernel while adding in Mach IPC, Libdispatch, notifyd, asld, launchd, and other components derived from Apple's open-source code for OS X. The basic launchd/notifyd/asld/libdispatch stack atop their "fork" of FreeBSD is working along with other basic components of their new design. You can watch a recording of the announcement as well as a longer introduction linked from Phoronix's story.

Comments

Use-case?

[Anonymous Coward]

What is the use-case that required a fork?

Re:Use-case?

[ChunderDownunder]

Apple are no longer interested in maintaining xnu/darwin and see strategic benefits from re-basing iOS and OS/X upon FreeBSD?

Re:Use-case?

[Anonymous Coward]

NetCraft wanted to confirm a fresh, new BSD corpse.

Re:Use-case?

[jellomizer]

The direction that a project is going, is further away than where you want it to go.

Lets consider Android vs. GNU/Linux (Now I personally hate calling Linux "GNU/Linux", but I need to differentiate it ). They both use the Linux kernel, but the rest of the Operating systems are very different.
Android was forked so it can better suit a mobile system market. GNU/Linux was more towards the server and workstation.
As Android uses more direct frame-buffer technology, GNU/Linux focuses around X windows.
Android doesn't need to detect every piece of hardware, GNU/Linux does.
Android expect more gestures for its control, GNU/Linux is more keyboard and mouse.

Now on the BSD level. That is mostly server vs server, so the needs are not as large. However there is a fair amount of discussion on how defaults should be setup, what type of hardware should be supported, as moving to a virtual environments how many tasks needed to be running optimally....
 

Re:Use-case?

[Eunuchswear]

systemd envy.

Re:Use-case?

[Bing Tsher E]

I wouldn't call Android a 'fork' of Linux. Linux is just a kernel, a plug-in component used in many different operating systems, i.e. Debian, Slackware, SuSE, Ubuntu. Android didn't 'fork' from any of those operating systems. It just incorporated the Linux kernel. It isn't a linux 'distribution' because it's for the most part a unified whole, not a dogs-breakfast of misc. userland programs from all over, which is what most (all?) of the operating systems that call themselves 'Linux' are.

Re:Use-case?

[laffer1]

launchd does not replace su(1) so it's not envy.

Re:Use-case?

[Anonymous Coward]

One of the reasons for this experimental project is to push FreeBSD as a viable mobile platform, by using some of the same technologies that Apple used to make their version of the FreeBSD kernel ready for mobile.

Re:Use-case?

[ShanghaiBill]

A different asshole wanted to be in charge.

1. Jordan Hubbard was one of the original founders of FreeBSD. He didn't need to fork to be in charge.
2. Jordan is not an asshole. He is a friendly, outgoing, and helpful person. Perhaps you have him confused with Theo de Raadt.

Re:Use-case?

[Anonymous Coward]

Kip Macy is the asshole. Dubbed the Landlord from Hell, he and his wife Nicole terrorized their tenants by turning off the gas, cutting floor joists to destabilize the building, kicking one in the chest, and threatening them with a gun. The prosecutor offered a deal that included less than a year in county jail with time served and a fine instead of state prison. He and his wife decided to jump a $500K bail put up by Kip's parents and go to Europe, where he continued to do work on FreeBSD. The developers know his history and continued to work with him, essentially the harbored him. Although the two were eventually found and brought back, Kip's parents ended up forfeiting the bail. Both Kip and Nicole did a stint in state prison for some felonies. In a jail house interview, Kip refused to take responsibility, still blaming his tenants. I guess writing code trumps criminal behavior.

The FreeBSD Project has a problem harboring unrepentant douche bags like Kip Macy, and also Randi Harper.

Re:Use-case?

[dgatwood]

Perhaps you don't understand what the word "harbor" means. It means to give a home or shelter to someone; in this usage, it implies doing so in secret. Allowing someone to contribute code openly (not in secret) is precisely the opposite. It keeps the person talking, thus revealing that person's location, and making it easier to bring that person to justice.

Besides, it's a bit like the ethical question of "tainted" money. If someone earns money through doing bad things, is it ethical to use that money for good? Maybe. To me, the answer comes down to whether doing so would encourage continued bad behavior. For example, it would be unethical to accept evidence obtained through an illegal search (fruit of the poisonous tree) because doing so would encourage police to ignore the legal process and get the evidence through any means necessary. But in this case, if what you described is accurate, it is one step removed from that, even. The coding wasn't gained through illegal or unethical means; accepting the code would probably not make the person more likely to do bad things in his personal life, because the two are largely unconnected aspects of the person in question.

Re: Use-case?

[Anonymous Coward]

WOOOOSH!
That's why he said GNU/Linux and not just Linux, since he addressed a forking of a larger Linux context, and not just the kernel.

Re:Use-case?

[Anonymous Coward]

I wouldn't call Android a 'fork' of Linux.

Neither did the GP.

Linux is just a kernel

Yes we already know that, the GP is talking about GNU/Linux, not just the Linux kernel which is why he used the term "GNU/Linux" 6 times and only used the term "Linux" when referring to the kernel directly.

Android didn't 'fork' from any of those operating systems. It just incorporated the Linux kernel.

The Android Linux kernel is a fork of the official mainline kernel, the other components are either re-implementations of existing technologies (Bionic for example) or forks of existing projects like the Dalvik components forked from Apache Harmony.

It isn't a linux 'distribution' because it's for the most part a unified whole

Wrong. It is made up of a number of different components cobbled together including the Linux kernel, the Bionic standard C library, Dalvik VM, ART, various libraries (WebKit, SQLite, Surface Manager, etc) as well as application framework components (Package, Activity, Location, etc managers and components like XMPP). Then on official Google version you have Google Play Services as well.

Re:Use-case?

[aaronb1138]

Except the part where socially, we should shun unrepentant criminals. Being allowed to continue contributing allowed Kip to belong to a community and likely gave a lot of solace and sense to him that he wasn't a "bad guy".

One of the key points of prison time is being removed from community, much more so than lacking freedom.

Re:Use-case?

[Anonymous Coward]

I know what you say is true, I just can't figure out how a scrawny little shit like Kip Macy intimidated anyone. Also, isn't he still supposed to be in prison until 2017?

Re:Use-case?

[dgatwood]

We've seen what happens when you treat unrepentant criminals as outcasts. They remain unrepentant criminals. The recidivism rate in American prisons should be proof enough that such tactics don't work. Or take a look at countries that try to imprison the opposing forces after a civil war. Things never stabilize. Sometimes, forgiveness by others is the first step towards repentance—turn the other cheek, and all that.

Re:Use-case?

[Anonymous Coward]

Probably released early due to the over crowding in California prisons. According to the plea deal, Kip and Nicole both got 4 years and 4 months for two felony counts of residential burglary, one felony count of stalking and one felony count of attempted grand theft. They served less than 2 years. By the way, Kip was sent to San Quentin. Compare this to the original deal, 1 year in county jail and 5 years probation. They would have been out of county in 6 months or less with the time served awaiting trial before they jumped bail.

I believe his parents lost the house they put up as collateral for the bail. If he was my kid, I would have disowned him.

Re:Use-case?

[Anonymous Coward]

sfer

Re:Use-case?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well at least as a bail jumper and double felon (he picked up the second felony while at San Quentin for attempted grand theft), he is unlikely to be able to obtain another passport.

Re:Use-case?

[epine]

The FreeBSD Project has a problem harboring unrepentant douche bags like Kip Macy, and also Randi Harper.

You do know that there is such a thing as false conviction, and the standard of "repentance or permanent ostracization"—remaining in glorious effect long after punishment by the state has run its course—effectively demands the the wrongfully convicted confess to crimes they never committed, in order to have any hope of returning to productive society ever again?

In general (absent subsequent evidence), we don't actually know who are the wrongfully convicted, or we wouldn't have convicted them in the first place.

Sometimes (for a value of "sometimes" with no fixed address) the rush to judgment really sucks ass. That ought to give you at least a moment's pause before this kind of sentiment as an anonymous coward. It's why we allow the state to assign punishment rather than throwing blemished produce at the town pillory (e.g. a perfectly edible cucumber that's not quite straight, or harbours somewhere a small scab).

Sure, he sounds like a royal douche. But is it really my job to see that he suffers forever-after on nothing but a thin gruel of second-hand story telling?

Has it never occurred to you that there's a downside to your unthoughtful bitterness?

Hmm...

[EmeraldBot]

Kind of interesting. From what I gather it's supposed to be the unstable rolling release branch of FreeBSD (-CURRENT), which presumably some Apple enhancements? Maybe the interface? I don't know, they're rather vague with what their ultimate goal is. The progressive part sounds like they intend for this to be something like Arch for Linux, but -CURRENT is not exactly a bastion of stability. It's the beta branch. Users won't want it because it's too unstable, and all the extras are going to make it unappealing for testing, I think. A neat idea, but I think this would be much better off if pulled from -STABLE or better yet, -RELEASE. THEN we'd have something quite interesting on our hands.

Re:Hmm...

[Anonymous Coward]

The targeted usecase is FreeNAS, and previous presentations by Jordan Hubbard made clear that he want to restructure the project to better manage daemons and configuration. Don't expect any graphical display stuff, they are from the proprietary stuff from apple, the only things that can be imported are bits from Darwin. Expect at some point wayland port depending on how much upstream is deep in their little linux world, but I don't think that'll come from a iXsystems. Expect maybe some graphical stuff from the lumina project, but not a complete DE like KDE, Gnome or MacOSX (more likely a nice "lightweight" Qt desktop).

Re:Hmm...

[myowntrueself]

The targeted usecase is FreeNAS, and previous presentations by Jordan Hubbard made clear that he want to restructure the project to better manage daemons and configuration.

Don't expect any graphical display stuff, they are from the proprietary stuff from apple, the only things that can be imported are bits from Darwin.

Expect at some point wayland port depending on how much upstream is deep in their little linux world, but I don't think that'll come from a iXsystems. Expect maybe some graphical stuff from the lumina project, but not a complete DE like KDE, Gnome or MacOSX (more likely a nice "lightweight" Qt desktop).

Ohhhh so its going to be systemd for BSD?

Re:Hmm...

[wkcole]

Ohhhh so its going to be systemd for BSD?

Yes and no.

Some of the legacy Unix issues that systemd is supposedly intended to address have been attacked by Apple in the tools NeXTBSD is adopting: ASL, LaunchD, GCD/LibDispatch, NotifyD, etc. Note that unlike systemd, the Darwin replacements for traditional init, cron, & syslog aren't monolithic and are relatively mature. LaunchD & ASL have been evolving for over a decade in mass-market OS releases and it is apparent to anyone using them attentively in MacOS over that time that Apple has been working to make them actual improvements for admins and developers interacting with them over the legacy tools, rather than merely replacements. They were both problematic in their earliest releases, but they both have been developed over time to the point where they no longer seem like the products of CS theoreticians who've never managed real systems.

Beyond that, I think it is safe to assert that there is MUCH more well-earned community goodwill towards Hubbard & Macy than there ever has been or ever could be for Poettering, so the social drama isn't preset for tragedy in the event that the project is unremarkable for a while.

Re:Hmm...

[JPyObjC Dude]

When I read the description, I saw the exact same thing as It sounded just like the discussion points for the upcoming FreeNAS 10. Its so wicked that Jordan now works for iXSystems :)

The new iXSystems FreeNAS 10 platform would be a great foundation as a general application server platform. I'm not sure how well it would behave as a desktop OS. You sure cannot go wrong with root ZFS though, which is something that is not trivial on linux.

Re:Hmm...

[caseih]

Systemd is not monolithic. It's highly modular and only a few small parts are mandatory for systemd's init to function. Saying systemd is monolithic does not make it so.

As for the evolution of launchd and it's current usability, the same exact things can be said of systemd. systemd is not a creation of theoretitists. It actually solves practical problems in a practical way, as does launchd.

It's just ironic to me that slashdotters will come to launchd's defense while lambasting systemd.

Re:Hmm...

[Anonymous Coward]

you have fell into Poettering fallacy. yes, systemd is monolithic. like linux is, but linux is a kernel. linux is modular like any other kernel but is a monolithic kernel yet. systemd is the same case, it's modular like any other program, but it's still monolithic.

only a microkernel is not monolithic because the services are in user mode and you can use them on another microkernel, but monolithic modules are made for 1 kernel and only it. systemd is not "micro" and its modules are dependant exclusively on it, so it IS monolithic.

about launchd i don't know, seems like a OpenRC with own daemon or i'm confusing with Apple SystemStarter.

Re:Hmm...

[Anonymous Coward]

Could something done along the lines of OpenStep GNUstep fit in with this? Sony had ideas about making use of that technology a few years ago, but apparently had a change of heart.

http://arstechnica.com/civis/v...

Will it run Windowmaker?

[Anonymous Coward]

Afterstep? Or utilize Enlightenment for that composited OSX feel?

Would love a modern NeXTstep

[jregel]

I'd love to see a desktop OS that builds on what NeXT did. I know Mac OS X is that to some degree, but I'm thinking of something more like the original NeXTstep GUI.

It's somewhat ironic that when GNUstep first started, one of the reasons why it didn't get much traction was the use of the "non-standard" Objective-C. As a result, effort was instead spent on KDE and then GNOME. If GNUstep became the standard, it could have changed Linux on the desktop as porting Mac OS X apps over would have been much easier. Of course, no-one knew that then.

Re:Would love a modern NeXTstep

[laffer1]

That's why I started MidnightBSD. I just didn't keep enough developers around after the initial push to finish it.

I've been looking at their code for a few weeks (it was in the trueos repo on a branch) and it's rather interesting. The Mach IPC layer is actually a port from code in NetBSD up to around 5.0. Then they've brought in patches for libdispatch workqueue support and a bunch of apple code.

Re:Would love a modern NeXTstep

[swell]

This appears to be the vision of a very small number of developers. One? Of course they welcome help but the single vision is important.

A person I greatly respected (my mommy) used to say, when she saw an ugly building, "It looks like it was built by a committee."

Have you ever noticed this effect in a software project?

Re: Would love a modern NeXTstep

[Anonymous Coward]

Somebody sounds jealous. Are you mad theo won't let you suck his dick?

Re:Would love a modern NeXTstep

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course, no-one knew that then.

Everyone with a brain knew that then. But even open source is hampered by groupthink. It's the same reason that GNUstep is in such a sorry state today when it comes to mobile support. Anyone with a clue would have capitalized on the popularity of iOS years ago, but not GNUstep.

NeXT

[pr0nbot]

I'd assume Apple still owns the trademark for NeXT, so I expect they'll rename it if it gets any traction.

Maybe NextBSD or nxBSD or something wouldn't fall foul of the trademark?

Re: NeXT

[Anonymous Coward]

BsdNT

Re:NeXT

[ChunderDownunder]

it's a crappy name designed to create confusion with NetBSD in any case.

Re:NeXT

[Anonymous Coward]

Just like everyone knows that XWindows and Windows are so easy to confuse.

Re:NeXT

[Anne Thwacks]

I vote for "Backstep"

Re:NeXT

[Anonymous Coward]

You mean that Apple is a trademark of NeXT.
Apple was sold for very cheap to NeXT, I mean it is the CEO of NeXT with their flagship product NeXTStep but renamed Apple and OS X.

Re:NeXT

[hummassa]

it's XWindow

Re:NeXT

[Anonymous Coward]

What title do you see on this page?

http://www.phy.ohiou.edu/computer/xwin/xfaq.html

Re:NeXT

[Anonymous Coward]

You mean that Apple is a trademark of NeXT. Apple was sold for very cheap to NeXT, I mean it is the CEO of NeXT with their flagship product NeXTStep but renamed Apple and OS X.

Mod as Informative. Cry like a baby Lin/Win Zealots!

Re:NeXT

[Anonymous Coward]

An ancient FAQ written by users is hardly authoritative, but if you accept those kind of credentials:

X was named after an earlier window system called "W". It is a window system called "X", not a system called "X Windows".

Re:NeXT

[myowntrueself]

An ancient FAQ written by users is hardly authoritative, but if you accept those kind of credentials:

X was named after an earlier window system called "W". It is a window system called "X", not a system called "X Windows".

I've always referred to it as 'The X Window system'

Re:NeXT

[Blaskowicz]

It's X11. No, it's Xorg. Wait, it's X11 since there are a few non-Xorg systems. Wait, if you run it raw it doesn't manage windows so perhaps that's why it is an "X Window system".

Re: NeXT

[Anonymous Coward]

BFreeSD

Re:NeXT

[Pikoro]

FreeBastard or NextBastard

Doesn't this already exist?

[nathana]

Why not just run / fork (okay, fine, "spork") Darwin?

-- Nathan

Re:Doesn't this already exist?

[Anonymous Coward]

They are FreeBSD users and developers that want to push the FreeBSD ecosystem further than the Current branch is able to go. They don't want a new kernel that works like Apple's OS X, they want a modernized in it that keeps the UNIX principles firmly in mind, while paving the way for mobile form factors and many others.

Re:Doesn't this already exist?

[Anonymous Coward]

Mach microkernel is very Unix-like. Was made in and for the BSD. It's a BSD technology to replace the traditional Unix monolithic kernel and test the concepts of its IPC and its sockets. Darwin = FreeBSD userland/(Mach + some FreeBSD modules + I/OKit). The only thing non-BSD in Darwin is the I/OKit and the fact is a hybrid kernel. They want to do the same in FreeBSD kernel, I mean, the traditional Unix kernel.

Wait, what happened to GNU OpenStep?

[Anonymous Coward]

Where did the open source version of NeXTStep go? Wasn't there one already?

Re:Wait, what happened to GNU OpenStep?

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you mean GNUStep? It's alive and kicking.

The GNU has most of the stuff to make NeXTSTEP now, but nothing is quite right.

* GNUStep
* GNU Mach
* GNU HURD
* GWorkspace ...

Richard Stallman was obviously trying to copy NeXT for a very long time.

Re:[Link] Why FreeBSD should not adopt launchd

[Anonymous Coward]

http://blog.darknedgy.net/technology/2015/08/26/0
Correct link

Hail!

[Anonymous Coward]

If it can't run systemd, I won't use it. I prefer my OS to be written by the chosen one. All Hail Lennart Poettering!

Re:Hail!

[Anonymous Coward]

He knows what is best for us. Unix was broken so he is fixing it.

Re:Hail!

[laffer1]

Soon he will declare the kernel too confusing and replace it with a systemd command. I'll get the popcorn.

Re:Hail!

[Anonymous Coward]

Soon he will declare the kernel too confusing and replace it with a systemd command. I'll get the popcorn.

I'll bring the FreeBeER!

adding Libdispatch, notifyd, asld, launchd...

[Anonymous Coward]

Systemd can replace all of that.

Re:adding Libdispatch, notifyd, asld, launchd...

[Anonymous Coward]

No one wants garbage like systemd.

Re:adding Libdispatch, notifyd, asld, launchd...

[Anonymous Coward]

You're getting it whether you like it or not!

Re:adding Libdispatch, notifyd, asld, launchd...

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, if those systemd zombies don't fix it, we all will be switching to NeXTBSD...

There is nothing wrong why are we fixing a non-existing problem ?

Re:adding Libdispatch, notifyd, asld, launchd...

[fnj]

You're getting it whether you like it or not!

No I'm not. I'm running FreeBSD.

Re:adding Libdispatch, notifyd, asld, launchd...

[Anonymous Coward]

If it only had a good text editor...

OpenSource NeXTSTEP == Apple Darwin

[Anonymous Coward]

Wait, didnt' Apple open source the base OS as Darwin?

Re:OpenSource NeXTSTEP == Apple Darwin

[Bing Tsher E]

Apple killed Darwin. I ran it for a little while, though I prefer NetBSD. Darwin wasn't very interesting compared to an OS that has a vibrant active user/developer community.

Re:OpenSource NeXTSTEP == Apple Darwin

[guruevi]

It's still around: http://www.opensource.apple.co...

Re:OpenSource NeXTSTEP == Apple Darwin

[Anonymous Coward]

> Apple killed Darwin.

What do you mean by 'killed'? I know they changed licensing and stopped providing installers, but as far as I know it's still distributed by Apple in source form.

Maybe you mean Apple's lack of support killed the "free" distros like GNU-Darwin and OpenDarwin? I think lack of interest had more to do with it.

Re:OpenSource NeXTSTEP == Apple Darwin

[Anonymous Coward]

Darwin includes the Mach and BSD bits from Mac OS X - which presumably evolved from counterparts in NeXTstep. It also includes an implementation of the HFS+ filesystem.

It doesn't include the higher-level object-oriented libraries and GUI stuff that made NeXTstep NeXTstep, just as it doesn't include the corresponding libraries and GUI stuff for Mac OS X. So when the Open Source community uses Darwin, they add an X Window System based GUI and an assortment of GNU/Linux tools, because that's what's available in the way of complete sets of tools, for free.

Of course, this also means that Open Source systems based around Darwin tend to look much like other Linux/GNU and *BSD distributions.

Re:OpenSource NeXTSTEP == Apple Darwin

[Anonymous Coward]

Apple is no longer going to contribute to it and the community around Darwin was never able to establish itself as a self-sustaining group. Apple can't retroactively remove the open source fork, but without Apple's support it's become a dead end.

Coherent Unix has gone open source, but none of us believe the fantasy that somehow a vibrant community can be built around some source code with no commercial support.

The Chef

[Anonymous Coward]

A spork?? Bork bork bork!!

launchd not as bad as systemd

[drinkypoo]

But also nearly universally reviled.

Why does everyone care about saving five seconds during boot that will be completely overshadowed by the time you spend in BIOS POST?

Re:launchd not as bad as systemd

[Blaskowicz]

Haven't used a UEFI system?
The other day, there was a forum thread by a guy who had assembled a new PC and thought that it didn't work. The thing went so quick as to not show anything on the display then monitor would get put on stand by. You pretty much have to mash keys before turning the thing on to get in the setup screen.

Re:launchd not as bad as systemd

[_merlin]

He obviously has no option ROMs. I have to wait through the LSI SAS controller, Chelsio NIC, Intel management engine and Broadcom network boot option ROMs booting and displaying their messages before my workstation can start loading an OS.

Re:launchd not as bad as systemd

[Anonymous Coward]

But also nearly universally reviled.

Why does everyone care about saving five seconds during boot that will be completely overshadowed by the time you spend in BIOS POST?

Because Cloud.

Re:launchd not as bad as systemd

[m4rtink]

But also nearly universally reviled.

Why does everyone care about saving five seconds during boot that will be completely overshadowed by the time you spend in BIOS POST?

Um, ever heard about containers, cloud images, disposable VMs, instant-on embedded appliances, etc. ?

Re:launchd not as bad as systemd

[drinkypoo]

Um, ever heard about containers, cloud images, disposable VMs, instant-on embedded appliances, etc. ?

None of which require the full suite of services which cause boot to be so slow. None of which will boot faster with launchd because the limited set of services depend on one another and so have to be started serially anyhow. None of which we are talking about right now, since we're discussing a desktop OS. None of which is relevant right now, so why did you bother?

Re:launchd not as bad as systemd

[Anonymous Coward]

I remember Steve Jobs found it important to save 5 seconds on the boot of one of the first Apple machines, because you save lives.

Say that there are about 10 M people who have OS X. Each reboots their machine once a month (because everyone is using standby these days). That is 10 M * 5 seconds * 12 = 3 Gs.

If you then look at how many seconds someone lives for 75 years. 3Gs / (75*365*24*60*60) = 1.26 lives per year saved.

Re:launchd not as bad as systemd

[Anonymous Coward]

Criticizing systemd is a hate crime.

Re: launchd not as bad as systemd

[Anonymous Coward]

Why do you keep your option roms enabled if you are not going to boot from them?

Re:launchd not as bad as systemd

[U2xhc2hkb3QgU3Vja3M]

If we think that way then videogames are killing millions of people every day.

Re: launchd not as bad as systemd

[Anonymous Coward]

Not all BIOS give you the option of disabling them.

Re:launchd not as bad as systemd

[laffer1]

It isn't about saving 5 seconds at system startup. People use that as an excuse because it's user visible. People constantly complain to me about MidnightBSD boot speed though. The real reason to do launchd (or maybe the one good thing about systemd) is that it allows you to make intelligent power decisions. If you know you're running on battery, you can avoid running background tasks that take a lot of CPU or disk IO. For example, the locate database could be updated next time you're plugged in. You could turn off services that are not needed when traveling.

If you had intelligent events sent as messages throughout the system, you could change graphics modes on low battery or tweak settings on wifi. If you think about it, OS X and Windows both act differently depending on power modes. It could all be done automatically. You can't build a good desktop OS without these features. They also have some value on servers when running on UPS backup, etc.

Re:launchd not as bad as systemd

[drinkypoo]

I remember Steve Jobs found it important to save 5 seconds on the boot of one of the first Apple machines, because you save lives.

How about a computer that doesn't need to reboot so often? I used most of the early Apple machines, Apple I and /// aside, including the ][gs, Lisa, Macintosh 512k (sorry, missed the 128k) and Plus, I think I still have a SE with an accelerator in it just for the nostalgia value, had a IIci, etc etc. And I've had a lot of free reboots, most of them from Macs, and most of those reboots occurring between the era when Macs started getting MMUs, and when they started actually using it.

The Amiga would be done booting up while the Mac was still thinking about whether the mac was happy or sad... You had to reboot it a lot, but at least it genuinely rebooted quickly. Especially if you had "a lot" of RAM, by which I mean an extra MB or so. Then you could put the whole OS (ROMs aside) into a recoverable ramdisk... talk about a quick boot.

Re:launchd not as bad as systemd

[Moridineas]

If you watch the last 20 minutes or so of the BAFUG video, Jordan Hubbard talks about launchd. I don't believe that boot time comes up a single time as a reason for making the switch.

Re:launchd not as bad as systemd

[Billly Gates]

But but its not init!!! Get out the tar and feathers

Re:launchd not as bad as systemd

[PPH]

allows you to make intelligent power decisions.

init run levels. Old news.

Re:launchd not as bad as systemd

[PPH]

It's not about saving 5 seconds. Its about not having a registry. Windows users and admins are stamping their little feet because no registry. And its about writing and installing start/stop scripts. Shell scripts. Windows doesn't have (practical) shell scripts. Windows is not made up of lots of little single purpose utilities than can be piped together, call other shell scripts or executables, handle I/O and return values. And all without having to worry about whether the utility was implemented as a binary executable or a script. And you can read and process logs (text logs) using shell scripts. You can raise alarms or run special handlers based on the contents of those logs.

If the goal of systemd creators is to slowly move users back to Windows, these are all capabilities that need to be eliminated. So UNIX/Linux users can't use them as reasons not to move.

Re:launchd not as bad as systemd

[laffer1]

Run levels don't solve the problem for desktop users. You can't ask a typical user to manually switch run levels. Not to mention rc.d in freebsd isn't setup like that.

Re:launchd not as bad as systemd

[Anonymous Coward]

Launched is NOT about speeding up boot, it is about a highly reliable daemon dependency system, which allows keeping running process to the minimum, and allows new events to register themselves i8n a uniform manner that is simple and doesn't introduce the complexity not SystemD. It is also production proven in both he mobile space a it is on every iPhone ever shipped, as well as all OS X systems in the last five+ years.

Re:launchd not as bad as systemd

[Anonymous Coward]

Um, ever heard about containers, cloud images, disposable VMs, instant-on embedded appliances, etc. ?

Ever heard of snapshots and VM migration?

ps - I've created several popular embedded appliances. I used sysvinit and was still able to support mandatory fast boot times for an HA system (high-availability)

Re:launchd not as bad as systemd

[squiggleslash]

Honestly, you can't rebut someone's point about a feature of systemd simply by stating a random, completely unsuitable, feature of init. Arguments don't work that way. To rebut something you need to actually deal with your opponent's argument.

BTW init sucks. systemd isn't perfect, but at least it isn't init.

Re:launchd not as bad as systemd

[PPH]

stating a random, completely unsuitable, feature of init.

But the parent poster stated:

you could change graphics modes on low battery

that's all supported by init. From the init man page:

If init is not in single user mode and receives a powerfail signal
(SIGPWR), it reads the file /etc/powerstatus. It then starts a command
based on the contents of this file:

F(AIL) Power is failing, UPS is providing the power. Execute the powerâ€
wait and powerfail entries.

O(K) The power has been restored, execute the powerokwait entries.

L(OW) The power is failing and the UPS has a low battery. Execute the
powerfailnow entries.

My laptop has co-opted these modes for line/battery/low battery conditions. The screen backlight and blanking are controlled by power state, as well as an orderly shutdown on a low battery. Not exactly the original intent of these signals (which was UPS status handling for servers). But smart people who can read man pages got it to work quite nicely. Without systemd or launchd. So, no. Its neither random nor unsuitable.

Re:launchd not as bad as systemd

[exomondo]

If the goal of systemd creators is to slowly move users back to Windows, these are all capabilities that need to be eliminated. So UNIX/Linux users can't use them as reasons not to move.

Yes it's all a big conspiracy! Red Hat isn't actually a supporter of Linux, despite being one of the top contributors to the Linux kernel and creating and supporting client and server distributions of Linux systems from which most of their revenue is derived they are actually trying to destroy Linux and drive people to Windows so they can kill their own business and profitability!

Re: launchd not as bad as systemd

[_merlin]

I kinda do have to boot from my SAS controller - that's how my disks are attached. But even if you aren't booting from them, you need to wait for them. Each of these cards has an embedded computer on it and you have to wait for that to be booted and configured before you can get into a state where you're ready to let an OS loose on the host machine.

Re:launchd not as bad as systemd

[adolf]

Then you could put the whole OS (ROMs aside) into a recoverable ramdisk... talk about a quick boot.

I've heard of this trick, though I never owned an Amiga or any manner of useful Apple (though there is ostensibly a useless pizza-box-shaped Mac over there on the table, and an example of the Last Hoorah of the PPC 24" iMacs working fine and being useless in my garage waiting for me to figure out how to ship it because they're still valued at hundreds of dollars, but not to me because it largely fails at Spotify and Youtube, which are two things I need from a fixed PC in my garage.).

It was certainly a clever hack: A loader that linearly (FAST!) loaded the OS into a RAM disk, and then booted from that RAM disk, and then would pivot back to the disk and free the RAM it was using.

Folks don't do anything clever like that anymore.

I remember scoring a 2MB EMS card (an Everex card that would use Intel drivers) for an XT that I ran a BBS from, and then scoring the 72 individual DIP RAM modules to populate it. Half was used as a RAM drive; frequent and generally read-only boot and BBS stuff would live there. I even toyed with optimizing it: Some of the TSRs would load overall-faster from the RAM disk, but once loaded they were resident so they could be flushed to make room for other things that would be used later. The other half was disk cache, at a time when disk cache was a thing that wasn't often done. The rest of the machine lived within its 640k of base memory.

Optimizing, tweaking. Pushing the edge to get booting faster, and regular operations going faster. I miss that.

Nowadays, we (or at least I) just throw parts at the problem:

Oh, your machine boots slowly? Here, try this SSD.

You're having a hard time switching between big programs? Here, let me plug in an extra >half-dozen gigabytes of RAM.

The answers these days are so easy, and so much less rewarding. (I should be able to chooch that G5 iMac in my garage into the modern world, but it's been forgotten for the purposes I want it for.)

Re:launchd not as bad as systemd

[Anonymous Coward]

> The Amiga would be done booting up while the Mac was still thinking about whether the mac was happy or sad...

Bullshit. The original Mac typically showed you a "happy" or "sad" Mac within 2 seconds after inserting the boot disk.

1986 Amiga 1000 booting - 15 seconds from power to disk prompt, over 60 seconds to usable desktop
1984 Mac booting - 15 seconds from disk insertion to usable desktop

Re:launchd not as bad as systemd

[drinkypoo]

1986 Amiga 1000 booting - 15 seconds from power to disk prompt, over 60 seconds to usable desktop

That's the worst case, not using the means I described above. You may try again when you learn to read, not until.

Re:launchd not as bad as systemd

[Anonymous Coward]

Okay, show me your video. I don't doubt it's fast, but there's no way it's faster than the Happy Mac icon.

Re:launchd not as bad as systemd

[drinkypoo]

Okay, show me your video. I don't doubt it's fast, but there's no way it's faster than the Happy Mac icon.

I dunno, I've had some inexplicable waits for that icon to show up. It just doesn't show up as quickly as you suggest every time. And I've used a very broad range of Macs, they were just sneaking into the schools while I was being forced to be in them, but I also come from Santa Cruz which is a very nerdy college town, and also full of liberal arts and graphic arts and whatnot and thus full of macs.

The only Amiga I have handy to make a RRD on is an A1200. It's kind of too new, it might invalidate the point. But if you insist, I'll see if it still powers up. I have a DV Bridge so I can get video into my PC, in theory. Hmm, and a camcorder with the same functionality, now I think of it.

Re:launchd not as bad as systemd

[Anonymous Coward]

Uh, excuse me but you said:

"The Amiga would be done booting up while the Mac was still thinking about whether the mac was happy or sad... ... Especially if you had "a lot" of RAM..."

Implying that the Amiga was quicker to boot even without the trick you mentioned afterward.

You can't be so unclear and then complain when people don't get what you're attempting to say.

Re:launchd not as bad as systemd

[Anonymous Coward]

Ever heard of sleep and hibernate?

Re:launchd not as bad as systemd

[Anonymous Coward]

Launched is NOT about speeding up boot, it is about a highly reliable daemon dependency system, which allows keeping running process to the minimum, and allows new events to register themselves i8n a uniform manner that is simple and doesn't introduce the complexity not SystemD. It is also production proven in both he mobile space a it is on every iPhone ever shipped, as well as all OS X systems in the last five+ years.

http://bsd.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=7927079&cid=50441923

You buy an Apple to escape Windows, but only if you don't know how to use Linux.

Linux is everywhere now.

Will it include systemd?

[Anonymous Coward]

From the NextBSD website:
"We do not fear changing the startup system or dragging Unix kicking and screaming into the 21st century by its hair, if necessary."
If so, it's a non starter for me.

Re:Will it include systemd?

[armanox]

No systemd - they're using Apple's launchd instead.

Re:[Link] Why FreeBSD should not adopt launchd

[Anonymous Coward]

Thanks!

Dead on arrival, nuff said

[Anonymous Coward]

Carry on

Funny.

[Runaway1956]

I downloaded the ISO on Friday night. Yesterday, I installed it ot a VM. Just got out of be a few minutes ago, and the VM is open in my right hand display, waiting for me to configure it. The network works right - I pinged Google from it. That's about all I know right now, since I've never installed a BSD before. I need to refer to some installation and setup guides next!

Re:Funny.

[Bing Tsher E]

One time I installed NetBSD on a box and configured and used it as my desktop machine. A few weeks later I needed to reboot it and was confused why it didn't have a hostname. It turned out that it was because I had installed it, done the first boot after install, and configured everything, but had never booted it a second time and had forgotten to add a hostname in the /etc/rc.d/rc.conf file. In other words it ran for weeks as a useful desktop machine but had only been booted a single time.

NetBSD is that easy to install, configure, and use, if you understand the classic startup sequence for BSD UNIX.

Re:Funny.

[c4757p]

Am I just stupid, or is their website crap? I couldn't find any indication that there is an ISO, let alone download one.

Re:Funny.

[Anonymous Coward]

No, it sucks. The first page is their name and your generic splash image of somethign cool. typical shitty modern web. This website is unvery bsd-like.

Re:Funny.

[Runaway1956]

Yeah, the website is pretty crap. It took a bit of perseverance to actually grab the ISO. Want the link?
$ wget http://www.optimcloud.com/disc...

So far, I've installed bash, and configured it as my default shell, then installed nano, and configured as default editor. One step at a time, if/when I feel like it, I should have a working system before 2115 . . . .

Re:Funny.

[Anonymous Coward]

> Am I just stupid, or is their website crap?

Do we answer with radio buttons or checkboxes? :)

Re:The FreeBSD guys were jealous over systemd

[Anonymous Coward]

systemd is coming to BSD - nobody is safe. Well, except for the Windows fans, but they have their own problems.

More Accurately DarwinBSD

[tomxor]

... but that name was taken

I was thinking something similar, and to be fair it is called "NextBSD" but as far as i can tell from the GitHub repo it's some combination of FreeBSD and Darwin, the open-source base system that OS X runs on top of. I think the Next name just fit well.

Maybe this one will be more successful than the previous short lived attempts to make the Darwin sources into something useful... I'm not sure what exactly they are doing that is different though.

PC-BSD is a better approach for desktop users.

[Anonymous Coward]

From the summary:

Phoronix notes a new project called NeXTBSD that might turn more heads than most new open source OSes

I certainly do not see NeXTBSD being better than actual FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, or PC-BSD ever. NeXTBSD surely could get proprietary funding, but it looks like another monolithic cancer victim because of launchd.

It is cool however to see the FreeBSD folks get direct donations.

https://www.freebsdnews.com/2014/11/19/whatsapp-donates-1-million-dollars-freebsd-foundation/
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8620716

-PC-BSD has a lot going for it.

-I think distrowatch.com should be among the top internet traffic these days. People really really should abandon Windows ASAP.

-I don't get news from Phoronix. I've seen way too many biased Phoronix stories being linked to, from Slashdot. This one tacks my BS meter.

IMO this article summary was a piss-poor choice of links. I'm sure the old timers can see what I mean. What I mean is if you are a first time reader of Slashdot (possible).. and you see this story... you will probably be like wtf. It points first to distrowatch, that is good. Then the url's point to OpenBSD [not casual user BSD, but great], then to CentOS [CentOS is 100% compatible rebuild of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux], then to xubuntu and kubuntu [modified Ubuntu which is third world Linux, Debian based]. Then it goes to a YouTube video from 2013 that begins with familiar Mac and Windows GUI's... but trails into prehistoric-looking, ancient-desktop NeXTSTEP.

So what am I saying? This article gives a false impression to noobs.

Know this:
systemd is hated in linux and launchd is not welcomed in BSD. That's the story. Distrowatch.com surely has links to the good stuff, the first link should have been the whole summary.

https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/systemd-vs-launchd.44973/

Everybody who accepts the unix-principle-defying systemd and/or launchd do it for unspoken reasons and even lie about it. eg. "oh but a monolith is so much simpler" arguments. No. False. It is not clever to have monolithic architectures in operating systems. eg. Windows registry sucks ass.

Unix is like this, and this is why it's smart and why it is loved.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_philosophy#Do_One_Thing_and_Do_It_Well

Imagine your kitchen had one monolithic drawer you put all your kitchen things in. One drawer. That is what the Windows registry is and what systemd is trying to pull. Store all the code under one "registry database" or one "process supervisor".

From the Phoronix article:

NeXTBSD was announced last week by Jordan Hubbard and Kip Macy at the Bay Area FreeBSD Users Group (BAFUG). NeXTBSD / FreeBSD X is based on the FreeBSD-CURRENT kernel while adding in Mach IPC, Libdispatch, notifyd, asld, launchd, and other components derived from Apple's open-source code for OS X.

This spin of BSD is like a suction facing Apple with Apple's launchd being what gets sucked in.

and.. Screw Redhat and Ubuntu. Redhat was only cool to version 7.3. Then it went Microsoft on it. $$$$ If you want Debian use Debian, not third world Ubuntu.

Re:PC-BSD is a better approach for desktop users.

[Anonymous Coward]

I certainly do not see NeXTBSD being better than actual FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, or PC-BSD ever.

It obviously isn't now given it has just started, but current BSD-derived operating systems offer little to the average user so perhaps a change is in order.

-I think distrowatch.com should be among the top internet traffic these days. People really really should abandon Windows ASAP.

What you think isnt relevant, the fact is that Windows is the predominant platform for desktop applications (just as Android and iOS are on mobile), the operating system is secondary to the applications. Linux lacks quality applications, it thrives in server and embedded but fails on the desktop which is why nobody is abandoning it in favor of Linux. In fact even the failures of Windows ME, Vista and 8 didnt make people abandon Windows for Linux: Linux is so poor on the desktop that all three of those systems that are considered abject failures were *far* more successful than desktop Linux has ever been!

It points first to distrowatch, that is good.

No, distrowatch is balls. It just serves to demonstrate how fragmented, disjoint and utterly confused the Linux community is about desktop users. Hundreds of distros throwing shit at the wall to see what sticks.

systemd is hated in linux

False, a small minority of vocal complainers hate it while the people actually doing work are embracing it, this is why all the major distros and developers are including it and that infuriates the non-contributor detractors even more.

and launchd is not welcomed in BSD.

This statement makes no sense, indeed the most popular BSD-derived operating systems (OSX and iOS) use launchd extremely successfully.

Everybody who accepts the unix-principle-defying systemd and/or launchd do it for unspoken reasons and even lie about it. eg. "oh but a monolith is so much simpler" arguments. No. False. It is not clever to have monolithic architectures in operating systems.

Yet you link to distrowatch, a promoter of the monolithic (and extremely bloated) Linux kernel.

Imagine your kitchen had one monolithic drawer you put all your kitchen things in. One drawer.

That is what the bloated, monolithic Linux kernel is.

Re:PC-BSD is a better approach for desktop users.

[Anonymous Coward]

You are stupid up and down the street yet try to flaunt uncommon vocabulary. "abject failures". gtfo

It obviously isn't now given it has just started, but current BSD-derived operating systems offer little to the average user so perhaps a change is in order.

Current BSD is for people who like computing beyond facebook and twitter. Linux is easier and has about the same capabilities. A change is in order you mean like oh... get users to depend on ONE THING so who controls that ONE THING controls the entire project? gtfo.

What you think isnt relevant, the fact is that Windows is the predominant platform for desktop applications (just as Android and iOS are on mobile), the operating system is secondary to the applications. Linux lacks quality applications, it thrives in server and embedded but fails on the desktop which is why nobody is abandoning it in favor of Linux. In fact even the failures of Windows ME, Vista and 8 didnt make people abandon Windows for Linux: Linux is so poor on the desktop that all three of those systems that are considered abject failures were *far* more successful than desktop Linux has ever been!

What I think is more relevant than what you or either of your parents think. You sound stupid. Saying "Windows is the predominant platform" is just pseudo-marking-bullshit. Piece-of-shit-Windows comes bundled on OEM PC's and that is why it is still relevant at all. It is not because it is better. A Google search for Windows sucks gives you a lot of hits. About 29,100,000 results (0.25 seconds) A Google search for Microsoft sucks About 8,040,000 results (0.35 seconds) A Google search for Linux sucks About 1,070,000 results (0.23 seconds) etc. You are like some brand new kid to even try to debate this with me. But ok, let there be light. You don't have to abandon ANYTHING to use Linux. This is very much what you do not get at all. People get Windows on their PC's and keep the piece of shit (up until Windows 10 spyware edition) just because it's there. A lot more people add linux and run linux in VM's than wipe Windows out and install Linux only. Mac OS X users exist largely as a flight from Windows. They escaped Windows. Then the marketing hype like wow it's so much more expensive and not Windows wow. I use them all and I still prefer BSD over Mac OS X. KDE on BSD and Linux just smokes Mac OS X.

Linux is awesome on the desktop right now. You are some sort of punk worried about your MSFT holdings or job to even try to defend Windows whatsoever. People use Windows because it's "there". Not because it is worth a flying shit.

https://www.linux.com/news/software/applications/810295-the-top-11-best-linux-distros-for-2015

Even Ubuntu which is for sure one of the 2-3 I will never use... 25 million users last year. 25 million is a lot of people is it not? Just one of the newer distros. Not the most popular or best.
http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/10/ten-years-of-ubuntu-how-linuxs-beloved-newcomer-became-its-criticized-king/

No, distrowatch is balls. It just serves to demonstrate how fragmented, disjoint and utterly confused the Linux community is about desktop users. Hundreds of distros throwing shit at the wall to see what sticks.

Again, you are at most a marketing student. You don't get it. Linux users are not fragmented or disjointed or confused. Linux and BSD users are the actual smartest of the smart computer users. Any 11 year old getting a Dell laptop with Windows 8 counts as a Windows headcount. That doesn't mean it's worth a shit unless you are selling it. Any hot MILF looking to do cam shows gets her Windows 8 too. Another HEADcount.

Linux users?
1) Basically every supercomputer
http://top500.org/featured/top-systems/
2) Fortune 500's like Amazon, Google, etc. Netflix runs on FreeBSD. Notice how they are probably not going to move to NeXTBSD? Sony PS4 is forked BSD a

Re:PC-BSD is a better approach for desktop users.

[Anonymous Coward]

Yet you link to distrowatch, a promoter of the monolithic (and extremely bloated) Linux kernel.

Everything you said just defies knowledge and intelligence. The Linux kernel is modular. Windows is monolithic. Linus's computing knowledge vastly exceeds that of Bill Gates and the regedit rocket scientists.

I'm not the AC you replied to but I'm just going to call you out on your utter lack of any knowledge on this topic, mainly because I'm sick of seeing this idiotic "distrowatch" shilling posted all the time.

So your first failure is the inability to understand that the kernel can be both modular and monolithic: AC didnt say it was not modular, but he did say it is monolithic which is 100% correct. Windows is monolithic -- nobody would argue otherwise -- and despite your nonsensical ravings Linux is monolithic as well, just ask Linus himself: see the Tanenbaum v Torvalds debate.

In addition the Linux kernel has become very bloated, again due to its monolithic design.

Marketing or not, for desktop programs Windows is the right choice for most people. Linux can have all the technical merit it wants but the programs people use are on Windows, not Linux. Do I want to use Windows? No, of course not but until the best NLE video/audio, photography, CAD/CAM/CAE, etc, applications are available on Linux there is no choice but to use Windows. Those who just want a web browser for facebook and email are better off with an iPad.

Re:PC-BSD is a better approach for desktop users.

[Anonymous Coward]

1) Basically every supercomputer

Linux is great for supercomputers but we are talking about desktops which are not supercomputers.

2) Fortune 500's like Amazon, Google, etc. Netflix runs on FreeBSD. Notice how they are probably not going to move to NeXTBSD?

No I have never seen any evidence that they are probably not going to move to NeXTBSD.

3) The International Space Station is Linux.

If I buy a space station I will consider running Linux but it isnt a desktop computer.

Go look at NASA and every other site on netcraft. Are these stupid people?

No, they use the right tool for the job so for running a server or embedded controllers they use Linux.

www.microsoft.com AND www.apple.com run on Akamai.. YES, that is LINUX.

Right because Linux is good for servers, we already know that.

Now tell me how oh oh but those are not desktops.

Why do you need me to tell you that?

Nobody fucking likes it. Nobody says OH WOW UNIX PRINCIPLES WERE RETARDED, GOOD THING WE DON'T DO THAT NOW. OH THANKS SYSTEMD.

Great! If nobody likes it then nobody will use it and you can stop complaining about it.

distrowatch.com has been the simplest way to locate iso's to install whatever you want for a long time.

distrowatch is just a pathetic website plastered with ads that promotes operating systems infected with systemd.

The Linux kernel is modular. Windows is monolithic.

Linux is monolithic (it is also modular). Windows (and OSX) have hybrid micro and monolithic kernels.

That is what the bloated, monolithic Linux kernel is.

http://wiki.osdev.org/Modular_Kernel

Modular != Monolithic. Linux is both modular and monolithic.

Re:PC-BSD is a better approach for desktop users.

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe you pretended in your own mind to "clear something up"? All that happened was you cleared up one thing: that you are in fact a Windows shill. There was nothing more to say. It was not possible for you clear anything up. distrowatch.com is exactly what I said it is, whether I said it or not. There is no such thing as Linux shilling. There is only Windows shilling. Linux is free. Windows is not.

shill
SHil/
North Americaninformal
noun
noun: shill; plural noun: shills

1.
an accomplice of a hawker, gambler, or swindler who acts as an enthusiastic customer to entice or encourage others.
a person who pretends to give an impartial endorsement of something in which they themselves have an interest.
"a megamillionaire who makes more money as a shill for corporate products than he does for playing basketball"

verb
verb: shill; 3rd person present: shills; past tense: shilled; past participle: shilled; gerund or present participle: shilling

1.
act or work as a shill.

Origin

Am I acting as an enthusiastic customer? How am I a customer when Linux is free? Am I pretending to be impartial? no. Am I acting like anything in the definition of shill? no. Do I work for anything remotely Linux related? no.

So you are a Windows shill obviously grasping at straws by demonizing me as a shill/liar. Tool. GTFO.

Here, this is a few years back. Listen to Linus Torvalds. Is Linus a shill?

VIDEO
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KFKxlYNfT_o

Now common sense dictates that the reason Windows is relevant at all is due to OEM pre-installs. I've said it many fucking times and only just now ever saw this 2012 video of Linux 10 minutes ago. I literally watched it and then refreshed this open tab and your dumb ass responded.

Here's the actual point. People will leave Windows in fucking droves. Get it? Windows is death knell. See the spyware links above? This shit is not make-believe. These are the facts. I do notice how you didn't refute one fucking fact. Not one. Zero facts refuted by you. You grasped for straws trying to extrapolate on modular vs monolith arguments by pointing at wikipedia debates and register.co.uk articles. Sure there's going to be more code around with new devices and hardware being created and developed. Here's the part you don't get. For Linus the actual primary developer it is more work. Sure it's a problem to him because it's more code. To end users? It means fucking zero. If you install Windows you are stuck with all the code for the hardware you don't even have nor will ever have. With Linux/BSD you can re-compile because... it's open source. You don't necessarily need to to enjoy the benefits of Linux over Windows and Mac OS X. Binary default installs work very well in all of the top distros on distrowatch.com. If you want to mess with it, sure, re-compile a custom kernel. YOU CAN NOT DO THIS SHIT IN WINDOWS OR MAC OS X. What does it mean to re-compile a kernel? CHOOSE WHICH MODULES (YES, MODULES AS IN MODULAR OS) you want to trim out because you don't have the hardware that needs them.

THIS IS WHY YOU ARE THE SHILL. THIS IS A WINDOWS SHILL'S SIGNATURE.

Marketing or not, for desktop programs Windows is the right choice for most people.

THIS IS THE "a person who pretends to give an impartial endorsement of something in which they themselves have an interest." PART FROM THE DEFINITION OF SHILL ABOVE.

Linux can have all the technical merit it wants but the programs people use are on Windows, not Linux. Do I want to use Windows? No, of course not

Sure you don't want to us

Re:PC-BSD is a better approach for desktop users.

[Anonymous Coward]

What you dont understand is that I want to run Linux but I cant because it cannot run my applications, that is why Linux fails. But by all means keep telling us the Year of the Linux Desktop is right around the corner LOL!

Re:PC-BSD is a better approach for desktop users.

[Anonymous Coward]

Linux is free. Windows is not.

Desktop Linux, so shit you can't even give it away.

Re:PC-BSD is a better approach for desktop users.

[Anonymous Coward]

You think /. doesn't use a desktop to admin this site? Is it all ssh from windows 10 tablets now? Does ssh even work on Windows natively yet? I heard they were working on it.

People can and do (by the millions and millions) use Linux without uninstalling Windows or OS X. You can run it at the same time. Linux is better than Windows and Mac OS X. This is why no fucking supercomputer runs Windows or OS X.

This is an article from 2012. It is surely higher now.

https://www.linux.com/news/enterprise/high-performance/147-high-performance/666669-94-percent-of-the-worlds-top-500-supercomputers-run-linux-

94 Percent of the World's Top 500 Supercomputers Run Linux

Windows is fucking shit-ware turned all out full blown spyware. The mother fucking OS is spyware. You idiot.

http://toolbar.netcraft.com/site_report/?url=network.microsoft.com

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MarkMonitor

Now back to the Windows shill definition above. Feel free to use Windows 10 on every possible thing in your house. Do it faggot. I hope you do.

Windows is death knell.

Re:PC-BSD is a better approach for desktop users.

[Anonymous Coward]

Really like what application? Linux never fails, shill.

https://training.linuxfoundation.org/why-our-linux-training/training-reviews/linux-foundation-training-prepares-the-international-space-station-for-linux-migration

hahahahahhaah

http://www.businessinsider.com/windows-10-depends-on-the-windows-store-2015-5

hahahahahahaha

Nobody installs "windows apps from windows stores". When you look at reviews for anything in "Windows Store app" lol it is all shit reviews. Who in the fuck would buy it? That shit is obsolete immediately. The entire Windows Store is an immediate uninstall on any Windows 8/8.1. How do you think that Apple-store-sells-apps-so-we-should-make-a-Windows-store-to-increase-revenue went, shill?

My mother fucking Android phone is a MUCH better server than Windows 10 and it's possible to secure, UNLIKE Windows 10. You know, Android... the Linux that is on your Android phone. You know, the most popular smart phones on the planet? https://www.idc.com/prodserv/smartphone-os-market-share.jsp

Keep looking back you will run into a pole. It must be great to use the same OS as your fucking grandma and your 9 year old little sister. Windows 10/Skype hot MILF cam chat GET IT NOW! hahahahhahahaha DONT TRIP ITS JUST A LITTLE SNOOPING DONT WORRRRRY ABOUT IT.

LMFAO!

This is what's up. This video is 2012 and now... Windows with it's shit x 10 spyware network edition... is death knell.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KFKxlYNfT_o

Keep using Windows though, Microsoft got your back lmfao

Re:PC-BSD is a better approach for desktop users.

[Anonymous Coward]

Linux is modular. You don't seem like you understand operating systems.

http://dsbscience.com/freepubs/linuxoverwindows/node9.html
http://linux.die.net/man/8/modprobe
http://linux.die.net/man/8/lsmod

You're also a Microsoft shill. Nobody on Earth thinks Windows is awesome, especially Windows 10 which is 100% spyware with some desktop PC features added for distraction.

yes, this is what I showed you.
http://wiki.osdev.org/Modular_Kernel

Read all the links above again.

It is absolutely a good thing for the International Space Station to run on Linux. Having made the flight to quality to a better OS does in no way mean that Windows is better on a desktop PC. Computers in space are actually computers built on Earth.

Go waste your time securing your Windows 10 which is absolutely through-and-through spyware. Use it for Facebook too so there can be nothing about you not stored on LINUX SERVERS someplace.

And space stations are far from the only devices to run Debian Linux.
http://www.computerweekly.com/blogs/open-source-insider/2013/05/international-space-station-adopts-debian-linux-drop-windows-red-hat-into-airlock.html

You can get it easily via distrowatch.com (http://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=debian) and compare its default install software versions with other distros, or get it from https://www.debian.org/distrib/ directly.

Linux and BSD rock. Windows sucks even before full-on spyware OS. NeXTBSD can die in a fire if it's going to just be more Apple walled garden code injected it a fork of BSD. I never depended on launchd or systemd in my life and I will never need it thanks.

get fucked shlls.

Re:PC-BSD is a better approach for desktop users.

[Anonymous Coward]

Really like what application?

Like Photoshop, AutoCAD, Maya, Solidworks, etc you know, stuff people use to get work done. Linux fails.

Re:PC-BSD is a better approach for desktop users.

[Anonymous Coward]

Linux is modular.

Yes Linux is modular, it is also monolithic and bloated which is a poor design.

Nobody on Earth thinks Windows is awesome, especially Windows 10 which is 100% spyware with some desktop PC features added for distraction.

Agreed.

Linux and BSD rock.

Linux is more bloated than ever and is not viable on the desktop, even after nearly 3 decades and hundreds of distributions it is still barely 2% of the desktop market..FAIL!

Re:PC-BSD is a better approach for desktop users.

[Anonymous Coward]

Year of the Linux Desktop! BAHAHAHAHA! Linux Desktop, so shit you can't even give it away!

Re:PC-BSD is a better approach for desktop users.

[Anonymous Coward]

You the same Windows shill? You can not understand this can you? Linux is modular. They don't teach you operating system architectures in shill school I see.

Linux is not bloated. It is comparably not-bloated to Mac OS X which is also modular. THE DIFFERENCE BEING that you can re-compile a custom kernel and remove every single last bit of possible bloat there is because Linux source is always available. It is open source SOURCE CODE.

Windows is NOT OPEN SOURCE.
Mac OS X is NOT OPEN SOURCE.

Windows is MONOLITHIC.
Mac OS X is MODULAR.
Linux/BSD are MODULAR.
Android is MODULAR.

systemd/launchd try to take control of what is MODULAR. That is why they are HATED.

FUCK A MONOLITH. From an end-user standpoint you can not possibly get more modular than Linux/BSD. You have the ability to recompile your kernel and every other software as well.. and remove ANY AND ALL (EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THEM) thing that could possibly be considered "bloat". When you have the source code available to you (as in HI, I'm open source whats up dicks) you can control what you install and how you install it. And also, WHEN you want to install it. You can use it on every desktop you have, as many times as you want to... multiple times at the same time included. IT IS SOFTWARE FREEDOM.

You reach back again to the years when Microsoft (NTFS/.wmv/etc and Adobe (flashplayer/pdf) and Realplayer and all of the rest of the proprietary dickhead-softs were trying their UTMOST HARDEST to stymie Linux and BSD. Even as LITERAL BSD NATIVE CODE is literally IN THE WINDOWS SOURCE CODE. It was a one-way street.

For decades...
Microsoft: Hey, thanks BSD devs for the TCP/IP etc... oh you want to access NTFS? haha fuck you. Thanks again though. It was a huge hack just to get read-only access to NTFS in Linux and BSD.

https://lwn.net/Articles/245805/

Now though? NTFS is 1993 shit. A very quick Google query and you get lots.
https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/insider/forum/insider_wintp-insider_perf/windows-10-replace-ntfs/eb2394d2-6baa-43cd-bf7c-b727b991daa8?auth=1

You have typical fanboi/shill knowledge. Everything I said is probably over your head, and it's basic as fuck.

Your argument is a complete lie. It is every sort of bullshit possible. It is directly and indirectly false.

Linux is more bloated than ever and is not viable on the desktop,

Hardware is so fast these days that nothing bogs whatsoever. Let's use handbrake as an example because it's cross-platform and uses all of a system's available CPU cores. I'm just grabbing a first-hit comparison from Google.

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ubuntu-oneiric-ocelot-benchmark-review,3121-22.html
Results
By category, Ubuntu leads with three wins (File Copy Times, Multimedia, and System), while Windows has the upper hand in none. On a per-test basis, Ubuntu wins 11 out of 19 tests and Windows wins eight. Of those, Ubuntu holds six significant victories over Windows' five. Any way you want to cut it, Ubuntu 11.10 beats Windows 7 in cross-platform performance testing.

And that is just a quick search for an example with Ubuntu. Surely they used a default Ubuntu install. And tbh Ubuntu and the other *buntu's along with Redhat/Fedora are the only Linuxes I have no interest in. Why? They are Microsoft wannabe's. It started at Redhat 8.0. Redhat 7.3 was nice, and RPM (Redhat Package Manager) is a very good package manager. Now though? No thanks. Many left Redhat at 7.3 as did I, and Ubuntu is ok for what it is, I just like others better.

You want a Linux that has zero bloat? Gentoo is exactly what that is for. All locally compiled packages from source for your machine. You can do the same as well on other distros.... but the performance is good enough with say openSUSE or Debian using binary packages.

So you fit the descrip as a shill, exactly as a shill, when you begin with "Agreed" that Windows sucks the

Re:PC-BSD is a better approach for desktop users.

[Anonymous Coward]

Circular reasoning. Linux is unpopular because it doesn't run the most popular applications, but the publishers won't port their applications to Linux until it's popular.

Re:PC-BSD is a better approach for desktop users.

[Anonymous Coward]

Really like what application?

Like Photoshop, AutoCAD, Maya, Solidworks, etc you know, stuff people use to get work done. Linux fails.

We are talking about desktop users, as in you go home after work and sit down at the PC you love. If you need to use proprietary shit for your job nobody cares. Just do it faggot. Do a flip. The amount of people who need AutoCAD and Maya at all outside of work is probably 0.x%. For desktop users GIMP and Blender are plenty. GIMP and Blender are free. If you really need AutoCAD and friends at home for your great design brainstorms during cereal... you could boot both or run Linux in virtual machines. How do you feel about AutoCAD on Windows 10?

(joke) LOL your project gets patented in India a month before you're done.
(not joke) Windows 10 is spyware as fuck though. Scroll back up and read through all of those links and ask yourself "what would I do if I wasn't stupid?"

You could also install Linux then run Windows in a virtual machine.. oh but daaaaaaamn huh... that license thing.. can't change hardware ohhh maybe if you call India they will say hello my friend and actually be your friend? Sure sure my friend we would love to have you install Windows in your virtual machine.

good luck on that. LOL

You are stupid trying to justify 3rd party software on Windows/Mac as a reason that Linux fails. Why do you think the billions upon billions of dollars of the world's supercomputers run on Linux? Because they just like to fuck up? Yeah, lets dump a couple billion into a supercomputer then oh hell, put an OS on it that slashdot commenters will hate because of their oh-so important "Photoshop".

https://www.linux.com/news/enterprise/high-performance/147-high-performance/666669-94-percent-of-the-worlds-top-500-supercomputers-run-linux-
^in 2012

Oh damn I looked for how many of Earth's supercomputers run on Windows and got this...
http://itsfoss.com/97-percent-worlds-top-500-supercomputers-run-linux/
^2014

When my query included the phrase Windows it corrected my spelling. Maybe if i look up which operating systems are 100% global spyware. LOL

Linux fails.

97 Percent Of The World’s Top 500 Supercomputers Run Linux

Go photoshop your shit, you are fail here.

Re:PC-BSD is a better approach for desktop users.

[Anonymous Coward]

http://itsfoss.com/97-percent-worlds-top-500-supercomputers-run-linux/

97 Percent Of The World’s Top 500 Supercomputers Run Linux

That AC is just Microsoft India shills coming out of nowhere. Sorry my friends, Windows is death knell.

Fuck Microsoft. Here's another new story while waiting for the lovely submit timer.
http://tech.slashdot.org/story/15/09/01/1951235/microsofts-telemetry-additions-to-windows-7-and-8-raise-privacy-concerns

Learn Linux now if you don't already know. It's way better than Windows and it's absolutely free, that's why it's so prevalent. (Android is Linux too) You can't count install "headcounts' like you can with Windows because there is no point-of-sale. Microsoft know exactly how many licenses they sell WORLDWIDE. This "big count" is misleading if you think it means Windows is worth a fuck. Bundled Windows on new PC's right now is just bundled "free" GLOBAL SPYWARE. There are plenty of links above to get a fucking clue. Search the Internet for more. Microsoft shills like to point at the successful count of OEM Windows that exist on PC's sold with the shit already on it. Only the very stupid will not get it. That's sad picking on stupid people. Fuck you Microsoft.

Every Windows 10 PC you buy now is one big fucking GLOBAL BOTNET with Microsoft themselves being the virus host. Sure they include "Windows Defender anti-virus protection". It is a lie.

distrowatch.com

Re:PC-BSD is a better approach for desktop users.

[Anonymous Coward]

systemd/launchd try to take control of what is MODULAR. That is why they are HATED.

try to take control of

try to take control of

try to take control of

try to take control of
try to take control of
try to take control of
try to take control of

hated

hated

hated
hated
hated

get rid of it

get rid of it
get rid of it
get rid of it

Re:PC-BSD is a better approach for desktop users.

[Plumpaquatsch]

http://itsfoss.com/97-percent-worlds-top-500-supercomputers-run-linux/

97 Percent Of The World’s Top 500 Supercomputers Run Linux

Percentage of Supercomputers on the Desktop: 0%.

Re:PC-BSD is a better approach for desktop users.

[Anonymous Coward]

http://itsfoss.com/97-percent-worlds-top-500-supercomputers-run-linux/

97 Percent Of The World’s Top 500 Supercomputers Run Linux

Percentage of Supercomputers on the Desktop: 0%.

VIDEO: Q&A session with Linus Torvalds: Why is Linux not competitive on desktop? (June 15, 2012)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KFKxlYNfT_o

tl;dr? Windows pre-installs on bundled OEM purchases. You know, that Microsoft anti-trust shit again.

That argument was valid in 2012. The sheep were buying OEM PC's at Walmart bundled with Windows. Little did the sheep know that Windows was about to become GLOBAL SPYWARE ITSELF.

You can't really count Linux installs because there is no point-of-sale. You can't even begin to count by downloads because years and years of DHCP and free Linux downloads wrecks the IP address uniqueness. I know my downloads surely couldn't have been accurately counted. Windows users who also install Linux are not countable. Linux explained this in 2012. Right now the world is Linux from Android phone to router to Smart TV to large corporation to government agency to search engine to supercomputer to international space station. But yeah, your grandma's Dell laptop probably has Windows on it. Probably Windows 7. The same goes for your 8 year old kid. Yep huge user base just enjoying the splendid spyware with extra functionality like Office 365 subscriptions and One Note.

All of you shills can starve in your cars with your families and 10 cats each. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has seen worse in India and there is nothing wrong with hiring Indians for "tech support". It would be somewhat cooler to not ship American company jobs overseas, but that is another issue. At least Bill Gates donates toilets to Africa with the money sapped from consumers worldwide for decades. This is a good thing too.

That being said, I imagine there is still possibly "something else you can say" because stupidity is infinite according to Albert Einstein.

http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/a/alberteins100015.html

Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former.

Albert Einstein

So by all means explain to the world why we need global spyware on all of our PC's again. Let's hear it we always need some bullshit.

Percentage of supercomputer operating systems on desktops: [every Linux and BSD ever installed on a desktop] & [growing thanks to Windows 10 Global Botnet Edition]

http://www.technobuffalo.com/2013/08/22/nsa-windows-8-exploit/
http://www.technobuffalo.com/2013/07/11/microsoft-gave-the-nsa-direct-backdoor-access-to-outlook-skype/
http://winsupersite.com/windows-10/how-stop-windows-10-upgrade-downloading-your-system
http://www.extremetech.com/computing/195592-with-windows-10-microsoft-could-move-to-a-subscription-based-model
http://www.extremetech.com/computing/205320-microsoft-windows-10-will-be-the-last-version-of-windows
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5GU5uv28a3I
http://techrights.org/2015/07/31/vista-10-anticompetitive/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wwRYyWn7BEo
http://www.ghacks.net/2015/08/28/microsoft-intensifies-data-collection-on-windows-7-and-8-systems/
https://gitlab.com/windowslies/blockwindows

Enjoy your reading and your day. distrowatch.com

Mach messages vs sysv messeges

[halfdan the black]

How exactly are Mach messeges different from sysv messeges in Linux? I've used Mach messeges before, but sysv messeges look pretty similar

Re:Mach messages vs sysv messeges

[Anonymous Coward]

According to the NextBSD slides:

What can Mach ports do that

Unix domain sockets can’t?

Separate Namespace for services (doesn't rely on file system naming or permissions.)

That sounds like a really crappy anti-feature.

Message Boundaries

Unix sockets can do this, you just create them with SOCK_SEQPACKET.

Kernel as peer

??? Isn't this what unix device files are for? At least on Linux (sysfs) and Plan9 (not unix) sockets can have an endpoint in the kernel.

Pre-existing well defined RPC interface

Why? Why not just establish a convention.

Receive messages directly in call to kevent()

I don't know what this means, but I'm not very experienced at FreeBSD. You can add sockets to epoll on Linux and /dev/poll on Solaris, but I don't know if this is what is meant.

OOL (out of line) messages (arbitrarily sized with zero copy for large messages)

???

Port send rights - can only send to a port for which the process has explicitly received the right to send

So this is some kind of capabilities facility. A better design would be to add capabilities tokens to your unix security model. Linux already has such a mechanism.

Provenance - Yes, PROVENANCE, receiver can have the kernel append an audit trailer containing full set of credentials of sender

Ok, this sounds useful, but again, why not just add this to unix sockets.

My beef with AF_UNIX/PF_UNIX (same thing), is the lack of a multicast mechanism wherein a socket can be opened more than twice, and a packet sent to the socket is delivered to all listeners like UDP broadcast or multicast sockets. I have a similar beef with UDP on Linux that multiple processes can't listen on the same UDP port and all receive the datagram(s) sent to it. You can have multiple machines listen to a broadcast, but there is no equivalent mechanism within a unix/Linux instance. I have needed this exact functionality countless times, and end up having to write or reuse a userspace broadcast dispatcher to distribute broadcast datagrams to each listener over unicast sockets. I guess there was some lame and naive reason at Berkeley why they didn't just make every UDP listener bound to a UDP port receive a copy of everything that arrived on that port, but I'm sure it sucks, and this should have been fixed long ago.

Re:Mach messages vs sysv messeges

[thogard]

Mach messages are much faster than SysV but not up to the speed of Solaris doors (which have some odd security issues but drop context swtiches). The SysV streams message system is based on the SysV IPC which is based on SysV shared memory and SysV semaphores. That stuff came from the early 1980s when a 2 CPU WE32000 in a 3B20 (or 5 or 15?) was the reference design for the biggest hardware Real UNIX (TM) would run on. Since that came from AT&T who wanted to make mainframes but had to have phone switches so their semaphore system was designed to work with things like a 5ESS phone switch where doing the right thing on failing hardware was better than doing anything fast.

Re: Mach messages vs sysv messeges

[halfdan the black]

The reason I'm interested is we're developing an agent based modeling language which makes very heavy use of IPC messages, so low latency and low overhead is super critical. Currently on OSX, it used Mach messages which works extremely well, I'm porting the system to Windows, and I'm using Windows ALPC messaging, http://www.zezula.net/en/prog/... Which is also working very well, it's actually very similar to Mach messages. Makes sense, as both OSX and Windows are hybrid micro/monolithic kernel OSs so it makes sense to have a fast messaging system. I'm going to port the system to Linux, but still need to research what is the lowest latency IPC system to use there. From my testing, Mach messages are faster on OSX than named pipes, I'm not sure how Linux sysv messaging compares to named pipes yet.

Re: Mach messages vs sysv messeges

[fnj]

I would be pretty confident that shared memory using atomic compare/exchange for notification and pickup would be the fastest on any hardware/software architecture. Definitely faster than Mach messages I would assume. Rather primitive, though. I would benchmark both named pipes and unix domain sockets as well, because they are architecturally nice.

Re: Mach messages vs sysv messeges

[halfdan the black]

Yes, shared memory for data transfer is the fastest, no copying and nothing goes through the kernel. I'm looking into what would be the fastest in terms of lowest latency for notifications, i.e. signaling another process. I'm kind of surprised that there's not a lot of benchmarks of posix messages vs unix domain sockets vs pipes out there.

nextbsd.org, terrible website

[Anonymous Coward]

nextbsd.org website is terrible looking complete with confusing interface

About time

[ArchieBunker]

My job keeps buying these shitty Gateway boxes and they used to have the slowest BIOS on the planet. I mean a good 15 seconds by the time it gets to the OS.

Re: Happy Sunday from The Golden Girls!

[Anonymous Coward]

It's "confidant" not "cosmonaut."

Is Hubbard still alive?

[Anonymous Coward]

Seriously. I heard he was killed in a helicopter accident. Still beating the same old drum, I guess.

What is the state of virtualization on FreeBSD?

[Anonymous Coward]

KVM, VirtualBox, VMware, Xen, OpenVZ, lxc... the list of fun is almost endless on Linux. Last time I checked BSD only had jails which are only slightly better than chroots.

You can't have a popular OS these days without good virtualization. Able to run Windows and other crap that should only ever be run in a VM, along with FreeBSD/Linux/etc for server isolation.

What you got FBSD fans? It actually truly is the only thing that has kept me off BSD since forever. Been using VMware since the beta circa 1999 and right then released I could never use another OS without good virtualization.

NeXT?

[Anonymous Coward]

I note that nowhere on the actual page do they refer to it as NeXTBSD, but rather always NextBSD. I'm not sure the intent is to build a NeXTStep like system but rather to build the next generation of BSD systems, with a focus on tracking FreeBSD (rather than Darwin which exists for the benefit of OS X) so why does Phoronix and this post insist on calling it NeXTBSD and possibly giving people the wrong idea?

it's not really a fork

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't think of this as a fork, but more as a developement branch.
the people involved are not breaking away from FreeBSD, but rather using the branch to develop new features and techniques that they feel will be of use to FreeBSD. These features are useful, but also a big step so it needs to be done in sucj a way as to not be disruptive to the existing FreeBSD world.
Most of the FreeBSD developers are looking forward to the new stuff, and we expect we will see it.

(I know all the people involved and have been in the FreeBSD project since before it was called that.)

Re: Happy Sunday from The Golden Girls!

[Anonymous Coward]

It's "confidant" not "cosmonaut."

:sigh: another newbie... and since you posted AC, so also shall i...

But until it has a GUI..

[doccus]

Then even people who should know better will see it as just another CLI based OS. All the "Good feelings" garnered for pre 2009 OSX and NextStep etc, were based on their human interface component. The fact in this case, however, is that there'a a huge opportunity here to create a far better interface. Something less blocky than OSX and the "Next" interface, Something with all the good improvements of Finder and Explorer, as well as all the different Linux GUIs. Something that REALLY "just works" .. like Macs used to... Now *if* that can be smoothly integrated into a solid BSD underpinning..we'd have another BeOS ;-)

Obligatory Bad Car Analogy

[Anonymous Coward]

GM saw itself as the premier auto/truck maker in this country. And yet, they made some stupid mangament and engineering decisions that are slowly leading them into the corporate graveyard. It's a long way down, but they'll get there eventually. And when they do, they can save a spot for Red Hat.

Re:Obligatory Bad Car Analogy

[exomondo]

GM saw itself as the premier auto/truck maker in this country. And yet, they made some stupid mangament and engineering decisions that are slowly leading them into the corporate graveyard.

So you're saying the goal of these management decisions was to move people away from GM cars? I don't think so, just like RedHat's goal isn't to move users to Windows.

Re: Happy Sunday from The Golden Girls!

[Meski]

It's "confidant" not "cosmonaut."

:sigh: another newbie... and since you posted AC, so also shall i...

Perhaps they forked it.

It's perfect

[morgauxo]

I think this would be a perfect new home for Leonart Poetering. It's a place were he could be productive and apreciated and the rest of us could be rid of him.