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If you haven't done so yet and you are playing with Open Source Operating Systems, read this article about the BSD family

it is very enlightening, and worth every minute of reading it

#bash #sh #zsh #ksh #csh #tsh #freeBSD  #100DaysOfCode #1000DaysOfCode #POSIX #Programming #Patch #UNIX #History

it-notes.dragas.net/2025/03/23

IT NotesOSDay 2025 - Why Choose to Use the BSDs in 2025
More from Stefano Marinelli

When I need docs I do

`man command'

When I pressed F1 in a gui program it did the following

* Request a helper running in my DE to parse a html page
* Ask the helper to open my default html parser
* __Without asking me__ the helper opened a __massive browser__ ravaging ram just to show me what I could find with
`man command`
* I wonder why instead the Ui program did not do the following

* request a helper open a (ba)sh
* parse >man command to the helper
* have the helper display the manpage in the sh

The results would be
* Much less resources used
* No assumption on my current internet connection would be made
* That method has worked for 60 years

<IRC>
/m shakes head and looks at the massive browser showing the equivalence of a manpage
</IRC>

@altbot

🖋️ #bash #sh #zsh #ksh #csh #qBittorrent #torrent #manpage #man1 #F1 #F1Help #WomenWhoCode #640daysofcode #301daysofcode #730daysofcode #100DaysOfCode #1000DaysOfCode #Linux #POSIX #Programming #DEVCommunity

github.com/qbittorrent/qBittor

Replied in thread

Still reading the lengthy article regarding SystemD on Wikipedia this is another interesting excerpt

In April 2014, Linus Torvalds expressed reservations about the attitude of Kay Sievers, a key systemd developer, toward users and bug reports in regard to modifications to the Linux kernel submitted by Sievers. In late April 2014, a campaign to boycott systemd was launched, with a website listing various reasons against its adoption.

#bash#sh#zsh
Replied in thread

@duncan_bayne

I started to dislike SystemD more and more, as I saw that most distributions were putting hooks for SystemD in case a user would want to switch to it and started with one of the other options initially, on that particular installation.
With the hooks in place that process usually goes seamlessly.

In my proud opinion, if you don't want to use SystemD, nothing of it should ever be on your system

Now I can easily achieve that by just building my Linux from scratch, and I'm not talking about the Linux from scratch distribution, I'm talking about the way I did it when Linux was initially pushed into alt.binaries.Unix many decades ago.

All variants of *BSD have made sure that all the commands which could break, like the ifconfig commands suite we're simply fixed!

But this is the the dilemma that you will get, when the kernel is just built for itself and it's not a coherent part of the base Operating System.

What you get in practice is that your kernel wants to move a certain way, while the userland software wants to move in a different way

That kind of friction would kill a human corpus. On Linux systems and servers it literally breaks things in an unexpected manner, something that you cannot afford when you're running a database where you get two million calls an hour. A database that runs in high availability with just one other VM as a concurrent live backup

#bash#sh#zsh
Continued thread

Mind you that I'm not saying that new command should not be developed, on a contrary; what I am saying, is that if for whatever reason, certain things change, you need to make sure that the older commands still work properly, because they are in our muscle memory
Those of us, the greybeards, have commands in our muscle memory, remember that

And for those of you who do not know,

Most of the systems that are running the internet, are built, installed and maintained, by us, the greybeards!

They are not built the young ones, who are barely 20 years old, who do not know the difference between a compiler and a debugger!

/3

#bash#sh#zsh
Continued thread

SystemD has so much going on, that I shall suffice by pointing you to the article. The words of Stefano need no more addition towards the subject of systemd.

On my systems I avoid Systemd like the plague. Now read that three times out loud...

If you want to know more about Systemd in detail, just go and read the many different good documents on the internet, please do not use Google to search for them use anything else, DuckDuckGo does it much better.

This is one example where you learn what the Systemd stands for

Repeating Stefano's words: why was it needed? Everything worked perfectly fine before Systemd came in, there was no reason for its existence.

I have included the Wikipedia article; take your Time to at least glance at it, because the writers have tried to give a Balanced View of the Pro and the cons of Systemd

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systemd?

/2

#bash#sh#zsh

In this post Stephan teaches you why he moves many of his servers from Linux to freeBSD.

Here is some background History of Mine:

Because I have been using Linux ever since the pre-alpha days, I know many things about the operating system that most other users do not. There was no other way to install the operating system in the beginning, than to compile the kernel on another operating system, to hex edit a boot sector, then boot to see if your kernel would actually properly spawn on your machine. In the beginning the hex editing was done on the floppy disk you could not boot from the hard drive.

From that point, you had to go back to the foreign operating system, compile the rest that you needed for minimum functionality, then put them in a convoluted manner on the file system which was then Minix.
It was normal in that period where you first installed Linux to do not just everything yourself but to know what to do otherwise you would never get the functioning operating system.
In the end you would also compile GCC in that foreign operating system, because there was no way for you to do it in Linux with a compiler you did not have yet {chicken egg dilemma}
Only after GCC was compiled, were you able to do Native compiling in Linux on the Minix file system.

It is exactly this manner of thinking that is still bothering Linux distributions today. Somewhere there are people who still think, that there are many users who want to Tinker with the operating system, when they just want to go from one major version to the next.

This manner of thinking breaks things when you need to upgrade from minor to Major version.

One thing that has always bothered me is that a simple major update from the operating system from one person to the next can **still*" literally break things in unexpected ways because of the way that Upstream handles certain commands. For no good reasons commands like ifconfig where depreciated, the other examples also like arp. Ifconfig has been in Unix Forever. Ifconfig is in muscle memory of hundreds of thousands of system operators. Ifconfig is a specialized command which does only one thing and it does it in a perfect manner and it has been doing it ever since UNIX existed.
It's still baffles me that I need to separately install the ifcommands, before I can work on a Linux system today, and that's with any any distribution

This is just one of the examples of why it is wrong to change commands on the fly, depreciating another set of commands, without giving the people the choice, at the beginning, to include it with the installation of the distribution

The IP Command is a good one, nice modern with colour output, ifconfig is still a very good command, nice, stable decades old, leave it be!

These are the major things, that often bring system operators to seek operating systems, where stability is first, where updates from minor to minor version go smoothly, and updates from minor to Major versions usually also go smoothly and where don't disappear 🫥 or are depreciated for trivial reasons.

#bash #sh #zsh #ksh #csh #tsh #freeBSD #100DaysOfCode #1000DaysOfCode #POSIX #Programming #Patch #RetroComputing #UNIX #History

it-notes.dragas.net/2022/01/24

Are you just like me? Do you want to make fantastically beautiful posts and not be limited by a silly 500 character fence, but want to BANG intricate stories of 10.000 characters?

Don't be limited by those silly 500 character servers!

Browse over here, find an instance that's suitable to you and go there. The list doesn't have everyone who has that massive 5,000 character size, but the list has a lot of servers, so pick one, choose one, and go be the literary giant that you are!

And yes there are servers which have a fantastically glorious 10,000 character limit!

@altbot @FediTips

fedi.garden/tag/larger-post-si

Take some time and learn what GrapheneOS is all about. It's good for your Android so it's good for you.

Excerpt:
It's focused on the research and development of privacy and security technology including substantial improvements to sandboxing, exploit mitigations and the permission model. It was founded in 2014 and was formerly known as CopperheadOS.

grapheneos.org/

#bash#sh#zsh
Continued thread

After I installed

github.com/gohugoio/hugo/relea

my results were positive

hugo v0.140.2

[...]

Pages | 8

[...]
Total in 86 ms

Environment: "development"
Serving pages from disk
Running in Fast Render Mode. For full rebuilds on change: hugo server --disableFastRender
Web Server is available at //localhost:1313/ (bind address 127.0.0.1)

Success on level I!

🖋️ #bash #sh #zsh #ksh #csh #hugo #100DaysOfCode #1000DaysOfCode #Linux #POSIX #Programming