Tuesday, February 11th, 2020

On ditching Linux
=================

There were  several phosts during  last days about ditching  Linux for
BSD or another free  Unix-like operating  system[1][2][3]. Here is  my
opinion: Going away  is not an the best solution  to the problem, when
there are still plenty other options.

Linux is based on strong culture of hacking, in the sense of trying to
make things  work by experimenting,  seeing the results  and iterating
this until  the result works as  wanted. Right from the  beginning the
main reason behind Linux  was to get a free (at first  as in beer, the
ideology  came  after that)  Unix-like  operating  system working,  no
matter what  dirty code hacks needed  to be done, to  reach that goal.
There is  a very  good book  about the early  history of  Linux called
Rebel Code (by  Glyn Moody), which I strongly recommend  to read (most
of you probably already did it).

BSD systems  however started on  quite clean academic BSD4.3  code and
try  to continue  in the  same spirit.  OpenBSD even  has a  rule that
hardware-related code not based on documentation is not accepted.

I perfectly understand both concepts and  approaches, as well as I can
see shortcomings of them and in the long run, I chose Linux.

I quite like  the fact, that when  there is a new hardware  - being it
internal components,  peripherals, development  kits, cameras,  etc. -
it's most  likely to be  supported on  Linux first. Then  someone will
probably look at  the code, polish it,  clean it, patch it  and put it
into BSD if  possible. This is for example exactly  what happened when
RTL-SDR hardware  became widely  available about  eight or  nine years
ago. The  idea of converting some  cheap Chinese DVB-T dongles  can be
converted to  wide-range SDR receivers emerged  somewhere between 2010
and 2012, then one of authors of v4l kernel modules created new kernel
module and  released it  for general  use. I had  a working  SDR stick
around the end of 2012 /  beginning 2013 on my ARM-based netbook Efika
MX and  was hunting  airplanes in  the wild  over ADS-B.  In BSD-based
systems the rtl-sdr package  came year or two later -  I had back then
one old laptop  with NetBSD and looked for the  package several times,
it simply didn't exist.

If I  was a  generic PC  user, wanting  just to  browse the  web, edit
photos, play  movies and  music, maybe programming  higher-level stuff
(scripting,  web,  etc.)  or  wanting to  participate  in  the  system
development, I would use BSD as well (probably NetBSD). But as half of
my  time spent  around  PC  is digging  with  some  old hardware,  HAM
peripherals, programming,  fiddling with  assembler (yes I  even wrote
some small  stuff for  Linux x86/x64  ABI) etc., I  just like  all the
choices that  Linux offers. Even though  they are time from  time very
bad choices and everyone should avoid them.

If  we all  left  for BSD,  illumos  or whatever,  there  would be  no
motivation for authors of small distributions to continue doing things
the way we want it. When there is one user less on Ubuntu and one more
on let's say FreeBSD, nobody will  notice. When there is one user more
on small distro, it makes a difference. And that's what I want to do.
It's nothing against BSD or whatever other operating system, it's just
how I want things in my computing life to be.


[1] gopher://sdf.org:70/0/users/sparcipx/phlog/February_2020/02-08-20
[2] gopher://republic.circumlunar.space:70/0/~slugmax/phlog/2020-02-10
-comments-on-ditching-linux
[3] gopher://1436.ninja:70/0/Phlog/20200210.post

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