From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on inbox.vuxu.org X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-0.8 required=5.0 tests=DKIM_ADSP_CUSTOM_MED, DKIM_INVALID,DKIM_SIGNED,FREEMAIL_FROM,HTML_MESSAGE,MAILING_LIST_MULTI, T_SCC_BODY_TEXT_LINE autolearn=ham autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 Received: (qmail 19122 invoked from network); 6 Jun 2022 14:54:20 -0000 Received: from minnie.tuhs.org (2600:3c01:e000:146::1) by inbox.vuxu.org with ESMTPUTF8; 6 Jun 2022 14:54:20 -0000 Received: from minnie.tuhs.org (localhost [IPv6:::1]) by minnie.tuhs.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id DC50D40CFB; Tue, 7 Jun 2022 00:54:16 +1000 (AEST) Received: from mail-ej1-x62b.google.com (mail-ej1-x62b.google.com [IPv6:2a00:1450:4864:20::62b]) by minnie.tuhs.org (Postfix) with ESMTPS id 207BC40CFA for ; Tue, 7 Jun 2022 00:54:12 +1000 (AEST) Received: by mail-ej1-x62b.google.com with SMTP id v1so18770275ejg.13 for ; Mon, 06 Jun 2022 07:54:12 -0700 (PDT) DKIM-Signature: v=1; a=rsa-sha256; c=relaxed/relaxed; d=gmail.com; s=20210112; h=mime-version:references:in-reply-to:from:date:message-id:subject:to :cc; bh=xfGvY+xnA5Ypp1N2ofqB7MxRKegY8wCQXKBuOzMIz0c=; b=U0vZqasn9sY+WQtsIeakf3wQSlu506VLQK8AJHiZHY5iS56TGzaLH4+8I10/iEVchm CBn0zLsfJPnjBYjVMryA1oKwWn83b0AxWoUPahhSUZx3VXV20kaL+/QptKAUrQ8J8e6Y hrYzp5uoJtbucA06i/8ItvIWNscakTolHE7jKpYLb4LYGiVvj3VK1mQUn/pD39hplmyn +DjsZudp8bpZVZJZV//2l1N/Itin8/wEiO+4fyLEmZVnI7WkEipmkL/p8YEWxj5YlHIU WFK1C6YQgtIH6P1A4CB0pRgBUp0/Ij838vEzgpkCnq0ihTDp6/N8/3b+f/S1wDFAH1ud FUsg== X-Google-DKIM-Signature: v=1; a=rsa-sha256; c=relaxed/relaxed; d=1e100.net; s=20210112; h=x-gm-message-state:mime-version:references:in-reply-to:from:date :message-id:subject:to:cc; bh=xfGvY+xnA5Ypp1N2ofqB7MxRKegY8wCQXKBuOzMIz0c=; b=zXdRdd8Z1hXRXUEupa7PEJXh9d1wlKBF4CWenkUPTHIpEJH2NLj5A6AmoU1SfQT9x+ NmM9SeavtrDorZg89df5b5xNfEBiBUHxQo4QNV4mEiNHuVWNOPyNDO7uXLvCTwuLOGwG rSOC/md1UnO1oV39FLYHnV1Q8v8m1P6h3o6aRZmzVlzNIo00wxbBnzrMLpOZfCWGRllf jccaYapDQJ+CglCoGxDGqeyARaVl7o+a44vxVJSagQqSmSC+jrdMlJFoqkpp7UjdZMqT Si+zjvv9aMa09v2eUzgy2MozCTWbI4WOOvZtuKNSkPFiYLcwck0T9AGUmIGXI6kyjPvW BEpw== X-Gm-Message-State: AOAM530uRC71WywJxqq6ONLsA0gVco3Qca//cjNuoR7DiZabtmbvMqxW 7YwerOceN/b31R9TyMitFsVShRiAfmu/hzo6JX+EcJf3 X-Google-Smtp-Source: ABdhPJyqNHB/uLAOWWwKBhOuWv8eO711Rlx7Ns+cR/SdBUUG4ZNeizCp6DvH/4G9A8R2ZdolJQFcDbrEPIq2JopgQLA= X-Received: by 2002:a17:907:1c06:b0:6df:b257:cbb3 with SMTP id nc6-20020a1709071c0600b006dfb257cbb3mr21801011ejc.631.1654527250354; Mon, 06 Jun 2022 07:54:10 -0700 (PDT) MIME-Version: 1.0 References: <20220603213215.GO10240@mcvoy.com> <20220603214032.GQ10240@mcvoy.com> <20220603223014.GS10240@mcvoy.com> <20220603234822.GV10240@mcvoy.com> <20220604010543.GZ10240@mcvoy.com> <20220606011511.GG10240@mcvoy.com> In-Reply-To: From: Henry Bent Date: Mon, 6 Jun 2022 10:53:59 -0400 Message-ID: To: Dan Cross Content-Type: multipart/alternative; boundary="0000000000000757ae05e0c8a5ed" Message-ID-Hash: ZTAOZOYNAXCHPLYYAP7I73VS2LMFSJVZ X-Message-ID-Hash: ZTAOZOYNAXCHPLYYAP7I73VS2LMFSJVZ X-MailFrom: henry.r.bent@gmail.com X-Mailman-Rule-Misses: dmarc-mitigation; no-senders; approved; emergency; loop; banned-address; member-moderation; nonmember-moderation; administrivia; implicit-dest; max-recipients; max-size; news-moderation; no-subject; digests; suspicious-header CC: The Eunuchs Hysterical Society X-Mailman-Version: 3.3.6b1 Precedence: list Subject: [TUHS] Re: Fwd: [simh] Announcing the Open SIMH project List-Id: The Unix Heritage Society mailing list Archived-At: List-Archive: List-Help: List-Owner: List-Post: List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: --0000000000000757ae05e0c8a5ed Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8" On Sun, 5 Jun 2022 at 21:41, Dan Cross wrote: > > The other day, I needed a Linux machine for work. I grabbed another > NUC and put Arch on it. A vastly different experience: much more akin > to installing 7th Edition than Windows or macOS. Oh! And I missed a > step, so I had to pull some shenanigans to fix that. > Gentoo is even more arcane, but that's essentially an "I want to do everything myself" distribution. I suppose my point is that there exist a full range of distributions, from the truly masochistic Linux From Scratch to the most hands-off/static ChromeOS Flex. I don't believe that any other "OS" has such a wide range of offerings. This is obviously both a wonderful feature and a confusing nightmare, depending on your audience. > I'd put the FreeBSD install process somewhere between the two. > Sure, it's textual, but it's pretty straightforward. OpenBSD is probably > a tad closer to the Arch-like experience -- it's not as colorful -- but > it's > not too hard[*]. So the experience varies across BSDs, but not that > much, while it's vastly different across Linux distributions. > I haven't installed FreeBSD or OpenBSD in many years, but I am familiar with NetBSD's text-based installer. It almost reminds me of how Solaris from the console was - if you want to you can manually set partition sizes and choose which portions of the OS you want to install, but if you just choose all of the defaults you'll almost certainly have a reasonable system. That being said, it does assume some preexisting level of Unix knowledge if you want to actually understand what is happening, or understand how/why you would want to change the defaults. > The ABI compatibility thing breaks down, too. A colleague was trying > to get the host-side of a Salae logic analyzer working on Arch, and it > doesn't. They more or less require Ubuntu 18.something, and that's > not what he runs. As far as most end-users are concerned, your > distribution of choice is "Linux", and distributions vary in all kinds of > ways. > What I think might be most confusing to the average user is that there is not really a "Linux 2" or "Linux 4" or what have you with which to advertise compatibility. Specific kernel versions are virtually meaningless to precompiled or closed-source binaries, it's all about the libraries. So you run into the situation of "we tested it on Ubuntu 18 and that works so that's what we're supporting" because it's probably not worth the time for a smaller company to validate their software against the plethora of available versions of available distributions, even if the solution might be as simple as "add this one package and it will work." Tangentially, this reminds me of the situation with Solaris and software compatibility. For example, the Sun Workshop Compiler 6 was advertised as only being for Solaris 2.6 and up. Upon close inspection it turned out that the only reason for this was that it wanted access to snprintf() and vsnprintf(), which weren't in the 2.5.1 kernel. But it turned out that __snprintf() and __vsnprintf() were, so if you created a very simple shared library and forced it in the environment with LD_PRELOAD, everything worked just fine. Sun later appeared to wise up to this with the introduction of dependencies on internal shared library versioning. > I ran into some weird behavior in their bootstrap, though; I traced this > to something slow in the BIOS, did a fix locally, sent a bug report along > with a patch, and got told, "go use UEFI." Meh. Ok.... So I went back > and used UEFI, and the same thing was slow (unsurprising as almost > certainly the BIOS and UEFI flows share common code), wrote back, > and got silence. I pinged again the other week and still haven't heard > anything. Very discouraging. I suspect it's that kind of thing that turns > people off of at least some of the BSDs. > I've submitted patches to NetBSD and this was definitely not my experience. It's disappointing to see OpenBSD's "user hostile" stereotype borne out in reality. -Henry --0000000000000757ae05e0c8a5ed Content-Type: text/html; charset="UTF-8" Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable
On Sun, 5 Jun 2022 at 21:41, Dan Cross &l= t;crossd@gmail.com> wrote:

The other day, I needed a Linux machine for work. I grabbed another
NUC and put Arch on it. A vastly different experience: much more akin
to installing 7th Edition than Windows or macOS. Oh! And I missed a
step, so I had to pull some shenanigans to fix that.
<= br>
Gentoo is even more arcane, but that's essentially an &qu= ot;I want to do everything myself" distribution.=C2=A0 I suppose my po= int is that there exist a full range of distributions, from the truly masoc= histic Linux From Scratch to the most hands-off/static ChromeOS Flex.=C2=A0= I don't believe that any other "OS" has such a wide range of= offerings.=C2=A0 This is obviously both a wonderful feature and a confusin= g nightmare, depending on your audience.
=C2=A0
I'd put the FreeBSD install process somewhere between the two.
Sure, it's textual, but it's pretty straightforward. OpenBSD is pro= bably
a tad closer to the Arch-like experience -- it's not as colorful -- but= it's
not too hard[*]. So the experience varies across BSDs, but not that
much, while it's vastly different across Linux distributions.

I haven't installed FreeBSD or OpenBSD in ma= ny years, but I am familiar with NetBSD's text-based installer.=C2=A0 I= t almost reminds me of how Solaris from the console was - if you want to yo= u can manually set partition sizes and choose which portions of the OS you = want to install, but if you just choose all of the defaults you'll almo= st certainly have a reasonable system.=C2=A0 That being said, it does assum= e some preexisting level of Unix knowledge if you want to actually understa= nd what is happening, or understand how/why you would want to change the de= faults.
=C2=A0
The ABI compatibility thing breaks down, too. A colleague was trying
to get the host-side of a Salae logic analyzer working on Arch, and it
doesn't. They more or less require Ubuntu 18.something, and that's<= br> not what he runs. As far as most end-users are concerned, your
distribution of choice is "Linux", and distributions vary in all = kinds of
ways.

What I think might be most confus= ing to the average user is that there is not really a "Linux 2" o= r "Linux 4" or what have you with which to advertise compatibilit= y.=C2=A0 Specific kernel versions are virtually meaningless to precompiled = or closed-source binaries, it's all about the libraries.=C2=A0 So you r= un into the situation of "we tested it on Ubuntu 18 and that works so = that's what we're supporting" because it's probably not wo= rth the time for a smaller company to validate their software against the p= lethora of available versions of available distributions, even if the solut= ion might be as simple as "add this one package and it will work."= ;

Tangentially, this reminds me of the situation w= ith Solaris and software compatibility.=C2=A0 For example, the Sun Workshop= Compiler 6 was advertised as only being for Solaris 2.6 and up.=C2=A0 Upon= close inspection it turned out that the only reason for this was that it w= anted access to snprintf() and vsnprintf(), which weren't in the 2.5.1 = kernel.=C2=A0 But it turned out that __snprintf() and __vsnprintf() were, s= o if you created a very simple shared library and forced it in the environm= ent with LD_PRELOAD, everything worked just fine.=C2=A0 Sun later appeared = to wise up to this with the introduction of dependencies on internal shared= library versioning.
=C2=A0
I ran into some weird behavior in their bootstrap, though; I traced this to something slow in the BIOS, did a fix locally, sent a bug report along with a patch, and got told, "go use UEFI." Meh. Ok.... So I went = back
and used UEFI, and the same thing was slow (unsurprising as almost
certainly the BIOS and UEFI flows share common code), wrote back,
and got silence. I pinged again the other week and still haven't heard<= br> anything. Very discouraging. I suspect it's that kind of thing that tur= ns
people off of at least some of the BSDs.

I've submitted patches to NetBSD and this was definitely not my exper= ience.=C2=A0 It's disappointing to see OpenBSD's "user hostile= " stereotype borne out in reality.

-Henry
=
--0000000000000757ae05e0c8a5ed--