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Lennart Poettering: BSD Isn't Relevant Anymore 460

halfaperson writes "In an interview with LinuxFr.org, Lennart Poettering speaks freely about his creations, PulseAudio, Avahi and systemd among other things. Naturally, what has stirred up most of the discussions online is Lennart's opinions on BSD. Following the recent proposal to make Gnome a Linux-exclusive desktop, Lennart explains that he thinks BSD support is holding back a lot of Free Software development. He says this while also taking a stab at Debian kFreeBSD: 'Debian kFreeBSD is a toy OS, people really shouldn't misunderstand that.'"
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Lennart Poettering: BSD Isn't Relevant Anymore

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  • by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 15, 2011 @09:14PM (#36782404)

    It is official; Lennart Poettering now confirms: *BSD Isn't Relevant Anymore

    One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered *BSD community when IDC confirmed that *BSD market share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all servers. Coming close on the heels of a recent Netcraft survey which plainly states that *BSD has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. *BSD is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test.

    You don't need to be Lennart Poettering to predict *BSD's future. The hand writing is on the wall: *BSD faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for *BSD because *BSD is dying. Things are looking very bad for *BSD. As many of us are already aware, *BSD continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood.

    FreeBSD is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its core developers. The sudden and unpleasant departures of long time FreeBSD developers Jordan Hubbard and Mike Smith only serve to underscore the point more clearly. There can no longer be any doubt: FreeBSD is dying.

    Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.

    OpenBSD leader Theo states that there are 7000 users of OpenBSD. How many users of NetBSD are there? Let's see. The number of OpenBSD versus NetBSD posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 NetBSD users. BSD/OS posts on Usenet are about half of the volume of NetBSD posts. Therefore there are about 700 users of BSD/OS. A recent article put FreeBSD at about 80 percent of the *BSD market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 FreeBSD users. This is consistent with the number of FreeBSD Usenet posts.

    Due to the troubles of Walnut Creek, abysmal sales and so on, FreeBSD went out of business and was taken over by BSDI who sell another troubled OS. Now BSDI is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.

    All major surveys show that *BSD has steadily declined in market share. *BSD is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If *BSD is to survive at all it will be among OS dilettante dabblers. *BSD continues to decay. Nothing short of a cockeyed miracle could save *BSD from its fate at this point in time. For all practical purposes, *BSD is dead.

    Fact: *BSD Isn't Relevant Anymore

  • Holding back? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 15, 2011 @09:15PM (#36782408)

    Innovation is still happening on the OpenBSD and DragonFly fronts.

    FreeBSD is all about incorporating other people's software at this point (ZFS, DTrace, LLVM), and hasn't really originated a good idea in a decade. Coincidentally, that is where DragonFly split off. That's what happens when Apple buys the FreeBSD development team...you get a bunch of core developers running FreeBSD in a virtual machine on MacBook Pros. They can't be bothered to get basic functionality like suspend/resume to work, and all new wireless drivers are lifted from OpenBSD.

    NetBSD is dead.

    Regarding the summary, PulseAudio adds nothing to the *BSDs...OSS has always been able to have multiple programs access the sound card at the same time. Avahi runs fine at least on OpenBSD, and systemd....well there are only about two Linux distributions even using it at this point.

    • Re:Holding back? (Score:5, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 15, 2011 @09:25PM (#36782466)

      Regarding the summary, PulseAudio adds nothing to the *BSDs...OSS has always been able to have multiple programs access the sound card at the same time. Avahi runs fine at least on OpenBSD, and systemd....well there are only about two Linux distributions even using it at this point.

      PulseAudio is a useless piece of shit. It's like ALSA with a bunch of stupid complications. How it got to be the standard sound system for so many mainstream distros is a real mystery.

      It lends credibility to the idea that Open Source developers don't really want to achieve a mature, working codebase and stick with that unless there are serious problems that really do require moving to something else. There is a perception that it has to be hackish and in perpetual beta to be considered sexy and cool for an Open Source OS. PulseAudio is a big example of why this perception exists.

      Just answer me one thing. ALSA has had Dmix for nearly ten years. It has enabled Dmix by default (as in it just automagically works) for about seven years. What glaring need is there for adding a second software layer to a sound system that already does what you need it to do? No, playing sound over the network isn't a good reason. That's what application-level streaming software is for. What does PulseAudio contribute other than needless complexity and several FAQs dedicated to replacing it with ALSA for various distributions that ship with it?

      Oh, and in the case of Mandriva, a petition to remove PulseAudio by default [petitiononline.com] since more than 90% of users are disabling it and replacing it with ALSA. Yeah, that's not for no reason.

      • As for Alsa/another sound server replacing OSS, OSS do the mixing (and resampling?) in the kernel space, citing latency is one of the reasons, while alsa let userspace programs the jobs. IMO, that kind of works does not belong to kernel space, so I prefer alsa.

        Regarding to pulseaudio, dmix is fine, but pulseaudio is better with features like glitch free playback (ironically, this is the reason why pulseaudio glitches so bad on some systems with broken drivers), you can set the resampling algo, per stream vo

        • Re:Holding back? (Score:4, Insightful)

          by causality ( 777677 ) on Friday July 15, 2011 @10:27PM (#36782760)

          As for Alsa/another sound server replacing OSS, OSS do the mixing (and resampling?) in the kernel space, citing latency is one of the reasons, while alsa let userspace programs the jobs. IMO, that kind of works does not belong to kernel space, so I prefer alsa.

          Regarding to pulseaudio, dmix is fine, but pulseaudio is better with features like glitch free playback (ironically, this is the reason why pulseaudio glitches so bad on some systems with broken drivers), you can set the resampling algo, per stream volume control, flat volume (another problematic feature), and as some people said, it is the only setup that allow output via bluetooth devices but I haven't tried it yet. The main reason for many problems related to it is the horrible audio drivers on Linux (as always), so you can't exactly blame pulseaudio, at least it always has fallback mode, and the distros never set them as default. Back when pulseaudio was first integrated into Ubuntu (around 8.04, right?), it didn't work well for me and stop working for many other. But now, most people I know have absolutely no problem with pulseaudio. PS: Aside from dmix, there are several other sound servers like arts, esd etc.... too, I'm glad that we get rid of all that and now pulseaudio on alsa is the standard.

          The in-kernel audio drivers have always worked flawlessly for me. I have never had problems with latency, glitches in playback, etc.

          But let's just assume, for the sake of argument, that I just got lucky. Let's assume most users have problems that can be directly attributed to shoddy in-kernel drivers (as highly unusual and unlike the typical linux kernel experience as this is...). The solution to that is to put available development effort towards fixing those drivers. They are, after all, the low-level foundation of the audio system. The solution is emphatically NOT to add a redundant software layer on top of broken drivers. You do like to solve problems by fixing things where they are actually broken, right? That's the sensible thing to do. That's the correct use of the talent of developers who specialize in programming sound systems.

          Arts (what a piece of vulture shit that was) and ESD are not on equal footing with Dmix. Dmix is a small, relatively efficient, rather problem-free mixer for sound cards that do not have a hardware mixer. It just works and it actually serves a purpose, unlike the sound daemons. ALSA will use a hardware mixer instead of Dmix if you have high-end hardware and one is available. I have never known Dmix to introduce playback stuttering, idiotic problems with multiple users, or any of the other problems you can easily find when you do a Google search for Arts or PulseAudio. I have also never known Dmix to use any noticable amount of CPU.

          Again I will reiterate. PulseAudio is a middleman standing between the applicating wanting to play sound, and ALSA. How exactly is that going to fix an inherent flaw in the underlying ALSA system? Hint: it will not and cannot. If there are such horrible problems with Dmix (that somehow I won the lottery of never personally encountering), that kind of development effort should be put towards fixing Dmix. Doesn't that make a lot more sense?

      • Re:Holding back? (Score:4, Informative)

        by gilboad ( 986599 ) on Friday July 15, 2011 @11:39PM (#36783024)

        Actually, I -really- like Pulse.
        For the first time since, err, RedHat 5?, I can actually hear music on amarok, watch a movie on youtube and get a call using skype without blocking the system.
        I can dynamically reduce the volume of streams that I don't like (E.g. flash) without dropping the volume on other applications (E.g. amarok) or dynamically move streams from one device to another (E.g. Switch music stream from on-board / headphone to SB Audigy / 5.1).
        I could never achieve that, not with Alsa (Linux w/ or w/o dmix) nor with OSS (under both Linux and FreeBSD).

        Now, ***you*** may not appreciate or need it, but calling a very stable (at least on Fedora) a useless piece of shit just because ***you*** don't use it, should have earned you a -5 troll.

        - Gilboa

      • IMO: Like you say, PulseAudio doesn't add any important technical features.

        The problem with ALSA is the configuration. Changing anything (even as simple as redirecting audio to a digital out, or indeed, even enabling dmix) requires monkeying around in your .asoundrc which to put it politely, is arcane at best, and there are no user-friendly tools to make it easier.

        So you slap PulseAudio on top of it, and it provides a convenient API. As such, there are easy GUI tools to configure where you want your sound t

        • Re:Holding back? (Score:5, Insightful)

          by gmueckl ( 950314 ) on Saturday July 16, 2011 @05:23AM (#36784252)

          I hate audio demons. These crutches never worked properly and never will. Someone needs to actually make a lot of absolutely breaking changes to ALSA. Why?

          When I plug in my USB headphones in Windows, all programs using default audio output automatically move from my 5.1 speakers (onboard sound) to the headphones the moment I plug them in. When I pull the plug, the reverse happens automatically. It just works! MacOS supposedly behaves the exact same way.

          On Linux, this is broken in ways you cannot even imagine. When I plug in the USB headphones after booting, they are treated as the second sound card (hw:1) when everything uses the first one (hw:0) by default. So in order to have anything use the headphones I have to reconfigure the applications one by one and probably restart them (xine needs a restart). Same when I change back. When I leave the USB headphones in when booting, it is totally random which sound device will be hw:0 and which will hw:1. Great. To make matters worse, when I leave the webcam plugged in, the internal microphone also gets registered as a different sound device. Plus, when it is plugged in when booting it gets a number one below the headset. So sometimes the webcam microphone ends up as hw:0 during boot and every program attempting to use hw:0 as output device will throw up confusing error messages about how everything stopped working (if they even detect that). A normal user would have given up on this mess already!

          The really proper fix would be the following: break the ALSA interface in a big way: don't number sound devices, but name them after the hardware they contain (not the bus location, esp. in the case of USB devices), and make the current default device queryable somehow. Programs must then query ALSA for the default device and be aware that this may change at any moment. ALSA must be extended by a mechanism to report such changes to programs, which absolutely have to respond to this in order to not crash and burn (it'll be a PITA for the programmers, but it's absolutely necessary to enforce all of this). Also, ALSA must be able to report the speaker configuration connected to a certain device.

          Why? Programs that are capable of generating two or more channels of output sound need to be aware of how many channels are going to be audible. It's not enought to know that the sound device has a 5.1 analog output. It is equally important to know whether all outputs are actually connected to speakers (e.g. a headphone connected to the onboard 5.1 analog output) or the program will play sound on channels that are inaudible and will not be heard by the user. Really great programs even should distinguish between stereo speakers and headphones or different setups for the same set of speakers (I guess most OSS Linux app devs won't even know why that is). Automatic downmixing inside ALSA when the output channel count decreases on a device change should not happen because the program almost always has additional information and thus can do a better job.

          I know that programmers will cringe when they read this because it makes using ALSA much more difficult, but that's what is missing to get consumer desktop audio up to par on Linux.

  • In related news (Score:4, Insightful)

    by ArchieBunker ( 132337 ) on Friday July 15, 2011 @09:17PM (#36782414)

    Apple claims HTC is no longer relevant and Ford also claims GM is no longer relevant.

    Seriously you're asking a linux developer his opinion on BSD? What answer were you expecting?

    • The point here is precisely that he is a Linux developer and not a BSD developer - as in if BSD doesn't get more developers porting their work between Linux and BSD and maintaining compatible builds BSD is just going to continue fading into obscurity.

    • Re:In related news (Score:5, Interesting)

      by dgatwood ( 11270 ) on Friday July 15, 2011 @09:39PM (#36782536) Homepage Journal

      Seriously you're asking a linux developer his opinion on BSD? What answer were you expecting?

      Something that doesn't make him sound like a complete idiot?

      The core of Mac OS X borrows heavily from BSD, so one could legitimately argue that BSD is now the most widespread UNIX variant. In fact, I wouldn't swear to it, but I suspect that makes BSD (and Mac OS X, specifically) more popular than all of the other Linux and UNIX variants put together.

      You'd pretty much have to be living under a rock to think that BSD isn't relevant. Either that or you have to believe that Windows is the way of the future. Take your pick.

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by Tester ( 591 )

        Seriously you're asking a linux developer his opinion on BSD? What answer were you expecting?

        Something that doesn't make him sound like a complete idiot?

        The core of Mac OS X borrows heavily from BSD, so one could legitimately argue that BSD is now the most widespread UNIX variant. In fact, I wouldn't swear to it, but I suspect that makes BSD (and Mac OS X, specifically) more popular than all of the other Linux and UNIX variants put together.

        1. Lennart is NOT a kernel developer. He is a userspace developer who wrote many important pieces of infrastructure for all free operating systems.

        2. Lennart is trying to make Linux more like OSX.. What he is saying is that the other BSDs are way way behind in features. Apple had to radically change BSD to make it suitable for a desktop, and Lennart is doing the same.

        • by MacGyver2210 ( 1053110 ) on Saturday July 16, 2011 @12:36AM (#36783226)

          Lennart is trying to make Linux more like OSX

          Thank you for clarifying that. Now I understand that he is to be stopped at all costs.

      • Re:In related news (Score:5, Informative)

        by Tom9729 ( 1134127 ) <tom9729@gDEGASmail.com minus painter> on Friday July 15, 2011 @10:49PM (#36782862) Homepage

        TFS is flamebait.

        LinuxFr.org : Systemd use a lot of Linux only technologies (cgroups, udev, fanotify, timerfd, signalfd, etc). Do you really think the Linux API has been taking the role of the POSIX API and the other systems are irrelevant ?

        Lennart : Yes, I don't think BSD is really too relevant anymore, and I think that this implied requirement for compatibility with those systems when somebody hacks software for the free desktop or ecosystem is a burden, and holds us back for little benefit.
        I am pretty sure those other systems are not irrelevant for everbody, after all there are people hacking on them. I just don't think it's really in our interest to let us being held back by them if we want to make sure Linux enters the mainstream all across the board (and not just on servers and mobile phones, and not in reduced ways like Android). They are irrelevant to get Free Software into everybody's hand, and I think that is and should be our goal.
        But hey, that's just me saying this. I am sure people do Free Software for a number of reasons. I have mine, and others have others.

        He's saying BSD isn't really relevant on the _desktop_ (and sorry but no, OS X is not a counter-example to this) and that if developers want Linux to succeed on the desktop then they need to worry less about other platforms. In other words, don't cater to the lowest common denominator.

        • by bonch ( 38532 ) *

          Slashdot is the Aint't-It-Cool-News of tech journalism these days. Every story is days behind and has to be controversial or misleading.

        • Re:In related news (Score:5, Insightful)

          by kc8apf ( 89233 ) <kc8apf AT kc8apf DOT net> on Friday July 15, 2011 @11:30PM (#36782994) Homepage

          It's interesting that the question implies that Linux is leading the charge in defining new APIs. Everything listed has a FreeBSD equivalent that predates the linux version:

          cgroups -> jails
          udev -> devfs
          fanotify, timerfd, signalfd -> kqueue

          Of course, the Linux developers decided to reinvent them all making compatibility impossible. I guess you could argue that the Linux versions offer some extra features over the FreeBSD versions, but from a user and developer perspective, the FreeBSD versions seem more complete and stable (see jails vs cgroups).

      • by jon3k ( 691256 )
        Not even close, linux dominates in the server world and Android is based on linux, which is outselling the iPhone quite easily (up to 550,000 android devices activated PER DAY).
  • PulseAudio? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by 0100010001010011 ( 652467 ) on Friday July 15, 2011 @09:23PM (#36782444)

    This guy needs beaten just for this.

    • by 0racle ( 667029 )
      I'd like to beat him for systemd while we're at it.
    • Re:PulseAudio? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by causality ( 777677 ) on Friday July 15, 2011 @09:54PM (#36782614)

      This guy needs beaten just for this.

      I don't blame him for creating PulseAudio. I blame the distribution maintainers for having the poor judgment to make it the main sound system for so many distributions. It would be one thing to have a sane default like ALSA and then have PulseAudio available in the repositories for those who really want it.

      For my friends who use Linux, the first thing I do whenever a new distro is installed is to check if it is using PulseAudio. If so, I remove it and replace it with ALSA. Suddenly issues related to audio playback go away and everything just magically works. Oh and they easily have a proper mixer without jumping through hoops, too, which is handy considering some of them are using 5.1 surround sound and/or bluetooth headphones.

      The first headache I had with PulseAudio was when I tried to run something as a different (normal) user account and audio wouldn't work. There was no meaningful error message. There was only a "connection refused" error in the terminal. As it turns out, this is because PulseAudio has to be run by the user and it is recommended not to run it as a system-wide daemon. User A was running the user-daemon and User B was denied access to it as a consequence. They both could not run their own, well they could but it wouldn't work, as that'd be far too easy. Rather than screw around trying to get that to work I just used ALSA since PulseAudio didn't do anything I needed it to do that ALSA couldn't do with none of the hassle.

      In case you wonder why I was running something as another normal user, it was for using Windows programs in WINE. I always prefer to do that with a separate user account that isn't used for anything else. This special WINE account has additional restrictions because I do not trust Windows programs -- they might phone home, they might contain malware, they are binary blobs that cannot easily be inspected, etc. The point is, Unix and therefore Linux are multi-user systems. You expect to be able to have multiple concurrent users running programs without issue.

      PulseAudio smacks of the walled-garden model, where as long as you are a very average user who does extremely predictable things that they have decided to allow for, such as only having one active user on the local system, then you have few or maybe no problems. As soon as you do anything even the slightest bit unusual (which multiple users on a *nix system hardly is) you start running into brick walls. To that I say "no thanks, not for me". If I wanted that experience I'd use Windows. If ALSA were a barely-functional, poorly designed sound system I could at least understand why PulseAudio exists and why it is becoming so popular. As far as I can tell it's a burdensome solution to a problem that doesn't exist.

    • This guy needs beaten just for this.

      Can slashdot start allowing posts to be modded up to Score:6, Insightful -- just so we can apply it in this one case?

      But to be fair, BSD does have its problems. I ran FreeBSD on both my desktop and my server for years. It was OK as a server OS, but not so great on the desktop. I had a list of open-source apps I wanted to run, and I could only get about 85% of them to run at any given time. That's why I jumped ship when ubuntu came along.

    • I used to share your opinion after I moved to Ubuntu from Gentoo. Specially developing games, Pulse caused a lot of lag and made coding sound effects terribly hard. My first install task was to remove pulse and set SDL to use ALSA.
      However, one or two Ubuntu releases ago, it started to just work© and haven't had a complaint about it since then (except for the huge pipes (?) stored in /dev/shm, a directory I use often, and doesn't cause lag in my tracker or my games anymore. That's enough for me, s

  • by mlts ( 1038732 ) * on Friday July 15, 2011 @09:24PM (#36782448)

    Just curious... does Netcraft confirm this?

  • by jvillain ( 546827 ) on Friday July 15, 2011 @09:26PM (#36782470)
    I guess Gnome is becoming more selective in it's appeal just like SpinalTap.
  • I will be sure to let the good folks at Juniper know.

  • Pulse Audio (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Beelzebud ( 1361137 ) on Friday July 15, 2011 @09:40PM (#36782548)
    I don't take anything from this guy seriously after dealing with Pulse Audio on a few systems. The shit never improved and only added a layer of incompatibility to systems that ran just fine using ALSA by itself.
    • Re:Pulse Audio (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 15, 2011 @10:02PM (#36782652)

      He has a tendency to develop things halfway, without taking any input from any users, and then everyone using Fedora has to end up using it even if it's complete shit. If you criticize him, he's got some staunch defenders that will call you out on it, mostly the people who have only ever used Linux on a laptop... that really does seem to be the only thing he cares about.

      PulseAudio - a useless NIH layer. ALSA was just fine. He lists a bunch of other problems with Linux audio, but everyone was just using ALSA directly, nobody was using his straw men really (Jack? OSS? Really?) This is the first thing I remove on my Linux boxes.

      I predict systemd will be his next "hit". He named the control command "systemctl" even though every Linux has a "sysctl" command already... one of the most easily avoidable CLI namespace problems I have ever seen in over 20 years of UNIX and 18 years of Linux administration. I think systemd is because he really really wants to make Linux into MacOS X. If you want MacOS X, then great, it's a fine desktop OS, have at it.... but Linux is still mostly used on servers, and there is nothing wrong with that at all. Anyway, systemd just throws out everything that was good about init and even upstart, and starts over, and he is busy adding the features of cron and inetd to it for some reason. Because saving some tiny amount of space in the process table is somehow useful.

      I just wish there was some review of features that make it into Fedora, etc, to see if they're really worth it.

      • Re:Pulse Audio (Score:4, Interesting)

        by gmueckl ( 950314 ) on Saturday July 16, 2011 @05:41AM (#36784316)

        From what I've read about systemd the most irksome part is that every daemon that wants to really work well with systemd must undergo quite some code changes. Otherwise, that particular demon will be handled like in the old init system. So, in order to bring any benefit at all, the whole system (which worked) must be adopted to systemd in some way. Given that some of these demons are really there to be run on servers where systemd has no place, this thing does not seem like a very good idea.

        But unlike PulseAudio, i haven't had a chance to see systemd fail spectacularly.

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        PulseAudio sucks, but systemd is reasonable stuff. It's like upstart (but done right) combined with inetd.

        Unlike what another reply says, systemd does not require changes to daemons.

        Rich.

  • BSD is irrelevant. Nobody's played Doom for years.

    Oh, wait.... Maybe I'm thinking of BFG.

  • by decora ( 1710862 ) on Friday July 15, 2011 @10:30PM (#36782778) Journal

    now we know.

    the developer lacks humility.

  • by DaMattster ( 977781 ) on Friday July 15, 2011 @11:16PM (#36782944)
    For security, stability, and reliability, I will take OpenBSD over Linux any day of the week. I can look at my logs and most would-be intruders give up after doing an OS fingerprint on my gateway machine. They see that it is OpenBSD and quit while they are "NOT ahead."
  • I see a lot of hate for PulseAudio in these comments, but no mention of Avahi. If a distro has it installed and running by default then that is one of the first things I uninstall or disable. Sad to say due to some odd dependencies it is sometimes easier to disable Avahi instead of uninstalling it (unless I feel like a sadist and and go go and re-install all those other packages that somehow ended up in dependency hell with Avahi).

    As for BSD, I haven't tried using it on the desktop, but I've had no complain

  • Lennart (Score:4, Insightful)

    by DaMattster ( 977781 ) on Friday July 15, 2011 @11:25PM (#36782982)
    Why does he have to spread crap like this around? Really, there should be cooperation between the Linux and BSD camps. They interoperate very well because, for the most part, they share some common userland tools and are also semi-POSIX compliant. One of Sun Tzu's principles in the Art of War is to divide and conquer. When FUD gets spewed from the OS camps, it simply shows how divided Open Source really is and makes it easier for proprietary OSes to gain inroads.
    • Re:Lennart (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Alcoholic Synonymous ( 990318 ) on Saturday July 16, 2011 @04:43AM (#36784116)

      Poettering is a zealot for a religious cause. It has nothing to do with truth or facts or even logic. His chief gripe isn't actually that BSD isn't keeping up with Linux, it's that BSD does things different from Linux and he doesn't like it. He tries to spin different as not keeping pace, but that's based on the assumption that the way he wants to do things is the One True Way. Mind you, he says this while simultaneously and purposely trying to keep BSD out of the party by refusing any and all compatibility patches that would make his One True Way usable on BSD.

      Amazingly, the BSD people have a way of fixing this crap themselves. It's just more of a pain in the ass when people like Poettering actively work against their efforts.

    • "there should be cooperation between the Linux and BSD camps"

      Of course there should be, but you won't see it from Pottering. He doesn't care if anything works on Linux except under Gnome. He certainly isn't going to care if things work on BSD.

      Oddly, as someone trying to use a modern Linus distro without Gnome, Potterings antics have made me wonder if I should switch to a BSD.

  • by rawler ( 1005089 ) <ulrik...mikaelsson@@@gmail...com> on Saturday July 16, 2011 @07:02PM (#36789580)

    Hurd is taking over it's space.

Keep up the good work! But please don't ask me to help.

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