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.'"
BSD Isn't Relevant Anymore (Score:5, Funny)
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
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(Impressed he got FP with it too)
I like to think that he always has it in his clipboard on the off-chance it will be relevant.
ha ha (Score:4, Insightful)
Linux's vaguely meritocratic approach has obliterated the BSD cliquish approach, period.
Does any other OS have multiple competing teams writing the scheduler? How could anyone possibly compete with that? Seriously!
Conversely, the LLVM will eventually obliterate GCC for the same reasons, multiple participants engaging in healthy competition. Oh, plus the LLVM simplifies writing compilers for virtually any language.
p.s. Does APL/K/J have an LLVM based compiler yet?
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There is nothing to require you to release the source of a BSD derived binary you ship. Apple do it purely out of respect, not obligation. The GPL, however, forces you to release your source (as far as it can be enforced anyway).
Holding back? (Score:3, Interesting)
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)
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.
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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)
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)
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
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Sounds like everything you could do with JACK years ago. Pulseaudio was written because... well... there is no good reason for pulseaudio to be written in the first place. Lennart simply didn't like JACK, or ESound, or aRts, or any of the other existing sound servers. It's the age old open source dilemma of rewriting from scratch what could otherwise be fixed in the existing systems..
.
I can only speak from my own personal experience, but at least in my case, ESD and Arts never really worked when trying combined non-native applications (E.g. KDE under GNOME or vice versa, let alone running OSS games/flash/etc under both) and as for JACK, well, tried it a couple of times, never really worked for me, dropped it.
Pulse marked the first time both me and the people around me can reliably mix multiple streams from different applications while getting expected results. (E.g. Mixing Amarok, skype
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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)
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.
Re:Holding back? (Score:5, Insightful)
Too bad they didn't port the FreeBSD audio. It actually works.
Re:Holding back? (Score:4, Insightful)
The other linux problem: Not Invented Here.
See DTRACE vs Systemtap [oracle.com]
Re:Holding back? (Score:5, Interesting)
Working audio was what made me switch to FreeBSD in the first place. This was back around 2001. The state of the art was something like this:
Applications played sound by writing writing to /dev/dsp. This was a fairly standard way of playing sound, based on the Solaris, and supported by most *NIX systems. OSS defined a set of ioctls for controlling playback, and these worked everywhere. There was one slight problem: most implementations didn't support software sound mixing if your hardware (like most cheap AC97 CODECs) couldn't do mixing in hardware. This meant that only one device could write to /dev/dsp at once, meaning only one application could play sound. KDE and GNOME both had their own (incompatible) sound daemons, so multiple KDE or multiple GNOME apps could play sound at once, but not both. I was using a KDE Jabber client, a GNOME email client and wanted to get audio new message notifications from either. I also wanted XMMS (which wrote directly to /dev/dsp) to play music in the background, and I wanted to play BZFlag! sometimes and have its sound work without breaking anything else.
In Linux land, there was ALSA. ALSA did sound mixing, but it required your applications to be rewritten to use it. Some sound cards only had ALSA drives, some only had OSS drivers. A few had both. ALSA had a half-arsed OSS emulation mode, but that broke various other things, and still didn't let multiple OSS applications play audio at once.
FreeBSD 4 had a virtual channel (vchan) mechanism. You had several /dev/dsp.n devices. /dev/dsp was a symbolic link to one of them. I set the KDE sound daemon to use /dev/dsp.1, the GNOME one to /dev/dsp.2, XMMS to use /dev/dsp.3, and whatever other app tried to use /dev/dsp got the /dev/dsp.0 channel (typically games, running in the foreground). All of my running apps could play sound at once and, after a small amount of initial configuration, it Just Worked.
I didn't stay with FreeBSD 4 for long on the desktop, I started using the FreeBSD 5 betas. This was a really unpopular FreeBSD release, because it was only about as stable as Linux at the time, which most FreeBSD users felt was completely unacceptable. It improved the sound system so that the vchans were automatically allocated. Now, things worked just as well as they did with FreeBSD 4, but I didn't need to configure anything. Apps could just open /dev/dsp and they'd each get a new vchan, up to a configurable limit (I set it to 16, which seemed to be more than I needed).
Now I use FreeBSD 8. As well as the earlier features, it has a new low-latency sound mixing path, per-vchan volume controls, and full OSS 4 support. Oh, and it even has a compatibility layer, so if I run old code that uses the OSS 3 APIs and tries to modify the global volume control via /dev/mixer, I can make it only modify its own vchan's volume.
Meanwhile, Linux developers were told that, actually, they shouldn't use ALSA, they should rewrite their sound code yet again, this time for PulseAudio. And people wonder why I hate having to support Linux...
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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 was pushed by Redhat and nobody else had a better solution to clean up the morass that is linux audio.
PulseAudio is a relatively recent arrival. ALSA + Dmix by default has "just worked" for a long time now, about seven years. As a matter of fact, I don't see PulseAudio in a kernel config anywhere -- implying that PulseAudio is just an extra layer of software standing between the program wanting to play audio and ALSA. If the goal is to get rid of problems caused by ALSA (I'd love to hear what those are, by the way), then that's not going to work.
Please explain to me the specific problems with Linux au
Re:Holding back? (Score:5, Interesting)
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Before PulseAudio it wasn't possible to turn on a bluetooth headset and have any audio that was playing through your speakers automatically start going to the headset instead.
It's good to have a real answer to a question. Still, I have another question. Given the open-source nature of all the software involved, wouldn't the developer time be better invested in fixing the ALSA drivers to accommodate Bluetooth headsets instead of creating an entirely new layer of middleman software between the application and the audio system?
It's a question of how to best manage and invest the finite talent and effort that is available. Why would PulseAudio be the best possible method? Wha
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PulseAudio isn't a bad concept, it's just that it doesn't work properly for far too many people. But the widespread adoption of tablet, smartphone and other "slim computing" devices does kind of speak to a need for a software-agnostic way to stream audio from server to client - requiring every application that wants to do this to implement streaming isn't a very sensible solution to the problem IMO.
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The right way of dealing with it, IMO, is more or less the pulse-audio way. ALSA is doing a lot of stuff in the kernel that probably should be in userspace, and cramming your entire bluetooth stack (plus any other audio sources and sinks that might be hotplugged) into the kernel just to handle audio is architecturally the wrong fix. You want to take a step back, figure out what needs to be done in the kernel (analogous to kernel modesetting for video), and pull the rest of ALSA's functionality into a userla
Further pulseaudio reasons (Score:4, Informative)
Many of the things that pulseaudio provides:
There were introductory issues too:
These issues seem to have been mostly solved with time but caused a lot of heartache along the way. The problem is whether it was a chicken and the egg issue where these issues wouldn't have been uncovered until people started testing these things but you can never get enough testers so...
Then there are issues that are still with us. If you have a creative sound card your life is going to be difficult. Pulseaudio doesn't make use of hardware mixing so if you have such a card, you may have noticeably higher CPU usage than ALSA alone (even though the audio mixing is no better). Two steps forward, one step back?
ALSA was never going to be able to introduce all the features mentioned in the first part of this mega post, mainly because it is too low level. Even OSS on the BSDs doesn't present an easy GUI for all those features (it does do mixing and per program volumes) yet Windows and OS X have many of these features. The big picture is that I can do things that I couldn't before and sometimes a lot simpler (remember esd and artsd?) but there was a cost. You may not find the cost was worth it but my feeling is that it will be around on "big" Linux (e.g. machines similar in power to desktops) for the next 10 years.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Not that PulseAudio would necessarily solve these, but here's my list:
(1) The default dmix resampler sucks. The "high-quality" one is better, but that one uses up significant chunks of CPU time. I haven't had a chance to look at the code (been meaning to) but it seems to me it should be possible to maintain quality without using so much CPU.
(2) Semi-pro home-studio type soundcards are poorly suppo
redhat audio people on irc (Score:5, Interesting)
back in the late 1990s, i had a flamewar on an irc channel with a guy from redhat, screaming at me that there was no reason anyone would want to have two programs play a sound at the same time.
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Replace "PulseAudio" with "X Window" and you fit right in the UNIX-hater's handbook. Not that that means you're wrong, mind.
I agree that PA-on-ALSA is just ridiculous. However, PA or something like it, after it matures, and over a barebones kernel layer, can make good sense.
What does PulseAudio-on-ALSA accomplish that straight ALSA cannot? Assuming a non-null answer to that, how many users really need that functionality to justify including PulseAudio as the default configuration for major distributions?
The case for PulseAudio rests on those two questions.
In related news (Score:4, Insightful)
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?
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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.
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Just because some guy is a Linux developer doesn't mean there aren't plenty of folks (and companies with HUGE market value) dedicated to working on BSD.
Are you saying that there are? If so -citation needed.
Re:In related news (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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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.
Re:In related news (Score:5, Funny)
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.
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Lennart can work himself to the bone trying to mimic OS X, but he'll need billions in resources and thousands of quality engineers to pull it off.
Ubuntu Natty is very like OSX in every relevant technical way. I promise you I can find more ways in which they are like than ways in which they are different. Both have accelerated graphics interfaces which will tile your virtual desktops or your windows. Both have a unified menu bar, and both sometimes generate applications whose menu doesn't go there (when you run something targeted against an ancient API.) Both try to have a unified look, but both will run applications which use other widget sets and ma
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You are making an apples/oranges comparison, it's obvious you know quite little about the BSD ecology.
That's funny, because I could swear I've installed and used a whole bunch of BSDs, including SunOS4, AOS 4.3 and BSD 4.3-lite on IBM RT PC, and scads of others (not to even mention x86 variants!)
The BSD OSes consist of a kernal and a complete userland, which even includes X11. Meanwhile, Linux is just a kernel, and there are dozens and dozens of different kludged together userlands that people combine with the linux kernel and call 'Linux.'
In practice they all tend to run approximately the same userland at the same time, although they may have different widget sets etc. This is also true of BSD to a certain extent, in that basically everything in use today is descended from BSD 4.4-lite, including OSX... as NeXTStep inherited bits from 4.3-lite and 4.
Re:In related news (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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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)
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).
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Didn't Linux invent the NIH syndrome or are they just pretending there too?
Re:In related news (Score:5, Interesting)
This issue has been going on for a long time, and each time a BSD developer asks to see solid docs so that he/she can port the API to be used on FreeBSD they get a bunch of incomplete specs that are absolute shit.
http://gezeiten.org/post/2011/01/Xfce-4.8-on-BSD-flavors#c14587 [gezeiten.org]
Warner Losh asking for good specs to implement udev on top of devd which has done the things that udev now does for years.
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Sure its a BSD. Pretty much any unix that isn't linux (or minix lol) shares DNA from the early AT&T + BSD unix's.
But I wouldn't call it a sibling anymore of the modern BSDs (It was originally), more a hipster turtleneck wearing cousin.
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Yeah, but using it as an argument that BSD isn't dead it like using you as an argument that your great-great grandfather isn't either ;)
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Sure they have. Take this for example.
http://www.osnews.com/story/22331/FreeBSD_Gets_Grand_Central_Dispatch_Port [osnews.com]
I could go on, but it's obvious you need to develop some research before forming opinion skills so I'll let you handle it from there.
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http://www.opensource.apple.com/release/mac-os-x-1068/ [apple.com]
You can even recompile your Mach+BSD kernel and install it on your Mac or hackintosh.
Since Apple has also rejected GPLv3, they are moving away from all things GNU in their user space as well. That means they've contributed heavily to LLVM and clang to replace GCC, also under the BSD license and written an entire new libc/c++ which they've also open-sourced. They've probably done more for BSD-licensed OS work than anyone in the world at this point.
I'm n
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Darwin is free and open source. You most certainly can download and install it on your server. Do your research.
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You missed my point. Of course Apple has based their OS on an open source platform, and therefore it is subject to certain terms.
My point is that Apple will not let you download their entire OS for free from a distro which is being counted amongst the BSD variants that are.
So if we are going to count up all the BSD installations, in the context of open source and a comparison against Linux, then it does not make logical sense to include Apple's BSD variant. One might say such a study or analysis would be
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http://www.opensource.apple.com/ [apple.com]
http://www.puredarwin.org/ [puredarwin.org]
Admittedly little used and no recent releases, but there are/have been Darwin OS releases apart from Apple.
IMHO, if you're curious, give it a shot. I personally much prefer FreeBSD as a server operating system. I don't run a Linux/BSD desktop, but if I did, I would probably use Linux.
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I prefer headless operating systems for my servers. It's what I use the most. I guess my biggest problem in trying different variants is just time really. I got so much to do coding and developing with a CentOS platform that I don't have the time yet to really explore different OS. Truth also being I don't have a lot of time for games either.
When I do get out from under the projects that I there are many things I am curious about, and BSD has always been one of them. If nothing else because Apple is ba
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Android isn't a smartphone. It's an operating system. With iPods and iPads counted, the most popular mobile operating system is iOS by a large margin. Apple's Darwin foundation is the most popular UNIX in the world.
Re:In related news (Score:4, Interesting)
Apple is due to report quarterly earnings next week. Guesses are that they will have sold around 18 million iphones and 8 million ipads, maybe 5-6 million iPod touches. Comes out to a ballpark of roughly 360k activations a day.
Is it just me or is it almost unbelievable that between iOS and Android there are almost a million devices being activated every day? Amazing...
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That's incorrect. Darwin is the most popular version of UNIX as of today and powers every iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad. Counting all Apple devices, iOS is the most popular mobile operating system in the world by a large margin, a fact that Apple trumpeted at WWDC this year.
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Sorry. I should have been clear: I'm not including embedded systems in that calculation; I'm only talking about desktops and servers based on PC hardware and similar. By that standard, Mac OS X has more than double the Linux installed base by most estimates (the most optimistic estimates I've seen for linux are 25 million, where the most pessimistic Mac OS X estimates are around 53-54 million, growing by roughly the size of the entire Linux installed base every 1.5 years or so).
If you include embedded Lin
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Look at OS X for proof.
And iOS since they share about 80% of their code base...
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Apple hired FreeBSD's co-founder.
PulseAudio? (Score:5, Insightful)
This guy needs beaten just for this.
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Re:PulseAudio? (Score:5, Insightful)
Word. Systemd. What a pointless masturbatory waste of effort. That's just one area where BSD, far from not being relevant, is right. They don't fuck with what works fine.
Re:PulseAudio? (Score:4, Informative)
Well, yes, actually. Breaking backwards compatibility is always bad. It may on occasion be necessary to do so to gain a greater good, but it's still bad.
Re:PulseAudio? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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Want a dual-boot Linux/Windows system with /user on an NTFS partition? Sorry, PulseAudio wont let you. WTF?!
Poettering is the poster child for crappy Linux developers.
How and why would a sound daemon even know or care about the filesystem type for any kernel-supported, read-writable volume? While the objections to PulseAudio are legion, I have never heard this particular one before.
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What's so significant about /user?
I presume they mean /home, and I'm surprised that much of anything works if you're weird enough to mount an NTFS partition there. I'm guessing FAT32 wouldn't make it very happy either.
I believe the issue is that Pulseaudio wants to set specific permissions on $HOME/.pulse and NTFS doesn't support them. SSH probably won't work either and I suspect that a bunch of other programs will fail.
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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.
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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. /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
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
Does Netcraft confirm this? (Score:5, Funny)
Just curious... does Netcraft confirm this?
Like SpinalTap (Score:3)
That's funny....... (Score:2)
I will be sure to let the good folks at Juniper know.
Pulse Audio (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Pulse Audio (Score:5, Interesting)
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)
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.
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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.
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1. If you even suggest for a second that systemd isn't awesome, you will hear from people (for example.... you) who says it's great, without addressing any concerns that system admins actually have.
Mainly because said concerns tend to boil down to "Waaah, it's different." Oh no.
2. The command line interface is annoying... it's even worse than the problems we have with SMF on Solaris 10+. Following the original threads about it, you can tell Lennart has no idea what people actually do with the command line. systemd calling $MORE? Hasn't anyone ever used expect?
"Annoying" is an opinion. Could you please link to said threads?
3. They want to roll cron and inetd into it... for no reason that I can see. Vixie cron and xinetd both work great last I checked. This seems to be bacause that's what MacOS X does with launchd, not for any real reason.
There are some advantages, such as per job/per request cgroups to make sure that all processes get cleaned up correctly. I'm not particularly bothered either way. Note that "in systemd" doesn't mean "in PID 1".
4. Doesn't socket activation require changes to daemons?
It does. However, you don't need to use socket activation -- "classic" forking services can be used just fine. Obviously, yes, if you want all the advantages
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Mmm. I'm still bitten every day by pulse problems, hate it intensely. However, I can't hate lennart for it, because as near as I can tell, IF you can get a distro that's done the packaging correctly AND you don't run into problems, it's amazing.
I just think it's nuts that I have a key-stroke to call pulse-audio --kill
An aside: Am I the only one who always preferred the BSD userland to the GNU/Linux?
Of course (Score:2)
Oh, wait.... Maybe I'm thinking of BFG.
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always wondered why PulseAudio sucked (Score:5, Insightful)
now we know.
the developer lacks humility.
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You put it too kindly. I would say he is a punk.
Well .... (Score:3)
Uninstalling Avahi is one of the first things I do (Score:2)
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)
Re:Lennart (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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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.
Yes (Score:3)
Hurd is taking over it's space.
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Why are you using "anymore"? When was Linux ever relevant on the desktop?
Disclaimer: linux desktop user
Re:Linux itself isn't relevant anymore (Score:4, Insightful)
That was my thought, BSD gets a bit of a license in that regards because it isn't trying to take over the desktop space. There are a small number of OSes that are related, some are focused on the desktop environment, but they're more focused on polish and actually working reliably from release to release and evolving the experience over time.
Linux OTOH varies enough that I can't really make a particularly fitting statement on that. Some distros are run by people that know what they're doing and focus on fixing things that are broken, others like Ubuntu are clearly run by crack smoking monkeys and you end up with unusable garbage or releases that have nothing in common with previous releases.
But with the dozens of distros and all the talk of being relevant to the majority of users, it's hard not to view it like the short bus kid that thinks he's going to be valedictorian. At the end of the day, most of what's wrong with Linux is the direct result of trying to copy Windows and scoop up the users even if things like automounting were stupid to begin with.
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Heck, next year isn't even the year of the desktop anymore.
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Precisely. Linus' kernel has found critical mass in Android. It uses as little of GNU as possible and - it's just a kernel - Google could port dalvik to one of the BSDs within a year without too much trauma.
I'm still hopeful we'll see desktop wayland-enabled meego/webos to save us from Gnome3/Unity!
Re:Linux itself isn't relevant anymore (Score:4, Funny)
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i think the only way for linux to be relevant on the desktop is if someone places their android phone on their desk.
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Here's a hint, it's unlikely that you would be on slashdot if not for BSD.
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Re:Um... Pardon Me, But... (Score:4, Informative)
not sure about today, but years ago, Juniper networks used freebsd inside, to run the userland side of their core routers.
netbsd was used (also about 10 yrs ago, a lot) for non-intel style embedded network devices. I was at a router/switch company and we used netbsd (ppc arch. at the time).
can't say I ever ran into a bay area company, during my travels, that used openbsd. but back about 10 yrs ago, freebsd and netbsd *were* quite popular in the enterprise. corp people didn't like the GPL (at least at the time) and bsd was the most business-friendly license they could find.
didnt openbsd develop ssh? (Score:2)
that basically everyone and their brother uses?
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And Juniper is using JunOS on it's new Switches and Firewalls now, not just it's routers.
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Was BSD relevant at some point? I think I was sick that day. Could you fax 'round the memo so I can update the logs? "BSD was relevant today. Huzzah! Who knows what tomorrow will bring!"
Remember to sign your entry "So long, and thanks for all the packets!"
Tomorrow will bring a centrally controlled internet. Huzzah!
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Yeah, there was this company called Sun that had some small server market share a ways back, using an OS based completely on BSD...
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Was BSD relevant at some point?
It was super influential in the early '80s.
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Really? I thought it was all the goddamned vampires....
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... or perhaps the only annoying issue with OSS in general, is that the OSS community contains far too many fools who think that their opinion about some other project they don't like somehow matters.
That's different from any other thing ... exactly how?
The world is full of people like that. Each one of them is perfectly right in his or her own eyes. Anyone who sits there hanging on their every word is not only part of the problem, but the biggest part.