Re: Using a FreeBSD desktop was somehting about dog food

On 3/28/22 12:54 AM, Steve O'Hara-Smith wrote:
> On Sun, 27 Mar 2022 21:31:50 -0400
> Valeri Galtsev <galtsev@kicp.uchicago.edu> wrote:
> 
>> Please, ignore my rant below. I figure, I have to learn reading
>> carefully, before writing something.
> 
> 	Oh not completely - you make some very good points about nVidia.
> 
>> Thank you, Steve for deep insights of all your posts, including this one
>> which I ranted about without even disagreeing with your points. Shame on
>> me.
> 
> 	Hey you noticed - I've known people to rant in violent agreement
> for several posts before I gave up trying to tell them we're saying the
> same thing :)
> 
>>> NVIDIA never releases the details of their chip internals. Therefore,
>>> no open source driver can [legally] be written which is capable of,
> 
> 	It can, but the reverse engineering to make it possible has to
> happen in a jurisdiction where that is legal. Even then though it's
> guess and hope work without the specs.
> 
>>> say, have dual screen with different screen resolutions, as there is no
>>> specs/description of how video RAM is mapped... ATI had always been
>>> open about chipsets' internals (don't know how things changed when
>>> developing continued after AMD bought them out), and therefore open
> 
> 	I believe they've kept the policy but ...
> 
>>> source drivers were extremely good. Now, NVIDIA's [proprietary] drivers
>>> are actually written by NVIDIA itself. For those systems which NVIDIA
> 
> 	Which makes them very good indeed and enables the nVidia drivers
> for DRI/DRM to be available as well tested fully developed drivers the day
> the cards come out, while the ATI/AMD open source developers don't get to
> start on their code until later in the cycle.
> 
>>> prefers. I am just ranting about Steve words of Linux catching up with
>>> Windows. Respectfully disagree - very first time probably disagree with
> 
> 	Nope, you're right in the case of nVidia Linux and Windows are head
> to head - for pretty much everything else Linux plays catch up with Windows
> but does a better job on standards and so has less catching to do than
> might be expected (often Windows needs a driver and Linux uses generic
> code - FreeBSD does this pretty much as well as Linux IME).
> 
> 	FreeBSD plays catch up here though because the DRI/DRM development
> is done on Linux and when that changes messily (as Linux things tend to)
> there's a lot of work to do bringing it up to date.
> 
> 	Now to pull out the crystal ball and wax philosophical for a bit.
> It seems to me that the BSDs are remaining what they always intended to be,
> accessible unix systems - which means servers and workstations and are
> sticking pretty closely to the original unix philosophy.
> 
> 	The Linux based OSs OTOH seem to be going in multiple directions
> exploring the phase space of operating systems based on a solid
> multi-tasking kernel with excellent hardware support. This seems to me to
> be a good thing to do.
> 
> 	At one end we have embedded systems in everything from washing
> machines and TVs to cars and aircraft by way of industrial machines. It's
> scary the number of things that can be tortured into giving a shell prompt.
> 
> 	Becoming more visible we have Android, ChromeOS etc. on watches,
> phones, tablets and lightweight laptops.
> 
> 	Then the various desktop Linuxes (which are getting less and less
> like unix systems and more and more like turnkey appliances with every
> release) in the middle.
> 
> 	On the large scale Kubernetes, Docker and VmWare ESX create a very
> different world in which services are orchestrated and fifty lines of yaml
> turns into several thousand VMs running an auto scaling distributed mass of
> services, clients, load balancers and VPNs at the click of a mouse and
> scientists hook up hundreds or thousands of machines with high end graphics
> cards in them to run massive neural networks.
> 
> 	This spreading family of OSs has pretty much abandoned traditional
> unix philosophy while hanging on to as many of the bits of unix as they find
> useful. I expect this trend to continue and the divergence to widen between
> the various members while still retaining the same kernel and a large pool
> of software to use as common building blocks.
> 
> 	Apple, as ever, are in their own walled garden using an eclectic
> mix of Mach, BSD and proprietary software on carefully selected hardware.
> Few seem to want to take Darwin anywhere. I'd love something for X11 that
> handles changing arrangements of multiple monitors as well as MacOS - it's
> nearly perfect and I'm pretty sure the failures are bugs. I'd *hate* to try
> and write and debug one - it's a hard problem that's nearly all edge cases,
> so hard that I despair of even writing bug reports that clearly describe
> precisely how it goes wrong and when.
> 
> 	Plan 9 and Inferno are attempts to take the unix philosphy to
> extremes - they're elegant in many ways but few want to use them.
> 
> 	Personally I like traditional unix and I'm very glad that I'm able
> to do pretty much everything I need in a well supported traditional unix.
> So thank you FreeBSD team for providing me with 29 years of great computing
> experiences - long may it continue.
> 
> 	What I like even more is that we have all this choice - and I've
> only glossed over the tip of the iceberg that is the incredible wealth of
> free software available today.
> 

Thanks for excellent writeup. Reading it was like reading a great SciFi 
novel in my childhood...

Valeri

> 	My turn for a rant :)
> 
> 	To those of us who once despaired of saving up the thousand[1] or so
> a *binary* unix license without networking, compilers or text processing
> suites (throw in another couple of hundred each for those) or spent weeks
> getting X11R5 to work on an unsupported platform (you may imagine how good
> it was to see that X move on a black screen for the first time after weeks
> of fighting library, compiler and make limitations) complaints that what's
> available for free lacks the gloss and polish of commercial software seem
> churlish and ungrateful.
> 
> [1] Dollars or pounds depending on which side of the pond - the numbers
> were about the same just the sign changed.
>