Intellidick.com - Pure Insanity

I’m done with *BSD (again). It was fun and all, but it’s just too cryptic for my tastes… coming from a guy who loves Gentoo Linux, that’s saying something. The *BSD guys need to realize a few things in my opinion.

It’s just not cool to be cryptic anymore.
Ports is old and beaten… quit flogging it and come up with something better. Gentoo’s packaging system may have been inspired by ports, but it’s light years better now. Most free distributions and even a lot of commercial *NIX distributions are guilty of this as well… although Ports is definitely ranked highly on the “cryptic and difficult to learn” scale.

The userland utilities are old and beaten, do what Sun did and slap it into /usr/ucb and call it a day. Just don’t follow Sun’s other example and never update their main userland utilities. If you want, create “long term” versions in a different directory and guarantee the user how long they’re remain there without change. That way, scripts and such can use the long term versions while users can reap the benefits of new, fresh userland utilities. RedHat accomplishes this by creating “Enterprise Linux” with long term support, while Fedora gets all of the new goodies. Take an example here guys. Break something every now and again. Backwards compatibility is great, but they need to lead, not follow.

Executing every script in /etc/rc.d/ and /usr/local/etc/rc.d/ and then using environment variables to determine which ones start is kinda foul. Sure, it’s neat in the fact that one file contains configuration for all services… but it’s kinda ridiculous that each script executes, regardless of whether or not it needs to. Granted, it’s based on the fact that you never have to reboot a UNIX machine, so I can understand the fact that it’s minimal considering that you don’t reboot often. But still, come up with something better. It’s dated and inefficient. I don’t have the answer either, but somebody does.

Same thing goes for that periodic cron job system… one configuration file to control what jobs run but still running them all in intervals? Ummmmm… no. Come on guys. Do better.

Elitist is bad.
Stop pushing people out with the “ur a n00b” attitude. We were all n00bz once. BSD was cool back in the day… now it’s quickly getting dated… fix it. Update it. LEAD, DO NOT FOLLOW. Do not “stick to your guns” because BSD was the best thing going 10 years ago. BSDi bit it and the *BSD free distros are falling behind what others are doing… anybody out there taking a hint? CATCH UP. STOP ACTING LIKE ASSES. Once again, i’ll say that a lot of distributions are bad about this.

The kernel is good. The rest is not. Apple figured it out.
The BSD kernel is an amazing piece of software. Stable and solid. Although it’s not lightning fast, it’s very solid and fast enough for most. The rest of *BSD is interesting, but not amazing. So, Apple took a CMU kernel (Mach) variant, some stuff from the BSD kernel, and some of the userland. Then they smashed it together with a new GUI. They prettied up the paths and tightened up the software installation in a way that only Apple can. Now, i’m not an Apple fan boy or anything, but they are the first company to successfully blend a UNIX-like kernel with a nice GUI. I’m not a big fan of the work flow of that GUI, but I have to respect the accomplishment. So, BSD team… take a lesson. The kernel is your strong point, most of the other stuff leaves a lot to be desired. I’d like to take this moment to point out that this is yet another problem that most *NIX free distributions have. I suppose that I can’t really say too much more about BSD here, except for the fact that they’re just as guilty as the rest.

Now i’m back to Gentoo Linux. Still not doing the “Gentoo ricer” thing. No aggressive compilation options, no bleeding edge packages or anything. Just Linux the way I like it. I stay with Gentoo because of the ability to customize packages, not to run the latest ones or try to tweak maximum performance with compiler optimizations. In my opinion, Gentoo is freedom without the costs of most distributions. It’s Linux my Way… all you have to do is be able to stomach the compilation time.

Tags: *BSD, Desktop, FreeBSD, Gentoo, Linux

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 22nd, 2007 at 3:40 pm and is filed under Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.