Drew and friends recently began working on a new distribution based on the NetBSD kernel. Watch this space.

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[–] 6 points 18 hours ago

Looks promising, I'm considering switching to a BSD, now that Linux is becoming a Sloperating System

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  • [–] 4 points 18 hours ago (1 child)

    I swapped to Linux a few years ago but know next to nothing about BSD. Is it essentially a different operating system entirely? Meaning if someone wanted to use certain software or play games, it would need to be specifically developed for BSD platforms? I get confused when stuff like this comes along that seems to combine parts of both.

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  • [–] 5 points 17 hours ago* (last edited 17 hours ago)

    It is a different operating system entirely (depending on your definition of "operating system"), yeah, but they have so much in common due to both being Unix derivatives (with BSD being directly descended from the original Bell Labs Unix and Linux, famously, just being a highly inspired and ambitious clone of a Unix kernel :3) that in a lot of cases no to very little effort is needed to port software that runs on Linux to the BSDs, someone who has the code just needs to push the button

    For example, even big projects like KDE or GNOME or Firefox work just fine on BSD. The only reason there aren't more things like games on BSD is cuz vendors don't wanna push the button for whatever reason and/or don't wanna make the small effort to port to BSDs. Also some BSDs like FreeBSD have a Linux compatibility layer that just means Linux software just straight-up runs on FreeBSD too by default lol (some exceptions to this)

    In the late 90s and early 2000s there was a big push from the corpo Unix vendors to standardize Unix software interfaces and conventions (look up POSIX if u wanna learn more) so they could be smth more akin to a software cartel rather than competitors whose customers were getting increasingly frustrated with their incompatible bullshit and switching to Linux (which was a lot more programming-communism in those days and specter-global the whole OS industry until it was finally coopted later ofc (contentious point :3))

    In the end, Linux and BSD (which, famously, was gonna be the choice of a lot of the free software movement for an OS to base their software on until it was embroiled in a decades-long legal scandal regarding who has the rights to AT&T/Bell Labs Unix code) ended up benefiting a lot from this standardization cuz despite not sharing a lot of code due to software license differences they are constructed rather similarly. Arguably more importantly, they're just in the same cultural tradition of Unix and agree on lots of things :3

    Also for some more modern, rly complicated stuff, BSDs have just copypasted Linux code and patched it into their kernels. The most immediate example I can think of is the DRM (Direct Rendering Manager) from Linux which is basically the standard for managing hardware-accelerated graphics in an OS kernel outside of Windows (I have no idea what Windows is doing) and it exists in all the still-maintained BSD kernels that I can think of

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  • [–] 10 points 1 day ago (5 children)

    The question I have is why? Is there some advantage in combining this kernel with alpine Linux userspace tools?

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  • [–] 9 points 1 day ago (4 children)

    my best guess is anti-AI protest, Drew Devault is quite famously vehemently against it, and the linux kernel has very openly embraced slopcoded commits

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  • [–] [S] 10 points 23 hours ago* (last edited 22 hours ago) (1 child)

    Mainly. I don't want to put words in his mouth (its an extremely early project without any formal announcement or anything), but there are nearly zero distributions where eliminating the reliance on AI-generated components is actually the goal. You have distros like Gentoo which don't use AI for development, but this has no impact on the system architecture, and with the kernel, sysutils, graphics libs, browsers, major programming languages, etc. all turning into slop, there is a dire need for an operating system which is ideologically committed to maintaining sane engineering practices.

    NetBSD has suddenly become popular as one of the last untainted OSes (excluding some externally-maintained components), but as a project / foundation, this is not due to any strong ideological commitments, and it is likely the priorities of maintaining NetBSD and building a no-AI base system (or salvaging a lot of Linuxy/GPL components) are not fully aligned.

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  • [–] 5 points 18 hours ago

    In addition, I would also like to add that Drew DeVault has spoken publically for years now on his blog in favor of the BSD model of development as in having a well-maintained "base system" full of software that like..... actually makes up an operating system rather than Linux chaos (that ends up being mostly the same anyway, just dominated by organizations that actually have the resources and ambitious to do total operating system crafting)

    Not to mention as well as a lot of BSD's technology and, uhhh, an approach to OS development that favors generally much simpler but less flexible and hyper-modularized systems

    I'm sure u, @PorkrollPosadist@hexbear.net know this :3 but I'm pretty sure AlpineBSD is a reference to Alpine Linux, a Linux distro that ppl having been saying for years is "BSD-like" cuz of the exclusion of a lot of GNU code and tooling and the focus on a simpler, easier to maintain system

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  • [–] 8 points 23 hours ago (1 child)

    That's cool. I was just wondering why use this over just NetBSD. I am assuming they are the BSD that don't take LLM generated contributions.

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  • [–] 7 points 18 hours ago*

    Tbh..... imo I think it's the only BSD appropriate for this kinda project rn

    OpenBSD is dominated by the dictatorship of that South African-Canadian chud, Theo de Raadt, who is almost singularly focused on "security" (a word which means many things to the OpenBSD project from good configurations defaults to uhhhh exploit mitigation techniques which have questionable utility at best). Their kernel is pretty much intended for them and only them and while they're changing shit out from under you if u complain about it on the mailing list Theo will probably call u an entitled [slur]. To be clear, I love OpenBSD, its my favorite Unix, and Google just ripped their libc for Android years back (Bionic) so its not unprecedented but I prolly wouldn't try to fork or base smth on their kernel unless I had development resources exceeding OpenBSD's team

    FreeBSD is the Linux of the BSDs :3 (derogatory). Its codebase is massive, its code quality is sometimes worse than even Linux (see that incident a few yrs ago when some landlord wrote an in-kernel Wireguard implementation for them), and the development staff, at least to me >w<, seems overworked and too focused on features to implement things like basic exploit mitigation technology (it took them until fuckin 2021 to enable ASLR by default, not to mention that embarrassing incident some years ago when some security researcher started looking into the FreeBSD codebase and reporting serious security bugs that didn't even get a reply from the FreeBSD security team (to be fair, that was a long time ago))

    I think prolly NetBSD is the only project that has ppl that might be open to working with an effort like this, has a codebase amenable to this kind of thing and which doesn't have part of itself ripped out every other year by ppl going over the code constantly with a chainsaw (OpenBSD) or have some userspace-breaking security change forced into it also every other year, and aren't too busy accepting commits from Netflix and Facebook to work on improving the codebase they already have

    All of this is besides the project's positions on LLMs which I'm not very familiar with

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