@mason @carson @funbaker @r1w1s1 @LukePhilipps
I actually found the WiFi process on #FreeBSD pretty easy, and I like Free and #OpenBSD's wifi config file format way more than whatever the default is on Linux (without NetworkManager).
Sometimes the complexity solves a very real problem. I'm not sure how Free and OpenBSD boot from encrypted / without initramfs, but they do seem to.
@LukePhilipps For anyone struggling with the GNU prefix, tell me: what libc are you running? Where'd you get your dynamic linker? If Linux is the brain of your system, GNU is it's blood.
(Alpine and some Gentoo folks, and any BSD or Illumos folks, are welcome to chime in as the free software world is far from a monoculture, but my questions are directed at the same audience as the original post.)
I don't mean this as a shitpost, but I say it out of frustration:
It's more systemd/linux than GNU/linux anymore.
That said, I do appreciate the GNU utilities, particularly the --verbose style GNU flags. I love the BSDs, but -verbose is hella cursed. 😂
But people don't care about the supposed GNU prefix, because people don't generally care about non-graphical userspace anymore. 😞
@rl_dane @LukePhilipps My only objection there is that nothing I run (except reproducer VMs for work) runs systemd or a desktop environment.
It's an interesting question, though, what percentage of my command line usage is GNU vs other. An awful lot of my time is spent inside nvi or vim. And all that time is spent inside urxvt, and all of that in Openbox, inside X11. So I'm not running the McDonald's of computing environments.
And of course we haven't touched on the horror that is web browsers as application delivery platforms. I do as little of that as possible. (...he says while glide-typing this into the DuckDuckGo browser on his phone.)
I used to have a script for debian called gnuness that looked at the output of dpkg -l and tried to ascertain what percentage of the system was GNU based on that alone.
Wait, I still have it! It's from 2019. Running...
...taking a long time...
...switching to balanced power profile to speed up the single thread, egad lol...
Ok, it returned 100%. It's not working. XD
Nevermind 🤦♂️
But basically, it searched for gnu in the package description and also applied a regex to the package name. Not sure why it didn't work, not going to try to troubleshoot it. XD
@rl_dane @LukePhilipps Playing Devil's Advocate, I bet there are a couple things you think are from coreutils because Debian ships coreutils and they're in coreutils but that Debian actually excludes by default.
Spot check: Does coreutils hostname(1) support -s? Why do you think it does?
I'd always assumed coreutils supported that flag and that Debian used hostname(1) from coreutils by default until I tried Void briefly. (Void does use the coreutils hostname (1).)
Interesting!
~ $ dpkg -S $(which hostname)
hostname: /usr/bin/hostname
~ $ apt-cache show hostname
Package: hostname
Version: 3.25
Essential: yes
Installed-Size: 50
Maintainer: Michael Meskes <meskes@debian.org>
Architecture: amd64
Replaces: nis (<< 3.17-30)
Pre-Depends: libc6 (>= 2.34)
Breaks: nis (<< 3.17-30)
Description-en: utility to set/show the host name or domain name
This package provides commands which can be used to display the system's
DNS name, and to display or set its hostname or NIS domain name.
Description-md5: a5a22acc3c69a7f40f07f1a8dfc93af1
Tag: implemented-in::c, interface::commandline, role::program,
scope::utility, use::configuring
Section: admin
Priority: required
Filename: pool/main/h/hostname/hostname_3.25_amd64.deb
Size: 11024
MD5sum: 0a4d5601fc0b60d1654562db9bd4e08c
SHA256: 9c2a27e5d4d87137211fe46631b05b2ee8892ec76aae926304e4485ba02e1015
GNU’s contribution to Linux is undeniable, especially historically.
I just see “Linux” as the system name, not a breakdown of interchangeable userland components.
That’s why I vote Linux.
CC: @LukePhilipps@swiss.social
@r1w1s1 @mason @LukePhilipps Linux is the Kernel, GNU is the most popular user space out there. Not that much up to Interpretation.
@funbaker @r1w1s1 @mason @LukePhilipps
GNU is only a part of the userspace, though. Seems to be less of it every year.
It comprised of (in no particular order, necessarily): systemd + your_desktop + whatever other command-line utilities + GNU.
@rl_dane @funbaker @r1w1s1 @mason @LukePhilipps In my experience, having run Linux-based operating systems since 1996, the whole argument about "Linux" or "GNU/Linux" or (hi, Richard!) "GNU+Linux" is not wrong as such but just...beside the point. What I care about is practically never "kernel" or "userland" but rather the distribution: am I using RHEL or Ubuntu or Debian or SUSE or Arch or [insert system here]? This is the level that, again in my experience, most people interact with their computers. The fact that RHEL and Ubuntu (to pick the most popular) happen to share the same kernel and to ship GNU utilities is...mostly irrelevant. 🤷♂️
@carson @rl_dane @r1w1s1 @mason @LukePhilipps this is ofc right, and doesnt matter much.
What imho matters is continuity.
@rl_dane @funbaker @r1w1s1 @mason @LukePhilipps A lot of this goes back to John Ousterhout calls "complexity": what is the part of the system that I actually have to interact with? https://books.chittom.family/user/carson/quotation/4433
@r1w1s1 @LukePhilipps Fair enough. I generally don't bat an eye at either usage. Was just speaking up because of the poll. :)
