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Old 12th May 2008
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Default Striking difference between the Linux community and BSD

I just started hanging out on the Ubuntu server forums and have noticed a trend I am really dissapointed in. I spent several hours last night trying to convince people on the SERVER forum why they shoud not load a GUI on their server. It was an excercise in futility to say the least. You would think since it was the SERVER forum, at least the experienced users would agree with me but that wasn't the case with most of them. I know this is a symptom of Micro$oft taking over more and more of the server market.

It's refreshing to come here and still see people that know what they are doing and that want to do things the correct way. once they port VMware to BSD, I'm outta the linux space for good. Sadly, I am seeing the dumbing down of Linux as it becomes more popular on the desktop. What do you guys think?

-Tim
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Old 12th May 2008
corey_james corey_james is offline
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i think ... you're right .....

The majority of the linux community sucks ... but what are you going to do ?

Linux is being made simpler as it's growing in popularity just as .NET is .... whether this is a good thing or not is another story
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Old 26th May 2008
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Quote:
Originally Posted by corey_james View Post
i think ... you're right .....

The majority of the linux community sucks ... but what are you going to do ?

Linux is being made simpler as it's growing in popularity just as .NET is .... whether this is a good thing or not is another story
Thank you for the compliment... I just switched my mother in law to Ubuntu, and I'm very glad for her it is simple. And as for the linux community: I'm very glad to help people with the most stupid questions. When I started, I also had stupid questions, and they were (almost) all answered. I've been helped and now that I'm able to answer some simple questions, I'm glad to do it. What's wrong with that?
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Old 6th June 2008
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Quote:
Originally Posted by corey_james View Post

The majority of the linux community sucks ...
This comes from Zenwalk forum:
Quote:
Hi,

If you are new to computers, Linux or Zenwalk this is the place for you. Here there are no "dumb" questions and lot's of friendly faces. Feel free to ask "anything" you need to help you succeed.

Also...

Remember that once you become more proficient to come back and help the next newcomer. Communities thrive on people helping others and we believe our community here is strong because of the people who help fellow Zenwalkers in time of need as well as those contributing to Zenwalk.

Oh, and Welcome to Zenwalk!
What's so sucking about being friendly?
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Old 6th June 2008
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Quote:
Originally Posted by idefix View Post

What's so sucking about being friendly?
From my experience when I asked a question in a linux forum I was answered by:
- people who had not read my question. (it is stupid that I have to repeat in the second post what I wrote in the first one...)
- people that did not know the answer (but for a reason I have not yet understood they reply anyway)
- people who reply with a tone that underline that they are better than you because they know that little thing and you don't.

maybe they are friendly, but they are sucking also.

It could be only a problem of mine, but if it is so, why here and on bsdforums I have been always answered correctly and professionally?
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Old 7th June 2008
idefix idefix is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by cubo View Post
From my experience when I asked a question in a linux forum I was answered by:
- people who had not read my question. (it is stupid that I have to repeat in the second post what I wrote in the first one...)
- people that did not know the answer (but for a reason I have not yet understood they reply anyway)
- people who reply with a tone that underline that they are better than you because they know that little thing and you don't.

maybe they are friendly, but they are sucking also.

It could be only a problem of mine, but if it is so, why here and on bsdforums I have been always answered correctly and professionally?

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Old 7th June 2008
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The Linux community is largely fractured because of the various distributions. However, let's consider the major distributions and their communities: Slackware, Gentoo, Fedora/Red Hat/CentOS, Debian, Ubuntu, Open/SuSE, Mandriva, and Arch. Out of these, you can expect the behavior that you encountered from the Open/SuSE, Mandriva, Ubuntu (oviously), and possibly the Gentoo communities. I included Gentoo because it has just as many uninformed users as the easier distributions do. You can get sound advice that would please all the informed Unix users from the Slackware, Fedora/Red Hat/CentOS, Debian, and Arch communities because those distributions do not focus on ease-of-use. They focus on functionality and simplicity, although I know Debian has made things quite easy. I've noticed that you'll find the most competent Linux users are Slackware users, and that makes sense, since Slackware is such a hands-on distribution. I know lumping Fedora/Red Hat/CentOS is kind of touchy, but you can do a vanilla install, and then add things as you would on other power-distributions. And, yum and rpm don't make things easier. I like yum, and it beats any of the GUI frontends that are available for Fedora in terms of management.

You notice this kind of behavior because Linux has become sort of a fad, these days because of distributions like Ubuntu, which have slowly turned away from Unix philosophy. There's no point to making everything monolithic, to having your standard installation include a GUI. That's why, with the exception of a few Linux distributions, namely Debian, Slackware, and Arch, I think only BSD and other Unices can keep Unix alive as it is meant to be. Otherwise, the rest of the distributions seem to be fighting a competition with Windows...competition for what, to become as similar as possible to Windows but keeping the same guts.
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Old 12th May 2008
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I wanted to see it gain popularity. Now I'm not too sure. I still use linux under my FBSD virtual machines, but it was very hard to find a distro that didn't come with 200 things installed that I had to remove first to get a minimal installation.

To me it's a shame to see any OSS community being dumbed down to the level of the Micro$haft masses.

-Tim
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Old 12th May 2008
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Quote:
Originally Posted by windependence View Post
I wanted to see it gain popularity. Now I'm not too sure. I still use linux under my FBSD virtual machines, but it was very hard to find a distro that didn't come with 200 things installed that I had to remove first to get a minimal installation.

-Tim
Have you tried Slackware, gentoo?

Well, not try to be blunt but most of linux users nowadays are migrants from Windoze. They are not knowledgeable, not educated, GUI oriented and seems not to get used to the "traditional" linux environment: linux is treated with dignity.

But there are still some guys who are exceptional.
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Old 12th May 2008
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Quote:
Originally Posted by 18Googol2 View Post
Have you tried Slackware, gentoo?

Well, not try to be blunt but most of linux users nowadays are migrants from Windoze. They are not knowledgeable, not educated, GUI oriented and seems not to get used to the "traditional" linux environment: linux is treated with dignity.

But there are still some guys who are exceptional.
No, to be honest I have not tried either. Gentoo always seemed like too much work to compile everyting but I guess that is what I do with ports in FBSD anyway.

I have always heard that slack was way behind everytihng as far as being up to date. Maybe I should look again. I only use Linux on my VMware boxes because they haven't done a stable BSD port yet.

-Tim
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Old 12th May 2008
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>I have always heard that slack was way behind everytihng as far as being up to date.

No that's mere nonsense, $BSD is behind everything too according to the 'public opinion' (aka Linux community) but in reality it's just childish behaviour to think so.
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Old 12th May 2008
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Well, I don't know about slackware, but one issue I always have with Debian/Ubuntu is that the packages are always so outdated, sometimes packages are almost a year old.
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Old 12th May 2008
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The "-current" packages on Debian are available for "sid". Ubuntu is based on "sid" but stops updating packages when the release number changes.
There are a couple of Debian-sid based distros (kanotix, sidux, ...).
The package list for Debian-sid must be the largest available, with latest versions.
As -current, -sid is the moving target which can stop working anytime, then be OK again a couple of minutes later with the next upgrade.


Slackware.
Have to check repositories (non of which are official) such as
linuxpackages.net (with a nice forum), or -my preferred- the Italian user group slacky.eu
Plus, there are about 50 distros based on Slackware, some with their own package list and package installation system.
Since I use slacky.eu I stopped complaining about packages to be old.
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Old 12th May 2008
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Originally Posted by Carpetsmoker View Post
Well, I don't know about slackware, but one issue I always have with Debian/Ubuntu is that the packages are always so outdated, sometimes packages are almost a year old.
It's rather easy to just use pkgsrc with Slack or to build just the packages you want.
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Old 12th May 2008
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Gentoo is the Linux for me, if I feel I must use Linux.

Portage is the next best thing after Ports (and for good reasons.)

To get it up and going is the trickiest part, and essentially all it is doing is doing a "make buildworld" and the other associative steps.

But "their kind" think FreeBSD has a soft underbelly because we're provided with that hardcore ncurses installer (I can't imagine it ever being replaced, it's too awesome)

But back to the bigger picture, I just don't like the Linux kernel in general :\ IMHO (and I'm by no means an expert) it's becoming bloated and it was always weird. I've only ever put together a couple of them (I was fortunate enough to come across FreeBSD early in my Linux days ) and it was thoroughly unpleasant for me.
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Old 12th May 2008
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Quote:
Sorry about double post. I can't seem to delete one of them myself
Yes, you can, click on "Edit" and then on "delete".

Quote:
But "their kind" think FreeBSD has a soft underbelly because we're provided with that hardcore ncurses installer (I can't imagine it ever being replaced, it's too awesome)
Actually, the sysinstall worked better for me when I was a "noob" than GUI installers.

FreeBSD was the first non-windows OS I tried, I got the installation right in one go, then it dropped me in a command prompt, I didn't manage to get X started so I decided a more "noob-friendly" might be a good idea, I decided on Mandrake Linux (Based on Red Hat, now Mandriva), It took me 3 or 4 times to get the installation right with the spiffy GUI...

The point is: There are more important things in an installation program than a spiffy GUI.
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Old 12th May 2008
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Servers with GUI!?!? Rubbish! *fires flaming arrow into poor sap's car*

The only thing I have GUI running on (at home) is my MacBook and an installation of Solaris 10 in VMWare Fusion on said MacBook. Oh and I do have XP Pro in VMWare also. For those pesky "Windows-only" things I run in to.

At work, I gotta deal with Windows Server 2000-2003 all the time. I jump at the chance to work on UNIX problems as they are generally easier (for me anyways). Maybe it's the quality of users. (Windows user: "I can't access the files I need to access. But I could last week. Fix it!" UNIX user: "I can't access this file as somehow I don't exist in sudoers anymore. Could you please add me real quick?"). Don't even get me started on network problems...
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Old 12th May 2008
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I can only paste you my words from bsdforums.org about Linux, my response to tux08902 statement.

Quote:
Originally Posted by tux08902
To get one thing straight, Linux isn't a mess. It seems like a mess to the BSD folks because of its different development ideology.
Of course LINUX IS A MESS and a BIG ONE, let me tell you why.

1. kernel + kernel config.
every driver for every device has to be selected to be compiled, the are no such things like ADD ATA support to add chipsets that support ATA no way, you have to add evry single driver that you need, and even if you do you have no guarantee that it will wirk, a live example: Intel 945P chipset support, you add ATA support, 945P support, DMA support, Legacy support (just for sure), GENERIC support (wow, not in LEGACY? ok), HDD ATA support (thought that I already selected ATA...), CDROM ATA support (yay another one, gimme more) ... and after recompile and reboot you notice that DMA does not work, why? because you added GENERIC ATA (but wtf, itf just GENERIC support, why it breaks something) well nobody knows that but it does, PURE MESS, and that is just one example and I do not have all day to write all of them here. Kernel documentation, or I should rather say NONE of such thing.

2. sound architecture.
ALSA, a pure mess about sound, messes and fscked up API with some workarouns for mixing, with some workaround to add support for OSS while its still not working right and you have only ONE OSS channel, every experienced user know what that means,, why not add FreeBSD like OSS support with live in kernel sound mixing and do it the RIGHT WAY since 4FRONT opened OSS4 drivers and its fully open source now, even on Linux favorite GPL2 licence.

3. useless dirs /opt /srv /sys
what to fsck are they for? not telling about mandatory mounted /proc because almost nothing will work without it, ok, so we have /proc so what the fsck is /sys for just for fun?
/opt mhmm we already have /usr/local or even every custom dir for every other package management like /usr/pkg or /usr/openpkg or /usr/whatever, but no lets create something new totally uncompatible like /opt it seems fun.

I do not have time to write all these things all day, but there are a lot more things like that in Linux and LINUX IS PURE MESS unfortunely.


I recently saw a Linux distro can can be little painless then all others:

Draco Linux

What is so great about it? Well, its still all that fscking mess and sh!t in the kernel, but it uses pkgsrc.org as package management and OSS for sound, no ALSA or PulseSh!it anymore.
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Old 13th May 2008
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Every community has it's newbies, the problem I see is what is done with them. I remember once reading something that directed me to THIS page; which comes to mind now.


I don't have a problem with newbies, I deal with them regularly and stupid (snip)s as well. I do however have a problem with ignorance.


I would rather live with 10,000 newbies who don't know squat but will learn and grow as time goes, rather then 1,000 that don't know squat, don't want to know squat, and will probably never give a squat as long as things work without having to use any of the dying gray matter approximately 3ft about their asses.


Ubuntu is focused towards those new to Linux. PC-BSD, I at least consider it for those 'not used to computers'. OpenBSD, well at least if you know a fair bit about using Unix is pretty darn easy to use.


The real question is 10 years later, who has a computer problem and shouts "JUST F'ING WORK" and who sits down and tries to figure out WHY it doesn't work and HOW to fix it.


I respect effort almost as much as competence.


I've used computers since I was about 4 years old, playing games on MS-DOS 2 before I could even read, let along understand how to use the command prompt.


I was learning C++ when I stumbled onto the UNIX and Internet Fundamentals HOWTO. When I went in search of a Unix like OS about two years ago, I wanted to learn the system because of the things I read in that doc.



I found both Linux and the BSDs, after a _lot_ of research I got to feeling that the BSDs would be much more to my taste then the "Linux Distro Thing". And FreeBSD looked like it was right up my ally all the way down to the source code.


I used Knoppix Linux to see what hardware support might be like but my first installations were of FreeBSD 6.0-Release and PC-BSD 1.0RC1.



By Micro$oft's standards, I probably exceeded 'Power User' a couple of weeks after my family made the move from WebTV to an old Pentium I machine running Windows 98 around 2000/2001.


But when I booted off a Knoppix Live CD, I had not TOUCHED a command line of any sort in over a decade, even then never learned to use it. Five minutes into using konsole and a couple shells, I fell in love even though I didn't know a single thing about it.


One of my superiors at the time at a website I'm involved with, he told me to give up on figuring this stuff out but being the pig headed guy I am, I kept moving forward.


I began using the system with no prior knowledge what so ever of Unix, my only friend was the handbook and wikipedia because manual pages were still as good as written in Greek for the first month or two.


I wanted to learn more then I had to... Flash forward about two years: I can live in a command prompt, I have 3 or 4 more computers, use multiple operating systems, went from Dev-C++ to Vim and many more languages, I'm helping friends with networking issues I couldn't even comprehend before, windows is neglected to a game machine, and I'm filling webmaster shoes once held by the guy that told me to quit !


I don't expect everyone to want to learn every thing....


But I do expect, people to be willing to learn what they need to in order to do what they want/need to get done.


If you want to write a webpage but know nothing I'm fine with that. But if your not willing to *try* to figure out the basic idea of it, well don't expect me to answer with a smile ^_^



Beyond people like that, I've never had any problems with the Microsoft, Linux, or BSD communities.




/*
* forgive me if this is a bit OT but I wanted to reply.
*/
Quote:
Originally Posted by vermaden View Post
3. useless dirs /opt /srv /sys
what to fsck are they for? not telling about mandatory mounted /proc because almost nothing will work without it, ok, so we have /proc so what the fsck is /sys for just for fun?
/opt mhmm we already have /usr/local or even every custom dir for every other package management like /usr/pkg or /usr/openpkg or /usr/whatever, but no lets create something new totally uncompatible like /opt it seems fun.
I somewhat dislike the /proc thing in so far as applications and documentations that assumes _every_ system has a Linuxes /proc structure. But at least Linux didn't invent the /proc idea, just most well known for it.

/opt is defined by the FHS, to me it is largely a waste... But it can have it's uses when desired and /opt is as good a name as any 3-letter combo.

/srv is also in the FHS, a good idea IMHO. My OpenBSD system for example is configured with a /srv/<service>/<service specific files>

for example, /srv/nfs/Videos -> good as place as any to store a big file share that changes so little, it could be RO ;-). Plus it puts in it a fairly obvious place.

/srv for services is no harder to figure out then /usr/share or /var/ either ^_^


(footnote: I've been 'stuck' into using NFS, which was my last choice).
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Old 13th May 2008
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I somewhat dislike the /proc thing in so far as applications and documentations that assumes _every_ system has a Linuxes /proc structure. But at least Linux didn't invent the /proc idea, just most well known for it.

/opt is defined by the FHS, to me it is largely a waste... But it can have it's uses when desired and /opt is as good a name as any 3-letter combo.

/srv is also in the FHS, a good idea IMHO. My OpenBSD system for example is configured with a /srv/<service>/<service specific files>

for example, /srv/nfs/Videos -> good as place as any to store a big file share that changes so little, it could be RO ;-). Plus it puts in it a fairly obvious place.

/srv for services is no harder to figure out then /usr/share or /var/ either ^_^
Linux "standarts", especially those about dirs or audio subsystem are definitely not the ones that people should go for, its a lot of layers that happen to work instead of one designed facility to do the job done in good manner, the fact that some sh!t is beloved by FHS does not mean that I will take that blindly just because it is aprooved by FHS, same for ISO standarts recently, MICROS~1 did not standarised OOXML, MICROS~1 bought that standart, so if you can buy one no matter how big sh!t it is, the ISO organization becomes useless as a quality determinant.

I also forgot about /sys dir here, we have /proc for all the "kernel stuff" why do we need another one? One big M.E.S.S
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