It's kind of amazing how many veteran Linux greyhairs I've seen, downstream of the age-check-in-systemd decision, saying well I guess I need to get comfortable with a BSD now. Thirty plus years of deep-grooved Debian/RedHat muscle memory to a one, quietly tidying up and looking for the exits.
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@mhoye i mean i did this when Oracle bought Sun, there goes the 10 years of Solaris from my CV, and called my boss and boss's boss into a meeting and said we need to get the fuck off and onto Linux *now*
@mhoye Not that the BSDs are in any way a bad option, but don't forget that it's entirely reasonable to use Debian without systemd. I'm doing it now.
It's well-supported by active volunteers:
https://packages.debian.org/trixie/sysvinit-core
And there are other good options: Slackware and Alpine stand out. Gentoo is a bit heavy with its config syntax, but it's a super solid option.
@mhoye I'm looking seriously at Alpine Linux vs Devuan... We had to rebuild our internal server recently (which had been happily running CentOS 4 for over a decade, we are not power users), and it was a total PITA - systemd is a shitshow even without this age nonsense. I'm too old and too cranky to be excited about learning a new distro, but here I am.
@llorenzin If I was building containers or basic infra right now, alpine is decisively minimalist in terms of both system requirements and drama.
@mhoye @llorenzin systemd mandating the nesting feature be turned on - which increases attack surface substantially - in order to run in LXC was responsible for my first install of Devuan within the past few months. I'm really hoping Devuan gets a lasting influx of donations & talent, realistically if I do eventually start switching to BSD it's gonna take me years to accomplish it.
@mhoye do you have any insight into how the hell the age check even made it a whole hour into Linux in the first place? It's possible I'm being hopelessly naïve here, but I really thought every Linux user/admin/programmer/whoever would've literally rioted in the streets before countenancing anything remotely like it.
@mhoye https://www.devuan.org/ is here for you
There’s no such thing as 30 years of RedHat muscle memory. I used RedHat quite a lot from the late ‘90s until about 20 years ago. I had to use Fedora again about for years ago and nothing I remembered about administering the system still worked. In contrast, 90% of the things I learned 25 years ago the first time I used FreeBSD still work (though they aren’t always the best way of doing things anymore).
@david_chisnall @mhoye lol true. I've been using Fedora for 5 years and I've already had to adjust my muscle memory thanks to changes to dnf's command syntax. Then again, I think yum has stayed largely unchanged though, no?
But are you even meant to use yum or dnf, or should you install things in AppImages? Or do I mean Flatpaks?
And let's not even think about how you set up a network and a firewall.
@mhoye wait... what... I had assumed that was just some kinda dumb joke. 😐
reaches for the FreeBSD ISO he downloaded last month
Not entirely joking, "modern Linux " things like systemd is one reason I'm already looking at shifting some things to a BSD.
(Debian user since 1997, me...)
@mhoye That's the interesting thing about being a greyhair in this industry. You've used enough different things to know they're all kinda crap and any kind of emotional buy-in to a piece of software isn't worth it because they all kinda suck in the end.
Plus, y'know, no matter how annoying switching might be, at least you're not using AIX so it could be worse.
@mhoye TBF, they will feel at home. It's people who were raised on modern thingies (like systemd) would have problems adjusting.
