Alright, so
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@ajroach42 thanks for all the thoughts in this thread.
If you all are wondering why so many of us in the “tech” world are feeling such existential dread and exhaustion about our profession, passion, and livelihoods, this thread does a good job of touching on most of the topics.
As you may have gathered from some of the posting that Sundog and I have been doing over the last few days, we're kicking the tires on some tech stuff.
Toy production is still ongoing, we're getting ready to order more molds, I met with one of our 3D modelers yesterday about the next models we'll be working up.
You can get Kumiai-Ki, The Mighty Labor Union Mech action figures from @MountainTownToys right now!
But we've solved a bunch of toy production problems, and half solved a couple of others, and a byproduct of that is that we have some extra cycles while we're waiting on parts and tooling to finish solving problems and start making the next batch of toys.
And that means we've been working on some tech stuff.
For me, this mostly means that I've been dusting off old ideas and checking out new projects and checking in on old projects.
I've been writing a lot, about technology, about what I want, about culture, about the ways technology has failed.
Some of these things might eventually become blog posts or a newsletter or a zine.
But mostly, I've been thinking, and trying to fight back in small ways to find or build a new foundation as the forces of capital erode the ground from underneath my feet, technologically speaking.
I have, for decades, considered Debian the bedrock of my computer infrastructure.
The thing that I could trust, because it was run by an organization so obsessed with the ideology of software freedom that it routinely rendered itself significantly more cumbersome as a result.
I was there for the IceWeasel campaign! I thought those principles were central to the project.
I was wrong.
So one of the many things I'm trying to do, as I reorient myself in the computer world without Debian as a foundation to build on, is looking for a new operating system.
The Linux kernel project accepts slop contributions, the debian project accepts slop contributions. Where does that leave me?
Put simply, I'm looking for a daily driver operating system that I can trust to be made by people, and not contain the product of an automated plagiarism machine.
(No, I'm not interested in arguing about the merits of AI, or hearing about how your use case is justified or okay or whatever.
I am opposed to generative AI and LLMs on several levels, but
I don't care what you do personally, and I'm not here to police your decisions.
I don't want AI generated code in my OS, and I don't want to talk about it.)
Of course, all of this is made all the more complicated by the fact that, along side most major software projects allowing AI code contributions, a bunch of software projects are ever more obviously being operated by Nazis.
And I don't want bigots writing my code either.
So I'm exploring.
I didn't think I would need to find an operating system that wasn't Debian or a Debian derivative, so I haven't really paid attention to the larger OS world.
From what I can see, the operating systems that have taken the most strong stance against the kinds of generative AI utilization that I'm concerned about here are NetBSD, FreeDOS, and ... illumos (or at least some Illumos distributions such as Tribblix)
I've also seen some general "we don't want AI here" conversation from Haiku.
But hardware support among these alternative operating systems is inconsistent (with NetBSD sitting at the top of the pile, but well under Linux and Windows.)
And, as with all things, there are degrees to all this. I recognize that I will probably end up having to make compromises in some of the things that I use in order to continue to do much of the work that I want to do.
In much the same way that I begrudgingly keep a windows 10 box around so that I can interface with some windows only hardware, I will allow Linux on devices that support Linux, or for activities that I can't perform in other environments unless/until I can afford to replace them.
But, if I'm going to be exploring alternative OSs and reexamining the foundational layer of how I approach computing, I might as well question it all.
I am looking at new ways of doing things, and new software, and new ideas about how software should work, and new ideas about what is *good* about the software community, up and down the stack.
I'm not just questioning my OS, I'm questioning everything about modern computers (and not for the first time! I was already banging this drum nearly a decade ago https://ajroach42.com/observations-on-modern-computing-the-last-10-years-were-a-misstep/ )
So yes, I'm going to set up a NetBSD laptop and a NetBSD server and start figuring out how much of my core life I can move onto them.
I'm going to migrate things off of my yunohost server and into the NetBSD server. I'm going to try to use Linux only when I don't have another choice.
I think these things are pretty obviously values aligned with the position that I've taken.
But I'm also going to start doing some other things.
@ajroach42 Well that's 2 people in almost as many minutes mentioning NetBSD on a laptop. I'll be interested to hear how your journey goes, if you wouldn't mind sharing.
@tehstu I'm sure I'll be talking about it.
I'm starting with a (currently semifunctional) pinebook pro, so step one is to make it work again.
@ajroach42 @tehstu
You guys definitely know more about computers than I do, but is it worth considering #OpenBSD ? As a noob, the only thing I haven't been able to do is reliably mount a USB drive.
