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.
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@miss_rodent @mhoye I'm thinking of experiences with activist groups in the last few years. There are tensions between leaving things to the tech people in the group, or avoiding that by going with commercial services that appear easier to implement. Technology decisions can have a disproportionate effect on how an organization functions, and it's a challenge for tech people in an activist group to be careful about ethics.
I haven't seen an easy solution to that problem. But Google et al are only too happy to advertise that they have easy solutions.
@foolishowl @mhoye Yeah, honestly activist groups in particular benefit a lot from having their own tech solutions, b/c relying on corporate options is a major liability. For groups/communities, though, not *everyone* needs to be techy, just, enough people that they can host & maintain the stuff the group needs. In general, for activist groups, the 'easy corporate option' are the most likely to get people arrested, work with anti-dissent efforts, etc., plus the mess of ethical problems they >
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@foolishowl @mhoye Yeah, honestly activist groups in particular benefit a lot from having their own tech solutions, b/c relying on corporate options is a major liability. For groups/communities, though, not *everyone* needs to be techy, just, enough people that they can host & maintain the stuff the group needs. In general, for activist groups, the 'easy corporate option' are the most likely to get people arrested, work with anti-dissent efforts, etc., plus the mess of ethical problems they >
@foolishowl @mhoye tend to come with.
It's often a case where taking the harder option is better, even if the easy option is easier.
Google might advertize an easier solution - and maybe they even have one - but is the work it saves worth having your comrades arrested, fined, tracked, etc.? Is it worth giving money to an organization actively working against your goals, thus making your life harder anyway? -
@llorenzin @mhoye hahahaha I was on the “operating systems” team at my work when we did the fleet upgrade from centos 5 to 6. Getting several million servers moved from artisanal bash script to systemd was a lot of fun and everyone was so pissed about having to upgrade
But we were starting to mandate cgroup hierarchies so away we went.
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@llorenzin@infosec.exchange @mhoye@cosocial.ca
Recently had to update because y'all were running an OS that EOLed nearly a decade and a half ago. Lulz.
@ferricoxide @mhoye hey, this is the *entire* reason I run Linux! It was internal, never got anywhere near the Internet, just happily chugged along in the basement. If it ain't broke...
(We finally upgraded because I realized how old the hard drives were and how very much borrowed time we were living on.) -
@ferricoxide @mhoye oh, I feel that. I used to cover LatAm - we had customers there still running Windows NT 4 (*outside* of critical infrastructure) well into the 20-teens...
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@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.
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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.
@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:
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.
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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.
@mhoye I was, quite literally, planning a migration for one of my main home servers away from FreeBSD to some kind of Linux containerization when the hardware it was on finally gave up the ghost a few months ago.
...I recently updated its VM to 15.0 and have tossed those plans.
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@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:
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.
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@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.
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@mhoye we were a solaris shop until we made the switch to Red Hat.
Interesting times
@gizmomathboy @mhoye yep, I’ve been involved with Solaris to Linux, AIX to Linux, and HP-UX to Linux projects over the years. This might be the first time I’ve worked on porting things the other way.
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@mhoye@cosocial.ca
Unfortunately, my customers are all on ELx and likely to remain that way for their non-containerized workloads (compliance requirements). I need to stay "in practice" so, moving off Linux is, effectively, a non-option for me (basically why, back in my Solaris admin days, I use Solaris x86 and OpenSolaris at home).
Maybe once I retire.@ferricoxide this was part of why I kept up with Linux and everything in that ecosystem. Now that I don’t deal with much above layer 2 professionally though, that isn’t as much of a factor anymore.
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@dalias you'd absolutely hope so, but the "embrace" phase has been completed, the "extend" phase is in full swing, and arguably the "extinguish" phase is already rolling.
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@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 This, I use alpine anywhere that doesn't use node.
Don't try this.It's alpha But I am currently running https://chimera-linux.org/ on one of my machine and it's so good.
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@dalias you'd absolutely hope so, but the "embrace" phase has been completed, the "extend" phase is in full swing, and arguably the "extinguish" phase is already rolling.
@womble Hardly. These people don't have much leverage with the folks who actually make decisions, and every bad thing they do burns what little political goodwill they have.
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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.
@mhoye I maybe don't fully understand the issue.. but are they not just adding an extra field for birthday to a file that already has your name, location, and email address? Most people leave all that blank anyhow.. they just want a standard place for it should you want to use it.. systemd is not making anyone use it or ask for it.
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@mcc @mhoye Ugh. Alright. Yeah:
But we're not strictly out of the woods yet:
"Core is investigating setting up a policy for LLM/AI usage (including but not limited to generating code). The result will be added to the Contributors Guide in the doc repository. AI can be useful for translations (which seems faster than doing the work manually), explaining long/obscure documents, tracking down bugs, or helping to understand large code bases. We currently tend to not use it to generate code because of license concerns. The discussion continues at the core session at BSDCan 2025 developer summit, and core is still collecting feedback and working on the policy."
from https://www.freebsd.org/status/report-2025-04-2025-06/#_freebsd_core_team
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@mhoye I still don't see how something like this could possibly be made to work.
Windows, Mac, fine - stop a service running and the whole thing crashes, but open source OSes, almost by definition, are about user choice. Don't want something running in the background? Fine turn it off, no bother.
If age verification is required, but likely is going to be on device, then we'll just make a service that says "Yes, over 18" when asked.
If age verification requires a third party cloud service, then well done they've just broken the internet.
