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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@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. -
@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...)
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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 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.
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@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.
@hurt138 @mhoye I’m not looking for a fight here, but many people find voluntary compliance with authoritarianism distasteful, and feel that aspects like this should be resisted as much as possible. Sometimes resistance looks like marching in the street, and sometimes it looks like a fistful of sand in the gears, starting with “there is no standard place to store that data, you’ll have to think of something else.”
There’s some additional complexity around the speed at which systemd rapidly replaced large parts of unix with an obviously terrible design, and because there is no easy outlet for that resentment, it sometimes surfaces in related subjects like this.
Finally, the compliance-in-advance is intended to improve the “saleability” of linux by large corporations to other large corporations, but many contributors do not value the concept of “saleability” and are concerned that the platform’s direction is increasingly set by companies that do not share their social goals.
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@hurt138 @mhoye I’m not looking for a fight here, but many people find voluntary compliance with authoritarianism distasteful, and feel that aspects like this should be resisted as much as possible. Sometimes resistance looks like marching in the street, and sometimes it looks like a fistful of sand in the gears, starting with “there is no standard place to store that data, you’ll have to think of something else.”
There’s some additional complexity around the speed at which systemd rapidly replaced large parts of unix with an obviously terrible design, and because there is no easy outlet for that resentment, it sometimes surfaces in related subjects like this.
Finally, the compliance-in-advance is intended to improve the “saleability” of linux by large corporations to other large corporations, but many contributors do not value the concept of “saleability” and are concerned that the platform’s direction is increasingly set by companies that do not share their social goals.
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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
