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.

[d6@merveilles.town]

@mhoye i'm pleased NetBSD is getting more attention these days.

[gizmomathboy@mastodon.xyz]

@wordshaper @mhoye or HP/UX

[gizmomathboy@mastodon.xyz]

@mhoye we were a solaris shop until we made the switch to Red Hat.

Interesting times

[elilla@transmom.love]

@airshipper @mhoye yeah the latest debian stable isn't even that stable anymore, I've been meaning to return to netbsd for a while now and with generative "AI" in the Linux kernel I——waitaminute did you say age verification in systemd

[airshipper@cloudisland.nz]

@elilla @mhoye running with a hacked systemd what could go wrong

[eigen@mattstodon.panar.ooo]

@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.

[mikestok@mstdn.ca]

@wordshaper @mhoye @algernon AIX had smit. That was a really great idea. I was a big fan of the 6150.

[wordshaper@weatherishappening.network]

@MikeStok @mhoye @algernon AIX had a #pragma in its C++ compiler to raise the default maximum length for a mangled symbol... in case the default 32k was too short. (And don't even get me started about its abomination of a linker)

[mikestok@mstdn.ca]

@wordshaper @mhoye @algernon let me suggest that C++ was the problem A proper OO response would have been to make the symbol table entries an s-expression, but if they had done that we wouldn’t have needed Perl.

[mikestok@mstdn.ca]

@wordshaper @mhoye @algernon the whole idea of binding before run time seems shockingly primitive and premature.

[llorenzin@infosec.exchange]

@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.

[ferricoxide@blahaj.zone]

@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.

[waffles@masto.yttrx.com]

@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.

[ferricoxide@blahaj.zone]

@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.

[aburka@hachyderm.io]

@paul @mhoye except systemd has spent the last years working its way into becoming exactly that kind of essential service

[foolishowl@social.coop]

@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.

[miss_rodent@girlcock.club]

@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 >

[miss_rodent@girlcock.club]

@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@infosec.exchange]

@waffles @mhoye cannot even imagine. I bet you have some *amazing* war stories from that one...

[llorenzin@infosec.exchange]

@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.)