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 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.
@wordshaper @mhoye or HP/UX
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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 we were a solaris shop until we made the switch to Red Hat.
Interesting times
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@mhoye we all wanted to use bsd all along it was just more convenient to use debian

@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
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@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
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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 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 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.
@wordshaper @mhoye @algernon AIX had smit. That was a really great idea. I was a big fan of the 6150.
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@wordshaper @mhoye @algernon AIX had smit. That was a really great idea. I was a big fan of the 6150.
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@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. -
@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.@wordshaper @mhoye @algernon the whole idea of binding before run time seems shockingly primitive and premature.
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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'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.
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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@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. -
@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 @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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@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@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.
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R relay@relay.mycrowd.ca shared this topic
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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. -
@foolishowl @mhoye When linux was only a thing that programmers, system administrators, and other techy types used, the assumption that everyone could/should be their own sysadmin made more sense - everyone could be assumed to have some tech proficiency, b/c if they didn't, they would still be on DOS/windows anyway.
That hasn't been a safe assumption to make about users for ~20 years though, unless you're a distro like slackware or gentoo that is explicitly not aiming at wide general adoption.@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.
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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...