Red Hat retires mailing list, leaving Linux loyalists to read between the lines Red Hat has closed its security advisories mailing list. It will still share the information, just via an RSS feed, with access free for all… at least for now. The Linux behemoth quietly announced that rhsa-announce mailing list would shut up shop last week: On October 10, 2023, the rhsa-announce mailing list will be …
"FreeBSD 14 is nearly ready."
Indeed. The BSDs are always a good option. I use it for servers and Internet facing kit.
However, if you are heavily invested in Linux, the mature and quite adult Slackware is still with us, and still sane, with no systemd, Snap, Flatpak or GNOME ... and Wayland is but an option.
If you haven't looked at Slackware recently, you may owe it to yourself to give it another try.
[Author here]
> If you haven't looked at Slackware recently, you may owe it to yourself to give it another try.
I did!
https://www.theregister.com/2023/07/20/slackware_turns_30/
It's _big_. OK, it's way _way_ easier than it used to be to install, but the thing filled up a 16GB partition on the first update. I was sitting there sweating slightly as my free space count went down to about 0.3%, then it finished.
(On a Btrfs volume, that would have been a more or less guaranteed corrupt root FS.)
It has come a long, long way, but it still has catching up to do with the friendlier distros. When I install, I'd like the option of a clean, fairly minimal desktop system, and I want it to stay that way when I update it.
Unsolicited opinion, but I do think adding Free/Net/OpenBSD to the FOSS desk's coverage would be a good thing. Remind people that there's more than just Linux out there. I'm sure there's also some kind of vulture related joke about circling the not-quite-dead (soon to be) figures of the *BSD family. Bonus points if you do a review of Darwin sans Apple's GUI on top, as a FreeBSD descendant.
In general I agree, BSD is fantastic. It currently feels like the Linux heyday when the hardware support was getting pretty darn good and yet everything was still clean and UNIXy.
However, the selfish git in me would prefer that we keep BSD as a well kept secret, so we don't need to deal with the overly obnoxious non-technical users ruining Linux currently.
Well, to be fair, if they're reading El Reg they're probably at least a half a cut above the rest. Enough that they at least know to google something first. And that brings back fond memories of using Linux in the mid-90s when the Internet was still barely a thing and you had to check FAQs or maybe there'd be some obscure USENET post. Downloading copies of Slackware floppy images and using a special program to write them to disk under Windows. The more things change, amirite? Great, now I feel old! I'm just going to stop digging now.
"memories of using Linux in the mid-90s when the Internet was still barely a thing"
The Internet had been "a thing" for about a quarter century by the mid-90s. Some of us had been using UNIX with it for pretty much that entire time. Linux is a relative newcomer. Those "special programs" started because we needed to write tape images to disk, and vice-versa (to say nothing of punch cards and paper/mylar tape). It was a normal part of computing. Still is, in some areas
To be fair the BSDs are occasionally covered, releases of OpenBSD usually generate a news story, and there's some FreeBSD news. However there's fewer contributions to BSD, and for OpenBSD a mantra of security before almost everything else, so new functionality is much slower to arrive than on Linux.
I do note on FreeBSD that WINE is now almost at parity with the latest release, and virtualisation support works, it's just somewhat more unfinished and less well documented than on Linux.
I adore OpenBSD, it's a masterclass in how to implement an OS with a singular focus, but a tad painful if you want to use it as a desktop, and even worse on laptops.
Never really touched DragonflyBSD. NetBSD I would love to run, but it is very much a research, hobbyist, and academic OS. Some parts are modern and well implemented, others are bleeding edge and unfinished, driver support is distinctly uneven, and functionality varies wildly across platforms.
FreeBSD has more divergence from classic BSD than I would prefer (it's the most Linux like of the BSDs), but I don't have the time and inclination to bootstrap NetBSD up to the point it becomes a viable Windows alternative, so FreeBSD is the pragmatic choice.
[Author here]
> I do think adding Free/Net/OpenBSD to the FOSS desk's coverage would be a good thing.
https://www.theregister.com/2022/05/20/freebsd_131/
https://www.theregister.com/2022/10/21/openbsd_72_released/
https://www.theregister.com/2023/04/13/freebsd_132_openbsd_73/
https://www.theregister.com/2022/08/10/netbsd_93/
https://www.theregister.com/2023/01/06/dragonfly_bsd_6_4/
https://www.theregister.com/2023/01/31/hellosystem_08/
https://www.theregister.com/2022/05/11/truenas_13_released/
I'm just saying... I do try to.
I'm a big enough person to admit when I'm wrong. I guess the release times between *BSD distros tends to be a bit longer and its easy to forget. Not that it's an excuse for my not taking the time to do a quick search to see if there were any articles, because clearly I would have found something.
That was more of a generic"you" than directed at you, personally, Liam. I should have specified.
Yes, it's big. But it's built to be used for years in the Real World, not dicked around with in a VM for four or five hours. It has a complete development environment, several GUI environments, etc. etc., and all the source for everything included ... not all of which is required for a complete, functional system. Get rid of those you don't need (easy to do in the installation procedure) and it becomes much slimmer.
With a little effort and customization, you can make the initial install very small, and very clean, with just the tools that you, personally need/want. I have an installation script that generates the system in use by my Wife, DearOldMum and GreatAunt and quite a few other functionally computer illiterate people. It is about 8% of a full install, and I could probably cut it down quite a bit further by removing some admin tools that the users involved will never even know exist.
Ozan pointed out Eric's mini installs in an earlier post in this thread. One could start with one of those and customize it for one's own needs.
Much easier and more recommended, find a cast-off computer that nobody wants anymore. (We've probably all seen one or two year old computers sitting by the side of the road ... ) Wipe the poor thing, and install Slackware on it. In this modern era of multi terabyte drives for under one hundred dollars, 16 gigs isn't really all that much to complain about ... especially when that 16 gigs is all functional and doesn't contain spyware, ad-ware, or other malware. Use the same machine for other distro reviews. That way you'll be reviewing them in their native habitat, instead of in a constricted VM, which will obviously colo(u)r the opinion of the user.
Or, depending on the tax laws for such things in the country you are living in, purchase a dedicated computer strictly for reviewing OSes and software. Use it as a write off, a necessary tool of your chosen trade. Worked for me back when I was reviewing commercial PEE CEE UNIXes for <redacted>.
This old goat remembers when CPU power had to be carefully shepherded. In that environment, a system that gets interrupts for work requests is more efficient than one that requires polling for work. Much less looping around doing nothing, when there are background things that also want attention.
As the author sort-of mentions, email is an interrupt which you can choose to ignore; forums, web-pages, etc. require polling.
The difference here is that it is the human's attention that is being wasted by polling, not CPU cycles.
Same as the issue I have with companies which stop sending out monthly/quarterly/etc statements and expect you to do download it from their web site. While this might be fun for the one or two exceptions, I really don't want to spend the end of every month hopping around umpteen site downloading PDFs. And, then I have to put them somewhere. Now I also have to have some additional storage, because some of those I need to keep for legal/tax/etc purposes. And I need them for like ten year and I have no guarantee the provider/site will exist then. Or, shock and horror, I have email rules to automatically file/archive/forward/process/etc them. All while I sleep. None of that's possible when every Tom, Dick and Harry believe their WebUI is their one special gift to humankind.
PS: I'm not even mentioning the copious tracking typically employed by said sites.
This post has been deleted by its author
Reading between the lines, is the message that IBM is slowly but surely turning its attention towards RedHat and figuring out new and creative ways to fuck up that product? Isn't that basically the IBM way? The top brass sits around a big conference room table and brainstorms ideas for how to piss off customers and drive a successful product into the ground.
Purely for the SPREADING of information, there really is no difference between RSS (Or WebFeeds in general) and mailing lists...if anything, RSS is slightly ahead in terms of functionality.
*quickly raises his shield and cowers behind it*
Good, now that the barrage has ended, let me explain: They are both plaintext formats. They are both standardized. Both are well established, tried and battle-tested. They are both client-agnostic. Both allow aggregation of many sources in a single client. Both are easy to subscribe to.
Why do I think RSS is ahead in its area of expertise? Because it's structure is standardized, so it has better machine readability, which depends less on established conventions, and it doesn't require the server to push out the messages by itself, it only has to cough them up them when clients come fetching.
Yes, mailing lists are bettwer for actual COMMUNICATION instead of just getting information out. I am not disputing this fact. I just wanted to break a lance here for RSS feeds, which btw. are far from a youngsters shiney new tech (most fresh-from-Uni hirelings I meet these days seem to lovingly call RSS "what?")
I was just today thinking that it once was the case that simple things were done simply (and hopefully correctly) in ways that were fairly easy to understand and complex things were composed from these simple thing with some hope that the whole would be understandable.
Now we seem to be confronted by behemoths like systemd that are pretty much monolithic slabs which few ever really understand.
Email v discourse fits this pattern. I imagine RSS feeds could be sucked down and recomposed into an email.
Quoting Tennyson's dying Arthur :)
"The old order changeth, yielding place to new,
And God fulfils himself in many ways,
Lest one good custom should corrupt the world."
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