I'm really interested in building a Linux distro that mimics what the BSDs are doing.
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It's data. Data can be copied over and over again. Anyone should be free to do whatever they want with it. Which includes not giving back code if they don't want to. Why would I care if they didn't? If it's useful enough for me to care about running it I'll just "steal" the code and release it for free myself.
I don't want to live in a "copyleft" world. I want to live in a world where such retarded concepts don't exist in the first place. GPL has been a disaster. Instead of just taking code and fucking off they subvert and stifle entire projects and kill them instead.
Stallman is just a propped up figurehead to ensure no real radical rises to lead an actual movement. He gets paid millions a year to shit out blog posts and eat his own foot cheese. He's a glow nigger/asset. You know who I respect more than Stallman? Anyone that leaks source code for things we don't already have. So many "tech workers" on the board. Yet none of them have the balls to cp things they work on here for the good of everyone. Cowards.
Most UNIX clones are designed by people with autism that couldn't design a decent GUI even if they were given the world's greatest toolkit and free access to to employees that do great things like design consistent buttons and other UI elements that look nice and are easy to understand. They can't wrap their minds around the concept that people might not want to use a terminal emulator emulating a system that never existed in reality. They don't know how to make things simple and easy to understand. They will never capture any meaningful portion of the user base beyond hobbyists that like to LARP as 1337 haxxor.
Most of the tools needed already exist and are easy enough to bundle together. But most people are like the GPLfag ITT shitting the place up. Everyone is too terrified to bundle BSDshit with GPLshit and MITshit to ship out to end users. Since most of these people are also greedy faggots that chase clout and have to attach their name to everything. They don't care about the users. They only care about the almighty dollar.
I'll give you a great example: Guix. It's the only package manager that has fully p2p repos planned. But it won't matter. Since they're huffing their own farts and refuse to ship out anything that isn't "libre". So no one wants to use it aside from some autistic faggots with hand picked hardware that's backdoored anyway. The right way to force these companies to open up their code is to take it by force. You give the ability for end users to use their hardware even if it requires binary blobs. Then once they start crying about it being shit you find a way to gain access to that code to leak it out or you shame the company.
So here's what I'm interested in: A stable base system with regular 6 months - 1 year update. A rolling release -current branch where development is happening that's as stable as OpenBSD (I haven't had to worry about an update every). A good way to update without breaking major things within the userspace which all distro suffer from.
Really not sure why anyone has done it yet. I think Portage is the best package manager for this now that they offer support for binaries. You could use custom use flags to avoid a lot of things that are plaguing other distros without losing support for all the stuff you need for a desktop. Keep most of the bad things away by replacing them with other lesser known projects in Gentoo overlay's. But all this requires having python as a dependency in lower userspace. Which is a huge pain because python. I really wish portage was written in C or something else that didn't have the issues that python has when you go through major upgrades.
I don't understand why no distro yet has copied what the BSD's are doing. You can do it all with GNU licensed stuff and still avoid all the bad stuff happening for now. But if you want a browser you're stuck with Chrome engines or Firefox. Which pulls in either Rust or Google's horrible code. Which takes hours to compile even on modern systems. They take forever and would tie up your builds on servers.
The BSDs are so nice with their stable upgrades (at least OpenBSD is. FreeBSD can be a bit of trouble but not nearly as bad as all the Linux distros).
What I would like to see in the long run;
>A good team rolls a new sane config for the Linux kernel. Assuming things get worse (Rust in kernel for example) they either exclude those modules or cut that code out of their version of the kernel. Which is a 'fork' without writing any code at all.
>The same team builds a base system around the above with a sane default config+packages. Which should include Xenocara or some version of Xorg along with the usual GNU tools and some scripting languages (if you use portage you'll need python of course)
>Use s6 as the init and provide services for packages in base. Shepard might also be an option to consider. But s6 is more mature imo.
>Arcan/A12 tools in base along with a new WM/DE to take advantage of what it can do with sane default config
>Copy the BSD concept of non-base packages being in /usr/local/bin instead of mixing them with base packages in /usr/bin. Also ability to have split /usr by default
>Use ZFS as default file system.
>Port over a lot of the good stuff from OpenBSD for the base system/kernel: pf, pledge/unveil, mg, ifconfig, maybe sndio, and various other tools they've created over the years.
>wine is base so you can run Windows software/games out of the box.
>Ignore licensing all together and run it as an "outlaw" distro. Mix BSD and GPL shit freely
>For our Arcan DE/WM: Build an easy to use control panel GUI for common tasks. Which can also be adjusted from CLI. Basically copy OpenBSD's sysctl but give it a GUI for people that want to do it with a mouse.
>The above should include an easy way to adjust kernel settings ala what the *BSDs use to set various things
>Good man pages for everything in base. Everything is required to be documented well. Should be able to hack on/configure system without needing an internet connection. Again copy the OpenBSD way when it comes to man.
>VMs included in base system with easy GUI to configure them.
>Ability to access and host fully p2p repos/packages. Our users can distro pre-built configs for games and stuff that extract .exes and drop them in the correct places for wine to run them. We don't have to worry about it being "illegal" since it isn't hosted on the project's main repos
>A good updating process/scripts. Again copy OpenBSD's. Use should be able to run "sysupgrade" and it'll pull down new kernel+base system, reboot, install it, reboot again and come up into desktop without breaking everything.
>Release stable kernel+base every 6 months-1 year. Offer snapshots of -current that are no more than a day behind master repo. Support -stable for 2 years and backport security fixes to it.
>Multimedia shit in base system (mpv, ffmpeg, codecs etc.) Users should be able to watch videos and play their audio files without installing stuff from ports
>Full freedom to fuck around and break the OS if the end users want. We support base config but we're okay with them going their own way. This is good for a variety of reasons. Mostly because it keeps everyone happy.
Note we'd have no issue with "out of tree" shit for the kernel like ZFS because we're shipping our own config of it anyway. If upstream decides to be dicks we just fork away and take whatever we want from newer kernel releases coming out of LKML for our own. I have more but this is already too long.
[SE]
[TOR]
It doesn't matter if you're using Debian, Ubuntu, Arch or any other mainstream distro. At the heart of them is a virus called systemd. You aren't allowed to criticize this software or anyone involved with its development on any mainstream /tech/ website, forum, mailing list, github, /r/linux, distro watch or any other place that hosts discussion about Linux.
So to ask
>how are you better/different than Debian?
Implies ignorance to the point where it isn't worth engaging with. You're basically asking me to sum up why the last 15 years of development in mainstream Linux distros is bad. Which I have done at length multiple times here. Which means you didn't bother to lurk or read those old posts.
The main developer of systemd was recently hired by Microsoft. The main influential distro that forces defaults upon all the others (Red Hat's distros) was recently purchased by IBM. They were most likely an IBM creation from the start and built with IBM funding. I shouldn't have to tell you why IBM and Microsoft having majority influence over a piece of software like the Linux kernel and its lower level userspace libs and applications is bad.
There are only 3-4 Linux distros left that are actually unique from the others. The rest are systemd libs+kernel with NSA code compiled right in+closed source firmware. The excuse is you can't have certain features like a functional desktop with automounting disks/thumb drives or accelerated graphics without them. You can't watch Amazon video streaming and Netflix and all that other normalfag shit without them. You can't run so-called "professional software" like Photoshop and MS office without them. _it's a lie_.
If you take the time to compile the software yourself with a careful set of compile time flags you can have a fully functional desktop with 99% of these "features". The other 1% can be hacked around pretty easily. The 10% left over (give 110% at all times) needs to be written from scratch but it isn't hard code and most of it is boring stuff like allowing a user that doesn't know anything to manage a system from a GUI control panel.
So the point and the difference between this and the others distros is we're taking the time to do all that bullshit work for you and offering you a functional system without trying to jew you. We aren't hiding data harvesting software in your libs. We aren't trying to sell you a product. We aren't artificially limiting what you can do with your system in an attempt to sell you a new computer every year. We aren't concerned about your running warez software or denying some website advertising shekels. All we want is people to help out with maintaining things and donating enough resources to keep it running (including my meager day-to-day food costs in time I hope. Don't worry I don't eat much).
Everyone else is trying to get rich off providing software. I'm just trying to eat and would invest anything we made beyond that back into the so-called "community". Imagine if Apple and Microsoft didn't spy on you, work directly with the NSA and put all their profits towards the good of humanity. That's the difference.
Although I doubt I'll ever make a dime off this and will eventually get murdered like my friend Ian. But it's nice to dream. I don't care about money anyway.
Let me give you a tangible example using something you can probably understand as a normalfag computer user.
You know how your web browser is always eating up half your RAM and every few years it feels like you need to buy more (or a system that has more)? In Linux there is a feature that can compress the contents of RAM by 50+% without any real cost to CPU resources. Meaning you can effectively double your RAM and "download more RAM from the internet". I have been using this feature for many years and lots of other people have to. It's stable, it's fast and it works great on modern multicore CPU systems.
Go download any Linux distro from Debian to Arch. Or one of the so-called "easy-to-use" systems like Ubuntu. NONE of them will take advantage of this feature by default. Most do not even tell you it's possible. If they do it's buried on some wiki page somewhere or deep in their forums. Hardly anyone is aware of it and the people that are aware of it usually don't use it. If they do it's only for some specialized task.
In our distro we'll not only enable this by default (or give an option) we will have an easy-to-use GUI application for the end user to configure it. You can turn it on and off. You can modify how much compression it does. You can even set it up so that it only kicks on when you're close to filling up your available RAM.
Any other distro? Read a bunch of guides and spend awhile fucking around on the command line and modifying config files. Then fuck around with your service manager to make it turn on at boot time. Then re-configure your swap partition and on and on it goes… Once it's working leave it alone and hope nothing breaks it in the future. But in modern distros it's tied directly to systemd. So it'll probably break all of the time.
systemd ended up everywhere because a lot of Red Hat software and the big projects like Gnome started pushing it heavily. Since every distro tries to have support for things like KDE and Gnome they pull-in the systemd stuff to avoid doing a lot of patching. It takes a lot of man hours to keep patching around their bullshit when they're changing stuff all of the time and not accepting outside PRs or listening to outside concerns. systemd is an NSA/US Army/Red Hat-first project. Do you really want it on your computer?
Did you know your Debian system pings out of google all of the time and there is nothing you can do about it? Did you know it snoops on every DNS request your system sends to the internet? It's doing a lot of things like that. No way to configure it. It's the default hardcoded right there in the code.
A lot of distros say they're systemd free. But systemd consists of a lot of libs that do a lot of other things. Things like automounting disks and managing log-ins/session in the graphical interface. These systemd-free distros pull in and build all of that crap but they change the init process that runs them at boot. So they aren't really "free" of those problems. They just hide them behind something like OpenRC or runit.
What we're doing is a full replacement of that software stack. All our services are original or from s6. We write our own scripts for boot time and services. We patch around the hard dependencies on the systemd libs. We replace them with other things that aren't just forked versions of those libs like elogind.
It's a lot of work to keep a true non-cancer system up and running. Every day there is something new to patch around. Since projects like Gnome and KDE are too hard to keep up with we've decided to replace them with our own default config for the desktop using existing projects. A default suite of desktop applications. Which is all Gnome and KDE is.
In addition to getting rid of the spyware such a system is much faster and stable. It uses far less resources while being able to run all the same software. What can't run natively runs fast in some kind of container. Stuff like commercial Windows software or cancer-ridden *nix software. So even if you're forced to use that stuff you can keep it contained away from the rest of your system.
The problem is right now you have to really know your way around *nix systems and spend days sometimes weeks patching, configuring and compiling software from source to have such a system. We're doing all that work for you and offering you binaries. That can be installed in 10 minutes and have a system up and running the way you want in about 15.
The guy above is implying you can "just run Guix" and have a system like this. He's wrong. Same goes for "install Gentoo". If you install the default Gentoo set-up you're in the same boat as the guy running Debian. You must spend weeks on the Gentoo forums and wikis to get the kind of system I'm going to offer. Even then you'll have a hard time finding the information because a lot of it has been buried, deleted, the people posting about it banned and the Gentoo project itself is run by some of the players I talked about before (Google employee sits on their board or whatever and determines things like the policy of their forum. There is an email where he bragged about getting a forum deleted because there was too much "political" discussion happening. Big coincidence that's where all the anti-systemd threads were being hosted after being banned from all the technical forums. The blamed Trump).
So to ask
>how are you better/different than Debian?
Implies ignorance to the point where it isn't worth engaging with. You're basically asking me to sum up why the last 15 years of development in mainstream Linux distros is bad. Which I have done at length multiple times here. Which means you didn't bother to lurk or read those old posts.
The main developer of systemd was recently hired by Microsoft. The main influential distro that forces defaults upon all the others (Red Hat's distros) was recently purchased by IBM. They were most likely an IBM creation from the start and built with IBM funding. I shouldn't have to tell you why IBM and Microsoft having majority influence over a piece of software like the Linux kernel and its lower level userspace libs and applications is bad.
There are only 3-4 Linux distros left that are actually unique from the others. The rest are systemd libs+kernel with NSA code compiled right in+closed source firmware. The excuse is you can't have certain features like a functional desktop with automounting disks/thumb drives or accelerated graphics without them. You can't watch Amazon video streaming and Netflix and all that other normalfag shit without them. You can't run so-called "professional software" like Photoshop and MS office without them. _it's a lie_.
If you take the time to compile the software yourself with a careful set of compile time flags you can have a fully functional desktop with 99% of these "features". The other 1% can be hacked around pretty easily. The 10% left over (give 110% at all times) needs to be written from scratch but it isn't hard code and most of it is boring stuff like allowing a user that doesn't know anything to manage a system from a GUI control panel.
So the point and the difference between this and the others distros is we're taking the time to do all that bullshit work for you and offering you a functional system without trying to jew you. We aren't hiding data harvesting software in your libs. We aren't trying to sell you a product. We aren't artificially limiting what you can do with your system in an attempt to sell you a new computer every year. We aren't concerned about your running warez software or denying some website advertising shekels. All we want is people to help out with maintaining things and donating enough resources to keep it running (including my meager day-to-day food costs in time I hope. Don't worry I don't eat much).
Everyone else is trying to get rich off providing software. I'm just trying to eat and would invest anything we made beyond that back into the so-called "community". Imagine if Apple and Microsoft didn't spy on you, work directly with the NSA and put all their profits towards the good of humanity. That's the difference.
Although I doubt I'll ever make a dime off this and will eventually get murdered like my friend Ian. But it's nice to dream. I don't care about money anyway.
Let me give you a tangible example using something you can probably understand as a normalfag computer user.
You know how your web browser is always eating up half your RAM and every few years it feels like you need to buy more (or a system that has more)? In Linux there is a feature that can compress the contents of RAM by 50+% without any real cost to CPU resources. Meaning you can effectively double your RAM and "download more RAM from the internet". I have been using this feature for many years and lots of other people have to. It's stable, it's fast and it works great on modern multicore CPU systems.
Go download any Linux distro from Debian to Arch. Or one of the so-called "easy-to-use" systems like Ubuntu. NONE of them will take advantage of this feature by default. Most do not even tell you it's possible. If they do it's buried on some wiki page somewhere or deep in their forums. Hardly anyone is aware of it and the people that are aware of it usually don't use it. If they do it's only for some specialized task.
In our distro we'll not only enable this by default (or give an option) we will have an easy-to-use GUI application for the end user to configure it. You can turn it on and off. You can modify how much compression it does. You can even set it up so that it only kicks on when you're close to filling up your available RAM.
Any other distro? Read a bunch of guides and spend awhile fucking around on the command line and modifying config files. Then fuck around with your service manager to make it turn on at boot time. Then re-configure your swap partition and on and on it goes… Once it's working leave it alone and hope nothing breaks it in the future. But in modern distros it's tied directly to systemd. So it'll probably break all of the time.
systemd ended up everywhere because a lot of Red Hat software and the big projects like Gnome started pushing it heavily. Since every distro tries to have support for things like KDE and Gnome they pull-in the systemd stuff to avoid doing a lot of patching. It takes a lot of man hours to keep patching around their bullshit when they're changing stuff all of the time and not accepting outside PRs or listening to outside concerns. systemd is an NSA/US Army/Red Hat-first project. Do you really want it on your computer?
Did you know your Debian system pings out of google all of the time and there is nothing you can do about it? Did you know it snoops on every DNS request your system sends to the internet? It's doing a lot of things like that. No way to configure it. It's the default hardcoded right there in the code.
A lot of distros say they're systemd free. But systemd consists of a lot of libs that do a lot of other things. Things like automounting disks and managing log-ins/session in the graphical interface. These systemd-free distros pull in and build all of that crap but they change the init process that runs them at boot. So they aren't really "free" of those problems. They just hide them behind something like OpenRC or runit.
What we're doing is a full replacement of that software stack. All our services are original or from s6. We write our own scripts for boot time and services. We patch around the hard dependencies on the systemd libs. We replace them with other things that aren't just forked versions of those libs like elogind.
It's a lot of work to keep a true non-cancer system up and running. Every day there is something new to patch around. Since projects like Gnome and KDE are too hard to keep up with we've decided to replace them with our own default config for the desktop using existing projects. A default suite of desktop applications. Which is all Gnome and KDE is.
In addition to getting rid of the spyware such a system is much faster and stable. It uses far less resources while being able to run all the same software. What can't run natively runs fast in some kind of container. Stuff like commercial Windows software or cancer-ridden *nix software. So even if you're forced to use that stuff you can keep it contained away from the rest of your system.
The problem is right now you have to really know your way around *nix systems and spend days sometimes weeks patching, configuring and compiling software from source to have such a system. We're doing all that work for you and offering you binaries. That can be installed in 10 minutes and have a system up and running the way you want in about 15.
The guy above is implying you can "just run Guix" and have a system like this. He's wrong. Same goes for "install Gentoo". If you install the default Gentoo set-up you're in the same boat as the guy running Debian. You must spend weeks on the Gentoo forums and wikis to get the kind of system I'm going to offer. Even then you'll have a hard time finding the information because a lot of it has been buried, deleted, the people posting about it banned and the Gentoo project itself is run by some of the players I talked about before (Google employee sits on their board or whatever and determines things like the policy of their forum. There is an email where he bragged about getting a forum deleted because there was too much "political" discussion happening. Big coincidence that's where all the anti-systemd threads were being hosted after being banned from all the technical forums. The blamed Trump).
[NL]
[TOR]
You either get it or you don't. You either care or you don't. If you don't get it and you don't care it doesn't matter what system you decide to use. You're okay with being treated like cattle and having everything you do spied upon. You aren't worth the time to convince. You'll only start using my system whenever it becomes popular enough to get shilled around on youtube and other big websites. So probably never.
On the other hand if you do care you need to start helping out now. For various reasons we probably only have like 2-3 years left before it'll be impossible to build a system like this out of the Linux kernel. By 2026 that window will have passed forever and there will be no point in trying. Too much will depend on the cancer to make a fork viable.
One of the many ways they've encouraged people to use this cancerware is implying that old software isn't "secure". It's more correct to say that no software is secure and most new software is not secure on purpose. Most spying tools are hidden in code as bugs or installed for "security" purposes. Since any "security" software needs root access by default.
By encouraging UPDOOTING they've managed to keep most users on their bandwagon. As any project with only a couple of people maintaining doesn't have the time and resources to "keep up with upstream". They say you must run stuff like the latest version of udev because the old versions are "buggy". But in reality a 12 year old version of udev will run with modern software just fine. It won't throw errors and it won't crash. It's just as secure as what you're running right now. The only difference is that old version of udev doesn't have a hard dependency on some cancerware lib like systemd. But if you go on an open forum and tell people you're running the 12 year old version you'll get masses of replies calling you an idiot and claiming that the sky is going to fall. Most of these people have never read the udev source code. They've just been trained into thinking new = better = more secure.
There are a lot of udev replacement projects active right now to break the dependency to systemd (e.g. mdev, eudev). When such people could have just downloaded the 10 year old udev source code, built it and would have discovered everything that needs it still works fine. I'm all for people making whatever you want but this goes to show just how much wasted effort is happening. All because Red Hat/US Government/NSA doesn't accept code from outside of their own little bubble. They are not interested in building good software. They're interested in building bad software. They've taken many projects like udev and co-opted them. After a few years they control the direction those projects go and who gets to add and modify the code. They've slowly taken over all of the Linux community this way for the last 2 decades.
Linus does not care. They're paying him millions of dollars to look the other way. He knows things are bad but he's eating well and doesn't have to worry about getting anhero'd. He will never speak out against this. Stallman pretends to care but he doesn't and he's on their payroll to. Most every celebrity and big time player in the (((community))) is on the take. Most people working on this software are employed by some /tech/ corporation like Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Amazon and all the other smaller off shoots. Their only interest is getting paid and doing whatever they're told to do.
We had better OSs in 1990 than we do right now. They ran faster using a 1,000th of our current resources. The only thing that's changed is software spies on the end user by default now and it sits in the background consuming most of the resources. We're interested in patching around all that spying and cancerware.
On the other hand if you do care you need to start helping out now. For various reasons we probably only have like 2-3 years left before it'll be impossible to build a system like this out of the Linux kernel. By 2026 that window will have passed forever and there will be no point in trying. Too much will depend on the cancer to make a fork viable.
One of the many ways they've encouraged people to use this cancerware is implying that old software isn't "secure". It's more correct to say that no software is secure and most new software is not secure on purpose. Most spying tools are hidden in code as bugs or installed for "security" purposes. Since any "security" software needs root access by default.
By encouraging UPDOOTING they've managed to keep most users on their bandwagon. As any project with only a couple of people maintaining doesn't have the time and resources to "keep up with upstream". They say you must run stuff like the latest version of udev because the old versions are "buggy". But in reality a 12 year old version of udev will run with modern software just fine. It won't throw errors and it won't crash. It's just as secure as what you're running right now. The only difference is that old version of udev doesn't have a hard dependency on some cancerware lib like systemd. But if you go on an open forum and tell people you're running the 12 year old version you'll get masses of replies calling you an idiot and claiming that the sky is going to fall. Most of these people have never read the udev source code. They've just been trained into thinking new = better = more secure.
There are a lot of udev replacement projects active right now to break the dependency to systemd (e.g. mdev, eudev). When such people could have just downloaded the 10 year old udev source code, built it and would have discovered everything that needs it still works fine. I'm all for people making whatever you want but this goes to show just how much wasted effort is happening. All because Red Hat/US Government/NSA doesn't accept code from outside of their own little bubble. They are not interested in building good software. They're interested in building bad software. They've taken many projects like udev and co-opted them. After a few years they control the direction those projects go and who gets to add and modify the code. They've slowly taken over all of the Linux community this way for the last 2 decades.
Linus does not care. They're paying him millions of dollars to look the other way. He knows things are bad but he's eating well and doesn't have to worry about getting anhero'd. He will never speak out against this. Stallman pretends to care but he doesn't and he's on their payroll to. Most every celebrity and big time player in the (((community))) is on the take. Most people working on this software are employed by some /tech/ corporation like Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Amazon and all the other smaller off shoots. Their only interest is getting paid and doing whatever they're told to do.
We had better OSs in 1990 than we do right now. They ran faster using a 1,000th of our current resources. The only thing that's changed is software spies on the end user by default now and it sits in the background consuming most of the resources. We're interested in patching around all that spying and cancerware.
[NL]
[TOR]