“I also wish they debloated packages; maybe I’ve just been spoilt by KISS. I now have D-Bus on my system thanks to Firefox. :(”
…why is D-Bus bad, exactly?
Also, this guy reminds me of the time I spent in my early high-school years distro-hopping. That’s not a good thing or a bad thing, just an observation… That time’s also when I discovered my love of OpenBSD, so I’m glad they’ve gone down a similar path.
I just don’t like how GNOME-y it is. It uses glib types, instead of just C ones, when it has nothing to do with GNOME. Many apps that shouldn’t need D-Bus hard-depend on it, which is annoying. I think it’s just my general disdain for anything freedesktop.org.
Also, this guy reminds me of the time I spent in my early high-school years distro-hopping.
I only hop once or twice a year, at max. Besides, I’m holed up at home with nothing better to do, so why not?
That said, I didn’t even want to post this here. These are just my opinions. You can have your own, I won’t stop you. My previous post here got some pretty… interesting responses. I didn’t think people would be this annoyed at my choices. Anyway…
Did you check out using ifconfig join in lieu of ifconfig nwid? (http://man.openbsd.org/ifconfig#join) You can even put it in your /etc/hostname.iwm0 and list a few networks and their wpakey’s so when you take your laptop to other known networks it should automatically detect and join them.
Good to see you here. Thanks for writing that up. I haven’t looked at openBSD for quite some time. A post like this, informs people like me that there is actually good support on recent laptops. That’s a good thing.
While I was slightly concerned about the responses that would come up due to what was said in your previous post, I thought that this article was interesting and relevant while not being quite so divisive - like Plan 9, OpenBSD seems to be one of those things that people can’t help but approve of. So far the discussion seems to be quite civil and cover various facets of the post, so I think it’s been a success.
Again, not saying hopping’s a bad thing at all! I found it to be a good way to learn about different systems. I took a similar path to yours, actually, but with CRUX instead of KISS [since KISS didn’t exist].
[D-Bus] uses glib types, instead of just C ones, when it has nothing to do with GNOME.
GLib is used by (and developed by) GNOME, but it does not have any GNOME-ism in it. It is just another library meant to make dealing with C more tolerable on a variety of systems.
«GLib is the low-level core library that forms the basis for projects such as GTK and GNOME. It provides data structure handling for C, portability wrappers, and interfaces for such runtime functionality as an event loop, threads, dynamic loading, and an object system.»
Many apps that shouldn’t need D-Bus hard-depend on it, which is annoying.
D-Bus is a serialization and messaging library with a central broker. If an application needs to talk with another application, it needs to speak the (de)serialization format used by the daemon. How is having a standardized (de)serialization format a bad thing?
Similarly, if an application does not want to send messages synchronously with this other (possibly slow) application, it needs to implement some sort of dispatching mechanism and a dispatching thread. How is having a standardized dispatch mechanism and daemon a bad thing?
I doubt that nowadays there are many interactive apps that 1) do not need to talk with another application and 2) don’t need to do that asynchronously and reliably.
That said, D-Bus could be improved or provided by the kernel. But something like or with the role of D-Bus is a necessary piece of every dynamic operating system.
I think it’s just my general disdain for anything freedesktop.org.
Again, freedesktop.org is just a consortium of people working hard on desktop environments. Every now and then these experts sit together and harmonize/standardize things that are, up to that point, wildly incompatible with each other. https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Specifications/ How is that a bad thing?
Is, for example, having a drag-n-drop standard spoken by GTK, Qt and all other GUI toolkits such a bad thing?
Running linux in vmm(4) has been on my todo list as well - I know it’s possible, I’ve just used vmm for OpenBSD on OpenBSD :~)
I’m also a lazy and my qemu linux and windows xp installs both still work on OpenBSD, so I’ve not ventured down the vmm for everything else path yet. I would be interested reading about in your experiements with running linux in vmm.
I was considering building a laptop with NetBSD Xen, for the sole purpose of running VMs that I’d selectively share hardware with. Something like a cheap and (probably) ineffective QubesOS… The “beauty” in the idea was that I could run a small linux distro and get a better driver for my wireless card, then bridge other VMs that need the network to it, etc.
But, now that that machine is my 3rd grader’s primary way to do school work, and runs Ubuntu, I guess the other plans I had for linux based VMs could probably be achieved via vmm(4), or even qemu as you point out–thanks for the reminder! :)
It seems to me that slapping OpenBSD on a laptop/workstation is always a breeze and awesome. The hardest part though (in my opinion) is to keep it installed…
I did try it on my work laptop, and had to give up because I couldn’t get screensharing to work, the company’s VPN, … So I reverted to Debian (and it broke my heart!).
So I decided that I would put it on my personnal PC, and bought a brand new SSD for it. So I now have a working OpenBSD install at home. Unfortunately I still don’t use it as my main boot yet (I still run a 5 years old crux install), because all my data (music, video, /home, backups, …) are sitting on an LVM partition which cannot be mounted on OpenBSD. Which means that I must move my data elsewhere, and reformat all my drives to do the switch completely. I know it is only laziness here, but this is a fairly high entry level here I think.
Note that I use OpenBSD on 4 servers already for web, gopher, git, mail, bgp, … And won’t switch back because it is just so easy to manage!
The thing about no code of conduct being a benefit seems to come up somewhat regularly. I even see it show up on the OpenBSD lists. But this is really just a function of community size. A small enough community can be self governing with implicit social norms.
But once it gets large enough, the possibility rises that you’ll have too many bad actors, so you need to start making the norms explicit. This is why you see a code of conduct in FreeBSD, the community is larger.
Code of Conducts aren’t exhaustive lists of what is allowed, and not even exhaustive lists of what is not allowed. They provide a bunch of guidelines but in the end, they need to be filled with life through enforcement action that usually goes beyond the scope of what is written down (and that’s where the bickering about CoCs starts: is any given activity part of one of the forbidden actions or not?) - which makes the actual social norms implicit again.
The main signal a CoC provides is that the community is willing to enforce some kind of standard, which is a useful signal. There are communities that explicitly avoid any kind of enforcement, and there are communities that demonstrate that willingness through means other than CoCs.
I don’t automatically assume that a community without a CoC is not willing to enforce a minimal standard of decency. If I were to insult a maintainer, a co-contributor or bug-reporter, I wouldn’t be surprised to experience repercussions. Do others assume that because there’s no formal document, that you can just say whatever you want?
Not being exhaustive is actually what is great about Code of Conducts. One of the interesting things about moderating online communities is that the more specific and defined your rules for participation are, the more room bad actors have to argue with you and cause trouble.
If the rules for your website are extremely specific, bad actors will try to poke holes in that logic, find loopholes, and generally argue the details of the rules. However, if your rule for participation is simply “don’t be an asshole”, then you have a lot more room as a moderator to deal with bad actors without getting into the weeds about the specifics.
The Tildes Code of Conduct is really great for moderating an online community, because it’s simple and vague enough for almost everyone to understand, but does not leave any footing for bad actors to try to argue that they didn’t technically break the rules.
I think Code of Conducts are great, and honestly, most of the people I encounter who are against them tend to be… not pleasant to collaborate with.
Regarding bickering about forbidden actions:
Shut it down. If you are a moderator or maintainer and someone breaks the rules, ban them. If someone causes a stink about it, warn them, and then ban them too if necessary.
I think online communities, especially large online communities, seem to be afflicted with this idea that people on the Internet have a right to be heard and to participate. That isn’t true. Operators of these communities are not and should not be beholden to anyone. If someone continuously makes the experience worse for others and refuses to do better, ban them and be done with it.
From a POSIWID perspective, the things I have observed lead me to conclude that the purpose of CoCs (in business, opensource, and other community organisations) is to install additional levers that may only be operated by politically-powerful people, and provide little-to-no protection for the people they claim to protect. I have seen people booted from projects despite admission by the admins that no CoC violation occurred, and I have seen people close ranks around politically-powerful people who remain protected despite violating organisation/project/event CoCs.
That was not my point. My point was that the need for a code of conduct is often due to community size. Smaller communities can be more self policing based on implicit norms. They certainly can and do ban or drive off bad actors
“I also wish they debloated packages; maybe I’ve just been spoilt by KISS. I now have D-Bus on my system thanks to Firefox. :(”
…why is D-Bus bad, exactly?
Also, this guy reminds me of the time I spent in my early high-school years distro-hopping. That’s not a good thing or a bad thing, just an observation… That time’s also when I discovered my love of OpenBSD, so I’m glad they’ve gone down a similar path.
Hi, I’m “this guy”.
I just don’t like how GNOME-y it is. It uses glib types, instead of just C ones, when it has nothing to do with GNOME. Many apps that shouldn’t need D-Bus hard-depend on it, which is annoying. I think it’s just my general disdain for anything freedesktop.org.
I only hop once or twice a year, at max. Besides, I’m holed up at home with nothing better to do, so why not?
That said, I didn’t even want to post this here. These are just my opinions. You can have your own, I won’t stop you. My previous post here got some pretty… interesting responses. I didn’t think people would be this annoyed at my choices. Anyway…
Nice writeup.
Did you check out using
ifconfig joinin lieu ofifconfig nwid? (http://man.openbsd.org/ifconfig#join) You can even put it in your/etc/hostname.iwm0and list a few networks and their wpakey’s so when you take your laptop to other known networks it should automatically detect and join them.It’s a great feature. My life got significantly better when it landed. Thanks, @phessler!
:trollhat: – you do realize that this is the Internet and people need validation that they are in the 95th percentile of “smart,” right?
Good to see you here. Thanks for writing that up. I haven’t looked at openBSD for quite some time. A post like this, informs people like me that there is actually good support on recent laptops. That’s a good thing.
Also, Nice window mgr screen/rice. Very clean.
Hi, I posted it, sorry about that.
While I was slightly concerned about the responses that would come up due to what was said in your previous post, I thought that this article was interesting and relevant while not being quite so divisive - like Plan 9, OpenBSD seems to be one of those things that people can’t help but approve of. So far the discussion seems to be quite civil and cover various facets of the post, so I think it’s been a success.
I enjoy your blog, thanks a lot.
Hey! No apologies needed. Thanks for reading, and posting. :)
Again, not saying hopping’s a bad thing at all! I found it to be a good way to learn about different systems. I took a similar path to yours, actually, but with CRUX instead of KISS [since KISS didn’t exist].
GLib is used by (and developed by) GNOME, but it does not have any GNOME-ism in it. It is just another library meant to make dealing with C more tolerable on a variety of systems.
«GLib is the low-level core library that forms the basis for projects such as GTK and GNOME. It provides data structure handling for C, portability wrappers, and interfaces for such runtime functionality as an event loop, threads, dynamic loading, and an object system.»
Should projects really implement yet another base64 conversion function?
D-Bus is a serialization and messaging library with a central broker. If an application needs to talk with another application, it needs to speak the (de)serialization format used by the daemon. How is having a standardized (de)serialization format a bad thing?
Similarly, if an application does not want to send messages synchronously with this other (possibly slow) application, it needs to implement some sort of dispatching mechanism and a dispatching thread. How is having a standardized dispatch mechanism and daemon a bad thing?
I doubt that nowadays there are many interactive apps that 1) do not need to talk with another application and 2) don’t need to do that asynchronously and reliably.
That said, D-Bus could be improved or provided by the kernel. But something like or with the role of D-Bus is a necessary piece of every dynamic operating system.
Again, freedesktop.org is just a consortium of people working hard on desktop environments. Every now and then these experts sit together and harmonize/standardize things that are, up to that point, wildly incompatible with each other. https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Specifications/ How is that a bad thing?
Is, for example, having a drag-n-drop standard spoken by GTK, Qt and all other GUI toolkits such a bad thing?
Running linux in vmm(4) has been on my todo list as well - I know it’s possible, I’ve just used vmm for OpenBSD on OpenBSD :~)
I’m also a lazy and my qemu linux and windows xp installs both still work on OpenBSD, so I’ve not ventured down the vmm for everything else path yet. I would be interested reading about in your experiements with running linux in vmm.
I was considering building a laptop with NetBSD Xen, for the sole purpose of running VMs that I’d selectively share hardware with. Something like a cheap and (probably) ineffective QubesOS… The “beauty” in the idea was that I could run a small linux distro and get a better driver for my wireless card, then bridge other VMs that need the network to it, etc.
But, now that that machine is my 3rd grader’s primary way to do school work, and runs Ubuntu, I guess the other plans I had for linux based VMs could probably be achieved via vmm(4), or even qemu as you point out–thanks for the reminder! :)
It seems to me that slapping OpenBSD on a laptop/workstation is always a breeze and awesome. The hardest part though (in my opinion) is to keep it installed…
I did try it on my work laptop, and had to give up because I couldn’t get screensharing to work, the company’s VPN, … So I reverted to Debian (and it broke my heart!).
So I decided that I would put it on my personnal PC, and bought a brand new SSD for it. So I now have a working OpenBSD install at home. Unfortunately I still don’t use it as my main boot yet (I still run a 5 years old crux install), because all my data (music, video, /home, backups, …) are sitting on an LVM partition which cannot be mounted on OpenBSD. Which means that I must move my data elsewhere, and reformat all my drives to do the switch completely. I know it is only laziness here, but this is a fairly high entry level here I think.
Note that I use OpenBSD on 4 servers already for web, gopher, git, mail, bgp, … And won’t switch back because it is just so easy to manage!
That is some sick ascii art!
Off topic: When was the OpenBSD Dev hat changed to Comic Sans?
Has been since day one!
Huh, never noticed that. Good tough though.
The thing about no code of conduct being a benefit seems to come up somewhat regularly. I even see it show up on the OpenBSD lists. But this is really just a function of community size. A small enough community can be self governing with implicit social norms.
But once it gets large enough, the possibility rises that you’ll have too many bad actors, so you need to start making the norms explicit. This is why you see a code of conduct in FreeBSD, the community is larger.
Code of Conducts aren’t exhaustive lists of what is allowed, and not even exhaustive lists of what is not allowed. They provide a bunch of guidelines but in the end, they need to be filled with life through enforcement action that usually goes beyond the scope of what is written down (and that’s where the bickering about CoCs starts: is any given activity part of one of the forbidden actions or not?) - which makes the actual social norms implicit again.
The main signal a CoC provides is that the community is willing to enforce some kind of standard, which is a useful signal. There are communities that explicitly avoid any kind of enforcement, and there are communities that demonstrate that willingness through means other than CoCs.
I don’t automatically assume that a community without a CoC is not willing to enforce a minimal standard of decency. If I were to insult a maintainer, a co-contributor or bug-reporter, I wouldn’t be surprised to experience repercussions. Do others assume that because there’s no formal document, that you can just say whatever you want?
Either way, it’s off-topic.
Not being exhaustive is actually what is great about Code of Conducts. One of the interesting things about moderating online communities is that the more specific and defined your rules for participation are, the more room bad actors have to argue with you and cause trouble.
If the rules for your website are extremely specific, bad actors will try to poke holes in that logic, find loopholes, and generally argue the details of the rules. However, if your rule for participation is simply “don’t be an asshole”, then you have a lot more room as a moderator to deal with bad actors without getting into the weeds about the specifics.
The Tildes Code of Conduct is really great for moderating an online community, because it’s simple and vague enough for almost everyone to understand, but does not leave any footing for bad actors to try to argue that they didn’t technically break the rules.
I think Code of Conducts are great, and honestly, most of the people I encounter who are against them tend to be… not pleasant to collaborate with.
Regarding bickering about forbidden actions:
Shut it down. If you are a moderator or maintainer and someone breaks the rules, ban them. If someone causes a stink about it, warn them, and then ban them too if necessary.
I think online communities, especially large online communities, seem to be afflicted with this idea that people on the Internet have a right to be heard and to participate. That isn’t true. Operators of these communities are not and should not be beholden to anyone. If someone continuously makes the experience worse for others and refuses to do better, ban them and be done with it.
From a POSIWID perspective, the things I have observed lead me to conclude that the purpose of CoCs (in business, opensource, and other community organisations) is to install additional levers that may only be operated by politically-powerful people, and provide little-to-no protection for the people they claim to protect. I have seen people booted from projects despite admission by the admins that no CoC violation occurred, and I have seen people close ranks around politically-powerful people who remain protected despite violating organisation/project/event CoCs.
You seem to be equating a code of conduct with a willingness to ban bad actors. I think that’s a false equivalence.
That was not my point. My point was that the need for a code of conduct is often due to community size. Smaller communities can be more self policing based on implicit norms. They certainly can and do ban or drive off bad actors
Thanks for the quick intro to cwm! — it looks and sounds pretty cool.