Fear and loathing in Linux (Or BSD user tries Linux)
One day I said “I want to die with FreeBSD installed”, and I still do, FreeBSD is a marvellous operating system that should be the final word in operating systems. Sadly the other day when I bought a new computer they pranked me very well because the network card this computer came with is not supported in the current stable version of FreeBSD. “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit, father, into your hands, why have you forsaken me?” I said, but after some searches I find that this network card WILL be supported and you can test the driver in the -CURRENT branch of FreeBSD, I didn’t thought -CURRENT would be much of a pain, knowing I come from “bleeding edge” Linux distributions. So I installed FreeBSD 14.0, the thing worked but when I tried to install the required modules for xorg to work it didn’t work. And that’s all they had to say. I want a stable system. Not that.
Some time ago, when I published my FreeBSD as desktop blog post, I got a comment in Hacker News (or lobsters, can’t remember) that told me that I was making clickbait because the experience was good. And the title promised “Fear and loathing”. Well, this one does have fear and loathing.
So my first try was the old reliable. Void Linux, a distro that has never failed me. Until yesterday, because when you come from BSD, you know what’s wrong with Linux.
Despite Xfce focuses on Linux operating systems and the BSD support could be a lot better, because it sometimes can’t tell the difference between oss and pulse audio, or the microphone doesn’t work, or other kinds, doing trivial things was a lot easier on FreeBSD than in Void Linux, but that’s okay. I can with it, i’ve had worse things in my life. So I could configure it. Then I wanted to install some packages for void installation in which I could use my beloved sakisafecli. But when I installed it I found out what was wrong with Linux.
So i tried to run bmake in linux (BSD make is much better than GNU
make and should cover some trivial makefiles). And it started to give
errors, like curl.h is not found. And this is when a BSD user will
cause the Fall of Rome. In BSD operating systems, there are not
-devel (or -dev) packages. So when you install libfoo you install
the shared objects (.so files), the header files (the thing in
/usr/local/include) and sometimes the .a files for static linking
(which is something Linux distributions should also do). I don’t think
it’s very arguable that it is possitive to include the header files in
the same package. Because they’re just text files that won’t take a
lot of space. Maybe this is normal for some kind of devices, but if
you install arch linux or void in a amd64 machine i don’t think you
care a lot about space.
That was the moment in which I remembered that one day a friend of my told me that arch linux doesn’t have -devel packages. And that was enough for me to install Artix Linux, I don’t even know what init system I’m using.
Let the fear and loathing begin.
Operation: filesystem
The state of ZFS in Linux is quite commedic because OpenZFS is under the CCLD and Linux is on the GPL and CCDL is incompatible with the GPL. So because of the GPL we can’t have ZFS endorsed by the kernel on Linux systems. Just because the GPL, I don’t think it’s pretty good that a so-called “free” software license tells you that you must share your changes. And I think it’s pretty idiotic that, because a License, they can’t add a sequence of ASCII characters to a kernel.
It was pretty funny because one day I found this message regarding btrfs on FreeBSD on the forums:
When I was installing Artix and it was part to create the partitions, I audibly chuckled, and I selected btrfs as my file system. And began using btrfs because I’m always open to try new things.
As mentioned before, the state of ZFS on Linux is commedic, because of differences between Artix and Arch, I couldn’t install the 3rdparty zfs module from the AUR, so I had to compile OpenZFS code myself. This wasn’t much of a problem.
Meanwhile, I also looked for “artix zfs” in my search engine and I found this blog post that was funny to me because it’s like the counter part of the other post:
So well, installing ZFS from source wasn’t much of a problem. After
building and installing it modprobe zfs just worked and I could
mount my pools just fine. And thus, restoring my data. so no big
problem there.
I wanted to try btrfs features because I am curious, and apparently btrfs is “zfs for linux”, so i wanted to try its features
Our man break19 was right, because if I want to add compression to my storage devices I have to do some weird stuff in the fstab, and that’s too much, i prefer the old good “zfs set compression=gzip zroot” rather than editing that file. I also can’t play with btrfs subvolumes or snapshots because the btrfs command line utility is horrible and I haven’t figured anything out.
Package management and the power it holds
Different commands. Same shit, the only package managers that has
innovated in something are GNU Guix and Nix, but I don’t think there
is much difference between pkg and pacman.
What is true is that pacman has a syntax that sucks, for example. in
FreeBSD you’d do pkg install emacs, while with Artix you do pacman
-S emacs, like I know what -S means, and apparently “pacman -Ss” is
better than “pacman search”, so i prefer FreeBSD package manager.
But what was funny to me is that when I installed clang, pacman
notified me that also gcc will be installed. I thought this was very
curious so I asked in the artix IRC channel, the answer frightened me:
<raoul> | Hello, nice operating system and all, but I have a question why does clang depends on gcc <Dudemanguy> | it's because clang uses the standard library provided by gcc most linux distros are like this
As a computer user I tell you, that no big problem. But as a BSD user I ask “why”?
I didn’t know it, but pacman is very fast. It downloads things in parallel and uses zstd, a fast compressing/decompressing software for compression, so I have no issues with pacman’s speed. It is pretty fine.
When I did some research on why I couldn’t install wine in Artix linux
I found out that my packages are being maintained by people with anime
profile pictures. And I also discovered that, for some reason, they
wanted to split all the repositories in separate repositories. Not
sure why, they have like 5 repositories for everything. I can
understand separating repositories with free/non-free software. But
here they don’t even do that. They’re just making thing more complex
for people who just want to install packages. In BSD this didn’t
happen as the main repo had all the 30k packages someone would ever
need. And this operating system lacks packages. I had to build
cmusfm myself.
Desktop
I hate to say it but Artix was less of a pain to setup as a desktop than FreeBSD, this is because the installation was made with Calamares installer. So I didn’t had to install Xorg and configure manually, the installer did all that for me. This wasn’t the case in FreeBSD in which I had to configure Xorg manually. And this is appreciated. The Xfce setup just worked. And I bothered on ricing it like Windows XP because I live in the past. Some people ask me why I riced it why XP, the reason is because I can and I wanted.
I have 0 reasons to complain about Linux in this case. So I just won’t.
Conclusion
If you haven’t tried a BSD operating system. Don’t, you’ll get hooked to it and if you ever have to come back to Linux, you’ll find yourself prefering to get a castration than installing Linux, because when you learn how BSD works, and its awesome features, the development philosophy (focusing in making a great operating system instead of focusing in a weird definition of freedom), you start to know why linux sucks.