Yeah. There would probably be a huge effort to make GNU HURD usable. The reason why hurd is not done yet is because GNU has no real reason to put effort into it given GNU/linux, but if linux goes bad that would change things. Linux is the reason why HURD is taking so long btw, it's not that it's literally taken this long, I'm pretty sure that it's because linux was simply sufficient at the time, and therefore GNU saw no reason to continue developing their kernel. Also, worst case one could quite easily switch to Openbsd. It's development goals make it seem like a stable-choice, and shouldn't be that different from GNU/linux. The only downside of this approach would be bad support for games, and virtualization (i think openbsd doesn't work with stuff like qemu). The third choice would be to just fork an older version of the Linux kernel. .. Actually this seems like the most easy one.
That is certainly a possibility, but I didn't want to get into that too much here. That is highly dependant on the specific scenario of how Linux goes bad, since I left it so ambiguous I did not want to go in detail with any specific case. This speech exists just to explore the alternatives. But let's take as an example that every hardware maker and major tech companies and such for some reason loses interest in Linux, perhaps another kernel or something shows up someday or whatever, then let's say Google takes up the development of Linux alone, everyone else abandons it but Google wants to keep Linux going for their own purposes, and then takes it into some absolutely horrible direction. Who is going to do such a massive effort as to maintain a fork of Linux in this scenario, they would need to do all the work alone, at that point there may be a few special interests and the community to keep it up. But at that point it would get deprecated over time and lose a lot of the hardware edge it has today over other free operating systems. Basically it would just become what illumos is today. But then if the kernel only went bad in a way like if some spywayre is added into it and a bunch of backdoors, then those could easily be removed in a fork. There is already a fork of Linux called the Linux-Libre which removes all the proprietary firmware blobs from the kernel. So that's easy enough and wouldn't be a big deal at all.
Actually I did not know Redox OS existed when I recorded this speech. I did find out about it later though. But I don't yet know enough of it to really comment on it at this time. Other than to say what I would say of any such new project; I guess we'll see if it goes somewhere.
@@awuuwa It's very much work in progress (struggles directly on hardware last I checked) but it's well worth keeping an eye on. It might end up getting more active development just by virtue of rust being fashionable right now.
You earned a sub from the first sentence. Need more people who care about end-user freedom/liberty, that is what free/libre software is all about, it's not about the tech.
Freebsd is the only realistic alternative to linux. It also has the potential to come much closer to linux in terms of features, but there just aren't enough developers that want to work on it. Its license doesn't do it any good either. It would have to change to gplv2 for it ever significantly improve.
Indeed, one way to help would be to draw more attention to the GNU project, for example by calling the complete operating system GNU+Linux. Since this speech specifically addresses the Linux kernel, I did not title it "GNU+Linux". But I am in favour of referring to the complete operating system as a GNU operating system. Also another problem is the "open source" movement, which is stealing the audience from the free software movement. I don't think the supporters of the free software movement push back against "open source" enough.
I don't know what you mean by that. Hurd is the name of GNU's own kernel. Typically people use Linux in a GNU distribution because Hurd is still developmental software, hence why the name GNU+Linux. A GNU distribution running it's own kernel is just a GNU operating system, no Linux added
@@awuuwa Linux is a kernel, if Linux ever sells out I am stating alternative kernels that I could switch to the libre kernel being first choice and the hurd being second choice since it is still being developed.
FreeBSD is pretty good, as it happens; I wish it weren't licensed the way it is; if it were GPL, it would almost certainly have better access to the linux drivers. That said, it's a good os in its own right, and if it had working drivers for my bluetooth and wifi adapter I would switch over to it on my laptop in a heartbeat. It has made a bunch of progress in terms of having a decent console experience over Linux (which on arch has only just started including large enough fonts to be readable on a 13 inch, 1440p screen, but still barely handles utf8 where FreeBSD has significantly better support.
When comparing FreeBSD to GNU+Linux on the desktop, the only real big difference is the hardware driver support, but if you get past that then FreeBSD is an excellent operating system. In a lot of ways FreeBSD is already technologically superior to GNU+Linux. And I could see myself possibly using FreeBSD one day on my main desktop setup. But that day is not soon, so long as my current setup works I am not going to bother changing it and it is also likely that I will move to Devuan next. Also currently the graphics card I use isn't supported on FreeBSD, even though it's AMD and it works well with the Linux kernel's default free/libre drivers. Hardware drivers really are the bane of operating system's existcnce, if it weren't for the need of those then it would all be better.
33:30 correction, I misspoke. The GPL version 3 is not "more copyleft" than the GPL version 2, what I should have said is that it is more freedom respecting
Besides it's not like you have to constantly add new features to a kernel, talking about the Hurd. When it's out it's out. It gets the features it needs and that's what it has, then it's just maintenance from there, on top of bringing in all the drivers and such of course. So the slow speed of the development of Hurd is not important, once it's ready it's ready. it's called being feature complete. Sure over time it could be extended or whatever but that's not inherently necessary
Personally, I’m a fan of the 3 clause BSD license. I daily use Debian Sid, Gentoo, FreeBSD, and OpenBSD on bare metal. I love FreeBSD the most. I love the fact that all 3rd party packages are separated from the base system. Its package manager and man pages are second to none! (OpenBSD man pages may be a tad better haha) The Linux compatibility layer does need some updating as it uses CentOS 7 userland
The only people who benefit from the permissive nature of those licenses over copyleft, are those proprietors who profit off of the software by making it proprietary. This comes at the expense of everyone else involved, of course they and any likeminded people at least would like those licenses. The supposed philosophical justification in that a permissive license is somehow more freedom respecting than a copyleft one, is nonsense. Because it's the argument that allowing punching people in the face grants the people more freedom. Except freedom from being punched in the face of course. And in setting proprietary terms for other people to follow when a proprietor distributes proprietary software, they are not exorcising freedom in their own life, what they are doing is exorcising control over other people. Setting the terms for other people to use the software, that's not freedom, that's controlling other people with the power of the license.
@@Parker8752 I went from FreeBSD to Gentoo on my laptop solely because of the constant Wi-Fi issues; and that’s with an Intel Wi-Fi chip. Still using FreeBSD on my 2012 Mac Mini.
@@ImageJPEG I have an old laptop that's basically fucked (I need external keyboard and mouse), and an old usb wifi dongle, and I run freebsd on that. It's a genuinely nice experience, as one of those nutters who would rather stay in the console 24/7 than launch a window manager, but I also get a decent experience with x11 (I haven't tried wayland stuff on it because effort)
I am not familiar with this, running Linux binaries on the zones. I need to look into this. If it is indeed possible then that may be useful. Would the zones work in a manner where the Linux binary software running on them is able to interact with the rest of the system in a normal way as if run trough a compatibility layer like on FreeBSD? Since the zones use virtualization, is it much different from just running a regular virtual machine? Can the software escape that and interact with the rest of the system?
I would argue the best thing to appear would be a FreeBSD-like GPL OS project, the problem is that nobody on the GPL side seems to have the will, desire, and means to create an operating system while actually listening to their average users and writing documentation for an average user like FreeBSD has, the problem is that FreeBSD has poor hardware vendor support and the BSD license holds it back. As licenses go my thoughts are that I like BSD for end-user software and GPL for the Operating system due to my experience in a couple indie game projects, particularly a multiplayer game where you end up in an arms race with cheat software devs by the second day after launch.
The fear is not for Linux to become bad. It is for Linux to become mainstream. Then a refuge will be required where all the elitists, gatekeepers, edgelords and neckbeards can flee to, so they can feel special again. :P
@@kztuptuo7076 Troonix is the overarching term for all unix derivatives since the troons infilitrated the open-source community. I'm guessing you don't know what troons are either, right? Those would be male individuals trying to pass as women, and they fail miserably at it. These individuals are obviously in an unstable state of mind, which has lead to problems before. Just look up that Lea person from Libreboot. Oh, and go all the way back where he was upset about someone calling him an emacs virgin and he then taking the word "virgin" literally and losing it over it. The latest drama is nothing compared to that. He even wrote an apology saying he was in a dark place and ... unstable state of mind. Linus warned us of this, but then he himself became a "woke communist" (his words). So yeah, I've already moved to OpenBSD, but even there the woke infestation has already begun.
Haiku sure is interesting, but it has some really weird peculiarities, and it is not Unix-like as I would like for this speech. I mentioned at 20:51 in the speech the recommendations are Unix-like. Altough Haiku has some small resemblances to being Unix-like, a Bash shell and partial POSIX compliance, that's nowhere near enough to call it Unix-like as some mistakenly do.
![[LIVE] : ONE ลุมพินี 80 | คู่เอก "รักษ์ vs ยอดนำชัย"](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/ckLMRorsMeY/mqdefault.jpg)
Yeah. There would probably be a huge effort to make GNU HURD usable. The reason why hurd is not done yet is because GNU has no real reason to put effort into it given GNU/linux, but if linux goes bad that would change things. Linux is the reason why HURD is taking so long btw, it's not that it's literally taken this long, I'm pretty sure that it's because linux was simply sufficient at the time, and therefore GNU saw no reason to continue developing their kernel.
Also, worst case one could quite easily switch to Openbsd. It's development goals make it seem like a stable-choice, and shouldn't be that different from GNU/linux. The only downside of this approach would be bad support for games, and virtualization (i think openbsd doesn't work with stuff like qemu).
The third choice would be to just fork an older version of the Linux kernel. .. Actually this seems like the most easy one.
What about just forking Linux? Why not? The last good version of the Linux kernel will surely be better than all the other options
That is certainly a possibility, but I didn't want to get into that too much here. That is highly dependant on the specific scenario of how Linux goes bad, since I left it so ambiguous I did not want to go in detail with any specific case. This speech exists just to explore the alternatives. But let's take as an example that every hardware maker and major tech companies and such for some reason loses interest in Linux, perhaps another kernel or something shows up someday or whatever, then let's say Google takes up the development of Linux alone, everyone else abandons it but Google wants to keep Linux going for their own purposes, and then takes it into some absolutely horrible direction. Who is going to do such a massive effort as to maintain a fork of Linux in this scenario, they would need to do all the work alone, at that point there may be a few special interests and the community to keep it up. But at that point it would get deprecated over time and lose a lot of the hardware edge it has today over other free operating systems. Basically it would just become what illumos is today.
But then if the kernel only went bad in a way like if some spywayre is added into it and a bunch of backdoors, then those could easily be removed in a fork. There is already a fork of Linux called the Linux-Libre which removes all the proprietary firmware blobs from the kernel. So that's easy enough and wouldn't be a big deal at all.
you forgot about redox os. based on rust, could be the future actually...
Actually I did not know Redox OS existed when I recorded this speech. I did find out about it later though. But I don't yet know enough of it to really comment on it at this time.
Other than to say what I would say of any such new project; I guess we'll see if it goes somewhere.
@@awuuwa It's very much work in progress (struggles directly on hardware last I checked) but it's well worth keeping an eye on. It might end up getting more active development just by virtue of rust being fashionable right now.
You earned a sub from the first sentence. Need more people who care about end-user freedom/liberty, that is what free/libre software is all about, it's not about the tech.
Fair; we just need more hardware that supports it. Freedom can be pretty expensive...
If Linux goes bad, i'll just write my own. 🙃
Freebsd is the only realistic alternative to linux. It also has the potential to come much closer to linux in terms of features, but there just aren't enough developers that want to work on it. Its license doesn't do it any good either. It would have to change to gplv2 for it ever significantly improve.
More and more users and professionals are coming to Linux without any idea of the philosophy behind it and any concept of software freedom.
Indeed, one way to help would be to draw more attention to the GNU project, for example by calling the complete operating system GNU+Linux.
Since this speech specifically addresses the Linux kernel, I did not title it "GNU+Linux". But I am in favour of referring to the complete operating system as a GNU operating system.
Also another problem is the "open source" movement, which is stealing the audience from the free software movement. I don't think the supporters of the free software movement push back against "open source" enough.
i'd just switch to the libre/hurd kernel
I don't know what you mean by that.
Hurd is the name of GNU's own kernel.
Typically people use Linux in a GNU distribution because Hurd is still developmental software, hence why the name GNU+Linux.
A GNU distribution running it's own kernel is just a GNU operating system, no Linux added
@@awuuwa Linux is a kernel, if Linux ever sells out I am stating alternative kernels that I could switch to the libre kernel being first choice and the hurd being second choice since it is still being developed.
FreeBSD is pretty good, as it happens; I wish it weren't licensed the way it is; if it were GPL, it would almost certainly have better access to the linux drivers. That said, it's a good os in its own right, and if it had working drivers for my bluetooth and wifi adapter I would switch over to it on my laptop in a heartbeat. It has made a bunch of progress in terms of having a decent console experience over Linux (which on arch has only just started including large enough fonts to be readable on a 13 inch, 1440p screen, but still barely handles utf8 where FreeBSD has significantly better support.
When comparing FreeBSD to GNU+Linux on the desktop, the only real big difference is the hardware driver support, but if you get past that then FreeBSD is an excellent operating system. In a lot of ways FreeBSD is already technologically superior to GNU+Linux. And I could see myself possibly using FreeBSD one day on my main desktop setup. But that day is not soon, so long as my current setup works I am not going to bother changing it and it is also likely that I will move to Devuan next. Also currently the graphics card I use isn't supported on FreeBSD, even though it's AMD and it works well with the Linux kernel's default free/libre drivers.
Hardware drivers really are the bane of operating system's existcnce, if it weren't for the need of those then it would all be better.
Tribblix and SerenityOS are very interesting
33:30 correction, I misspoke. The GPL version 3 is not "more copyleft" than the GPL version 2, what I should have said is that it is more freedom respecting
Besides it's not like you have to constantly add new features to a kernel, talking about the Hurd. When it's out it's out. It gets the features it needs and that's what it has, then it's just maintenance from there, on top of bringing in all the drivers and such of course. So the slow speed of the development of Hurd is not important, once it's ready it's ready.
it's called being feature complete.
Sure over time it could be extended or whatever but that's not inherently necessary
BSD, Plan9, TempleOS
there is also Minix it is used by Intel to my knowledge
On the subject of microkernels, it's worth keeping an eye on redox os
BSD is my present. macOS handled it about 20 years ago, already.
Personally, I’m a fan of the 3 clause BSD license.
I daily use Debian Sid, Gentoo, FreeBSD, and OpenBSD on bare metal.
I love FreeBSD the most. I love the fact that all 3rd party packages are separated from the base system. Its package manager and man pages are second to none! (OpenBSD man pages may be a tad better haha)
The Linux compatibility layer does need some updating as it uses CentOS 7 userland
The only people who benefit from the permissive nature of those licenses over copyleft, are those proprietors who profit off of the software by making it proprietary. This comes at the expense of everyone else involved, of course they and any likeminded people at least would like those licenses.
The supposed philosophical justification in that a permissive license is somehow more freedom respecting than a copyleft one, is nonsense. Because it's the argument that allowing punching people in the face grants the people more freedom. Except freedom from being punched in the face of course.
And in setting proprietary terms for other people to follow when a proprietor distributes proprietary software, they are not exorcising freedom in their own life, what they are doing is exorcising control over other people. Setting the terms for other people to use the software, that's not freedom, that's controlling other people with the power of the license.
I do want to go back to freebsd; I just need support for mediatek wifi/bluetooth cards, and I can move over to it on my new laptop.
@@Parker8752 I went from FreeBSD to Gentoo on my laptop solely because of the constant Wi-Fi issues; and that’s with an Intel Wi-Fi chip.
Still using FreeBSD on my 2012 Mac Mini.
@@ImageJPEG I have an old laptop that's basically fucked (I need external keyboard and mouse), and an old usb wifi dongle, and I run freebsd on that. It's a genuinely nice experience, as one of those nutters who would rather stay in the console 24/7 than launch a window manager, but I also get a decent experience with x11 (I haven't tried wayland stuff on it because effort)
What about Linux Zones for illumos?
They allow executing arbitrary linux user land applications.
I am not familiar with this, running Linux binaries on the zones. I need to look into this. If it is indeed possible then that may be useful. Would the zones work in a manner where the Linux binary software running on them is able to interact with the rest of the system in a normal way as if run trough a compatibility layer like on FreeBSD?
Since the zones use virtualization, is it much different from just running a regular virtual machine? Can the software escape that and interact with the rest of the system?
I would argue the best thing to appear would be a FreeBSD-like GPL OS project, the problem is that nobody on the GPL side seems to have the will, desire, and means to create an operating system while actually listening to their average users and writing documentation for an average user like FreeBSD has, the problem is that FreeBSD has poor hardware vendor support and the BSD license holds it back.
As licenses go my thoughts are that I like BSD for end-user software and GPL for the Operating system due to my experience in a couple indie game projects, particularly a multiplayer game where you end up in an arms race with cheat software devs by the second day after launch.
30:08 Debian is more at the risk of things you said than the Linux.
I'm not following, are you intending to say that Debian is likely to go bad?
The fear is not for Linux to become bad. It is for Linux to become mainstream. Then a refuge will be required where all the elitists, gatekeepers, edgelords and neckbeards can flee to, so they can feel special again. :P
It already is mainstream in almost every server software. As before, you even count gaming systems that are starting to use it
Troonix already suffers from "get woke, go broke". How much more mainstream do you want it to go?
@@callisoncaffrey WTF is troonix
LITERALLY, thank you!
@@kztuptuo7076 Troonix is the overarching term for all unix derivatives since the troons infilitrated the open-source community. I'm guessing you don't know what troons are either, right? Those would be male individuals trying to pass as women, and they fail miserably at it. These individuals are obviously in an unstable state of mind, which has lead to problems before. Just look up that Lea person from Libreboot. Oh, and go all the way back where he was upset about someone calling him an emacs virgin and he then taking the word "virgin" literally and losing it over it. The latest drama is nothing compared to that. He even wrote an apology saying he was in a dark place and ... unstable state of mind. Linus warned us of this, but then he himself became a "woke communist" (his words). So yeah, I've already moved to OpenBSD, but even there the woke infestation has already begun.
do you happen to be finnish?
yes.
@@awuuwa suomi perkele
Haiku is an interesting option I'd really like to try it on winter holidays
Haiku sure is interesting, but it has some really weird peculiarities, and it is not Unix-like as I would like for this speech.
I mentioned at 20:51 in the speech the recommendations are Unix-like. Altough Haiku has some small resemblances to being Unix-like, a Bash shell and partial POSIX compliance, that's nowhere near enough to call it Unix-like as some mistakenly do.
blasphemy