Date: Mon, 28 Mar 2022 10:03:19 -0400 From: Valeri Galtsev <galtsev@kicp.uchicago.edu> To: Steve O'Hara-Smith <steve@sohara.org> Cc: questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Using a FreeBSD desktop was somehting about dog food Message-ID: <5b408597-e7e0-e0f1-8865-cec1c745a4c2@kicp.uchicago.edu> In-Reply-To: <20220328055449.8a30774a61f3b298e778ae68@sohara.org> References: <38b7f44-6d54-fec6-c1f0-d3609d301687@safeport.com> <20220327132420.201da20c@archlinux> <20220327212421.adaee52ba708a058e5ef6bd8@sohara.org> <4f3edca7-45ec-b8ae-45dc-9648cced9bfe@kicp.uchicago.edu> <772cf4b0-9e26-3126-ec4b-bd91986883dd@kicp.uchicago.edu> <20220328055449.8a30774a61f3b298e778ae68@sohara.org>
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On 3/28/22 12:54 AM, Steve O'Hara-Smith wrote: > On Sun, 27 Mar 2022 21:31:50 -0400 > Valeri Galtsev <galtsev@kicp.uchicago.edu> wrote: > >> Please, ignore my rant below. I figure, I have to learn reading >> carefully, before writing something. > > Oh not completely - you make some very good points about nVidia. > >> Thank you, Steve for deep insights of all your posts, including this one >> which I ranted about without even disagreeing with your points. Shame on >> me. > > Hey you noticed - I've known people to rant in violent agreement > for several posts before I gave up trying to tell them we're saying the > same thing :) > >>> NVIDIA never releases the details of their chip internals. Therefore, >>> no open source driver can [legally] be written which is capable of, > > It can, but the reverse engineering to make it possible has to > happen in a jurisdiction where that is legal. Even then though it's > guess and hope work without the specs. > >>> say, have dual screen with different screen resolutions, as there is no >>> specs/description of how video RAM is mapped... ATI had always been >>> open about chipsets' internals (don't know how things changed when >>> developing continued after AMD bought them out), and therefore open > > I believe they've kept the policy but ... > >>> source drivers were extremely good. Now, NVIDIA's [proprietary] drivers >>> are actually written by NVIDIA itself. For those systems which NVIDIA > > Which makes them very good indeed and enables the nVidia drivers > for DRI/DRM to be available as well tested fully developed drivers the day > the cards come out, while the ATI/AMD open source developers don't get to > start on their code until later in the cycle. > >>> prefers. I am just ranting about Steve words of Linux catching up with >>> Windows. Respectfully disagree - very first time probably disagree with > > Nope, you're right in the case of nVidia Linux and Windows are head > to head - for pretty much everything else Linux plays catch up with Windows > but does a better job on standards and so has less catching to do than > might be expected (often Windows needs a driver and Linux uses generic > code - FreeBSD does this pretty much as well as Linux IME). > > FreeBSD plays catch up here though because the DRI/DRM development > is done on Linux and when that changes messily (as Linux things tend to) > there's a lot of work to do bringing it up to date. > > Now to pull out the crystal ball and wax philosophical for a bit. > It seems to me that the BSDs are remaining what they always intended to be, > accessible unix systems - which means servers and workstations and are > sticking pretty closely to the original unix philosophy. > > The Linux based OSs OTOH seem to be going in multiple directions > exploring the phase space of operating systems based on a solid > multi-tasking kernel with excellent hardware support. This seems to me to > be a good thing to do. > > At one end we have embedded systems in everything from washing > machines and TVs to cars and aircraft by way of industrial machines. It's > scary the number of things that can be tortured into giving a shell prompt. > > Becoming more visible we have Android, ChromeOS etc. on watches, > phones, tablets and lightweight laptops. > > Then the various desktop Linuxes (which are getting less and less > like unix systems and more and more like turnkey appliances with every > release) in the middle. > > On the large scale Kubernetes, Docker and VmWare ESX create a very > different world in which services are orchestrated and fifty lines of yaml > turns into several thousand VMs running an auto scaling distributed mass of > services, clients, load balancers and VPNs at the click of a mouse and > scientists hook up hundreds or thousands of machines with high end graphics > cards in them to run massive neural networks. > > This spreading family of OSs has pretty much abandoned traditional > unix philosophy while hanging on to as many of the bits of unix as they find > useful. I expect this trend to continue and the divergence to widen between > the various members while still retaining the same kernel and a large pool > of software to use as common building blocks. > > Apple, as ever, are in their own walled garden using an eclectic > mix of Mach, BSD and proprietary software on carefully selected hardware. > Few seem to want to take Darwin anywhere. I'd love something for X11 that > handles changing arrangements of multiple monitors as well as MacOS - it's > nearly perfect and I'm pretty sure the failures are bugs. I'd *hate* to try > and write and debug one - it's a hard problem that's nearly all edge cases, > so hard that I despair of even writing bug reports that clearly describe > precisely how it goes wrong and when. > > Plan 9 and Inferno are attempts to take the unix philosphy to > extremes - they're elegant in many ways but few want to use them. > > Personally I like traditional unix and I'm very glad that I'm able > to do pretty much everything I need in a well supported traditional unix. > So thank you FreeBSD team for providing me with 29 years of great computing > experiences - long may it continue. > > What I like even more is that we have all this choice - and I've > only glossed over the tip of the iceberg that is the incredible wealth of > free software available today. > Thanks for excellent writeup. Reading it was like reading a great SciFi novel in my childhood... Valeri > My turn for a rant :) > > To those of us who once despaired of saving up the thousand[1] or so > a *binary* unix license without networking, compilers or text processing > suites (throw in another couple of hundred each for those) or spent weeks > getting X11R5 to work on an unsupported platform (you may imagine how good > it was to see that X move on a black screen for the first time after weeks > of fighting library, compiler and make limitations) complaints that what's > available for free lacks the gloss and polish of commercial software seem > churlish and ungrateful. > > [1] Dollars or pounds depending on which side of the pond - the numbers > were about the same just the sign changed. >
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