Re: Joy of this, Joy of that

On Sun, 8 Dec 2024, 186282@ud0s4.net wrote:

At redhat, the only things that is focused on is Openshift, as the ultimate
lock-in tool, so the OS just lives to the side in its own world.

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 IBM has "different motives" when it comes to Linux.
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 They will use what they want to use and then trash
 the rest.
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 We're in the middle of that.

This is the truth! They've done it in the past, and I'm sure they'll do it
again. I wonder if they will sell of p and z/i eventually as well? Then the
transformation to a completely useless consulting organization would be
complete.

What is sad is that SUSE is doing the excat same thing. Their strategy seems to
be to copy everything Redhat does, and do it worse. They now only focus on
rancher, and are leaving the OS to the side. They closed down their openstack
and their ceph.

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 Yea, (real)SUSE isn't worth it anymore.
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 Ever tried OpenIndiana - formerly Solaris ? It's
 not really Linux or Unix but "familiar". Really
 not so bad.

I've heard about it, but I do not think they supported a laptop last time I
checked it out, and was VM-only, but perhaps things have moved in the right
direction!

 And there's always Plan-9  :-)

True! =)
It would be wonderful if some genius tried to pick it up from where it fell
down, and would be able to bring it to life, natively, on a fairly modern
laptop!

What they sadly don't realize is that the OS is their jewel. I would focus on
that in the embedded space, they had a hueg lead in the SAP space, and see if I
could grow up. But no... rancher and containers it is, and there redhat is
blocking them well with openshift.

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 The pointy-haired bosses are only interested
 in quick PROFITS and CONTROL. No sense of 'mission'
 beyond that.
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 I greatly fear when Linus drops out of the picture.

That will be a fascinating day! Only then will we fully understand the results
and his unique abilities as benevolent dictator for life. I would not be
surprised if the corporate vultures would step in and it ending up with forks,
slowly diverging into Dell-linux, IBM-linux, Google-linux etc. all of which,
over time will become incompatible with each other by design.

 Switched to Deb - but now IT seems to have hired
 a bunch of Canonical rejects .....

 Deb has been on my list to try, in case opensuse finally dies. I also thought about trying Alpine linux but I do not know how much trouble musl will cause me. Finally, if those do not deliver, I thought about actually going back to some of my earliest experiments and try FreeBSD for day to day use. Since I'm not a cutting edfe developer, I only need some basics, which I think all are in the FreeBSD packages, so if they fixed their wifi problem (I tried it 1 year ago and had to run a small linux VM for a working wifi driver) it could definitely be a serious option. Oh, and that would mean it doesn't drain the battery as well. But let's see. I think I can stick with opensuse 15.6 for at least another 2-3 years, and then they might kill the project in favuor of some container based crap.

   Deb WAS the Solid Foundation ... until now. It became
 just another 'Buntu IMHO. Tragic !
  The BSDs are "usable" - really Not Bad. However remember
 they are Unix, not Linux, so a lot of little stuff is
 different. They also tend to be a few years behind when
 it comes to drivers. The real target is SERVERS, not
 desktops.

 True. BSDs are a bit behind, but since my main use case is office + light
scripting + some light servers stuff (backup, web server, etc.) BSDs should be
fine I think. We will see in about 1-2 years when the time comes to leave
opensuse 15.6 behind.

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 The BSDs might be just perfect for your needs. They
 are NOT so perfect for other people's needs - esp
 the gigantic 'desktop' users segment who expect tons
 of eye candy, GUI everything and anything plugged-in
 to Just Work.

This is the truth! As long as I can have some basic tools, vim, xfce, wifi and
decent battery life (oh, and suspend), I'm a happy camper!

 I've got FreeBSD in a VM right now - to refine the
 'how to do it' trivia. DID get X and XCFE installed.
 Next step is to install on an N95 BMax mini-box and
 attach an external HD box. I'd like to use SAMBA but
 something weird CHANGED with that in the last year
 or two and I can't seem to bring up the shares -
 always permissions errors regardless. NFS works,
 but it's got less security and far fewer options.

It's not the classic version problem? When samba switched from v2 to v3 it
decided to break backwards compatibility. I have this problem with an old NAS.
When I install a modern opensuse, it cannot access it. I have to specify some
flag in order to get it compatible with v2 mode, otherwise it default to v3
mode, and cannot access the old NAS.

 Hmmm ... is it possible to 'dd' a VM into a usable
 bootable image on a real machine ? I've seen various
 'answers'. MX has a utility for cloning the running
 install, it works well, but haven't seen that elsewhere.

I don't see anything that speaks against that being possible.

 OpenSUSE/Tumbleweed ... DID get it to run on a Pi-4,
 albeit a bit clunky sometimes because it isn't a
 "light" distro. Pi-5s are WEIRD ... can't even get
 a Fedora for those even a year on. Apparently the
 boot-up chain of events is a huge kludge. HAVE
 found instructions - pages and pages and pages
 of them - WAY too old for that shit and half of
 it would probably disappear on the next update.

 I have a radxa zero for my kodi/tv use, and I tried to get opensuse to run on it
and it was not possible. The radxa zero, being some kind of chinese raspberry
copy had horrible documentation, so in the end, the only thing I managed to get
working was some kind of dev snapshot of debian in their git repository.

>
 Well, not all PI clones are equal. DID try an Orange PI
 and Banana PI. Close ... but not QUITE the same. It'd
 depend on your exact purpose. If you NEED all the I/O
 pins then stick to PIs, esp genuine PIs. If not then
 shop BMax/BeeLink mini-boxes. Did buy another Pi just
 a few weeks ago - but it's a Pi4, not Pi5. The pre-
 BookWORM distros will run on it.

The only thing I need is power, wifi and a very small formfactor, since it lives
behind my flatscreen TV, so it cannot be thicker than about 1 cm or so.

I would loooose for raspberry to develop an updated version of the pi zero. That
is what the radxa is. I have 4 GB ram and 16 GB built in flash storage on the
tiniest board. It was wifi and bluetooth, and kodi and 1080p runs well on it.

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 The P0 is an interesting variant. You could do a lot of
 useful stuff with the old Pi-1/2 boards and P0 seems to
 encapsulate that capability without much more BS.
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 WiFi/BT/etc ... MIGHT take a bigger board - but the
 parts ARE getting smaller and better all the time.
 Expect a Pi0.1 eventually.
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 When I retired I still had an original Pi - the one
 with fewer I/O pins - doing a simple job in the
 server room (inside an old drill-bit box). It'd been
 working since forever. DID finally update the system
 near the end, new SD card - and it still worked great.
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 The new guys don't know Linux from their assholes so
 I don't know if it's still there ... they just pay
 M$ lots and lots of $$$ and if anything goes wrong
 they blame M$ or external vendors. Tragic.

This is indeed tragic! It will be fun to see the IT budget explode. It will also
be fun to watch them when Microsoft cloud services go down from time to time,
and all they can do is to have a coffee and wait.
Related to this, I'm currently working on selling software defined storage to
companies, and I have discovered that manufacturing companies are _very_
approachable to this argument and owning their own boxes. They know how much it
costs to sit around and wait for some cloud provider to get their act together,
vs just going down to the data center (or data wardrobe) and restart/change
what's not working.
I'm surprised, but it is nice to have found out that this awareness is still
aliev and well in the manufacturing space! =)

If raspberry updated their zero to those specs (or beyond) I would drop the
radxa in a second since I expect that the git repository will become
unmaintained in a year or two.
 

 If you really want an alt, consider Arch and
 derivs. Endeavour is nice. Manjaro works well
 (but, like Tumbleweed, kinda updates the ENTIRE
 system at the slightest change).

 Thank you for the pointers. Have made a note of this.

>
 Just trying to predict the near future ... it's
 not ALL so rosy.