[foreword]

@ Obarun-community: After having read some threads of the "Talk about" category, I reckon this post is not off-topic or misplaced here. My apologies if ever it is. By the way, I'm quite amazed by the openmindedness of this forum. It makes sense again to me to hear/read/say "free as in free speech." :)

@ fungalnet: After having written what follows, I'm thinking it could be a "paper" in systemd-free. It may interest some readers of sf out there… What do you think? If you're okay, I can even re-write a bit.

[/foreword]

Hail to yee all,

I'm gonna here speak from an END-USER perspective, because an END-USER I am, although having spent the last 12 years on various Linuces. (Those who have answered some of my questions on this forum will have noticed.) Yet, I hope that even some much more advanced people out there may find elements to feed their own thoughts and researches. If you find mistakes in what I say in this post, feel free to disabuse me with adequate comments. After all, disabusing is much what that comes is about…

I'm gonna start speaking a bit about Buddhism. Please, don't think I am trying to convert anyone! I'm not even a Buddhist, myself —although my avatar-icon in here is a picture of Dharmachakra, the "Wheel (chakra) of the Law (dharma)". I've known a few Buddhism devotees in my life, some dear friends, and got interested by this approach to existence. Yet, due to my story, I'm more of a "Tao" guy. But I'll soon digress on Buddhism with a precise aim: to draw certain analogies that I think can be eloquent and fruitful.

On language

But before elaborating with this analogy, please, consider taking it seriously, and not just as a completely gratuitous rhetorical strategy. The few days following my self-introductory topic, Fungalnet and I have much exchanged our points of view on very various topics. And this is one of the very interesting things he wrote:

fungalnet wroteI had this pen-pal some years ago who was preaching general semantics and to a certain extent the principles of I find correct. Language is a very confusing thing, it is symbolism that makes you think it is reality, when it is just a tiny summary description of reality. It also carries much of historic and pre-historic idealism and metaphysics in it. When in your garden or neighboring park you have this huge maple tree that you remember being huge ever since you were a kid, you know of things happening around that tree, you have seen birds nest, grow, and die on that tree, you remember eating syrup from the tree, it is very specific. If I say maple tree it covers all this historic reality, it is like a picture, static. If I just say it is a tree it is even worse. For you it is much more than just a maple tree. It is even worse when "this is an old maple tree" is one symbol.
C is a very good language, it is very finite and specific, but it depends on libraries of symbols and routines and such. It is still not assembly, not speaking directly the machine's language. Imagine how many layers of programming language there is in English, or French. And we are being programmed, conditioned, by language and we end up as confused as we are today. Priests, generals, dictators, presidents, teachers, cops, parents, have translated reality so we can obey them and execute their decisions.
This Greek poet wrote in one poem "don't worry, someday we will all communicate in colors and musical notes" which as numbers both are very precise symbols of frequency. Unfortunately she died young because she couldn't bare living among the zombies.

Here is why and how this (clever) stream of thoughts strikes me deep: the darkness prevailing in today computer languages/libraries/bloat-softwares being used in the (mainstream) Linux and in computing in general is not only a metaphor of our own inadequate way of processing and expressing information as human beings in our everyday life. It is also a direct REFLECT of it. Orwell's "Nineteen Eighty-Four" is one of the recent (and cult) expressions of that concern. It's not by far the only. I tend to think that all (good) litterature and all (good) philosophy expresses a deep concern about how we delusion ourselves because (and when) we forget that the words we use are just words, i.e. conventions, social marks or, at the opposite end of the spectrum, very private existential marks of individual affective concerns. This work of language "deconstructionism" has NOT begun with the "Po-Mo", the so-called "POst-MOdernist" thinkers. It's already plain explained in Nietzsche's (and his "educator" Schopenhauer's) works, in Montaigne's works, back to Aristotle and Plato, and Heraclitus! In China, some very parallel wonderings and debates have taken place in Laozi's and Zhuangzi's works. And how many unrecorded thinkers? Just a funny example of how you can play on words about words:

Polonius: What do you read, my lord?
Hamlet: Words, words, words.
Polonius: What is the matter, my lord?
Hamlet: Between who?
Polonius: I mean, the matter that you read, my lord."

Now back to my point. Who are the "zombies"? According to the vampires in Jim Jarmusch's "Only Lovers Left Alive" (2013), all we humans are zombies! There are but two categories: the Undead (ie the Vampires) and the Zombies (ie the "living dead"). Period.
Seriously now, what is a zombie? If you ask a true Voodoo sorcerer, a zombie is a human that is kept asleep so that you can program him/her to obey in his/her awaken sleep. And the Voodoo sorcerers say that it's not that hard to forge a zombie. You just need to know the plant-composition of the poison you'll have the person drink. (This poison will make him/her fall in a cataleptic sleep that makes him/her look like he/she is dead.) And, after the funerals, you need to know what is the right time you will exhume his/her body to give it to the future OWNER of this living-dead programmed body.
And how do you program an empty shell, a machine without a ghost? Well, just like the story says about Odessa's Golem, just like a computer-engineer with a program for the computer, just like with ANY being you "breed" and "raise" to get "functional" (be it your dog or your child): with in-form-ation. You "shape" with "forms" that "in-form". You shape with words and gestures. And gestures can also convey/obey a language syntax.
Hence, the disaster of mainstream PC (Personal Computing) is corollary to the disaster of our mainstream way of life! It's just information, BAD information, CRAPPY information, dysinformational information, but information nonetheless! And this crappy information is what makes that "We are such stuff as dreams are made on" (says Prospero) but also that "[Our lives] are such stuff as [programs] are made on".
Basically, in the Cybernetics study field, life was used as a model of cleverly programmed machine behaviours, whose behaviour would respond an ambient output. Hence the machine became a metaphor of its model, the human body. Nowadays, it's quite vice-versa: we humans have become a metaphor of the machine…
Well, alright, let's claim that! Let's aknowledge how much we can be programmed. Besides, there's nothing really new here…

Awakening

For Centuries (Millenia?) there are been endless controversies about Buddhism being whether a religion or a philosophy.

I think Buddhism aims to be a wisdom and a way to reach freedom. It's a frame of tools (of both praxis and theoria levels) that can help us understand why/how we are never satisfied, and why/how, hence, we are never completely present here and now to what surrounds us and to what we deeply are. In other words, we spend most of our lifetime not to actually live, but wondering how we could live better or… how it can get worse. We are beings who spend half of our time remembering, the other half of our time anticipating. The (gone) past and the (yet to be) possible futures are permanently invading our present mind. In the Buddhist tradition, there are sayings that assert that only Buddha is able to live here and now and behave accordingly, adequately. Buddha is the only one able of real ACTION instead of RE-ACTION. —Hence the image of Buddha "setting in motion (i.e. actioning) the wheel of Dharma" when he pronouced the first speach of his post-enlightenment teaching.

Now, Buddha is not some "God" or superman. Buddha means "the awakened/enlightened", period. Buddha was a man of flesh and bones (Siddhartha Gautama) who has reached a certain state of awareness to liberate himself from the conditioning causalities that hurted him. He observed pain, he observed its causalities, understood them thoroughly, reached freedom and then, as any anarchist or revolutionary who considers that "as long as any man is enslaved, I am not free either" (is that Bakunin?), he walked a path of teaching to spread the word of liberation. For no one can escape the effect of causalities without knowing them. (Knowing them is not good enough, though.) The aim of a Buddhist is to feed, develop, enhance and maintain this "nature" (understand: quality) that is called "buddhahood".

Taking Refuge

But when one becomes a Buddhist (in our Western countries, hence not for cultural inheritence), of course, it's generally because he/she feels imprisoned, painful and helpless in the first place. Hence the very important notion of "Taking Refuge" for devotees. This said "Refuge" is said to be triple, threefold. 1. The devotee takes refuge into Buddha, 2. The devotee takes refuge into the Dharma (the Law, the correct Doctrine) [A], 3. The devotee takes refuge into the Community (of devotees).

(A) Even if the many schools of Buddhism may differ on what the nature of the correct Doctrine is, and on the manner to expose it and practise to reach the enlightenment, they all aknowledge that the Doctrine must be correct and that it's one fold of the three-fold Refuge.)

The most perceptive may see where I am coming to, don't you?… Once again, it's just an analogy, but I think it's acurate:

For someone who lived years or decades in the Samsara of proprietary/closed source/corporate crappy software, where the data you have collected or even created are not SAFE, and, sometimes, aren't even yours anymore (see Facebook policy), coming to Linux (once) felt like a huge Liberation. With the distance I have now, I now see that you would take refuge into:

Unix itself,
the "Unix Way", aka "KISS" (and this "doctrine" is embodied in a quality documentation (B), freely available, which is equivalent to the huge body of sutras and comments),
the community of people who share your choice and condition — among who, some are more advanced on the right way and can help you to walk it.

(B) Microsoft's and Apple's are very far from the exhaustive documentation available for free OSes. Even as for the documentation you can only have by BUYing it. For instance, O'Reilly's "MacOS X Missing Manuals", although useful books for a Mac-user and although good compared to Apple's homemade (tiny) documentation, cannot compare one second to Unices' documentation. However: Apple architectures are much fewer, hence, it would be much easier for them to write adequate documentation! More generally, free software's documentation (not only OSes') is often better than proprietary's.

In order to NOT let you think my analogy with a school of spirituality be excessive, think about how "messianic" are the endeavour and behaviour of many activists of the FSF, of the Linux ecosystem, etc. Some kind of Revolution and War against proprietary software has been declared —whether we are legitimate to think this war is just self-defense, a right cause, etc. or not is not the point here. There IS a war going on.

Even inside the sole Linux ecosystem, there are many "confessional" wars going on too — about the init you use, about the kernel modules to integrate, about security and privacy, about the desktop you use, about the way packages are managed, about the libraries, about the license you use for your software, about in what language softwares are written, even about what is your favourite text-editor or web-browser!, and so on… For instance, to the eyes of a Debianist, if YOU are not a Debianist, you are nothing but an heretic, aren't you? (And, just like in early Christianity, being an heretic is WORSE than being a "pagan", i.e. an MS- or Apple-user!) Maybe Debian is too much obvious an example to my point ;), but the same could apply to other distributions as well…)

JUST AS they are hundreds of schools of Buddhism (each one pretending being the right one), there are hundreds of communities claiming they are the true heirs of the Unix "spirit".

The many GNU/Linux distros have claimed so. Many have renounced since, more or less secretly. Most of them still do claim being Unix. (C)

(C) Just see how isolated is the GoboLinux project just because they emulate another filesystem hierarchy that is not the FHS (Filesystem Hierarchy Standard). Immediately, they were suspected to do so for bad, evil reasons, being one the following: 1. being too stupid to understand Unix or 2. aiming to Windowzify Linux, i.e. to un-Unixify a *nix. Very few take in account the reasons why GoboLinux took this path.

But is this claim still true? Hasn't it become some marketing positioning, some pure PR ("Public Relations") crap?

(Although I'm quite aware of the diversity in Linux, I'll take "Linux" as a whole in what follows, just to "keep it simple" and target a global trend.) Many are the signs that Linux HAS already betrayed most of its original promises.

Freedom: Well, as we all know here, some crappy init system has spread like a disease and, even if the "choice" remains, it is more and more difficult to sustain a concrete system (which, by the way, you run only in order to run APPLICATIONS) with useful applications to run on which do not depend on the aforesaid crappy non-Unix spirited init. It is NO secret for the well-informed that Linux and, more generally, the Open-Source, is now owned by the Corporate. It's not just a question of money (so much noise in the community when Novell got a deal with Microsoft ten years ago!) It's also a question of the CODE you integrate, and the way developers do CODE. It's a cultural issue.
"Unix spirit" (or "Unix way", if you prefer): See my point above. Also consider how bloated and crappy are MOST of the applications that populate the repositories of ANY today distro. (But some will stand this in the name of "choice"!) ;) Consider the crappiness of many libraries. On that point of Unix unorthodoxy, after all, we had been warned, haven't we? "GNU is Not Unix." And some people half-joke that Linux stands for "Linux Is Not UniX". Many recent events tend to show it's NOT a joke at all.
It's a bit anecdotal and recent, but it also says much: ESR has been sacked from the OSI, whom he was one of the fathers. Not from the board (I'm not sure if he had already left it or not) but from the very mailing-list. He has been silented. I do not agree with ESR's vision. But the one-side way he has been sacked should be a subject of serious concern for those who still believe in the Open-Source model and culture.
Frugality : When I decided to dive into Linux and migrate completely, it was not only because I embraced the ethos of "libre" software. It was also, which I consider a corellary ethos, for the promise of being able to run old hardware. This demand is more ethical now than ever, when considering the way we're spoiling this world with our stupid (organised) waste of resources. (Even the dumb people who call themselves "press-reporters" have realised there is something called "planned obsolescence". Even Apple fanboys have heard about it! Thanks, the iPhone!) What's Linux good if it cannot offer to a wide crowd (demos) of end-users the ability to run the computers they have bought only ten years ago and which are still capable machines? (But to do so, sorry, I'm not ready to install Puppy…) Note that I'm not speaking about people who are already and immediatly able to install "niche" distros the CLI way to install a lightweight system on a 32-bit computer. I'm talking about the average computer users. It's been more than a decade that Linux fanboys claim Linux is mature for the desktop and easy to install for the average end-user. The truth is quite other when it comes to revive old (but not SO old!) stations.
Code-correctness : As far as I know, that remains the fight of very few people out there. The guys of suckless.org, some guys here at Obarun and systemd-free, some people who create or maintain "niche" distros (Slackware, Gentoo, some systemd-less Arch distros, Obarun being one of them, some non-Arch KISS distros (D), etc.) Yet, originally, afaik, the expression was emphasized (if not forged) by Theo de Raadt. And more than quarter a Century after having forked NetBSD to OpenBSD, it seems that this principle remains one of his main FIGHTS. And I fear for him he must feel quite alone…

(D) Among them, I have to mention… Void (despite the recent turn that fungalnet has unsealed a week ago), NuTyX, Adélie, Hyperbola, KISS Linux. (Those I forget will forgive me. And they are free to make themselves know!)

How revive old hardware now?

Personally, my main laptop has been running Obarun for 10 weeks and my older 32-bit netbook has been running Void for 2 weeks. I had to battle a bit to customise Void to my taste and get a system that works and can access the web by Wi-Fi. (But I wouldn't say it's Void's fault, that's just me having been accustomed to get the wireless work "out of the box" on all the distros I have installed before.) And, when I could make my first wireless web-browsing (in Falkon or Qutebrowser) from that very Void box, it was only to read fungalnet's posts on Void being that "behind closed doors" kind of development team, a distro whose users are not WARNED that some of their software will be erased and replaced by something else when updating! It's not just the question of it being elogind…

Hence, I'm still looking for a better system to run on my 32-bit netbook. I've considered Adélie, Hyperbola, and a few others.

Three months ago, to fit the bill of a reliable, frugal, systemd-free and 32-bit OS to install on my 10-year old netbook, I had tried NomadBSD, which is a quite good and user-friendly live-iso system. But I broke it within a few days, when trying to upgrade its base from FreeBSD 12.0 to 12.1 —FreeBSD version upgrades, even minor version ones, are a drag! The mirrors are slow and unreliable, and, curiously, while the FreeBSD documentation is generally quite good, the topics concerning version upgrades are… well, not so good!— Yet, I do not regret that unsuccessful episode, from which I learned a few things and that may have prepared me to install Obarun on my other station… I don't regret the failure of my FreeBSD trying all the more because I've recently learned that FreeBSD is not as much a good Unix as it's said to be. (I'll have some further words on that point later.)

And when I eventually installed Void on the same netbook, of course I did it because Void provides a i686 version, because the Void repos are now quite widely populated (I would not have installed Void three years ago), because Void can be installed from live-isos that let you giving it a try before, and also because Void is reputated for its frugality. (And that reputation is not deceptive.) But I mainly installed Void because, from what I had read here and there, it seemed one of the most OpenBSD-ish Linux distros.
Now, the facts that 1. Adélie claims (between the lines) a somewhat OpenBSD-oriented care to adapt a Gentoo background experience and that 2. Hyperbola has officially announced they are migrating their base from Linux to OpenBSD has raised my attention to the latter. (Not to mention this page of systemd-free and this comment that inspired it. Plus this page of the OpenBSD site.)

BSDs vs Linuces

I'm not quite sure Theo de Raadt is the actual person who said what follows —I wouldn't be surprised he did, though, because it sounds like him. Nevertheless, the quote goes (in substance) like this: "The crowd of Linux people keep on walking their path because they hate Microsoft. We (BSD people) keep on walking our path because we love Unix."

That says a lot. (E) And I've also recently come across a quote by Linux Torvalds himself that concurs (at least a bit) on Linux NOT being the most correct way, Unixly speaking. He once said (in substance): "When I was about to start Linux, if 386BSD had been released, there would be no Linux today."

(E) Even the fact the quote mentions Microsoft and not Apple as the target of hatred is quite accurate. Many Linux people do not think very highly of Apple as a Corporation, but very rare despise MacOS X (now macOS) as a system. As a matter of fact, macOS is the model that most of mainstream Linux people follow…

I'm not narrating my (noobie) stream of thoughts and researches by narcissism. I'd like to give concrete experiencial foundation to my point. Which is:

After having "taken refuge" (from Windows) in Linux 12 years ago, I wonder if the time has not come to "take refuge" from Linux (as it has become now) to OpenBSD.

The thing is:

Contrarily to the majority of Linux distros, you cannot check what packages are available for OpenBSD before installing it. (F) (At least, I have not found a simple way to do so. If someone knows, please share in a comment.)
You cannot give it a try without actually installing it: there's no GUI-live-iso of OpenBSD. (G) (Well, of course, you can always play with it in a VM, but that's not what I do and we all know that the experience in a VM, though similar, is not quite identical to what it is on real hardware.)

(F) With FreeBSD, you can query their "ports" from a web-portal, just as with the repos of Arch, Debian, Void, etc.

(G) While NomadBSD lets you give a try to FreeBSD, with an Openbox live-session experience, with immediate wireless connection —if your hardware is compatible, which is often the case, don't believe all the trolls on DW and YouTube. I'll say more: without any ethernet wire, I was able to install NomadBSD on my i686 netbook, then update, then browse the web. And this install ran smoothly. My issue occured only when upgrading the FreeBSD base from 12.0 to 12.1, which is completely different. And I was the one who absolutely wanted to upgrade: I was not imposed, or even proposed, by pkg, the package-manager. For those who may be interested, the NomadBSD last iso has now been updated to a new version, based on FreeBSD 12.1-p2.

But as for me, after having listened to several conferences and interviews of Theo de Raadt, I don't aim to install any FreeBSD flavour anymore. It will be OpenBSD (maybe DragonflyBSD) or nothing. Theo de Raadt is the most sensible, reasonable, articulate "distro" project-manager I've heard so far (among the old mother-distros, Éric!) ;) I take it as a good sign of probity that he's been keeping going on ever since he began OpenBSD, 26 years ago, and as another (sad) good sign that the OpenBSD is lacking money. — At least, it means that they are not sponsored by the Corporate, even via one of these dubious FOSS NGOs. (It seems the same applies to DragonflyBSD, by the way.)

They are not here for the money. They are here for the love of correct-coding and for the love of Unix.

Sooo...

What do YOU think?