BSD Bros vs SysV Sisters. Is this anything

@mcc no, because Illumos is garbage

@ariadne @mcc what's bad about it? (i've never used illumos and my knowledge about it is limited to "they made some amusing slides about the linux subsystem")

@whitequark @mcc

the main issue is that Sun did not fully open source everything in the first place. there are quite a few binary blobs that still exist, even today. this is not a thing with BSD or Linux.

beyond that, Solaris is just a clunky, slow and bloated system. almost all of the good ideas from Solaris have been reimplemented elsewhere in some form or another.

@mcc This is annoying #lang_en

@mcc Two of the early lights in BSD (fellows, but I wouldn't call them bros) are married to each other and have a wine cellar up in Berkeley. I took a BSD filesystem course from one and worked for the other in Emeryville. So... maybe? I can't speak to SysV.

@mcc can't we all just be POSIX Pals?

@ariadne @whitequark @mcc I found it mostly just incredibly stable, predictable and well-documented. The man pages were top notch, and the system felt properly engineered. But it has definitely aged a lot and most Solaris distributions nowadays import lots of Linux and FreeBSD tech.

Sun not open-sourcing everything was partially legal reasons with 3rd party contractors holding the copyright, e.g. with i18n code. And then Oracle came and put a nail in the coffin.

But yes, most of the ideas of Solaris live on, be them SMF (upstart, launched, systemd) or ZFS (Btrfs). Like most of Sun tech, Star Office being LibreOffice now, Sun Java, etc.

@mcc I'd have imagined that BSD was more sapphic, but you probably know more about both topics than I do

@mcc And the systemd hoes like myself

@wotsac don't look at me, I was using Macintoshes until 2021. I have wasted my life

@jmeowmeow @mcc I am aquainted with those fellows as well. Bro is not BSD. Another old BSD acquaintance, Rat, would flex his teeth hearing the like. Maybe, 'braah'.

@alzdran @mcc Not-Windows Niblings

@ljrk @ariadne @whitequark @mcc the boundary between "incredibly stable, predictable and well-documented" and "clunky, slow and bloated" is much thinner than one'd think, and I say that as someone who supported Solaris in an open source project until ca. 2020. Just not touching things is "stable". It's also "rotting". And there was so much rot… I'm happy our workarounds are gone.

P.S.: "Solaris distributions nowadays"… just let the dead horse lie.

Oh and they never fed their improvements back.

@mcc Haiku homies. BeOS babes. TempleOS ... transients?

@equinox @ariadne @whitequark @mcc Oh, absolutely! I just liked that when I did a thing for the first time on Solaris, most often it behaved exactly as one would've imagined and consistently in harmony with the rest of the design. That was and still is a big appeal for me.

With stable I mostly meant "I didn't face many quirky bugs" not API stability, but that of course is also true. And something I consider perhaps Solaris' other downfall: The Windows-esque backwards compatibility trumps everything mentality. Somehow a laudable goal but bringing often more harm than good.

Solaris still lives on in niches such as OmniOS for Oxide Computer, but with many modernized/replaced components.

@mcc

Siblings arguing.

@mcc damn! My two brain sides are now looking weirdly at each other…

@ariadne @whitequark @mcc did you know solaris and illumos still use userspace X.Org drivers and don't even support Wayland in the first place?

@ariadne @whitequark @mcc I wish this was true but it isn’t.

DTrace is best integrated in illumos
mdb is best integrated in illumos and no other debugger comes close
Zones is best integrated in illumos and trying to “reimplement” it on Linux or BSD is a nightmare.

Yes illumos is slow/bloated, but it is the most advanced Unix-like operating system out there.

Don’t even get me started on SMF. Everything else is just a temu version of SMF.

I still have nightmares about SMF, some kind of object-oriended Bash metaprogramming spaghetti monster. It was nice to use but

at what cost


CC: @ariadne@treehouse.systems @whitequark@mastodon.social @mcc@mastodon.social

@antranigv @whitequark @mcc i said ideas, not specific technologies