Reprinted with permission from Ryan Farmer.

OpenIndiana Hipster Frustrations. (Revisiting Solaris)

I finally downloaded OpenIndiana Hipster, which is a forked continuation of OpenSolaris, from before Oracle shut it down after buying Sun Microsystems.

After reading that they still kept Solaris going, and had packaged an assortment of modern desktop software (and even SeaMonkey!), and had the ZFS file system and (very pretty) Nimbus GTK theme on Mate Desktop, I simply had to try it.

I was hoping for a longer post, but something happened as I was booting it on my older laptop and it bailed to “Single User Mode” and you can’t really do anything with it that way, so that was a let down.

As far as I know, if you get dropped to Single User Mode by SMF (the init system), it means something very bad has happened, and it happened quite fast. So pretty much, that laptop works in an “emergency recovery mode”, as root, on a console. 😛

I may try booting it in VirtualBox and see if it’ll run on that.

(KDE doesn’t have GNOME Boxes, but GNOME Boxes is so awful I always ended up with VirtualBox anyway.)

(If not, then they’ve made the UNIX answer to ReactOS.)

I actually had two OpenSolaris machines running at once when Sun had Ian Murdock, who founded the Debian project, working for them as Vice President of Emerging Platforms.

He resigned when Oracle took over the company. They probably could have found him a new role at Oracle, but it wouldn’t have been working on anything open source, probably. So I don’t know if they pushed him out or if he decided to leave. But Solaris was becoming very usable on the desktop while he was at Sun.

It’s a huge shame what happened to him later. Driven to suicide due to police misconduct.

He deserves to be remembered better than that way, but unfortunately, that’s how the police operate. They probably did such a number on the poor fellow that there’s no telling what he was thinking.

Solaris was as far as I’ve ever gotten in using a non-Linux *nix system for a daily driver.

At the time, thanks to his work (which was wasted by Oracle), it worked really well on PCs and it looked like it may have been a rival to Linux eventually.

Most of the non-Linux *nix systems really don’t really prioritize desktop/laptop computer users as a “use case”, although they may “have X11 and some desktop environments”, few people would ever want to use them as such.

It’s not like I’ve ever been married to the idea of sticking to Linux, but I don’t think any other OS really even cares what the desktop experience is like on a PC.

I’ve never even found working network drivers on FreeBSD on any computer I’ve tried using it on.

There was a desktop-focused FreeBSD called PC-BSD that I tried a long time ago, but while it detected and configured most of my hardware, no network drivers.

And, they’ve just sort of “spackled” in “support” for PC users throughout the years if your idea of “support” is “buy an Nvidia card, use the proprietary driver, and find some Windows driver to stick in the BSD kernel for networking”.

They had a name for Windows (NDIS) networking support. Project Evil.

Today I also ran into this, by “Bill Paul”, who worked on Project Evil.

I think a humorous rant like this would definitely violate some stupid Code of Censorship in “Linux” projects today, so I don’t know if the “F*** ’em if they can’t take a joke.” mentality is still around at FreeBSD, but that’s definitely a point in their column.

The main problem with sticking proprietary modules and Windows drivers in your OS is that now you have security vulnerabilities, bugs, and workarounds for bugs, and the OS vendor can’t even help you if they wanted to. So it just rapidly devolves into this big shitpile that nobody can fix.

The “pragmatism” of telling users to use blobs is that you’re offloading lack of development resources onto the user, where it becomes their problem.

I ran into a post by a Google “engineer” about why CentOS Stream is more appropriate for enterprise use than CentOS was and how everyone that doesn’t like it is a “cargo cult” for wanting the same binaries that Red Hat’s customers get.

Almost like they’re making a case that CentOS Stream is “enterprise” ready, they point out that Twitter (X) is using it.

Twitter (X) hasn’t been noted for being highly reliable after Musk bought it.

Elon Musk has been closing down data centers on not paying his landlords or Web hosting though, so to be fair, it’s hard to tell how much of this is really the fault of CentOS Stream.

I have not noticed anyone from NASA talking about internal usage of Stream. They were using CentOS previously, at NASA.

CentOS Stream is, unreliable in the sense that you aren’t getting the same binaries that RHEL customers get (or at least something very, very close), like you were with CentOS.

If you absolutely need something RHEL-like, you should look into Rocky or Alma, but if you don’t, you should get a distribution like Debian where they show you their code and everyone gets the same binaries.

Red Hat engineers go on and on about making their system “valuable” by adding FIPS-compliance crap to get federal contracts. I’m not really impressed by “security” standards that the NSA has been caught backdooring, and which Windows can meet, so they too can get contracts.

One of the first things OpenBSD did when they forked OpenSSL after countless security disasters and tons of bad code in OpenSSL made it impractical to rely on, is, they deleted the FIPS crap.

(Also, things like DOS support and a big-endian x86…LOL)

Musk can’t afford to pay any of their vendors. He’s lost so much money on Twitter (X) already that he’s daring people to actually do anything about not paying his bills.

He’s a deadbeat. A fraud and a deadbeat.

If your landlord is suing you and you’re daring the city to do something about the unlawful building modifications and zoning issues, then maybe your risk appetite for something like CentOS Stream is high.

This doesn’t really change anything about the issue that IBM is very much opposed to the GNU GPL and comes as close to violating it as their lawyers think they can get away with.

For a while I had a PC running Scientific Linux because the High Energy Physics Labs were cloning RHEL themselves and decided to make it available to everyone.

It was very stable and well-polished.

They ended up telling their users to go run CentOS.

Well, I sure hope they’re happy trying to get any actual work done with this “rolling release” nonsense.

Hey, if it’s good enough for Twitter (X)! ⬆