Comment by kev009
6 hours ago
These types of projects tend to have a flash of appeal, especially to people used to Linux, because it lessens one degree of unfamiliarity, but they don't seem to stick around for to me obvious reasons.
It's hard to get involved with something like a BSD project because you have to learn a lot and put in enough effort to get committer rights. And then if you want to move the needle you have to do even more work and build consensus without getting overly emotional when people disagree with you. But it is the path I would recommend to have a lasting impact, and I am speaking from experience as a FreeBSD and NetBSD src committer.
Also, pkgsrc is one of the strong points of NetBSD, coupled with pbulk and pkgin. Wrapping that all up in an opinionated installation (like Omarchy recently did to Arch) would be a more survivable effort. But as my friend Larry McVoy would say, it means you don't always get to drive the big red fire truck by yourself.
The BSDs do have comparatively miserable contributor experiences, though I understand why. At least from my very, very limited exposure.
Several years ago now, I ran into a problem with playing audio on NetBSD/sparc. I had an RDI PowerLite laptop, which is 80% of a SPARCstation 5 clone stuffed into a laptop chassis. Part of the 20% different was the audio chip, which was the same AMD ISDN chip used in the SPARCstation 1/2, doing mu-law audio.
Whenever I'd play audio, the laptop would instantly reset. Huh. That's weird. I ended up figuring out that someone had recently massively overhauled the audio driver subsystem in the kernel, and basically the relevant audio driver was missing some mutex operation, and an assert() was panic'ing the kernel.
For a non SMP system, the lock wasn't necessary (IIRC) but the new code was being more rigorous and causing a kernel panic.
The patch was pretty easy, just adding a few locks/unlocks. But I could never figure out what I was supposed to do with the patch after.
I'm probably just stupid. I don't want to imply there's no path to do this, I just never figured it out. I didn't try for long either, since getting 8-bit mu law audio working was just something goofy I was doing for fun.
But for comparison, when I found a bug in the signal handler for 32-bit PowerPC, my memory was that it was pretty straightforward to produce a patch: find the relevant maintainer, open a dialogue, and eventually submit a patch: https://marc.info/?l=linuxppc-embedded&m=160963760120837
Neither fix was ultimately very important, and neither would have impacted more than a couple dozen people on the entire planet. But Linux got a patch, while NetBSD didn't...
> But I could never figure out what I was supposed to do with the patch after.
Send an email to the dev list with a patch. Same as Linux, Git itself, and a lot of other projects.
>I had an RDI PowerLite laptop
Just out of curiosity, why the Sparc laptop? While I'd love to find one today to tinker with, I assume anyone who had one back then was mainly working on sun machine's / unix and needed some at home familiarity.
I bought mine back in 2019, when I was ... 22. I was going through my "I want a real UNIX machine!" phase, and that's why I went through the motions of trying to make NetBSD "genuinely usable" on it.
Nowadays it runs SunOS 4.1 with a port of KDE 1 on it, and netboots Sprite for fun.
Of course, after porting the Sprite kernel to said laptop, I learned why the Linux kernel is littered with comments like this, and why it was never quite the beautiful, elegant, UNIX :tm: machine I imagined it was.
Or, maybe, it was even more UNIX-y than I had thought. :-)
(of course, the laptop itself is lovely -- the plastic shell has a nice rounded edge for your wrists, and the keyboard uses proper mechanical switches that feel much nicer than actual Sun keyboards of that era)
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> Wrapping that all up in an opinionated installation (like Omarchy recently did to Arch) would be a more survivable effort.
Well we currently have fallout in FreeBSD land because of Jordan Hubbard slopping together Daemonarchy.
Going about as well as you expect when you even loosely tie yourself to a crazy white nationalist like DHH. Even in what is barely a reference to his slop dotfiles masquerading as a distro.
As DHH is a Danish guy partly or mostly living in the US, it would be interesting to know this nationalist's view of the whole Greenland thing.
Most residents of Greenland are indigenous Inuits. A boot-licking fascist would be happy to betray his own country and support selling off the territory.