the life and times of the lesser spotted packet jockey

I mentioned earlier that having only partially done the Orion questionnaire, I was somehow now destined to keep coming back to write in my journal even after NaBloPoMo was over, like the blogging analogue of the siren’s call of the Trevi Fountain.¹

I find myself with a quiet moment here today and only multitasking less than a dozen other things, so why not move it along a little further as well?

• If you could make pancakes with anyone living or dead, who would it be?
  I’m going to make the assumption that the question is asking about someone I can’t readily do this with today if I wish, so the easy answers of making and sharing breakfast with my spouse and children which would always be my first and everyday desire, or even my own parents, should be stated but for our purposes here set aside for the sake of the deeper “what if…” implied here. I think my grandfather would be my choice. As a young boy I spent many hours with him, learning a lot about his technical expertise and generally looking up to him and spending time with him. It would be nice as an adult to be able to have pancakes (or whatever) with him and be able to share our perspectives now about life and everything looking back on our experiences after all this time.
• What are some of your favorite words?
  你們 (nǐmen—in Chinese they have a plural form of “you,” distinct from the singular— nǐ 你—which is brilliant to make it clear whether you mean “you” as the one person you’re addressing, or the group of people you’re with; there’s yet another form of “you” when addressing a large audience as well), scrumptious, kerfuffle, ephemeral, gazebo, skullduggery, quux, firebottle, frobnitz.
• Who are some of your heroes, heroines, real or fictional?
  The previous question revealed one of mine already. My father has always been another of my real-life heroes especially as I was growing up when it seemed to me there was nothing he couldn’t do. Even as I got old enough to realize he was a regular mortal, I started to appreciate the choices he had to make and how he sacrificed to support his family, always putting others first with patience and compassion that was a role model to me to try to aspire to be like.
• What is something new you’ve done recently?
  Maybe not extremely recently but I’ve been expanding my range a bit on the microcontrollers I’ve been playing with in recent years. Back in the early 2000s I was exclusively using PIC chips but now it’s all Arduinos and Raspberry Pis these days. And I’ve been dabbling a little more in trying to appreciate Anime a bit more.
• What’s the wildest thing you’ve experienced or witnessed in nature?
  Earthquakes, monsoon season, and a really good tropical thunderstorm with lightning bolts striking way too close for comfort certainly remind one to respect Mother Nature and realize how small we humans are when out in the elements by ourselves.
• It’s late afternoon on a summer Saturday, you’re sitting with your feet in a cool creek and someone hands you the perfect beverage. What is it?
  Right now, it would typically be a Diet Coke, I’m embarrassed to admit, but I need to cut down on that, so let’s say a lemonade.

I hate giving interviews.
—Bobby Deol

THE world of computing has no shortage of tribal factions, some of them more fanatical than others. Emacs vs vi, Windows vs Linux, which programming language is the One and Only to rule them all, the list of things we will pile up hills of old CDROMs and unread manuals to then die on are endless.

Some people are content to leave these choices to more pragmatic matters of selecting the right tool for the job at hand, and quietly allowing others to do the same.¹ Others, of course, see their choice of language (*cough*)Rust(*cough*) as superior to all others and are baffled why anyone still bothers using any other language. There are many technical reasons why that is absurd regardless of how amazing that language’s strengths are, of course, but that attitude is kind of interesting psychologically. Why are humans driven to be so territorial about things like this?

And we, of course, see this with Linux distributions² as well. Sometimes I’m amazed Linux got as popular as it has with all the in-fighting between the distro camps (or, perhaps, it owes some of that to the competition created there).

But in terms of smugness, it’s hard to beat the legendary Arch Linux tribe and their viral tagline, often injected unnecessarily into conversations, “I use Arch, BTW.”

And I get the appeal of Arch, personally, if not the attitude. I like working closer to the bare metal of the computer, given my history of starting there and working upward to higher-level languages and operating systems as I learned. I like administrating systems and have even written a device driver or two of my own. I’m not afraid of getting my hands dirty and don’t need a computing “appliance” or someone else to keep it working for me.

On the other hand, I don’t have the spare time at the moment to have to do that all the time. I’d prefer it to be a hobby, not a daily necessity.

But nonetheless, I took the plunge a couple of years ago to “use Arch BTW.”

Purists may object, saying that I didn’t truly use Arch. I did, briefly, and it was fine, but eventually settled on an Arch derivative called Garuda Linux as my daily driver on my desktop system (while my laptop stayed with Pop_OS! that came factory-installed on it).³

It was fine, I liked the fact that the package manager was called pacman, so creativity points to them for that. Generally, it was Linux, and it worked, and I was happy with it. I could bend it to my will more or less as I needed to.

However, over time, the cracks started to show in ways that got too much in the way for me to want to use it every day.

Arch is a “bleeding-edge” kind of system where people tend to always keep the system patched to the latest versions of every package and every system update. But unfortunately that’s not just a tendency, that’s essentially a requirement. If you go too long without updating, things get unhappy.

And unlike other distros, you can’t easily do selective updates or backrev individual packages and apps. You must upgrade everything on the system every time, always, and often. Which means, quite frequently I’d find that someone had made a change somewhere that I had to accept and now my system was broken until someone fixed it.

And that’s really ok if you’re running a Linux system because you like experimenting with computers and aren’t relying on it to be stable to get real work accomplished. But I was. I had personal stuff to do, and research experiments to run and couldn’t afford random downtime arriving like lightning strikes out of the blue.

So a couple of months ago I decided I just had enough and wiped the whole system to go back to my actual favorite operating system, that has always been my favorite since I discovered it as a teenager (i.e., when dinosaurs still roamed the Earth).

Unix.

Specifically, BSD. Specifically specifically, FreeBSD.

Yeah, there’s a bit of a snarkiness there too, but usually it’s a lot more low-key because it’s a smaller, and I think friendlier, community. The only memorable tag-line I remember being viral over time was an old USENET signature line that went something like, “Linux is for people who hate Windows. BSD is for people who love Unix.” (Again, I have more to say about what it is compared to Linux that’s long enough for its own post but for now it’s not Linux but is similar in that it’s also—like Linux—an open-source operating system based on the older Unix operating system but legally and technically a separate codebase and distinct from it.)

After getting it all set up and having moved my data back on to the system, getting reacquainted with ZFS, and settling in, I’ve been pretty happy with it. “They” say BSD isn’t a great choice for a desktop and is best suited as a server OS. That’s not entirely wrong (and to be fair, the same is said of Linux, but a lot more has been invested in getting Linux working better in that space), but it seems to be good enough for me to meet my needs. And it’s better than I recall it being last time I used it.

Rock-solid and stable, too, which is what I need, while also being an OS that’s not remotely interested in holding my hand with administrating a Unix-like system, which I also like.

And having got that all working with version 14.3 of the system, I see that they just released 15.0. So maybe after Christmas I’ll upgrade it. Maybe. I am in the middle of a metric ton of work on my research so maybe it’ll be Christmas, 2026.

There are two major products that came out of Berkeley: LSD and UNIX. We don’t believe this to be a coincidence.
—Jeremy S. Anderson
UNIX systems administrator