the life and times of the lesser spotted packet jockey

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

IN hindsight, I was probably lucky I made it three-quarters of the way through November managing to keep up posting something considering the workload I’m juggling. I had to give a very high priority to my research for school and in the end that just had to win out. C’est la vie. But, abbreviated though it was, It still provided a few brief moments here and there to take a break from that work to jot down a few thoughts and read those of a few friends who were also doing NaBloPoMo.

I did start the Orion questionnaire, so I’ll go ahead and finish that at least, and will try to keep up some kind of trickle of entries as I can, but I’m still deep in the research work, so we’ll see….

Happy belated Thanksgiving and happy upcoming holidays to everyone.

The best-laid plans of mice and men often go astray, and leave us only grief and pain for promised joy.
—John Steinbeck
Of Mice and Men

FELLOW blogger Kari wrote in her blog about “an article where louise erdrich [sic] answered questions from the orion website.” The questionnaire is one of those “get to know each other better” sorts of things so I thought it sounded fun to try out as well.

It would be fun to see if any of my friends want to try these questions in your blogs as well. Given the length of the questionnaire, I’m going to split it up over a few posts instead of trying to tackle the entire set all at once.

• Do you knock on wood? As Michael Scott said so famously now as to be a cliché at this point, “I’m not superstitious. I’m just a little stitious.” Except I’m really not at all stitious—I mean, I’m not a superstitious person although it does amuse me to do things like knock on wood ironically for fun or to troll people sometimes. So… sometimes, I might.
• There’s a spider in the room; what do you do? Depends on its armor class and whether I memorized fireball that morning. Or how cool it is. I mean, you can’t deny that an anadi or giant mutant phase spider are pretty neat as species go. But while I may not scream and run from the room per se, I wouldn’t exactly be comfortable sharing my living space with something with just too many eyes staring back at me like that. I’d probably find a way to relocate it so we can both get on with our lives.
• What is your most treasured comfort meal? There are quite a number I could name, but the one that popped into my brain first just now was Mongolian BBQ.
• What is a species you feel is frequently misunderstood? Australopithecus afarensis. While biology, paleontology, and anthropology are not my fields of expertise, I find them interesting from a distance and have listened to what a number of experts in those fields have said. And I have unfortunately heard an awful lot of misinformation about “Lucy” by people who are far less informed than they would like their audiences to believe, when there’s money to be made by spinning conspiracy theories.
• In what environment do you feel most at home? In a quiet place surrounded by computers I can hack on and family and close friends I can be my introverted self around.
• My favorite tree in the world is? No. 1… The larch….¹
• What is something you’re looking forward to? Christmas. I always love the Christmas season, the lights, the food, the celebrations and all, but this year I’m looking most to being back with my family to celebrate the holiday.
• What was your last memorable animal encounter? Snuggling with our kitty Sabrina.
• Do you have any unusual hobbies, hidden talents, or superpowers you’d like to share? Making cool but useless gizmos out of microcontrollers (like quiz shows and computer-controlled Christmas lights) is probably a bit unusual.
• If you could, regardless of the climate, reach out of your kitchen window pluck a fruit from a tree, bush, or a plant, what would it be? Maybe the silver apples from Narnia in The Magician’s Nephew by C. S. Lewis.

The man who asks a question is a fool for a minute, the man who does not ask is a fool for life.
—孔子 (Confucius)