The musl community is one of my favorite things on the internet. It's obvious that many members of it could be making a generous salary at any number of companies but they're just hanging out on IRC because they don't give a shit and they love software.
I don't get the sense that they think they are infallible, just that they are right far more often than not. You can't achieve the sort of spartan aesthetic that you see in the musl codebase by handling things like everyone else. The ability to distill things to their essence betrays a very high level of understanding.
As they say in the streets, the dope sells itself.
Competition from Linux has become very stiff. For me, Kubuntu 19.10 delivers on all of the promises that OpenSolaris made back in the day. My laptop has two 1TB SSDs in a ZFS mirror. Docker works as you'd hope, creating a new ZFS dataset for each container. I have remarkably good hardware support, everything just works. I'd say that the user experience rivals or beats MacOS or Windows, although at this point I'd say it is largely just a matter of preference.
Linux still lacks the multitenant security guarantees of Solaris Zones but this isn't so bad. Hard multitenancy is a problem that only concerns a fairly small subset of people and even then, there are solutions. You can do hard multitenancy with Linux containers (namespaces/cgroups to be pedantic) if you start restricting the system call table. There is also Firecracker[1] which obviously isn't as efficient as Zones (because it uses VMs), but is proven in production and does provide additional security guarantees.
The technical advantages of Illumos are outweighed (or rivaled) at this point, in my opinion. When I show people things on my laptop, I always end up talking about the desktop cube in KDE or my neovim/tmux/zsh setup. Due to ZFS snapshots and the power of zfs send/recv, I expect this system installation to last for years to come. No more reinstalls, we're good, this operating system thing is covered.
To get off into the weeds a bit... I've actually spent quite a bit of time using Illumos. The epicenter of The Suck begins, in my mind, with the effort involved in actually building the system.
GCC (and Clang) obviously didn't exist back in the day, so none of the Makefiles for the base system are written for a compiler that was released in the past 20 years. There is actually a wrapper that takes SunCC arguments and calls GCC... so that kinda works, right?
Okay, well, yes. It works. But then, it all kinda starts snowballing. There is a big investment in a debugger from the 1980s which can't unwind stacks without frame pointers. So... we have to emit frame pointers. Okay, that works. Because we care a lot about this, we'll also ensure that all function arguments promoted to registers are also copied to the stack so we can always look at them. Okay, fair enough.
Is this idiosyncratic enough for you yet? Okay, let's step it up a few notches and actually implement the Linux system call table on top of this. Wait, what? The struggle is real.
This is all technically brilliant in any number of ways, but I have things to do this week. All of the man years of effort spent on Linux and the surrounding ecosystem have actually solved a lot of real technical problems and solved them incredibly well.
Like any large scale project with a long history, we certainly have our share of eccentricities. We're working on moving the argument translation from cw (our "compiler wrapper") more directly into the Makefiles themselves.
I would note that both Studio and GCC are both older than 20 years if you're going by the date when they were first released; releases of both that we were using (Studio is no longer in use) were released more recently than 20 years ago. We currently recommend people use GCC 7.3 or 7.4 to build the OS, and those were released in the last two years.
The debugger I believe you're talking about is MDB[1], which is emphatically not from the 1980s. It was started as a project in the lead up to Solaris 7, as I understand, which was closer to 2000. GDB was first released in 1986, but I don't think either of these dates are a meaningful observation: they're both actively maintained debuggers with a different approach and a different focus.
There are lots of arguments for, and presumably against, the use of %rsp as a frame pointer. They're all trade-offs. The amd64 architecture is, at least, less register starved than 32-bit x86. Stack unwinding with correct use of the frame pointer is substantially less complex than using the unwinding information provided by DWARF sections. This helps a lot when making the stack() and ustack() DTrace routines available, as they need to unwind the stack in an extremely limited context in the kernel. Saving arguments to the stack (-msave-args) is another trade-off tilting the scale toward a better debugging experience, because yes, we do care a lot about that as a project.
At the end of the day, you should use whatever makes you happy and solves problems for you. Those of us who work on illumos, use it at home, or ship it in products, are doing so for just that reason.
I love this concept and I love that it is proliferating. Purism offers what I'd consider to be more attractive hardware, but that's very subjective. As of Kubuntu 19.10, I actually consider Linux to be the best operating system for a laptop.I look forward for 20.04 and a few years of near total disregard for updates.
I want to be an AMD fanboy! I want (at least) 16 cores, 32 threads, a fully open source graphics stack, Wayland, flicker free boot, and open source firmware as described here. As it is, I just had to go with Intel/NVidia because it's more seamless. Even though I'm not really using the NVidia GPU, I do have it available if I want to work with Tensorflow etc. Ultimately, for me it is a question of stability but I hope that these systems can really close the gap.
I want something like this System76 machine with very good support for encrypted ZFS right out of the box. I don't know if that would entail LUKS or ZFS encryption, but I want it to work. I want a USB key that actually serves as a key and allows me to boot or otherwise unlock the system. Again, I'd prefer this to be a fully open source AMD/ATI system based on Kubuntu. With ZFS, bpftrace, and Docker... this is what Solaris wanted to be when it grew up.
I'm not sure how big the market for this would be, but I'd pay good American money if anyone catered to it. Right now I'm using a Dell G3 Intel/Nvidia laptop which, in fairness, is obscenely fast.
If you aren't using a GPU regularly, Why not use a cloud gpu? Cloud CPU is cheap as free if it's just occasional playing around, vs $100 to $1000 and all the manufacturing pollution to be stuck with a GPU you don't use
I wanted to use the NVidia GPU in this laptop, it just doesn't work as well as the Intel GPU (I hate screen tearing). I think this will be great as a development environment once I get around to making Docker work with the NVidia drivers (allegedly it should). I'm not sure if you can do the same thing with AMD gear but the ability to create a Tensorflow NN and distribute it as a hardware accelerated Docker image is pretty cool.
I'm a happy Protonmail user and I think this (even if it were true) is only an issue if you are being unrealistic. All companies can be legally compelled to take action regardless of their jurisdiction. If you have some gratuitously paranoid threat model, you should be using Tor anyway.
I like their service much more than GMail and I feel much more comfortable with regard to data privacy when using it.
The worst part of it, in my experience, is that it can be hard to tell a food founder from a bad founder until you've spent some time working with them. I think that venture capitalists have the same issue although they generally have a much larger database of wins and losses to shape their opinions.
Based solely on the title, I assumed this article was going to be about Jeff Bezos. We're entering a brave new world where all compute is rented from Bezos and can only be used for the furtherance of his agenda. The recent tabloid scandal kinda speaks to the underlying problem. When given documentary evidence of a tryst between Bezos and a married woman, these people did the right thing and tried to blackmail him. Bezos somehow managed to turn this into a story about his endless accomplishments and his courage in the face of adversity! Bezos isn't even competing against other companies anymore because that would be too easy. Bezos is actually competing against the rest of humanity now. We're entering the era of Bezos Purpose computing.
I went to elementary school with the founder of RapidSOS and it's pretty cool to see one of us country boys making the front page of HN! If I'm being objective about this, I think it's a fairly good idea in the abstract but it will be very difficult to monetize. Where I grew up, there are still huge gaps in cellular coverage and this won't help people who can't even make a call. I do think there is a there there but it's fraught with peril. That said, best of luck to Michael! At the very least, his heart is in the right place.
I realize it's somewhat off topic, but I feel like Joyent Manta deserves an honorable mention. It's an S3 style object store, but you can spin up containers on top of objects and do massively parallel computations with Unix tools.
Is it possible to start an S corporation instead? Part of the appeal of Delaware is that transitioning from S->C is a well defined process, and a C corp seems a bit silly for many businesses.
I don't get the sense that they think they are infallible, just that they are right far more often than not. You can't achieve the sort of spartan aesthetic that you see in the musl codebase by handling things like everyone else. The ability to distill things to their essence betrays a very high level of understanding.
As they say in the streets, the dope sells itself.