Everyone (and their mother) have been trying to convince me that I should use one of my less loaded servers to be a Fediverse node. However, all Fediverse software packages I checked only support being installed on complicated systemd + Docker machines. My servers don’t have either of those, because neither systemd nor Docker even exist on OpenBSD and illumos.

I know that it would be possible to manually install (e.g.) Lemmy, assuming that I won’t ever need official support, but I wonder why the world outside a limited subset of the Linux ecosystem is - at most - an afterthought for Fediverse developers.

How can I help to change that?

  • rhabarba@feddit.deOPEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    Unless one fancies rewriting systemd .unit files each time something needs to be installed (which I don’t), the practical choice is to work with it.

    The last Linuces I deliberately played with :-) were Gentoo and Void, both being non-systemd distributions by default. The point is that, if Linux was about choice (at least that’s what I’m told rather often than not), a particular init system should not be a component on which other components depend.

    At least none of the services on my servers demanded systemd just yet. Maybe I’m a minority.

    I can transfer a handful of configuration files to a brand new computer and replicate my system precisely, encompassing all my installed packages and configurations, including those in $XDG_CONFIG_HOME. It will literally recreate the same exact environment.

    Sounds like a glorified rsync to me. I can imagine how this could come in handy if you have a whole set of identical machines that should serve the exact same purpose. I never had this situation in my own environments yet.

    And both of them are inspired by Unix, what’s your point? :P

    The D in BSD means distribution. BSD was Unix until the early 90s. Admittedly, today’s BSD is quite a different piece of software than 4.xBSD, especially given that both macOS and OpenBSD started with (a version of) it.

    I believe that all code that matters should be FOSS

    So do I, and the BSD license is a FOSS license. That does not necessarily mean that you are allowed to sell my code - or that I must not sell mine. Nobody said that FOSS requires “free of charge”. And if you spend quite a lot of money, I’m even sure that Microsoft will gladly sell you the Windows code. I a way, all code is free - it only depends on your bank account.