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On 04/04/15 11:45, Migel Wimtore wrote: > "it's not like I'm unfamiliar or n00blike with Arch or any other system > for that matter." > > Well, I mean setup time as in time from base install to functioning > desktop environment. As in choosing and installing a fair few packages > and setting them all up. It's no big deal, but compared to the > straight-to-desktop experience of most other popular distros, it's not > negligible either. And, unless you have that automated with a script or > something, this is what I meant by time consuming. Nothing to do with > noobishness. Your technical literacy comes accross in your writing > clearly enough. > > "My fridge will be asking Amazon to buy more milk in a few years. I > really hope that whatever crappy OS does that, it will be a bit less > rubbish than anything I'm using now." > > Personally, I like to have discrete and, as much as time and expertise > will allow: hardened OSes in my laptop, phone, and mp3 player (well, > this last one doesn't have an intertet connection and runs a free OS, lol). > Call me fusty, but I store very little remotely, take care of all my own > backups and feel no desire to hook my household appliances up to the > network for marginal convenience gains, nor my systems to each other, at > any level lower than that of a couple of interoperability programs and > user initiated connections. > It seems we have trouble enough securing our dedicated computer systems > (networks, home computers, phones and tablets), which are designed with > security in mind (as far as it doesn't impinge on general-user's > convenience); I am not rushing to put my house and vehicle online > anytime soon. There to expose me and my friends and family to further > tracking and and data monetisation, and potentially seeing us targeted > in more sinister and destructive ways. > > The marginal life-style benefits are not worth the trade off for me. > Give me keys, light switches, shopping lists, manual thermostats, > mechanical cars, and keep my computers general purpose, please. > > Ps: what are you liking about FreeBSD currently. ZFS and jails are > certainly cool. But RMS cries and gorges himself on toejam everytime a > BSD is spun-up. Won't anybody think of the messiah?! Primarily because BSD is a lesser evil these days - sadly it's not even necessarily positive features that are drawing me in, more the lack of Linux stupidity that is forcing my hand. Zones are actually nice and a native ZFS root is a priceless feature (you can do it on Linux, it's just a bit hacky still and rather fragile) but the overwhelming advantage is BSD's boring, stable, practical and unchanging approach to modernising that I'm increasingly drawn to - apart from slowly and steadily adding cool new things, it just doesn't ever really change much and that's a good thing. I'm sick of being forced to adopt whatever stupid new $FEATURE Linux has decided to force on us this week, and yes, of course this is partly aimed at systemd. I'm interested as to what you mean by hardened OSes, especially in regards to your phone: I've got a jailbroken iPhone and a rooted Android that I've had a good go at locking down but I still wouldn't exactly consider them hardened, just a bit less leaky than the stock ROMs from their respective useless manufacturers (Apple and Samsung). I categorically do not trust either phone anywhere near as far as I could throw them considering that's probably a pretty good distance if the last ring had been another damn robocall... Even though you may like it as little as me the Internet of Things is pretty much already here, and there's little we can do about it. From 'smart' electricity meters and thermostats to wireless connected sensors, watches, fridges and cars, *everything* will soon be network addressable from a hacker, law enforcement or stalkers perspective, and all this stuff will be running crappy, proprietary, non-updatable and ridiculously insecure software: our illusion of privacy will be completely gone within a decade. There will be no opt-out because before long it will be simply impossible to buy non-networked, non-broken gadgets of any kind - fridges without IPv6 simply won't exist. Unless you're going to 3D print everything you ever own yourself and microwave every embedded RFID tag in every single thing you ever don't fab yourself, the dystopian future has you firmly in it's grasp. God, I've even made myself feel miserable now. -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/listfaq