My dear friend, this is (again!) some beautiful art you got there ! This could easily be the artwork for openbsd 7.6 ! If you don’t mind me I’d like to mention it on /c/openbsd so your work doesn’t go unnoticed? :D

I cannot speak for prahou, but I’m fairly sure we both agree on this:

• Codebase is clean and lean
• Security is a first grade citizen
• Dev team is not afraid to call stuff obsolete and remove/replace stuff
• It’s a full operating system, not just a kernel that you need to build on top of before distributing it
• Config files syntax is cohérent across the whole OS
• master Puffy rocks.

We call them crowdstals down there. They used to only target ancients NT kernels but apparently they evolved to infect other environments. Eh, nature.

Nope. But I’m eager to know how you can be so confident saying that ? (FYI the WiFi is served by a hotspot from my phone, which uses a randomized MAC address)

Oh I love this style <3 It’s refreshing and yet so comforting because it’s still girl :D

Thanks !

Gotta punch holes in the screen and hammer the keyboard a bit haha. But remember friends, Hardware is forever.

Easy, become a Magnetic Nymph today !

The real answer here.

Worth it.

Right now overlays requires elevated privilèges, but ideally it shouldn’t. Rewriting the Linux kernel to implement per user namespaces like plan9 does would allow unprivileged actions from any user (just like if any user was sitting in a container, overlayed from the base system).

I know we’re not there, and that’s not the direction development is going, but this thread is about dreams, right ? 😉

About the XDG specs, they serve a totally different purpose so they’re out of the discussion IMO. I’m not advocating against env variables. Just $PATH which is a workaround as I see it, but your mileage may vary. As for your “issue” with steam, of course this is the best way to solve it. Because of today’s OS limitation. My point is that with a better designed namespacing implementation, there would be more elegant solutions to solve it (and would get rid of the need to use LD_LIBRARY_PATH too, or literally any *_PATH env variable)

By mounting the binary over, I mean something like a bind mount. But in your case of a wrapper script, it doesn’t apply indeed. Though in this case I would simply name the script steam-launcher and call it a day 🙂

Having multiple executables with the same name and relying on $PATH and absolute paths feels hackish to me, but that’s only a matter of preference at this point.

I’m not saying we should get rid of $PATH right now. My point is that it was created to solve a problem we don’t have anymore (not enough disk capacity), but we still keep it out of habit.

As a reminder, the discussion is about what should be rewritten from scratch in linux. And IMO, we should get rid of $PATH as there are better options.

Today’s software would probably break, but my point is that $PATH is a relic from ancient times that solved a problem we don’t have anymore.

You missed my point. The reason $PATH exists in the first place is because binaries were too large to fit on a single disk, so they were scattered around multiple partitions (/bin, /sbin, /usr/bin, etc…). Now, all your binaries can easily fit on a single partition (weirdly enough, /usr/bin was chosen as the “best candidate” for it), but we still have all the other locations, symlinked there. It just makes no sense.

As for the override mechanism you mention, there are much better tools nowadays to do that (overlayfs for example).

This is what plan9 does for example. There is no need for $PATH because all binaries are in /bin anyways. And to override a binary, you simply “mount” it over the existing one in place.

$PATH shouldn’t even be a thing, as today disk space is cheap so there is no need to scatter binaries all over the place.

Historically, /usr was created so that you could mount a new disk here and have more binaries installed on your system when the disk with /bin was full.

And there are just so many other stuff like that which doesn’t make sense anymore (/var/tmp comes to mind, /opt, /home which was supposed to be /usr but name was already taken, etc …).

I KNEW IT !! Last of the puffer clan, that couldn’t be real !

sysupgrade seems to fetch 7.5 right now. I’ll see how well it goes !

Edit: upgrade went fine, running 7.5 now !

Can’t wait for next year to keep on investigating this… Girl does have the same “run bad” tatoo as her though so that’s why I’m asking ;)

+1 on the Gazzew U4. I just swapped from browns to it and I’m never going back ! They’re more tactile and much more silent.