OpenTelemtry is the perfect example of an overengineered mess.
While I usually think that at least having some standard that people agree on I think OpenTelemtry should be dropped.
A lot of the less popular alternatives (just going with Prometheus, Victoriametrics, etc) are de-facto competing smaller standards and a lot better both in terms of less added complexity and the results you get.
I think OpenTelemetry turned metrics into a farce. In many situations even self-rolled telemetry works better even with the added stuff. The annoying thing is that OpenTelemtry is that big standard now one kind of has to to add compatibility. So please, if you write software, make sure you don't lock yourself into OTel.
What about InfluxDB? Speaking of standards, it’s worth noting that this system was created early on, when microservices were emerging as a concept. Another reason this “de facto standard” emerged is that there were almost no alternatives. This is what we need to understand about standards and who promotes them. But technology doesn’t stand still, and I wouldn’t call Prometheus the standard right now, because OpenTelemetry is already starting to be referred to as the standard in the field of observability. Some people like it, some don’t, but Zabbix and Nagios are still going strong; for some, they remain the standard for monitoring for a variety of personal reasons.
That's all nice on a theoretical but such ideas quickly fall flat in a world where corporations are owned by rich people and create pollution often whole countries are even unable to pull off, often completely unpunished often economically and politically ("we need more jobs") encouraged.
I think reducing individuals to two people whose only difference is wealth in respect to which goods they can buy is wrong when applied to real world societies in the same way that weather prognosis based on a very limited set of parameters is wrong.
Wealth is not a measure to pay just fines or good, but today effectively the approximation for power that individuals, groups of individuals or legal entities hold. And measuring wealth is a huge complex topic on its own which also makes the taxation topic very complicated.
I think that's a huge flaw in present day economical thought. X is good because it increases X/Y ignoring secondary effects. It's like predicting whether it will rain on a given day by just looking at which way the wind goes on your weather station. There is theoretical truth to it, but given both secondary effects and the rest of the world that you might completely ignore but might have complete or partial reversal effects.
And then you have various groups that anyway mess with the details of the rules and people that ignore them through various other means, like not getting caught.
Classic example is also "We raise taxes, because then the rich will go away" which ignores things from "the rich" potentially not giving you anything if they don't give you taxes and the fact that your country might be able to offer a bit more both as a living and a working place than the level of taxes. In fact there have been studies conducted and the reality is that it barely has an effect. Turns out that people don't just leave for paying something that might even indirectly benefit them. Just like if you are rich you probably don't care much if the price for base goods increases, because you might have way bigger incentives like being in a secure place, having a house and family at a place and your company currently running smoothly with no downtrend in sight.
If I kill someone, or behave like an asshole, everyone will hate me, so I've got an incentive not to. Is that so horrible?
The reason that people talk about incentives when it comes to politics is that laws and large parts of present day's richer countries economic systems are controlled by laws, contracts, associations between countries, companies, people, etc. and are an artificially created ruleset. That means if you change rules you change incentives. Eg. if you know a government will bail you out, you lose the incentive to avoid risky things, if there is a tax on something you are it will influence your monetary incentives, if being an asshole is looked upon favorably then you have an incentive to be one. Also if tax fraud isn't considered a crime by large parts of people or is seen as smart then you have an incentive to commit it.
A lot of social change good and bad came from shifts in good and bad incentives.
Even more. If you look at the legal and prison systems in Norway vs eg the US the incentives that individuals, governments and corporations have are a reason for a 5 year recidivism rate of 70% vs 20%.
In general if you think your life will be better as a criminal than the alternative then you will be incentivized become one. If you can choose between joining the mafia that might even care for you or barely getting through with day jobs then you are incentivized to do so.
So if a government manages to make sure your life will certainly better, than the incentive to join is a whole lot lower.
If you are shamed vs praised (or otherwise feel supported) for sexism or racism you will have an incentive to go a certain way.
Cults and so on used incentives in a bad way, many parents use incentives in a good way ("if you clean up your room/finish your homework/behave you'll get ice cream later").
The reason people talk about incentives is because they shape whether things are likely to work out. As we've seen big public companies usually will do everything they can get away with and will break laws if the expected profit is higher than the potential fine. That is a wrong and very much changeable incentive.
And it doesn't have to be laws. It can be public opinion. If the marketing is more expensive than just not doing a bad thing in first place then that's an incentive as well.
Incentives are the things that make people do things good and bad. Incentives are the reason people go out of bed and be it just the incentive to ease the pressure on their full bladder. And even there if getting up will cost you great pain you might have a higher incentive there.
Just like people going to doctors is often dominated by incentives of getting rid of a sickness vs not having to pay money or endure a potentially painful or side effect rich treatment.
They for that reason also were very very early in the Xen game both host and guest. Back when it was essentially a research project, why before hardware virtualization was even on the roadmap for Intel.
I will focus on the things that people rarely point out. Btw. to be clear, I largely use Linux personally and professionally. So no evangelism here.
First of all: The BSDs are ALL general purpose operating systems, not distributions. I just mention this because there is that general "OpenBSD is for routers" and "NetBSD is for old hardware" nonsense. To give you an example. Various things including 3D graphics acceleration for various devices has been available in OpenBSD and DragonFly a lot earlier than in eg. FreeBSD even though FreeBSD for example has proprietary NVIDIA drivers available unlike the rest. People use all of them on server, as desktops and even on gaming devices. It's even kind of a myth in BSD communities that "this BSD is for X".
Something that people who aren't in the BSD users already and especially ones that do use Linux sometimes misunderstand is that the BSDs are independent of one another. Eg. OpenBSD and FreeBSD are as different as eg. FreeBSD and macOS, which is also a BSD and has A LOT of kernel and user space level code shared with FreeBSD. That's why grep -v says FreeBSD that's why docker uses (or used) xhyve which is FreeBSDs bhyve for macOS, which is why you got kqueue and dtrace, etc.
So in that respect "the BSDs" doesn't really work that well and is "dangerously" oversimplifying things.
All of them have a pretty good security track with strengths and weaknesses compared to each other and Linux. I would say it's overall even. But depending whom you ask the difference may very, because even in the Linux world there are different approaches to security. And as anyone having anything serious to do with security it's not that easy to measure security in first place. OpenBSD has a strong focus and achieves a lot on the C side and people who don't use any BSD at all actually and basically don't know it have critical C code compile on OpenBSD to spot issues affecting their actual target platform.
As for development. All of the BSDs increase in terms of development (only happen to know it cause someone once pointed me at an obviously wrong graph). I got a bit interested in that comparison because something that people like to underestimate is that single individuals are still the ones doing huge chunks of big projects. It's insane. Linux kernel might be one of the very few exceptions because a huge amount of people make hardware essentially for it for a living (SBCs and so on). Even if you look at other "big" projects like Postgres and so on which huge companies absolutely rely on it's a couple of people doing insane amounts of work. You have that in all BSDs.
FreeBSD sees a lot of usage as a base for commercial OSs (video game consoles, Netflix cache servers, etc.). However to be fair while some parts come back to the OS they also have companies that shamelessly take code without giving pretty much anything back (looking at you, Apple). Nobody is angry at that cause that's the terms and people in the BSDs often contribute out of the drive to make a great OS.
Something in my opinion greatly overlooked is that FreeBSD has one of the best package bases of all open source operating systems including all the Linux distributions. This is somehow rarely advertised but you have a huge official, very stable, very up to date, highly configurable "repository". I think this is pretty much unmatched elsewhere. It's like having Arch AUR, but without the security nightmare nor instability. In fact getting a commit bit is on the harder side compared to many Linux distributions. Many official package maintainers cannot commit on their own. This means that the "many eyes" does a lot of work there.
You get binary packages with one of the best binary package managers out there (classic case of being late to the game, but taking all the leanings and doing a great implementation).
You get close to 35k of these "ports" both binary or compiled if you want. If you compile yourself you get a huge amount of flexibility. My go to example for this is pick and choose a Postgres and PostGIS version combination, but there are many other examples from disabling adding docs, to optimizations to a stunning amount of third party nginx patches giving you better than commercial version experience. That coupled with a great flexible automatic build tool called poudriere, which you can use to create repositories of all or parts of these 35k ports and your chosen options for different versions of FreeBSD.
I am not completely sure but the sheer amounted of vetted(!) packages is unseen anywhere else. There is a security database, there is deprecation warnings and since the base OS and package separation (maybe the common differentiator of BSDs compared to Linux) you can match stability with the latest packages (or older version, eg. in Postgres), which is something I really miss in the Linux world even though there is nothing that is because of the OS/kernel it runs. It's simply nobody in the Linux world did put the effort in so far.
While FreeBSD has had a couple of not so great defaults - I think maybe to do with how many long term FreeBSD users any ways have their custom configs and trying to be compatible with upgrades - I think it got better. On the other hand they have and had a lot of projects on that front. jails predated pretty much everything else in the open source world, there was the TrustedBSD project, now there is CherBSD which puts a capabilities system in to hardware, etc.
OpenBSD also has a strength that is overlooked in that for a lot of "set and forget" style applications the base OS is enough. You get a highly secure (custom) HTTP server, a custom acme client, a custom load balancer (relayd), one of the best firewall implementations, etc. out of the box. I love to use it for simple I need something so that one can upload files via SFTP to a HTTP server setups. Just run syspatch and every half year sysupgrade and you are good. OpenSMTPD is also an absolute breeze and also having a Go application running with pledge and unveil (basically a way simpler easy to use seccomp) is great. Also for some reason there is a serious gaming community on OpenBSD making things work without wine (doesn't even work on the OS) in a way that is hard to believe.
Another thing is that a lot of "everyone uses them" tools come out of OpenBSD circles. Eg. tmux, OpenSSH, sudo (even though doas replaces it), OpenNTPD, OpenBGPD femail, etc. Also LibreSSL and sndio which always pop up on Linux in the least expected places (like games) for some reason. They all of that heavy focus on simplicity, but done in a non-academical but very real world scenario. They also do a lot of work in the compiler scene on the security side.
NetBSD and DragonFly also have their often very unexpected strength. Eg. DragonFly supports multiple ways of full file system encryption, including truecrypt compatible one. NetBSD while working on a Dreamcast also has very interesting and it runs in unexpected places like the ISS and somehow there have always been DARPA contributions, while in all BSDs at least subjectively the most to NetBSD. Mostly because there I've also seen quite a few pkgsrc (their non-base-OS packages) contributions. pkgsrc probably is one of NetBSDs biggest impacts being using by lots of other OSs from Minix to illumos. And on that topic, Android has (had?) quite a few NetBSD parts (in place of GNU userspace software) and Microsoft took the network stack from the BSDs and Internix (which was the predocessor to the Linux subsystem from when they wanted to be compatible with Unix datacenters, etc.) was largely a modified OpenBSD system.
Again, not a BSD users, and BSD people being very practical and less of a cult they'll usually tell you to keep using Linux if it works for you. But I think there also are a lot of misinterpretations when you used Linux all your life.
In fact the hardest thing on just trying it will probably be it NOT being Linux and also when switching between BSDs. They are simply other approaches to making an operating system. So if you take away one thing from this it's they are general purpose operating systems in their own respect and while they share code so does macOS, which as mentioned is also a BSD.
Use Linux if it works for you, but just for people trying it out: If you wanna actually be able to compare it you really have to use it and get it else you will just be annoyed with it not being Linux. Kind of like when you try a different editor, programming language, etc. Just don't make the mistake thinking BSDs are like distributions. That's a bit like thinking AIX and macOS are just Unix distributions. Even Solaris I think in very old versions was BSD based. ;)
> I guess that most companies just chuck it up there as a default so they dont have to read the law
I think most companies just don't give a fuck about user privacy and therefor have to show one. There are of course exceptions. But I don't know how many of them have been actual (for-profit) companies.
Also I wanna know when websites don't give a shit about my privacy and therefor have to show a cookie banner. While theoretically not consenting should mean not collecting blocking it altogether and modifying page content might mean "all bets are off". If the website expects you to have made a decision that might wrongly consider it consent.
It's great. The current law forces people that don't give a shit about user privacy to have a banner (or any other way of asking for consent first) while giving everyone that cares and everyone not wanting to spy on their visitor a free pass.
People click yes too often because it's the easier way to make it go away. This new thing could actually result in a 0% tracking cookie consent rate, effectively making them illegal.
While I usually think that at least having some standard that people agree on I think OpenTelemtry should be dropped.
A lot of the less popular alternatives (just going with Prometheus, Victoriametrics, etc) are de-facto competing smaller standards and a lot better both in terms of less added complexity and the results you get.
I think OpenTelemetry turned metrics into a farce. In many situations even self-rolled telemetry works better even with the added stuff. The annoying thing is that OpenTelemtry is that big standard now one kind of has to to add compatibility. So please, if you write software, make sure you don't lock yourself into OTel.