What distro he uses? 🐧💻

bastonia@lemmy.mlbanned from sitebanned from site to Linux@lemmy.ml – 126 points –
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The movie came out in 1999. In the movie, they state that it's 1999 (in the Matrix anyway). Neo is pretty tech savvy and a renowned hacker.

My assumption is he would've used FreeBSD. Or, maybe, Slackware. But I'm leaning more towards BSD.

Man I wish FreeBSD hadn't fallen to the wayside. It's really cohesive and feels put together in a way not Linux distro ever has.

Except it uses push over licensing

That's a GPL point of view. Most BSD users I've talked to prefer a more permissive license. Theo said: "GPL fans said the great problem we would face is that companies would take our BSD code, modify it, and not give back. Nope -- the great problem we face is that people would wrap the GPL around our code, and lock us out in the same way that these supposed companies would lock us out. Just like the Linux community, we have many companies giving us code back, all the time. But once the code is GPL'd, we cannot get it back. Ironic."

i guess this might be why a lot of processing and storage clusters use it behind closed doors with proprietary code we will never see.

Which is fine with for example OpenBSD, they write "ISC or Berkeley style licences are preferred, the GPL is not acceptable when adding new code, NDAs are never acceptable. We want to make available source code that anyone can use for ANY PURPOSE, with no restrictions. We strive to make our software robust and secure, and encourage companies to use whichever pieces they want to."

And where system is doing better, Linux or BSD? Also the point of the GPL is not to give back. You can have GPL code that is read only and it doesn't hurt a thing. The point is you can get the code running on your computer and freely make changes to it.

Doing better in what way? Number of installs or being robust and secure? If we go by numbers one could argue that Windows is doing best on the desktop, and that proprietary code therefore is something to strive for. Either way it's a tangent of the original statement, that the BSD license is a "pushover" license, which I oppose, because the BSD devs are deliberately allowing their code to be used by anyone for any reason.

Is it still worth using? Say, for a web dev? Or is it less supported?

Honestly it isn't. Support for anything front-end related is way more sparse compared to Linux.

That's a shame. I'd love a new exotic OS to try.

I don't think I've ever heard FreeBSD described as either "new" or "exotic"

New and exotic to me.

“hello system” is pretty nice to look at, and has some Mac-isms I find helpful. FreeBSD has a new release recently, so maybe Nomad or GhostBSD could be worth trying. You’ll find FreeBSD is a lot more “consistent” compared to Linux, but be prepared for random hardware to not work.

I'll give you "new" but it's about as far from exotic as you can get... Not a bad thing, BTW, and I highly recommend giving it a try, it's an excellent system, though probably better for a server than a workstation/desktop (though it definitely can be a very good workstation/desktop if you like)

Its Ports system is the inspiration for Gentoo's Portage, BTW

You know, I've never used it. Maybe I'll install it in a VM tonight and give it a whirl.

I mean, it’s decades older with a history of being used in business critical applications…

Or SuSE Linux, the non-slackware or jurix version was bleeding edge at the time.

I'd argue that he'd use OpenBSD and be running his own firewall, web server, email server, and ftp server.

Remember he presses Ctrl+x to try to get rid of the message on his screen. That's Unix, right?

Realistically, Debian, because it existed when the movie was set.

And also because realistically there's no need for any other distro. :P

Other distros exist to teach people that Debian is better.

We had tons of Linux distros then. Maybe more than today if you exclude all the Debian clones

Real image from the really official archived film 👍 👍

Well, since the movies where one big trans allegory, the answer can only be Arch.

Wut

Lilly Watchowski has stated as much

I am not a big Matrix fan, so maybe my knowledge about the films (I saw 1 and 2, both only once) might be too limited. But I completely fail to understand the symbology.

From what I can remember, the simbolism is stronger in the first movie and not so much on the other two. I recall two key things that can simbolize the struggle trans people go through or are references to transgenderism.

  • Neo feels that there is something wrong with the world and that he does not belong in it
  • The Character Switch was originally supposed to be a man in the real world and a woman when plugged in to the matrix.

I'm sure there's more but it's been a while since I came across the analysis.

Worth noting that when I watched the movies I never made an association with transgenderism. I think in great part because I was not even aware of it.

The Character Switch was originally supposed to be a man in the real world and a woman when plugged in to the matrix.

This would have been a clear symbol.

A bit subtle, especially if you weren't familiar with medicines at the time, but the blue pill is supposed to represent an antidepressant (Prozac was apparently blue at that time, don't know about now, and was commonly prescribed to closeted trans women instead of actually addressing the core issue), and the red pill HRT (one of the common hormone pills at the time was red)

Which makes the "redpill" movement extra hilarious.

As said, though, it was really subtle if you knew that and completely opaque if you didn't

Page doesnt load

How about this link

Thanks. That loads but it doesn't explain how the film is an allegory for transgender. I'd love to read an analysis of the film that breaks down what scenes mean what through that lens

I see. I watched some video on it a ong time ago so I don't recall the details. I'm sure you can find something.

With a lot of shots, scenery, and concepts stolen right from the movie Dark City.

There is no distro.

Yeah he doesn't distribute it due to privacy and security. He wrote it himself.

Do not try and hack the distro, that's impossible.

Instead, only try to realize the truth: there is no distro.

Then you will realize it isn't the distro you hack, it is only yourself.

He is Assembly, Operating Systems require him to operate.

Debian, the cool guy distro in 1999. The machine overlords run on Red Hat.

In the low budget parody version, Neo ran Slackware, and the climatic battle was basically about Agent Smith somehow fucking up his libc.so.6 but then Trinity got him a copy of the file on 3.5" floppy from another system. Or something.

i'm sure he runs his own, custom distro he spun himself

Probably debian or slackware, there weren't that many in 1999

There was a lot more that you’d think.

But most of those were extremely shitty or niche and got abandoned. Except Mandrake. That one was pretty good but I think I remember they were constantly having funding issues.

Mandrake was to Redhat as Ubuntu is to Debian now.

Mandrake, Suse, Corel, Red Hat, Turbo, Conectiva, PLD, Caldera, Rock, Coyote... that's just the more well known distros, there were dozens at that point already.

NixOS - about a year ago it would have been Arch, but the Nix bois seem to have overtaken them us.

nix is just objectively better which sucks because it does a bunch of stuff bad and has a bad wiki

neoOS, an operating system which can be ran inside of a browser.

Seems to be dead, but can probably be hosted locally