As a longtime BSD user, I have my doubts about our future(reddit.com)
reddit.com
As a longtime BSD user, I have my doubts about our future
https://www.reddit.com/r/BSD/comments/n1m4he/as_a_longtime_bsd_user_i_have_my_doubts_about_our/
80 comments
My experience has been, for each toxic person you eliminate, there are ten decent people waiting in the wings to replace them. The toxic folks are actively harming the project by keeping people away.
can you point to a few concrete examples? (which are already public, please don't "out" anybody)
Good people don’t wanna work with problematic people.
Look at what’s going on at Basecamp. When it came out just how problematic they were and if they weren’t willing to fix things, they lost 30% of their employees. Reportedly it’s now up to 40-something percent.
Look at what’s going on at Basecamp. When it came out just how problematic they were and if they weren’t willing to fix things, they lost 30% of their employees. Reportedly it’s now up to 40-something percent.
'Problematic' is such a fantastic word. Labelling a person, in whole, as 'problematic' but we're the nice and inclusive ones.
For one, problematic refers to a behavior, not a person. If you find your behavior is causing problems for people, you can change that behavior (I encourage all employees/owners with a commitment to problem-solving to do this).
For two, when the word is used in the context of inclusivity, usually the problem is that someone is behaving in a way that's exclusionary -- it's not being nice to encourage them to continue that behavior.
For two, when the word is used in the context of inclusivity, usually the problem is that someone is behaving in a way that's exclusionary -- it's not being nice to encourage them to continue that behavior.
Labelling someone problematic is super exclusionary. Usually more so than the 'problematic' behavior.
Take a step back and it's cliques all the way down.
Take a step back and it's cliques all the way down.
That's putting the cart before the horse -- in that context you would only see it used when the person's behavior already is super exclusionary. It's specifically used to describe that exclusionary behavior that has already happened. Of course people can get it mixed up but that's the job of the people doing the community management to make sure that doesn't happen.
The comment I responded to said "how problematic they were" -- not "they were being".
And it was about a case where a funny names list had circulated, the founders said "yeah, don't do that" but then objected to holocaust references in the reaction to it. This was extremely 'problematic' -- not the references, the objection to them.
So, exclusionary to whom? Some people might value not dragging the dead into a dumb debate about a funny names list. It's not unreasonable.
And it was about a case where a funny names list had circulated, the founders said "yeah, don't do that" but then objected to holocaust references in the reaction to it. This was extremely 'problematic' -- not the references, the objection to them.
So, exclusionary to whom? Some people might value not dragging the dead into a dumb debate about a funny names list. It's not unreasonable.
I didn't make that comment, I agree that comment could have been worded better. I'm assuming by the use of past tense they didn't mean to suggest that they are inherently problematic for life. Edit: I don't have any additional comments on this particular happening, I believe there was several other HN threads with more than 1000 comments where this was discussed extensively.
But even the actual disagreement they had at Basecamp was small fry, angels on the head of a pin level stuff.
Would you break out 'problematic' to describe that? How small is the circle of non problematic people?
Would you break out 'problematic' to describe that? How small is the circle of non problematic people?
You would probably see people using it any time a lot of people feel alienated by the behavior.
Usually I see good community managers as people who go out of their way to be agreeable to the whole community, helping to reach common ground and consensus. That's their job, to solve those people problems. The size of the circle is whatever your community defines it to be, for some communities it's obviously easier to find consensus than for others. Example from the reddit post: Linux people seem to be fine with both GPL and BSD license, but BSD people seem to view GPL as problematic. So practically speaking it seems it can be easier to reach consensus in Linux, around some particular code licensing issues anyway (Please don't start a flamewar about this, I personally don't take any sides here when it comes to licensing).
Usually I see good community managers as people who go out of their way to be agreeable to the whole community, helping to reach common ground and consensus. That's their job, to solve those people problems. The size of the circle is whatever your community defines it to be, for some communities it's obviously easier to find consensus than for others. Example from the reddit post: Linux people seem to be fine with both GPL and BSD license, but BSD people seem to view GPL as problematic. So practically speaking it seems it can be easier to reach consensus in Linux, around some particular code licensing issues anyway (Please don't start a flamewar about this, I personally don't take any sides here when it comes to licensing).
> For one, problematic refers to a behavior, not a person.
They're literally responding to:
> Good people don’t wanna work with problematic people.
(https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27169569)
They're literally responding to:
> Good people don’t wanna work with problematic people.
(https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27169569)
Evil are created by those who felt themselves as so righteous.
- Me
- Me
That's not an example because:
1. Basecamp is not OSS, and the people involved were all employees.
2. As employees, if you worked with someone for years,"it came out just how problematic they were" is a stretch.
1. Basecamp is not OSS, and the people involved were all employees.
2. As employees, if you worked with someone for years,"it came out just how problematic they were" is a stretch.
From the post and op's comments - they really hate a lot of stuff. I find that people like this who can't really handle changes they don't like have a tough time communicating about it in an effective way or doing anything about it that is meaningful. Mostly I see them try to stir up trouble that could have a negative impact on the people actually doing things and that's about it.
“Here are various problems and I can’t use the proposed solutions for unmentionable reasons.”
Maybe Netcraft can be reached for comment on whether BSD is alive.
Maybe Netcraft can be reached for comment on whether BSD is alive.
> Maybe Netcraft can be reached
That was exactly the connection I made, then wondering if the author even realised the allusion. Claiming to be a “longtime BSD user”, but starting in 2013 means they’re not, not in the scheme of things, and by some decades.
That was exactly the connection I made, then wondering if the author even realised the allusion. Claiming to be a “longtime BSD user”, but starting in 2013 means they’re not, not in the scheme of things, and by some decades.
As a very generic and simple computer person, BSD was off the table for me the moment I had to bother with the terminal to install it with a gui environment. Unlike Linux, BSD has a high barrier to entry similar to arch. And frankly, work, school, and social life take priority over learning how to install an OS that requires more maintenance and messing around to get things to work than even an unstable Linux distro.
I really do like the idea of BSD and have several major OS choices, but honestly Linux seems to be the solution for most "third way" OS problems until programming a new OS becomes common like 100+ years down the road. BSD just failed where Linux succeeded in being able to easily pull in the lazy nerds like me. Short of a basic terminal command and simple troubleshooting of course. BSD is like arch level of difficulty and maintenance and I don't care for it. Also it's kind of ironic that he bashes macOS when historically it's the successor of BSD. What it gets right, this guy complains about. It's simple, I don't need to worry about any of the issues he mentioned, and it's reliable. The reason other BSDs aren't is because you have to waste time making you're system work first before you can do anything else unlike almost every other major OS.
I really do like the idea of BSD and have several major OS choices, but honestly Linux seems to be the solution for most "third way" OS problems until programming a new OS becomes common like 100+ years down the road. BSD just failed where Linux succeeded in being able to easily pull in the lazy nerds like me. Short of a basic terminal command and simple troubleshooting of course. BSD is like arch level of difficulty and maintenance and I don't care for it. Also it's kind of ironic that he bashes macOS when historically it's the successor of BSD. What it gets right, this guy complains about. It's simple, I don't need to worry about any of the issues he mentioned, and it's reliable. The reason other BSDs aren't is because you have to waste time making you're system work first before you can do anything else unlike almost every other major OS.
> I really do like the idea of BSD
What do you consider to be the idea of BSD?
What do you consider to be the idea of BSD?
Just another supported operating system. I think it's good that we have somewhat of a variety so that it's not just the big 3. I'd really hate to see an MS and OSX only market 40 years from now.
I don’t see much future for BSD at this point - and I say that as someone who had their MBR overwritten by 386BSD core dumping once upon a time. I love BSD, and it’s simplicity, but outside of dedicated appliances, I think general purpose UNIX is long settled.
What’s more is that Docker has become the one true way to distribute software for enterprises. The dependency and package management problems are not optional anymore, and the lack of a consistent structure makes image based deployments inevitable. Yes, someone will immediately bring up that BSD had these features first, but it ignores the two advantages of universal distribution and simplicity that Docker built.
What’s more is that Docker has become the one true way to distribute software for enterprises. The dependency and package management problems are not optional anymore, and the lack of a consistent structure makes image based deployments inevitable. Yes, someone will immediately bring up that BSD had these features first, but it ignores the two advantages of universal distribution and simplicity that Docker built.
Isn't Docker dying?
Docker™ is dying but docker (e.g. k8s on containerd) is bigger than ever.
What do you mean by Docker™?
The company, as opposed to the distribution format/ mechanism.
Calls macOS’s interface “fischer price”, and complains about elitism in the same sentence...
What this guy is observing is that BSD is a subculture getting swallowed by a dominant monoculture. There are a few strategies for dealing with this - one is to accept fate, give up, and join the monoculture. Another is to find a core differentiating purpose, rally around that, and hope that the monoculture sees you as complementary. This harder path does mean foregoing the benefits of economies of scale, such as having lots of other people writing drivers for you for free.
So what is the core differentiating purpose of BSD that will win the hearts of developers and convince them to turn their efforts towards it?
What this guy is observing is that BSD is a subculture getting swallowed by a dominant monoculture. There are a few strategies for dealing with this - one is to accept fate, give up, and join the monoculture. Another is to find a core differentiating purpose, rally around that, and hope that the monoculture sees you as complementary. This harder path does mean foregoing the benefits of economies of scale, such as having lots of other people writing drivers for you for free.
So what is the core differentiating purpose of BSD that will win the hearts of developers and convince them to turn their efforts towards it?
While not differentiating specifically for developers - as an end user, I’m gravitating more towards the BSDs since they don’t have systemd, wayland, pulsesudio, or all the other components that modern Linux has bolted on.
Frankly, there are a few distros which don't require systemd (my laptop runs one, specifically Void). Wayland is not a requirement anywhere. Pulseaudio is also not a requirement; I happily live without it. You can do without all that, unless you want the latest Gnome.
Red Hat way is not the only way with Linux, fortunately.
Red Hat way is not the only way with Linux, fortunately.
Lots of good points there, I’m a long time FreeBSD user too and I kinda feel the same about the continuing dependence on Linux in so many areas. I switched to Arch Linux for my day to day a couple of years ago, everything works better. It’s very hard to innovate when all your major drivers are lifted from elsewhere.
I have less sympathy on the codes of conduct complaint. Codes of conduct are pretty straightforward to follow.
I have less sympathy on the codes of conduct complaint. Codes of conduct are pretty straightforward to follow.
I think the poster is not seeing the forest for the trees. BSD has no real use case except as a way to subsidize giant megacorp development with volunteer work.
Linux, for all its warts, is superior to BSD in nearly every way that matters to application developers and to companies who need a server OS. The areas in which BSD is superior to Linux simply aren't important enough to justify using BSD, unless you are a corporate parasite like Sony and need an operating system with a parasitism-enabling license but don't want to pay for more than a handful of developers.
The market just doesn't seem big enough to support Linux and a handful of BSDs, and at the end of the day that's the real reason why BSD appears to be dying, because there's no reason to reach for BSD when Debian and Slackware exist.
Linux, for all its warts, is superior to BSD in nearly every way that matters to application developers and to companies who need a server OS. The areas in which BSD is superior to Linux simply aren't important enough to justify using BSD, unless you are a corporate parasite like Sony and need an operating system with a parasitism-enabling license but don't want to pay for more than a handful of developers.
The market just doesn't seem big enough to support Linux and a handful of BSDs, and at the end of the day that's the real reason why BSD appears to be dying, because there's no reason to reach for BSD when Debian and Slackware exist.
Are there any megacorps using BSD other than Netflix?
Apple do right?
Apple's Darwin is probably better thought of as a descendant of BSD (and other technologies).
Lots of things build on top of BSD. JunOS for example is the software that powers Juniper network devices and is based on FreeBSD (which depending on the platform may itself run in a VM on top of Linux).
Sony ?
AFAIK WhatsApp used to be Erlang on FreeBSD, not sure if it is still the case (maybe, Facebook is a big FreeBSD sponsor)
Several people with some form of FreeBSD commit access (including past members of FreeBSD Core Team) work for Facebook.
FreeBSD was at one point (and may still be, I haven't checked in a few years) used in the bootstrap process for FB's ISP-hosted cache clusters (because potential GPL headaches IIRC).
It's also useful to test network protocol implementations across multiple platforms (e.g. Linux + FreeBSD) and can be handy if you are working with a standards body that wants to N>1 implementations of a protocol.
FreeBSD was at one point (and may still be, I haven't checked in a few years) used in the bootstrap process for FB's ISP-hosted cache clusters (because potential GPL headaches IIRC).
It's also useful to test network protocol implementations across multiple platforms (e.g. Linux + FreeBSD) and can be handy if you are working with a standards body that wants to N>1 implementations of a protocol.
Dell EMC with Isilon, NetApp, Juniper mentioned:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_products_based_on_Free...
You'll see regular "Sponsored by" lines in FreeBSD commit messages from Intel, Chelsio, Mellanox/NVidia for their products. Also:
* https://www.netbsd.org/gallery/products.html
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_products_based_on_Free...
You'll see regular "Sponsored by" lines in FreeBSD commit messages from Intel, Chelsio, Mellanox/NVidia for their products. Also:
* https://www.netbsd.org/gallery/products.html
Sony is pretty notorious for flipping BSD technology into products. The PS2 and PS3 are notorious for having large portions of their software derived from FreeBSD
Why 'notorious'? Is there anything wrong with the way they are using BSD?
Some people really dislike the permissive licence used by FreeBSD. They see large companies, such as Sony, using FreeBSD and they wonder whether any useful code, hardware, or cash are sent to FreeBSD as a result. It can feel to some people as "unfair", perhaps even exploitative.
It's interesting to see the culture clash between different licensing philosophies.
It's interesting to see the culture clash between different licensing philosophies.
I guess because of the Linux PS3 debacle. See the OtherOS entry on Wikipedia [1].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OtherOS
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OtherOS
I can't see what that has to do with Sony's use of FreeBSD as the base of their console operating systems.
I mean, it is definitely germane. Microsoft has always written their own software for their consoles, and Nintendo's history making console firmware is so complicated that they may as well just write it themselves. Building a mass-market console using off-the-shelf components and free software is a little more common now (See: Nintendo Switch running Android on an Nvidia Tegra), but Sony was really the first major console manufacturer to do it.
The "notoriety" portion comes from the OtherOS side of things, as the other commenter mentioned. In the PS2 era, you could order a kit from Sony containing all of the software/hardware you needed to turn your PS2 into a reasonably capable Linux machine. To make a long story short, licensing is always a concern and it blew back in Sony's face. The whole "Linux on Playstation" thing is a blemish on Sony's reputation, and it's why a lot of people call Sony the "biggest offender" license abuse.
The "notoriety" portion comes from the OtherOS side of things, as the other commenter mentioned. In the PS2 era, you could order a kit from Sony containing all of the software/hardware you needed to turn your PS2 into a reasonably capable Linux machine. To make a long story short, licensing is always a concern and it blew back in Sony's face. The whole "Linux on Playstation" thing is a blemish on Sony's reputation, and it's why a lot of people call Sony the "biggest offender" license abuse.
I tell people who want to make money off of FOSS to license as GPLv3 or AGPLv3. Offer a commercial license for money. Some people see megacorps' aversion to GPL and license as BSD, trying to believe that megacorp will come along and decide to hire them or pay them a retainer, despite the many instances of Amazon, Google, et al. ripping off some random permissively licensed project.
There was previously a post on HN about this.
There was previously a post on HN about this.
So much this, well said. Only issue is with SASS strip-miners muscling you out of your commercial license space. On the one hand Amazon adoption certifies the success of your product, on the other it puts any ambition of financial return to rest.
Giving up on something like that is quite narrow minded. Diversity matters and monoculture is almost never a good thing. The fact that there are open operating systems other than Linux makes Linux better too.
While you're right in terms of technical prowess, there absolutely is a use case for BSD: it has a distinct culture with different values.
There's a large group of people in technology who don't really care how something works, as long as it works for their purposes. That's set against another group who will put up with incovenience in the name of what they think is "correctness". I genuinely don't want to suggest that either group is better than the other - but they are distinct.
Around 2010 I felt that the first group had started to dominate the decisions around the direction of the Linux userland. It was wonderful to be able to switch to BSD, which I sense is used and maintained mostly by the second group. Having an OS that is aligned with your culture is a sort of a "happiness by a thousand cuts": the defaults are already what you would have set them to, you don't have to declutter after the first install and what you do want is in the package repo, your niche use cases get attention when it comes to bug fixes because they're not considered niche in that crowd, etc. When the maintainers think the way you do it feels like they've anticipated your needs - it's presumably the same feeling that Apple-culture people feel when they use an Apple product; like it was made for them.
In a lot of ways, technology has mostly become a matrix for competing cultures. From that perspective it's not a matter of what performance edge the BSDs have over Linux, it's about whether there's a distinct enough culture to justify the costs of the duplication of effort. In my mind that distinction has only grown in the last 10 years.
There's a large group of people in technology who don't really care how something works, as long as it works for their purposes. That's set against another group who will put up with incovenience in the name of what they think is "correctness". I genuinely don't want to suggest that either group is better than the other - but they are distinct.
Around 2010 I felt that the first group had started to dominate the decisions around the direction of the Linux userland. It was wonderful to be able to switch to BSD, which I sense is used and maintained mostly by the second group. Having an OS that is aligned with your culture is a sort of a "happiness by a thousand cuts": the defaults are already what you would have set them to, you don't have to declutter after the first install and what you do want is in the package repo, your niche use cases get attention when it comes to bug fixes because they're not considered niche in that crowd, etc. When the maintainers think the way you do it feels like they've anticipated your needs - it's presumably the same feeling that Apple-culture people feel when they use an Apple product; like it was made for them.
In a lot of ways, technology has mostly become a matrix for competing cultures. From that perspective it's not a matter of what performance edge the BSDs have over Linux, it's about whether there's a distinct enough culture to justify the costs of the duplication of effort. In my mind that distinction has only grown in the last 10 years.
> BSD has no real use case except as a way to subsidize giant megacorp development with volunteer work. Linux, for all its warts, is superior to BSD in nearly every way that matters to application developers and to companies who need a server OS.
FreeBSD has ZFS in-tree as part of the base system with zero kludges (DKMS, I'm looking at you) and perfect compatibility supported directly by the core devs, as opposed to having to deal with a semi-hostile upstream (KH: "my tolerance for ZFS is pretty non-existent", Torvalds: "If somebody adds a kernel module like ZFS, they are on their own. I can't maintain it, and I can not be bound by other people's kernel changes."), and it's the default filesystem out of the box for several releases now with good tooling support around it. ZFS can be hacked into a Linux distro, but it'll always be inferior.
FreeBSD has ZFS in-tree as part of the base system with zero kludges (DKMS, I'm looking at you) and perfect compatibility supported directly by the core devs, as opposed to having to deal with a semi-hostile upstream (KH: "my tolerance for ZFS is pretty non-existent", Torvalds: "If somebody adds a kernel module like ZFS, they are on their own. I can't maintain it, and I can not be bound by other people's kernel changes."), and it's the default filesystem out of the box for several releases now with good tooling support around it. ZFS can be hacked into a Linux distro, but it'll always be inferior.
I wish for BSD to stay around forever. Sure, on desktop it's a tricky option, but neither Linux meets my standards there. For server use, it's unmatched IMO. A polished product meant to be relied on; well-organized and pleasantly conservative—what works keeps working, what's learnt stays useful. Really hoping this sentiment won't gain too much ground.
I don't understand their problems with firefox. I'm a happy user of plain firefox (ESR) on OpenBSD. What are they talking about?
I run it on NetBSD (without dbus) fine as well.
What is the issue with dbus? I've seen a lot of complaints about it but I have yet to see anyone bother to create a viable replacement for it, after several years.
One of the points of the original rant was that it was required everywhere. This isn't true, Firefox works fine without it.
Right, but Firefox is its own special case. I don't get that complaint in the context of GTK or Qt apps -- dbus is the native IPC there. Taking it out without a replacement is just going to break things, and any replacement has to happen at the toolkit level. It's not something that the apps would ever really want to handle, unless they're already built like firefox to be self-contained and not need IPC.
I think the linux community really should listen to those criticisms, not only for BSD users' good but for their own as well.
Unfortunately linux community is not a well defined term anymore, because there are too many people and interests involved.
Unfortunately linux community is not a well defined term anymore, because there are too many people and interests involved.
>As a longtime BSD user....
>I've used FreeBSD since 2013, NetBSD since 2015.....
May be it is me, but I expect long time to be at least a decade for OS. Especially for a "category" of OS.
> OpenZFS
I do sort of understand the issue especially with OpenZFS. The change-log always mentions fixes were specifically for FreeBSD. Usually I am pessimistic in these scenario as part of a possible EEE cycle. But I do think OpenZFS, or ZFS needs FreeBSD to survive. As long as the economics and political support are there, It should be fine.
And despite being a fan of BSD, there are increasingly less reason to go with BSD as all technical, and financial benefits gravitate towards linux. Minix is dead [1] because of similar reason.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26451540
>I've used FreeBSD since 2013, NetBSD since 2015.....
May be it is me, but I expect long time to be at least a decade for OS. Especially for a "category" of OS.
> OpenZFS
I do sort of understand the issue especially with OpenZFS. The change-log always mentions fixes were specifically for FreeBSD. Usually I am pessimistic in these scenario as part of a possible EEE cycle. But I do think OpenZFS, or ZFS needs FreeBSD to survive. As long as the economics and political support are there, It should be fine.
And despite being a fan of BSD, there are increasingly less reason to go with BSD as all technical, and financial benefits gravitate towards linux. Minix is dead [1] because of similar reason.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26451540
I love that the numbered points 1-3 go on and on about the dangers of "Linuxisms" and the need to use BSD as a desktop vs. MacOS and the problems with taking a patched ZFS-on-Linux as the reference upstream. Basically the standard list of purity arguments one sees, nothing special.
Then number four: "We need to stay out of the politics of the larger FOSS scene"
Dude... (And yes, I know that the author means "politics" in a different sense. But still.)
Then number four: "We need to stay out of the politics of the larger FOSS scene"
Dude... (And yes, I know that the author means "politics" in a different sense. But still.)
> Linuxisms
What exactly is this? Linux features not standardized by POSIX?
What exactly is this? Linux features not standardized by POSIX?
The all-or-nothing FreeDesktop/GNOME/systemd thing seems to be unpopular in BSD land.
Those pieces can all be separated, but increasingly few people seem to be interested in putting in the work to do it. In particular, freedesktop is mostly just a set of standards for common protocols and file formats for an open source desktop -- I doubt anyone wants to get rid of that stuff just to have their applications all break.
It's unpopular, but I don't think most users are going to make it point 2 of a 4 point plan if it gets pulled in while installing desktop stuff from ports and packages.
Adoption of ZFS has been a real problem for BSDs. In one hand, ZFS gives them a good storage stack. In the other hand, it does not have BSD license, it does not integrate well with the rest of the kernel, and it does not differentiate them from any Linux distro with ZoL packages.
They should come up with a new file system of their own, for all BSDs, or try to use Hammer, and stop using someone's else file system.
They should come up with a new file system of their own, for all BSDs, or try to use Hammer, and stop using someone's else file system.
There is the Berkeley Fast File System (BSD Fast File System, FFS) [0]. OpenBSD defaults to it.
FreeBSD defaults to the Unix File System (UFS). I'm not sure about NetBSD and the others, but I assume they are pretty much either FFS or UFS.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkeley_Fast_File_System
FreeBSD defaults to the Unix File System (UFS). I'm not sure about NetBSD and the others, but I assume they are pretty much either FFS or UFS.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkeley_Fast_File_System
> We are all adults, we know what is and isn't generally acceptable on the internet.
> I also, once upon a time, maintained some ports before getting banned for "conduct issues" shortly after John Marino left FreeBSD
I'm going to go out on a limb and say that if you are getting banned for "conduct issues" perhaps you don't actually know what is and isn't acceptable.
> I also, once upon a time, maintained some ports before getting banned for "conduct issues" shortly after John Marino left FreeBSD
I'm going to go out on a limb and say that if you are getting banned for "conduct issues" perhaps you don't actually know what is and isn't acceptable.
He says elsewhere in that thread that he was a gamergate person, which checks out.
Wasn't gamergate about ethics in video game journalism?
There's been plenty written about it elsewhere, but the short answer is that there was a lot more to it than that.
Maybe for the first 30 seconds or so, but that got pivoted away from pretty quick.
In 1994 I got a new 486 computer to run a unix as I was using a mix of unixes at work. It was hard to choose technically between the various BSD and Linux disks from Walnut Creek CDrom.
So I took a look into the mailing lists. On the BSD lists they were having some sort of fractious food-fight, if I remember about something like whether to ban people who ask dumb questions. On the linux list it was like "hey we got NCR 810 scsi working in 1.18".
Since I had an NCR 810, and some dumb questions, Linux (slackware) was what I tried first. 27 years later OP's post and the reddit thread confirm it was the right choice.
So I took a look into the mailing lists. On the BSD lists they were having some sort of fractious food-fight, if I remember about something like whether to ban people who ask dumb questions. On the linux list it was like "hey we got NCR 810 scsi working in 1.18".
Since I had an NCR 810, and some dumb questions, Linux (slackware) was what I tried first. 27 years later OP's post and the reddit thread confirm it was the right choice.
You do you, but I've been using *BSDs for more than 3x the length of time as this reddit user and I don't find his post or comments to be very representative of my own experience. I don't think anyone should use this comment to confirm their life choices.
> I don't think anyone should use this comment to confirm their life choices.
Same goes for the post itself, actually. You'll find disagreeable people in every domain if that's what you're focused on. Likewise if it was really all that toxic, it wouldn't last. Painting everyone with the same dismal brush does a disservice to the awesome folks that are there.
Same goes for the post itself, actually. You'll find disagreeable people in every domain if that's what you're focused on. Likewise if it was really all that toxic, it wouldn't last. Painting everyone with the same dismal brush does a disservice to the awesome folks that are there.
I’ve been running FreeBSD since 1998, 2.2.2, as well as pfsense and now currently TrueNAS.
I’m satisfied with what I use, but there are some unbaked annoyances, like how jails basically don’t have an orchestrator. Another is how Salt seems to be falling behind, and Ansible just has ok support. No one seems to have bothered making a module for TrueNAS and Ansible.
XI seems to want to move over to Linux with their SCALE product, which would be really annoying if in the end FreeBSD is dropped.
I don’t have a whole lot of doubts, but I do have a wishlist and having more deployments at sites would keep the toolkits flowing.
I’m satisfied with what I use, but there are some unbaked annoyances, like how jails basically don’t have an orchestrator. Another is how Salt seems to be falling behind, and Ansible just has ok support. No one seems to have bothered making a module for TrueNAS and Ansible.
XI seems to want to move over to Linux with their SCALE product, which would be really annoying if in the end FreeBSD is dropped.
I don’t have a whole lot of doubts, but I do have a wishlist and having more deployments at sites would keep the toolkits flowing.
I hate to say it, but wouldn't a jail orchestrator essentially be the BSD version of systemd, docker, k8s and friends? The (admittedly few) BSD people I've talked to seem to be hostile to this concept because it's too much of a "Linuxism" but I don't think it has to be.
It could be. There is also an opportunity to make a new concept. For example, Joyent’s Triton can manage containers, zones, and servers. They are conceptually the same as FreeBSD and jails.
My thought is having a competing distro is a good thing since there is an avenue for a new spin on the state of the art.
My thought is having a competing distro is a good thing since there is an avenue for a new spin on the state of the art.
Have you seen https://github.com/samuelkarp/runj ? I have some hopes for that as the glue to do orchestration on jails.
I’m waiting for it to mature. It is somewhat better for me not to try bleeding edge.
> If you don't agree with me, you are certainly free to take your negativity elsewhere.
Good to foster open discussion early.
Good to foster open discussion early.
" But if everyone got offended and quit a project over someone saying mean 30 years ago, all FOSS would have quickly died out. "
The snowflakes are invading FOSS and trying to take it out! We must protect ourselves!