Oh my god, this article is so bad. How can you win people over by vomiting all over the other camp? Maybe there are some technical arguments in there but I couldn’t bring myself to read this until the end.
This should be taken with a huge grain of salt. I dislike the conspiratorial tone of his “the real reason for systemd” linked article, and really think systemd as a whole has really deeply marked people negatively which is weird because you can always start your own distro without it, there are more than enough haters out there to make it happen.
The number of Linux users that intensely hate systemd is probably pretty small, given that people are not moving to other distributions en masse (even if you can get Debian without systemd, which should attract Debian, Ubuntu, Mint, etc. folks). The drama of a vocal minority is used by some (but definitely not all) BSD folks to bash Linux. FreeBSD’s Benno Rice had a very nice, balanced talk about systemd:
I think there are plenty of people who don’t like systemd, but other concerns/aspects in their distro choice take priority over “I don’t like systemd”. For example, I have some friends who use Arch because they like the docs and pacman, but don’t like systemd.
In many ways, systemd is an implementation detail many people don’t care about, although personally, I think that if attempting to fix Spotify can crash your system (had to restart dbus: will crash logind requiring reboot) or fixing your nfsd can cause hearing damage, something is very wrong…
Same here. I don’t hate it. I would love to not have it, but overall the problems are minor (for me personally it’s still a net negative compared to sysvinit) - but I’ll stick to Debian (and sometimes Ubuntu) because it’s not a factor that drives me off my distro of choice.
Does FreeBSD have a purely functional package manager? After getting used to NixOS I can’t even bother to migrate to other Linux distros, much less other unixes.
I don’t see a reason it couldn’t be done, but I also am not aware of any efforts towards this (there may be!). But you can use ZFS snapshots and take a snapshot before you install any new packages, or … say, upgrade the kernel, or the base OS. It’s sort of a call/cc for filesystems! You could do this in Linux with OpenZFS, too, I suppose. :)
If you use FreeBSD and want to me why you think it’s great: go for it. Telling me that I “should migrate everything to it” is silly and toxic.
And yes, I did read the article and am not just responding to the title. The article contains so much bullshit and fallacies that responding to it in full would cost me far too much time. It’s easy to claim that “Linux contains DRM!!!11!!1!” and “even Linus says Linux is Bloated?!?!!?!111”, as that takes no time at all: you can just paste a contextless quote and be done with it. It takes more time, skill, and expertise to contextualize and explain that, after which point all of it suddenly becomes far less dramatic and “insane” as this article claims.
This article is classic “popularity by controversy”.
Seems like docker is still considered problematic on FreeBSD and also there doesn’t seem to be CUDA (or at least I wasn’t able to find it) which might make ML quite a bit harder. Also, most CIs do not appear to have BSD support which will make it harder to ensure software works on that platform and likewise, if you use BSD, more software will be untested.
I want to like BSD stuff but I don’t feel like I’d be getting any benefits from switching. I like running the very newest hardware and using the current stable upstream releases and from a quick look at ports, it doesn’t seem to be supporting this style of using computers. I guess I’m gonna stay on Arch Linux for the foreseeable future. :)
It’s a pity Linux (“is not Unix”) is such an island in Unix-land. A lot of software is developed on Linux and it is getting harder and harder to port that to other Unixes like FreeBSD and OpenBSD.
Linux is more like a continent, and the *BSDs are small islands…
At least when I looked at FreeBSD almost a decade ago, their preference was to have a good binary interface to Linux software, so that FreeBSD could profit from it.
ok, but I use linux, and I would like to be able to use the parts of linux that aren’t portable to eg BSD. People complain that systemd is linux only, but that’s because it uses cgroups, and it uses cgroups for a really good reason.
I think the article is super good and it demostrate with first person quotes.
Actually hyerpbola linux came to the same conclusion and the team will change linux for bsd.
The “Create your own Distribution” model in Linux-land doesn’t quite work the same in BSD-land. Sure there are always people who try and there are some good ones for the average Joe, likeTrueOS formerly PC-BSD, GhostBSD…
But sticking to “Vanilla” *BSD and helping with ports, and bug reports, and patches is much appreciated.
That said, as long as bugfixes are reported upstream, go for it.
I don’t have super new hardware, but I can tell you that my T450s hardware works perfectly under OpenBSD. Thinkpads tend to be a good bet, as they are the unofficial “BSD developer’s machine.”
FreeBSD runs well on my 2nd generation Dell XPS 13, developer edition (9333). NetBSD also runs on that machine, but I haven’t tried to get suspend working, and the Atheros Card I have in it isn’t supported (but works in FreeBSD). However, a random RealTek USB wifi dongle worked when I inserted it…
The great thing about all of the BSDs descending from a single code base is that the drivers, are in theory, easier to port, though having never tried to do this, I don’t know how true it actually is. This site’s founder, @jcs, documents driver development for OpenBSD, especially around getting newer hardware to run on OpenBSD on his blog, which maybe gives you some insight (at least for OpenBSD).
I don’t think the licence alone is sufficient to improve the state of the world for closed source drivers, though it removes one source of wailing and gnashing of teeth. What you really need for practical closed source (or even externally maintained open source) drivers is a stable driver API/ABI.
Open and documented hardware and drivers would be best, but sometimes the people who make the hardware aren’t sold in it. It can be of benefit nonetheless to find a way to work with those folks.
Oh my god, this article is so bad. How can you win people over by vomiting all over the other camp? Maybe there are some technical arguments in there but I couldn’t bring myself to read this until the end.
This should be taken with a huge grain of salt. I dislike the conspiratorial tone of his “the real reason for systemd” linked article, and really think systemd as a whole has really deeply marked people negatively which is weird because you can always start your own distro without it, there are more than enough haters out there to make it happen.
TA complains that Linux has fragmentation and then complains when the systemd project tries to unify userspace. :+1:
The number of Linux users that intensely hate systemd is probably pretty small, given that people are not moving to other distributions en masse (even if you can get Debian without systemd, which should attract Debian, Ubuntu, Mint, etc. folks). The drama of a vocal minority is used by some (but definitely not all) BSD folks to bash Linux. FreeBSD’s Benno Rice had a very nice, balanced talk about systemd:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_AIw9bGogo
I think there are plenty of people who don’t like systemd, but other concerns/aspects in their distro choice take priority over “I don’t like systemd”. For example, I have some friends who use Arch because they like the docs and pacman, but don’t like systemd.
In many ways, systemd is an implementation detail many people don’t care about, although personally, I think that if attempting to fix Spotify can crash your system (had to restart dbus: will crash logind requiring reboot) or fixing your nfsd can cause hearing damage, something is very wrong…
Same here. I don’t hate it. I would love to not have it, but overall the problems are minor (for me personally it’s still a net negative compared to sysvinit) - but I’ll stick to Debian (and sometimes Ubuntu) because it’s not a factor that drives me off my distro of choice.
Does FreeBSD have a purely functional package manager? After getting used to NixOS I can’t even bother to migrate to other Linux distros, much less other unixes.
I don’t see a reason it couldn’t be done, but I also am not aware of any efforts towards this (there may be!). But you can use ZFS snapshots and take a snapshot before you install any new packages, or … say, upgrade the kernel, or the base OS. It’s sort of a call/cc for filesystems! You could do this in Linux with OpenZFS, too, I suppose. :)
If you use FreeBSD and want to me why you think it’s great: go for it. Telling me that I “should migrate everything to it” is silly and toxic.
And yes, I did read the article and am not just responding to the title. The article contains so much bullshit and fallacies that responding to it in full would cost me far too much time. It’s easy to claim that “Linux contains DRM!!!11!!1!” and “even Linus says Linux is Bloated?!?!!?!111”, as that takes no time at all: you can just paste a contextless quote and be done with it. It takes more time, skill, and expertise to contextualize and explain that, after which point all of it suddenly becomes far less dramatic and “insane” as this article claims.
This article is classic “popularity by controversy”.
Seems like docker is still considered problematic on FreeBSD and also there doesn’t seem to be CUDA (or at least I wasn’t able to find it) which might make ML quite a bit harder. Also, most CIs do not appear to have BSD support which will make it harder to ensure software works on that platform and likewise, if you use BSD, more software will be untested.
I want to like BSD stuff but I don’t feel like I’d be getting any benefits from switching. I like running the very newest hardware and using the current stable upstream releases and from a quick look at ports, it doesn’t seem to be supporting this style of using computers. I guess I’m gonna stay on Arch Linux for the foreseeable future. :)
It’s a pity Linux (“is not Unix”) is such an island in Unix-land. A lot of software is developed on Linux and it is getting harder and harder to port that to other Unixes like FreeBSD and OpenBSD.
Linux is more like a continent, and the *BSDs are small islands…
At least when I looked at FreeBSD almost a decade ago, their preference was to have a good binary interface to Linux software, so that FreeBSD could profit from it.
ok, but I use linux, and I would like to be able to use the parts of linux that aren’t portable to eg BSD. People complain that systemd is linux only, but that’s because it uses cgroups, and it uses cgroups for a really good reason.
I think the article is super good and it demostrate with first person quotes. Actually hyerpbola linux came to the same conclusion and the team will change linux for bsd.
yes, but a) I don’t think hyperbola is really in widespread use and b) their total pivot is still kind of vaporware.
The “Create your own Distribution” model in Linux-land doesn’t quite work the same in BSD-land. Sure there are always people who try and there are some good ones for the average Joe, likeTrueOS formerly PC-BSD, GhostBSD…
But sticking to “Vanilla” *BSD and helping with ports, and bug reports, and patches is much appreciated.
That said, as long as bugfixes are reported upstream, go for it.
How is hardware driver support for BSD compared to Linux? I think the BSD license model is better for closed source drivers, but I wonder the reality.
I don’t have super new hardware, but I can tell you that my T450s hardware works perfectly under OpenBSD. Thinkpads tend to be a good bet, as they are the unofficial “BSD developer’s machine.”
FreeBSD runs well on my 2nd generation Dell XPS 13, developer edition (9333). NetBSD also runs on that machine, but I haven’t tried to get suspend working, and the Atheros Card I have in it isn’t supported (but works in FreeBSD). However, a random RealTek USB wifi dongle worked when I inserted it…
The great thing about all of the BSDs descending from a single code base is that the drivers, are in theory, easier to port, though having never tried to do this, I don’t know how true it actually is. This site’s founder, @jcs, documents driver development for OpenBSD, especially around getting newer hardware to run on OpenBSD on his blog, which maybe gives you some insight (at least for OpenBSD).
All of my hardware was ‘officially supported’. Regardless, my wi-fi would disconnect every 30 seconds or so, and vulkan didn’t work at all.
I recommend trying it out to see, but don’t be surprised if something breaks that’s not supposed to.
I don’t think the licence alone is sufficient to improve the state of the world for closed source drivers, though it removes one source of wailing and gnashing of teeth. What you really need for practical closed source (or even externally maintained open source) drivers is a stable driver API/ABI.
Open and documented hardware and drivers would be best, but sometimes the people who make the hardware aren’t sold in it. It can be of benefit nonetheless to find a way to work with those folks.