10 ms·

Some of it it's a reaction to systemd hate.

by paride5745 10y ago

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
verytrivial 10y ago
I prefer: Some of it is a constructive reaction to legitimate systemd concerns.
- ezequiel-garzon 10y ago
  Take away "constructive" and "legitimate" and you become a diplomat.
- apecat 10y ago
  FreeBSD is so very much worth taking a look at. Hardware support is not on Linux’s level, so it’s not necessarily an endeavor I’d recommend for desktop use, at least as a first 'nix experience, even with the super nice ZFS integration in PC-BSD. But if you’re at all frustrated by any aspect of Linux in server use, it’s worth having a peek at FreeBSD. And I’m saying this as a person who doesn’t really have much business talking about tools like dtrace or even jails. But I will argue that it’s the increasing wtf:ness of Linux that has held me back from wanting to become a more competent admin and more focused on IT work in my career. Blame the system, right? As a reluctant IT person and "advanced beginner" sysadmin, I was inspired to look into FreeBSD this spring. The final push had a lot to do with that massive, remotely exploitable glibc vulnerability (CVE-2015-7547), when the potential consequences of Linux monoculture started to really dawn on me. First thing I did was to migrate a couple of my Tor relay nodes to FreeBSD (instructions here: https://torbsd.github.io/ https://torbsd.github.io/ ). Whether my handful of <10 Mbit/s middle relays are real workloads or not is debatable, but it’s stuff I have a sense of duty about, especially with regards to doing basic security due diligence. Tor has a direct impact on real people doing real things, but it's not like these boxes keep me from working if they're down for a week, so it’s a good place to learn. After ten years on Debian and Ubuntu for server stuff, FreeBSD is quite refreshing. There's really a lot to love: human readable userland, man pages and scripts, the simplicity of throwing basic ipfw rules in /etc/rc.conf etc. Whereas stuff tends to "just work" on Debian (including automatic restarts of services after package installs), one needs to read the manual on FreeBSD. But everything feels like less of a pain to learn. And to be clear, the system doesn’t feel like a "tinker or GTFO" kit like Gentoo or Arch, starting with the installation process. After looking quickly at pf for more advanced networking stuff, I feel like I’ve been duped into believing that I hate networking, when it’s really the syntax of Linux’s iptables that is at fault. Another thing I definitely need is in-place upgrades, without the need to boot from media (like OpenBSD and NetBSD still seem to require). ‘freebsd-update’ seems to be stable nowadays. For the base system, FreeBSD seems to be moving towards a proper LTS model, where one is encouraged to stay on top of point releases. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8991960 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8991960 For third party software, packages seem to make a whole lot more sense than my expectations. I had heard that FreeBSD only recompiles all their packages every few weeks, but nowadays, it’s every three days or so. I have used ports on my Tor relays in order to be able to install security patches immediately. As a virtualization platform, I suppose Linux’s KVM remains a lot more mature and well supported. But the bhyve hypervisor seems to be coming along nicely. Before long FreeBSD might become a good virtualization platform. Personally, I can’t wait to see something like FreeNAS becoming a virtualization appliance, like the one you’d get with Proxmox or those QNAP prosumer file servers. From what I’ve seen so far, it seems increasingly frustrating that BSD didn’t become the major free 'nix platform back in the day.
  - copperx 10y ago
    >> From what I’ve seen so far, it seems increasingly frustrating that BSD didn’t become the major free 'nix platform back in the day. I remember when FreeBSD was considered to be more mature than Linux for server use. What made Linux more exciting than FreeBSD? Why did FreeBSD lose ground?
    - itgoon 10y ago
      I was a huge fan back in the 4.x - 6.x days. The problems, for me, were: - apps developed specifically for Linux. The shim wasn't 100%. - Hardware support. This wasn't too bad, but I always had to take it into consideration. - Virtualization. This was the killer for me. Yes, jails are fantastic, if your entire workload ran on FBSD. But if you needed even one Windows/Linux instance, for any reason, you needed another physical machine. With Windows and Linux I could consolidate everything into a single machine. Things have improved a lot, and I may try it out again, but unfortunately the mindshare is all Linux now.
    - lmm 10y ago
      It took a long time for FreeBSD to support MS-DOS partitioning, so for a long time you couldn't dual-boot between Windows and FreeBSD without buying a second hard disk. So kids getting started tended to run Linux instead of FreeBSD, and they stuck with what they knew.
      - emaste 10y ago
        DOS partition support was added to the FreeBSD installer over two decades ago: Tue Sep 7 12:02:11 1993 UTC (22 years, 9 months ago) Added DOS partition support and maybe badblock remappping. https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base?view=revision&revision=408 https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base?view=revision&revision=408
        mioelnir 10y ago
        I love that maybe in there.
  - 10y ago
Philipp__ 10y ago
Absolutely no! Maybe it is because people at FreeBSD and it's users believe in OS.
- gaius 10y ago
  BSD is for people who love Unix, Linux is for people who hate Microsoft.
  - technofiend 10y ago
    >BSD is for people who love Unix, Linux is for people who hate Microsoft. OpenBSD is for people who love the UNIX equivalent of Dwarf Fortress. I call it a full contact OS because of what will happen to you upon asking an easily googled question.
  - Philipp__ 10y ago
    THIS!
  - paride5745 10y ago
    That's the reason I'm a DragonFlyBSD user. Plus the lovely community there.
    - sigusr1 10y ago
      The dragonflybsd community is great. When I was experimenting with it, their freenode channel was super helpful, often with Matt himself answering questions. I ran into a bug after an upgrade and he had a patch up in like an hour. I've been deploying my stuff in linux containers recently, and I really like that flow. I really hope something like Jetpack (https://github.com/3ofcoins/jetpack https://github.com/3ofcoins/jetpack) can eventually provide a solid OCI implementation on top of jails and hammer (not sure what containers demand of a filesystem, I know jetpack is currently focused on ZFS).
  - mhd 10y ago
    Yes, Berkeley sockets are a true embodiment of the Unix nature.
2close4comfort 10y ago
2 sides of the same coin. But this is great opportunity for FreeBSD and to think I am saying thank you to Microsoft.
- cm3 10y ago
  Microsoft is large enough that there are good and bad parts, but still they're not extending OS support on Azure out of goodwill. It's a cloud provider, so naturally they want to at least support the same stuff AWS does.
Touche 10y ago
Didn't Hubbard give a talk where he likes some of the design decisions from systemd and wants to adopt them?
- schwarze_pest 10y ago
  Hubbard wants FreeBSD to use launchd. Hubbard is in no position to enforce this if the project doesn't like it.
- ivl 10y ago
  Well, if anything good comes of that is a different question, but with his NextBSD project he looked to trying something with OS X's init system IIRC.
- cm3 10y ago
  A more likely contender is Nosh. It's additionallyy inspired by SMF and systemd and can import systemd's unit files. it also works on BSD and Linux.
  - snuxoll 10y ago
    > can import systemd's unit files That's actually pretty neat. I don't have any real complaints about systemd, but every alternative I've looked at is more painful to use for service management. No longer having to hack together init scripts has been wonderful for me, it took a 10 line unit file to get YouTrack configured as a proper service on my CentOS 7 VM - I used to run JetBrains teamware products on Windows just because dealing with custom init scripts was such a pain in the ass.
    - JdeBP 10y ago
      > it took a 10 line unit file to get YouTrack configured as a proper service on my CentOS 7 VM If you did it the way that other people have done it, wrapping youtrack.sh start and youtrack.sh stop in a systemd service unit, with a sprinkling of erroneous Type=forking to get around the fact that that ends up running the Java process as a quickly orphaned grandchild of where systemd expects the daemon to be, and with log output explicitly redirected away from where service management could handle it into an ever-growing private log file under /usr ... then you have entered systemd House of Horror territory. "proper" is not really the word. * http://homepage.ntlworld.com./jonathan.deboynepollard/FGA/systemd-house-of-horror/ http://homepage.ntlworld.com./jonathan.deboynepollard/FGA/sy... * http://homepage.ntlworld.com./jonathan.deboynepollard/FGA/systemd-house-of-horror/tomcat.html http://homepage.ntlworld.com./jonathan.deboynepollard/FGA/sy...
epoch1970 10y ago
I've routinely seen a desire to not use systemd described as "hate". Why is that? When somebody wants to use zsh instead of bash, it's not described as "bash hate". Or when somebody wants to use Clang/LLVM instead of GCC, it's not described as "GCC hate". Or when somebody wants to use PostgreSQL instead of MySQL, it's not described as "MySQL hate". Yet when somebody wants to use some other init system instead of systemd, it is described as "systemd hate". Why are so many systemd supporters fixated on this vague concept of "hate"?
- loudmax 10y ago
  Using zsh instead of bash is a choice. The same more or less goes for a compiler or database. At least, we aren't seeing a situation where large numbers of major beloved projects are forcing their users to switch compiler or database. Nearly every major Linux distribution is now moving to systemd. Regardless of its merits, this is a significant change, and a lot of us sysadmins feel like we're being forced into it. Whether you're running RedHat/Centos, Ubuntu/Debian, or Arch, systemd is coming whether you like it or not. Even if systemd's merits were undisputed, one of the things we like about Linux is choice. As it is, the merits of systemd are very much in dispute, and the choosing not to run it pretty much means moving away from these major Linux distributions entirely. Hence lots of new interest in FreeBSD. FWIW, systemd has been pretty solid in my experience. Still, I'm glad the FreeBSD exists and is thriving without it.
- eggnet 10y ago
  Because you don't change operating systems over mild discomfort.
- phippsbrad 10y ago
  To understand, you only need to read the recent posts about how systemd is effecting how commonly used userland applications work like: screen, tmux, nohup. The systemd supporters are soon going to take away the ability to run pretty much all background processes (including using "&" in a shell) by killing those processes when your X session logs out. This will fundamentally changes the way you administer and maintain a linux computer. When told that this change is a bad idea, the systemd supporters said they knew better than you, and they are doing this to make the desktop UI better. This is one small example why they invoke "hate". They make a decisions like that every day that dramatically effect the entire linux platform. If I can't run "nohup" or "screen" or "sh &" to do my job anymore, then that forces me to use some other OS/distro that does not have systemd installed as the default.
AndyMcConachie 10y ago
As a single data point, I'm someone who recently gave up on Linux and moved over to the BSDs. Not that the BSDs were new to me, but I've given up on Linux for servers, and Debian specifically, precisely because of systemd.
- toyg 10y ago
  I'm tempted to do the same myself, but man, how can you live without apt-get and dpkg? I haven't looked at FreeBSD for ages; in OpenBSD packaging and patching is quite a pain, and this is holding me back a bit.
  - zedpm 10y ago
    FreeBSD has a binary package manager (pkgng) that should feel much like apt. The ports tree still exists if you want to customize and build from source, but in general you should be fine just using pkg.
    - JdeBP 10y ago
      There's no "should" about it. It does feel like APT. (-: I invoke aptitude install on Debian and pkg install on FreeBSD/PC-BSD. dpkg -b stage/ target/ on Debian; pkg create -r stage/ -o target/ on FreeBSD/PC-BSD. Bear in mind, of course, that the SVID package management is a clear precursor to both of them.
  - Sanddancer 10y ago
    To be honest, I'd rate pkg-ng higher than apt and dpkg these days. It's faster, cleaner, and uses an SQLite database as the backend, which allows for much more interesting queries for figuring out system state. For the base system, FreeBSD has an in-place binary updating system called freebsd-update that works rather well. I'd definitely encourage you to try FreeBSD, it has a beautiful amount of cleanliness that's missing from current Linux distros.
im_down_w_otp 10y ago
Hmmm. I would have thought it'd be for other merits? Like a better TCP stack, kqueue, first-class ZFS support, etc.
drudru11 10y ago
I have to agree with this. I used to stick to Ubuntu, but now I'm starting to look around. Now that I see FreeBSD on AWS, Digital Ocean, etc. I'm seriously considering that. I spun up a droplet yesterday just to check it out. Everything worked fine, but I cannot justify the switch yet. I'm planning on really testing it out in a few months. Til then I'll hang on to LTS.
gribbly 10y ago
Makes no sense to me at all, what systemd does brings the Linux ecosystem closer to what FreeBSD offers, a standardization of base components, which is what FreeBSD (and of course the other BSD's) are doing, but on a whole OS level. So if you dislike the tight coupling of components in systemd, why on earth would you go to FreeBSD which is a whole OS developed with tight coupling ? So I think this is nonsense, as I see it, it's just FreeBSD advocates trying to play off the systemd controversy in Linux land.
- nisa 10y ago
  Sorry, this is wrong in many aspects. FreeBSD/*BSD traditionally maintains userland and kernel together. The userland is also BSD licenced so using GNU is not possible so there is need to maintain these tools. But mostly it's taken from a shared upstream with some specific patches. There are seldom new components that introduce huge changes. There is also mostly a single community that decides on changes. This has led to splits in the past but usually things are consensual. systemd as a project was/is mostly driven by Red Hat and kind of praised itself into distributions due to eating udev and that would have required a fork (Gentoo did that with eudev). Debian almost self destructed in the discussions and it's mostly unrelated with the kernel. They tried to push kdbus but this was denied. So there was some split between distribution developers (systemd made a lot of stuff easier and was the new upstream for must-have-components) and users (never change a running system) about that. This has caused lot's of nasty fallout on the internet - mostly from the users that were opposed. But both sides kind of heated the debates. > So if you dislike the tight coupling of components in systemd, why on earth would you go to FreeBSD which is a whole OS developed with tight coupling ? Source lying in the same git repository is not tight coupling. Depending on dbus,journald,logind kind of is, but systemd is not really tightly coupled it's more like there are components that can be used and software has to adapt to use it (GNOME, kwin migrated to logind on Linux), tmux and screen likely will adapt to the user sessions. So you kind of have to use it on Linux, to not be an outsider and run unmodified upstream tools. I guess tight coupling is that you have to use the whole systemd package and can't just pick e.g. logind or the udev parts on your system. These won't work without everything else. So it's far more coupled than FreeBSD at the moment. FreeBSD maintains only the typical POSIX/UNIX userland. No one tells you what to do and most userland is pluggable - e.g. they have a patched OpenSSH and Sendmail as default - this can be disabled with 2 lines and you can install OpenSSH and Postfix and everything will work fine. You can also exchange syslog or ditch cron and run runit and runwhen instead. Everything will still work after that. You need to know what are you doing through but that's kind of the mindset of using BSD. It's almost impossible to rip out e.g. journald or dbus of a systemd distribution. It's not necessarily bad it's just a different idea. > So I think this is nonsense, as I see it, it's just FreeBSD advocates trying to play off the systemd controversy in Linux land. Actually I've never saw this from FreeBSD devs - there might be some fanbois, like everywhere but usually it's a more professional and calmer community. FreeBSD is and was always quite popular on HN there are a few core members here as well. FreeBSD has a lot of merits that Linux lacks or does slightly different. Clang, DTrace, ZFS, Jails, ByHyve... so it's an interesting topic to talk about. I guess most FreeBSD users don't need to badmouth Linux and even FreeBSD is looking into getting a new init based on launchd or some alternative - not sure what the current status is - because dependency resolution and reaction to events becomes important. Unit files are also a good idea that will spread. There is also SVC from Solaris that inspired systemd (amongst others) so there is nothing spectacular unique or new that systemd offers in regards to init. Most criticism against systemd also has nothing to do with the init aspect but with policy choices and defaults from the maintainers e.g. arbitrary new limits or changing default behavior or rewriting old tools in a manner that is disliked by some. Recently Ubuntu decided to include the systemd-resolved resolver and that caused some fallout due to certain assumptions from the devs. So systemd kind of changes the whole Linux ecosystem - IMHO in an honest attempt to improve it - and this usually causes some breakage even if it's for the better and if you just want to run your Unix and don't need the features you not really enjoy the ride. E.g. because the most events your server gets is a new IPv6 prefix once every 2 years you don't just need all the new bells and whistles. A lot of experienced devs and sysadmins also voiced conceptional and design complaints but I'm not able to judge that really. Some of it looks very reasonable. TL;DR systemd is not just init - it changes Linux and causes fallout - FreeBSD was always popular and it's getting attractive for servers due to these changes.

Some of it it's a reaction to systemd hate.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

verytrivial 10y ago

I prefer: Some of it is a constructive reaction to legitimate systemd concerns.

ezequiel-garzon 10y ago
Take away "constructive" and "legitimate" and you become a diplomat.
apecat 10y ago
FreeBSD is so very much worth taking a look at. Hardware support is not on Linux’s level, so it’s not necessarily an endeavor I’d recommend for desktop use, at least as a first 'nix experience, even with the super nice ZFS integration in PC-BSD. But if you’re at all frustrated by any aspect of Linux in server use, it’s worth having a peek at FreeBSD. And I’m saying this as a person who doesn’t really have much business talking about tools like dtrace or even jails. But I will argue that it’s the increasing wtf:ness of Linux that has held me back from wanting to become a more competent admin and more focused on IT work in my career. Blame the system, right? As a reluctant IT person and "advanced beginner" sysadmin, I was inspired to look into FreeBSD this spring. The final push had a lot to do with that massive, remotely exploitable glibc vulnerability (CVE-2015-7547), when the potential consequences of Linux monoculture started to really dawn on me. First thing I did was to migrate a couple of my Tor relay nodes to FreeBSD (instructions here: https://torbsd.github.io/ https://torbsd.github.io/ ). Whether my handful of <10 Mbit/s middle relays are real workloads or not is debatable, but it’s stuff I have a sense of duty about, especially with regards to doing basic security due diligence. Tor has a direct impact on real people doing real things, but it's not like these boxes keep me from working if they're down for a week, so it’s a good place to learn. After ten years on Debian and Ubuntu for server stuff, FreeBSD is quite refreshing. There's really a lot to love: human readable userland, man pages and scripts, the simplicity of throwing basic ipfw rules in /etc/rc.conf etc. Whereas stuff tends to "just work" on Debian (including automatic restarts of services after package installs), one needs to read the manual on FreeBSD. But everything feels like less of a pain to learn. And to be clear, the system doesn’t feel like a "tinker or GTFO" kit like Gentoo or Arch, starting with the installation process. After looking quickly at pf for more advanced networking stuff, I feel like I’ve been duped into believing that I hate networking, when it’s really the syntax of Linux’s iptables that is at fault. Another thing I definitely need is in-place upgrades, without the need to boot from media (like OpenBSD and NetBSD still seem to require). ‘freebsd-update’ seems to be stable nowadays. For the base system, FreeBSD seems to be moving towards a proper LTS model, where one is encouraged to stay on top of point releases. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8991960 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8991960 For third party software, packages seem to make a whole lot more sense than my expectations. I had heard that FreeBSD only recompiles all their packages every few weeks, but nowadays, it’s every three days or so. I have used ports on my Tor relays in order to be able to install security patches immediately. As a virtualization platform, I suppose Linux’s KVM remains a lot more mature and well supported. But the bhyve hypervisor seems to be coming along nicely. Before long FreeBSD might become a good virtualization platform. Personally, I can’t wait to see something like FreeNAS becoming a virtualization appliance, like the one you’d get with Proxmox or those QNAP prosumer file servers. From what I’ve seen so far, it seems increasingly frustrating that BSD didn’t become the major free 'nix platform back in the day.
- copperx 10y ago
  >> From what I’ve seen so far, it seems increasingly frustrating that BSD didn’t become the major free 'nix platform back in the day. I remember when FreeBSD was considered to be more mature than Linux for server use. What made Linux more exciting than FreeBSD? Why did FreeBSD lose ground?
  - itgoon 10y ago
    I was a huge fan back in the 4.x - 6.x days. The problems, for me, were: - apps developed specifically for Linux. The shim wasn't 100%. - Hardware support. This wasn't too bad, but I always had to take it into consideration. - Virtualization. This was the killer for me. Yes, jails are fantastic, if your entire workload ran on FBSD. But if you needed even one Windows/Linux instance, for any reason, you needed another physical machine. With Windows and Linux I could consolidate everything into a single machine. Things have improved a lot, and I may try it out again, but unfortunately the mindshare is all Linux now.
  - lmm 10y ago
    It took a long time for FreeBSD to support MS-DOS partitioning, so for a long time you couldn't dual-boot between Windows and FreeBSD without buying a second hard disk. So kids getting started tended to run Linux instead of FreeBSD, and they stuck with what they knew.
    - emaste 10y ago
      DOS partition support was added to the FreeBSD installer over two decades ago: Tue Sep 7 12:02:11 1993 UTC (22 years, 9 months ago) Added DOS partition support and maybe badblock remappping. https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base?view=revision&revision=408 https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base?view=revision&revision=408
      - mioelnir 10y ago
        I love that maybe in there.
- 10y ago

Philipp__ 10y ago

Absolutely no! Maybe it is because people at FreeBSD and it's users believe in OS.

gaius 10y ago
BSD is for people who love Unix, Linux is for people who hate Microsoft.
- technofiend 10y ago
  >BSD is for people who love Unix, Linux is for people who hate Microsoft. OpenBSD is for people who love the UNIX equivalent of Dwarf Fortress. I call it a full contact OS because of what will happen to you upon asking an easily googled question.
- Philipp__ 10y ago
  THIS!
- paride5745 10y ago
  That's the reason I'm a DragonFlyBSD user. Plus the lovely community there.
  - sigusr1 10y ago
    The dragonflybsd community is great. When I was experimenting with it, their freenode channel was super helpful, often with Matt himself answering questions. I ran into a bug after an upgrade and he had a patch up in like an hour. I've been deploying my stuff in linux containers recently, and I really like that flow. I really hope something like Jetpack (https://github.com/3ofcoins/jetpack https://github.com/3ofcoins/jetpack) can eventually provide a solid OCI implementation on top of jails and hammer (not sure what containers demand of a filesystem, I know jetpack is currently focused on ZFS).
- mhd 10y ago
  Yes, Berkeley sockets are a true embodiment of the Unix nature.

2close4comfort 10y ago

2 sides of the same coin. But this is great opportunity for FreeBSD and to think I am saying thank you to Microsoft.

cm3 10y ago
Microsoft is large enough that there are good and bad parts, but still they're not extending OS support on Azure out of goodwill. It's a cloud provider, so naturally they want to at least support the same stuff AWS does.

Touche 10y ago

Didn't Hubbard give a talk where he likes some of the design decisions from systemd and wants to adopt them?

schwarze_pest 10y ago
Hubbard wants FreeBSD to use launchd. Hubbard is in no position to enforce this if the project doesn't like it.
ivl 10y ago
Well, if anything good comes of that is a different question, but with his NextBSD project he looked to trying something with OS X's init system IIRC.
cm3 10y ago
A more likely contender is Nosh. It's additionallyy inspired by SMF and systemd and can import systemd's unit files. it also works on BSD and Linux.
- snuxoll 10y ago
  > can import systemd's unit files That's actually pretty neat. I don't have any real complaints about systemd, but every alternative I've looked at is more painful to use for service management. No longer having to hack together init scripts has been wonderful for me, it took a 10 line unit file to get YouTrack configured as a proper service on my CentOS 7 VM - I used to run JetBrains teamware products on Windows just because dealing with custom init scripts was such a pain in the ass.
  - JdeBP 10y ago
    > it took a 10 line unit file to get YouTrack configured as a proper service on my CentOS 7 VM If you did it the way that other people have done it, wrapping youtrack.sh start and youtrack.sh stop in a systemd service unit, with a sprinkling of erroneous Type=forking to get around the fact that that ends up running the Java process as a quickly orphaned grandchild of where systemd expects the daemon to be, and with log output explicitly redirected away from where service management could handle it into an ever-growing private log file under /usr ... then you have entered systemd House of Horror territory. "proper" is not really the word. * http://homepage.ntlworld.com./jonathan.deboynepollard/FGA/systemd-house-of-horror/ http://homepage.ntlworld.com./jonathan.deboynepollard/FGA/sy... * http://homepage.ntlworld.com./jonathan.deboynepollard/FGA/systemd-house-of-horror/tomcat.html http://homepage.ntlworld.com./jonathan.deboynepollard/FGA/sy...

epoch1970 10y ago

I've routinely seen a desire to not use systemd described as "hate". Why is that? When somebody wants to use zsh instead of bash, it's not described as "bash hate". Or when somebody wants to use Clang/LLVM instead of GCC, it's not described as "GCC hate". Or when somebody wants to use PostgreSQL instead of MySQL, it's not described as "MySQL hate". Yet when somebody wants to use some other init system instead of systemd, it is described as "systemd hate". Why are so many systemd supporters fixated on this vague concept of "hate"?

loudmax 10y ago
Using zsh instead of bash is a choice. The same more or less goes for a compiler or database. At least, we aren't seeing a situation where large numbers of major beloved projects are forcing their users to switch compiler or database. Nearly every major Linux distribution is now moving to systemd. Regardless of its merits, this is a significant change, and a lot of us sysadmins feel like we're being forced into it. Whether you're running RedHat/Centos, Ubuntu/Debian, or Arch, systemd is coming whether you like it or not. Even if systemd's merits were undisputed, one of the things we like about Linux is choice. As it is, the merits of systemd are very much in dispute, and the choosing not to run it pretty much means moving away from these major Linux distributions entirely. Hence lots of new interest in FreeBSD. FWIW, systemd has been pretty solid in my experience. Still, I'm glad the FreeBSD exists and is thriving without it.
eggnet 10y ago
Because you don't change operating systems over mild discomfort.
phippsbrad 10y ago
To understand, you only need to read the recent posts about how systemd is effecting how commonly used userland applications work like: screen, tmux, nohup. The systemd supporters are soon going to take away the ability to run pretty much all background processes (including using "&" in a shell) by killing those processes when your X session logs out. This will fundamentally changes the way you administer and maintain a linux computer. When told that this change is a bad idea, the systemd supporters said they knew better than you, and they are doing this to make the desktop UI better. This is one small example why they invoke "hate". They make a decisions like that every day that dramatically effect the entire linux platform. If I can't run "nohup" or "screen" or "sh &" to do my job anymore, then that forces me to use some other OS/distro that does not have systemd installed as the default.

AndyMcConachie 10y ago

As a single data point, I'm someone who recently gave up on Linux and moved over to the BSDs. Not that the BSDs were new to me, but I've given up on Linux for servers, and Debian specifically, precisely because of systemd.

toyg 10y ago
I'm tempted to do the same myself, but man, how can you live without apt-get and dpkg? I haven't looked at FreeBSD for ages; in OpenBSD packaging and patching is quite a pain, and this is holding me back a bit.
- zedpm 10y ago
  FreeBSD has a binary package manager (pkgng) that should feel much like apt. The ports tree still exists if you want to customize and build from source, but in general you should be fine just using pkg.
  - JdeBP 10y ago
    There's no "should" about it. It does feel like APT. (-: I invoke aptitude install on Debian and pkg install on FreeBSD/PC-BSD. dpkg -b stage/ target/ on Debian; pkg create -r stage/ -o target/ on FreeBSD/PC-BSD. Bear in mind, of course, that the SVID package management is a clear precursor to both of them.
- Sanddancer 10y ago
  To be honest, I'd rate pkg-ng higher than apt and dpkg these days. It's faster, cleaner, and uses an SQLite database as the backend, which allows for much more interesting queries for figuring out system state. For the base system, FreeBSD has an in-place binary updating system called freebsd-update that works rather well. I'd definitely encourage you to try FreeBSD, it has a beautiful amount of cleanliness that's missing from current Linux distros.

im_down_w_otp 10y ago

Hmmm. I would have thought it'd be for other merits? Like a better TCP stack, kqueue, first-class ZFS support, etc.

drudru11 10y ago

I have to agree with this. I used to stick to Ubuntu, but now I'm starting to look around. Now that I see FreeBSD on AWS, Digital Ocean, etc. I'm seriously considering that. I spun up a droplet yesterday just to check it out. Everything worked fine, but I cannot justify the switch yet. I'm planning on really testing it out in a few months. Til then I'll hang on to LTS.

gribbly 10y ago

Makes no sense to me at all, what systemd does brings the Linux ecosystem closer to what FreeBSD offers, a standardization of base components, which is what FreeBSD (and of course the other BSD's) are doing, but on a whole OS level. So if you dislike the tight coupling of components in systemd, why on earth would you go to FreeBSD which is a whole OS developed with tight coupling ? So I think this is nonsense, as I see it, it's just FreeBSD advocates trying to play off the systemd controversy in Linux land.

nisa 10y ago
Sorry, this is wrong in many aspects. FreeBSD/*BSD traditionally maintains userland and kernel together. The userland is also BSD licenced so using GNU is not possible so there is need to maintain these tools. But mostly it's taken from a shared upstream with some specific patches. There are seldom new components that introduce huge changes. There is also mostly a single community that decides on changes. This has led to splits in the past but usually things are consensual. systemd as a project was/is mostly driven by Red Hat and kind of praised itself into distributions due to eating udev and that would have required a fork (Gentoo did that with eudev). Debian almost self destructed in the discussions and it's mostly unrelated with the kernel. They tried to push kdbus but this was denied. So there was some split between distribution developers (systemd made a lot of stuff easier and was the new upstream for must-have-components) and users (never change a running system) about that. This has caused lot's of nasty fallout on the internet - mostly from the users that were opposed. But both sides kind of heated the debates. > So if you dislike the tight coupling of components in systemd, why on earth would you go to FreeBSD which is a whole OS developed with tight coupling ? Source lying in the same git repository is not tight coupling. Depending on dbus,journald,logind kind of is, but systemd is not really tightly coupled it's more like there are components that can be used and software has to adapt to use it (GNOME, kwin migrated to logind on Linux), tmux and screen likely will adapt to the user sessions. So you kind of have to use it on Linux, to not be an outsider and run unmodified upstream tools. I guess tight coupling is that you have to use the whole systemd package and can't just pick e.g. logind or the udev parts on your system. These won't work without everything else. So it's far more coupled than FreeBSD at the moment. FreeBSD maintains only the typical POSIX/UNIX userland. No one tells you what to do and most userland is pluggable - e.g. they have a patched OpenSSH and Sendmail as default - this can be disabled with 2 lines and you can install OpenSSH and Postfix and everything will work fine. You can also exchange syslog or ditch cron and run runit and runwhen instead. Everything will still work after that. You need to know what are you doing through but that's kind of the mindset of using BSD. It's almost impossible to rip out e.g. journald or dbus of a systemd distribution. It's not necessarily bad it's just a different idea. > So I think this is nonsense, as I see it, it's just FreeBSD advocates trying to play off the systemd controversy in Linux land. Actually I've never saw this from FreeBSD devs - there might be some fanbois, like everywhere but usually it's a more professional and calmer community. FreeBSD is and was always quite popular on HN there are a few core members here as well. FreeBSD has a lot of merits that Linux lacks or does slightly different. Clang, DTrace, ZFS, Jails, ByHyve... so it's an interesting topic to talk about. I guess most FreeBSD users don't need to badmouth Linux and even FreeBSD is looking into getting a new init based on launchd or some alternative - not sure what the current status is - because dependency resolution and reaction to events becomes important. Unit files are also a good idea that will spread. There is also SVC from Solaris that inspired systemd (amongst others) so there is nothing spectacular unique or new that systemd offers in regards to init. Most criticism against systemd also has nothing to do with the init aspect but with policy choices and defaults from the maintainers e.g. arbitrary new limits or changing default behavior or rewriting old tools in a manner that is disliked by some. Recently Ubuntu decided to include the systemd-resolved resolver and that caused some fallout due to certain assumptions from the devs. So systemd kind of changes the whole Linux ecosystem - IMHO in an honest attempt to improve it - and this usually causes some breakage even if it's for the better and if you just want to run your Unix and don't need the features you not really enjoy the ride. E.g. because the most events your server gets is a new IPv6 prefix once every 2 years you don't just need all the new bells and whistles. A lot of experienced devs and sysadmins also voiced conceptional and design complaints but I'm not able to judge that really. Some of it looks very reasonable. TL;DR systemd is not just init - it changes Linux and causes fallout - FreeBSD was always popular and it's getting attractive for servers due to these changes.