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Very informative article, thank you. This article is missing discussion on ArchLinux ( probably because it is very old ? ). Arch has a minimal base system ( no

Very informative article, thank you. This article is missing discussion on ArchLinux ( probably because it is very old ? ). Arch has a minimal base system ( no X etc ) and you can build the system you most like. Also Linux now uses git for development. > And normally, you do the whole rebuild process in four steps. You start with a make buildworld which compiles all of userland, then a make buildkernel which compiles the kernel. Then you take a deep breath and make installkernel to install the new kernel, and make installworld to install the new userland. Each step is automated by a target in the Makefile. > Of course, I'm leaving out tons of detail here. Things like describing the kernel config, merging system config files, cleaning up includes... all those gritty details. Wow, so painful. For me its as simple as : $ pacman -Syu and watch some movie. I bet the BSD way offers more opportunities to learn but I personally don't like learning for the sake of learning. Learning different ways to do the same thing does not make me a better person. So this is not interesting to me. > Does Linux support hardware that BSD doesn't? Probably. Does it matter? Only if you have that hardware. I could obtain that hardware at some point in the future. > "But Linux has more programs than BSD!" > How do you figure? Most of these "programs" you're so hot about are things that are open source or source-available anyway. Given an application, does the provider support it on your OS is an important consideration that people make before choosing to use an OS, as they should. > Linux, by not having that sort of separation, makes it very difficult to have parallel versions, and instead almost requires a single "blessed" one. Isn't this what NixOS ( https://nixos.org/nixos/about.html https://nixos.org/nixos/about.html ) is supposed to be solving ( among other things ) ? I might try a BSD for the novelty aspect of it, but so far I have seen no reason why it should be better.

talideon 10y ago
Yes, the article is very old. > Wow, so painful. And also something that hasn't been true for ages. By way of anecdote, I've had to do config merges on major version upgrades more on Debian systems than FreeBSD systems, but even then the difference hasn't been all that great: major version upgrades just work. And the last time I had to build a custom kernel was FreeBSD 6, which was about a decade ago. Any remaining pain is largely a consequence of the freebsd-update works and should mostly go away once the base system is packaged (which should also make security updates a little faster to install).

talideon 10y ago

Yes, the article is very old. > Wow, so painful. And also something that hasn't been true for ages. By way of anecdote, I've had to do config merges on major version upgrades more on Debian systems than FreeBSD systems, but even then the difference hasn't been all that great: major version upgrades just work. And the last time I had to build a custom kernel was FreeBSD 6, which was about a decade ago. Any remaining pain is largely a consequence of the freebsd-update works and should mostly go away once the base system is packaged (which should also make security updates a little faster to install).