10 ms·

Comprehensive and biased comparison of OpenBSD and FreeBSD [pdf]

170 points by oherrala 10y ago

lacampbell 10y ago
Has anyone run both Linux and BSD on a server? What was your experience?
- julie1 10y ago
  It depends. If you call linux: debian or ubuntu or centOS, even with unsafe defaults freeBSD is secured. Compared to untuntu/debian/centOS freeBSD has got bleeding edge softwares coming from upstream. That is the power of SOURCE distribution. Theses packages being compiled it may suit you. I must admit FLAVORED packages (make.conf templates) make sense. I remember being a linux sysadmins and building my openLDAP/python/php packages from source by hand that were 4 years old with envy wondering WHY?! Since systemd and my migration to BSD I have no regrets. PF, ipfw are way more powerful than any linux firewall tools. I have upstream stable software in the stable distribution. I don't have systemd. I have jails... And I have no religion switching to openBSD for core servers that need security knowing I have very few knowledge costs in doing so. And be it capsicum or privilege dropping I look at linux containers techno as a smoke screen for poor man's security through obfuscation. My advice is be smart: don't trust me, but if you are in between experiment.
anw 10y ago
Warning: this takes you directly to a PDF which may automatically download (such as on Chrome for Android). — update: the title appears to now reflect that this is a PDF. It did not earlier.
- peterwwillis 10y ago
  The "[pdf]" in the HN story header indicates this.
- eriknstr 10y ago
  The title already has the pdf tag and I think that's automatic so it was there when you clicked the link also. The server does not send the Content-Disposition [1] header, so if your browser auto-downloads the PDF then either you've made poor choices about your browser config or you have a browser that can't itself show PDFs, in which case you may have made a poor choice of browser. [1]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Headers/Content-Disposition https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Headers/Co...
  - JadeNB 10y ago
    > if your browser auto-downloads the PDF then … you have a browser that can't itself show PDFs …. Surely a browser that shows PDFs itself downloads them in order to do so? (I don't know for sure what was bothering anw, but I'm often on a limited data connection, and, whether the PDF is displayed in my browser or dropped in the download folder, it hits my data allowance the same.)
    - eriknstr 10y ago
      Of course it must be downloaded in order to display it. Obviously what I mean is that since they point out "auto-download" specifically I would think that they mean that it's saved to disk in your Downloads folder. Why this should be a problem somehow you'll have to ask them not me. If they file size was the concern, they would have said so. There are a lot of web pages that weigh in at more bytes than this PDF these days with all of their images and scripts and god-knows-what.
    - tedunangst 10y ago
      If a 100K download is of great concern, it's probably best not to click any link on HN. There are pages that have style sheets bigger than that.
- oherrala 10y ago
  I added the "[PDF]" in subject line when I posted the link.
donpdonp 10y ago
This paper appears to be an IRC session formatted in LaTEX. It'd be easier to read as text.
- jlgaddis 10y ago
  You can easily make your own plain text version [0]: $ wget https://www.bsdfrog.org/pub/events/my_bsd_sucks_less_than_yours-AsiaBSDCon2017-paper.pdf $ pdftotext \ my_bsd_sucks_less_than_yours-AsiaBSDCon2017-paper.pdf \ my_bsd_sucks_less_than_yours-AsiaBSDCon2017-paper.txt Or, if you prefer HTML [1]: $ pdftohtml -i -nomerge -s \ my_bsd_sucks_less_than_yours-AsiaBSDCon2017-paper.pdf \ my_bsd_sucks_less_than_yours-AsiaBSDCon2017-paper.html ETA: Surprisingly, the PDF is quite lightweight. File sizes, in bytes: PDF: 118,971 TXT: 90,912 HTML: 384,256 [0]: http://evilrouters.net/foo/my_bsd_sucks_less_than_yours-AsiaBSDCon2017-paper.txt http://evilrouters.net/foo/my_bsd_sucks_less_than_yours-Asia... [1]: http://evilrouters.net/foo/my_bsd_sucks_less_than_yours-AsiaBSDCon2017-paper-html.html http://evilrouters.net/foo/my_bsd_sucks_less_than_yours-Asia...
  - jakebasile 10y ago
    I have my issues with HN, but this type of comment is one of parts I relish. Thanks!
    - jlgaddis 10y ago
      Indeed, learning new little tricks like this is one of the great things about HN! Many times, I get more "value" from the comments than I do the submissions.
  - JdeBP 10y ago
    To be more in the spirit of the paper, you could perhaps give your instructions in terms of FreeBSD's own fetch command or OpenBSD's own ftp command, rather than wget from ports. (-:
Mark_B 10y ago
FYI - Abstract This paper will look at some of the differences between the FreeBSD and OpenBSD operating systems. It is not intended to be solely technical but will also show the different "visions" and design decisions that rule the way things are implemented. It is expected to be a subjective view from two BSD developers and does not pretend to represent these projects in any way. We don't want it to be a troll talk but rather a casual and friendly exchange while nicely making fun of each other like we would do over a drink. Of course, we shall try and hit where it hurts when that makes sense. Obviously, we both have our personal subjective preferences and we will explain why. Showing some of the weaknesses may encourage people to contribute in some areas. Most of the topics discussed here could warrant their own paper and talk and as such some may not get the deep analysis they deserve. This is a totally biased talk from two different perspectives.
mrstone 10y ago
I don't understand how this is a paper. It's just two dudes in a chatroom and the 'authors' felt it was necessary to format it with LaTEX? Also, the title has a spelling error in it.
- brynet 10y ago
  The authors of the paper are French, it's in the form of a loose transcript of a recent talk given at this years AsiaBSDCon. https://2017.asiabsdcon.org/program.html.en https://2017.asiabsdcon.org/program.html.en "P10A: Comprehensive and biaised comparison of OpenBSD and FreeBSD" In was probably presented and formatted this way because of tradition, also.. https://www.openbsd.org/events.html https://www.openbsd.org/events.html
  - tedunangst 10y ago
    "Slides are useless. We want talk transcripts." Here's a transcript. "Take it away, take it away!"
    - sverige 10y ago
      "Or at least clean up their funny pronunciation and grammar first!"
  - cperciva 10y ago
    AsiaBSDCon has a lot of attendees whose English is less than completely fluent. Having material in written form allows them to read at their own pace rather than struggling to keep up with a conference speaker.
  - ajross 10y ago
    ... and the French are known for their affinity toward chat transcripts?
- Nomentatus 10y ago
  You'll want to stay strictly away from Plato (the philosopher, not the website) if you can't take information in dialogue form seriously.
ploek 10y ago
This appears to be a written down version of the talk they gave at FOSDEM: https://fosdem.org/2017/schedule/event/my_bsd_sucks_less/ https://fosdem.org/2017/schedule/event/my_bsd_sucks_less/
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
eriknstr 10y ago
Typo: >but the ports tree is a rolling release not tight to a FreeBSD release should be >but the ports tree is a rolling release not tied to a FreeBSD release
- jlgaddis 10y ago
  What is the point of mentioning this here as opposed to, say, e-mailing the authors? With -- at most -- a handful of exceptions (assuming maybe ajacoutot or bapt show up), no one here on HN has the ability to fix this so I really don't see the point.
  - aairey 10y ago
    Also, I guess he gave up shortly after. There's way more than the single typo ...
    - jlgaddis 10y ago
      Yeah, I noticed that and that's part of the reason I asked. If one pointed out every typo in this document (as well as all other HN submissions), the signal-to-noise ratio of the comments section would be intolerable.
  - eriknstr 10y ago
    I am counting on the authors seeing this thread.
r0brodz 10y ago
If I was on my rig right now I would definitely convert this PDF to text so everyone could access it.
- jlgaddis 10y ago
  Are there common platforms where PDFs are inaccessible?
  - r0brodz 10y ago
    Not everyone runs GUI DESKTOP. Smartypants
    - tedunangst 10y ago
      Perhaps this is a good opportunity to teach those people about pdftotext. If you keep converting everything for them, how will they ever learn to do things on their own?
    - jlgaddis 10y ago
      It was an honest question. My interpretation of your comment was that there was some (not insignificant size) group of people who would be unable to view this document due to some inherent limitation of whatever platform they're using to access the Internet (e.g., some mobile phone OS that can't open PDFs or something similar). If I'm understanding correctly, however, your complaint is either that 1) nobody has provided you with an application to render PDFs on an 80x25 dumb terminal screen or 2) this document wasn't created in the format that you prefer. When you make a conscious decision to not utilize a "GUI DESKTOP" -- like >99.9% of the rest of the world -- you must be prepared to accept such inconveniences and/or find alternatives that meet your needs. The rest of the world has no burden or obligation to cater to your preferences. (FWIW, in an earlier comment, I posted instructions for converting this PDF to both text and HTML as well as performing the conversion myself and making available those versions of this document. You're welcome.)
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
ploggingdev 10y ago
Very interesting read! As mentioned, the wireless and graphics areas are sorely lagging behind GNU/Linux os'. They only have support upto Haswell in the graphics department. Ouch. The priority of both BSDs is clearly not the regular desktop user where wireless and graphics support can be deal breakers. The FreeBSD based PC-BSD (now known as TrueOS) exists, but AFAIK it does not fix the wireless and graphics support situation. Given that GPU based computing is becoming more prevalent with the advent of ML/DL, I wonder if there are efforts to improve support for graphics. (It would have been interesting if a Linux guy also joined the conversation, along with a Windows guy and a MacOS guy.)
- notaplumber 10y ago
  > They only have support upto Haswell in the graphics department. Ouch. OpenBSD supports up to Broadwell graphics, but neither support Skylake or newer.. except in experimental branches, or patches. https://www.openbsd.org/59.html https://www.openbsd.org/59.html
- jlgaddis 10y ago
  I think the primary reason for this (graphics/wireless support, or lack thereof) with regard to FreeBSD is that a large number of the developers -- possibly even a majority, if what I've seen at conferences is any indicator -- don't run FreeBSD as their desktop OS. Instead, they seem to overwhelmingly run macOS. A larger percentage of OpenBSD developers do seem to run OpenBSD on their laptops, however. FWIW, I do recall hearing about some fairly extensive progress being made recently WRT both graphics and wireless support on both of the BSDs recently, so expect the situation to improve quite a bit in the near future if it hasn't already.
- vasili111 10y ago
  I think the lack of support for some graphic cards is not because of developers but because of hardware vendors. AMD, for example, does not support FreeBSD and OpenBSD officially but supports Linux.
- boomboomsubban 10y ago
  FreeBSD is fixing the graphics issue, their DRM-next branch is in or nearly in sync with Linux. It's not on 11 to my knowledge, still needs some testing, but TrueOS ships with it.
jcranmer 10y ago
One of the nice things about this is the last section (if you can bear to read that long). Both people comment on the strengths of the opponent's BSD: OpenBSD is complemented on "tackling very important project [sic] which would probably have never happened otherwise" (e.g., OpenSSH), particularly also the fact that OpenBSD cares to see their projects ported to !BSD (e.g., Linux). Meanwhile, FreeBSD is complemented on "its [sic] a real “enterprise” oper- ating system and I think it is slowly filling the spot left by Solaris." At the end of the day, both OpenBSD and FreeBSD are niche systems. They don't have the popularity of Linux, and they probably never will. But that's not a problem. Both of them are major operating systems that do innovate, and hence they're worth paying attention to. That's where the compliment of FreeBSD as becoming Solaris's successor is really telling--Solaris was the operating system that brought us DTrace and ZFS, and it was FreeBSD who I believe had the first container system (jail).
- _delirium 10y ago
  I can see FreeBSD picking up a good part of the ex-Solaris marketshare in terms of users, but have they really taken over the role in terms of development? As far as I can tell, ZFS in particular has its canonical upstream development in the Illumos repository (Illumos is the successor to OpenSolaris), which FreeBSD pulls from, rather than development having really moved to FreeBSD as the new canonical home. FreeBSD developers are certainly involved in contributing code upstream, but then, so are a number of other developers, including from the major Illumos vendors (OmniTI and Joyent), and even some from ZFSonLinux.
  - RantyDave 10y ago
    SmartOS also has working Linux compatible Zones. Last time I looked, FBSD was a way short of this...
    - _delirium 10y ago
      Even without the Linux-compatible aspect, Illumos Zones are considerably ahead of FreeBSD jails these days imo. Better tooling, resource limiting infrastructure, etc., especially if you want to run multi-tenant with untrusted tenants. Jails did pioneer the concept, though.
tannhaeuser 10y ago
What could be done in order to help the BSDs to become mainstream or more visible as server-side alternative to Linux? I've operated a small FBSD mail server until 2004 (FBSD 4, vinum RAID, sendmail, cyrus IMAP) and was extremely pleased with the performance, robustness and overall coherency of it (though I wouldn't use that stack today). While Linux certainly works well, I'm instinctively against monocultures of any kind or form. With Linux-only containers (Docker and co.) there's now the danger that we're loosing the BSDs terminally as a replacement for Linux. But is the isolation (or lack thereof) and interfacing to the host system provided by Docker/runC/whatever really worth it (compared to portable POSIX-based primitives eg. chroot jails, or modern capabilities-based generalizations of it such as FBSD's capsicum)? It's also odd that a GPL-licensed OS, of all things, is making it to the top in containerland. But then the nominal "default" host OS for Docker (Alpine Linux) uses musl (MIT-licenses libc) rather than glibc. I'm not complaining, and there doesn't seem to be anything wrong with it legally, but the commercial Docker image ecosystem, to me, has the smell of a GPL-circumvention device of sorts in that many images routinely install the Debian/GNU userland tools on first load.
- eatonphil 10y ago
  FreeBSD jails are on a different level in terms of stability (and simplicity, that contributes to stability) compared to Docker. Personally -- having run Docker containers for over a year in testing -- I would take jails over containers in a heartbeat.
  - lacampbell 10y ago
    how do they compare to LXC? I ran into a lot of annoying issues trying to set them up in ubuntu
  - AsyncAwait 10y ago
    Yeah, I would take jails over Docker as well, but systemd is just so much better, (more so than jails over Docker in my opinion), than init, that I am hoping for a better tool to come about, the underlying LXC technology appears to be solid.
tachion 10y ago
While you're here, have you donated[0][1] yet? :) You may or may not be aware, but FreeBSD runs your movies on Netflix, your games on PlayStation 4 and Nitendo Switch, your files on FreeNAS and ZFS, your friends on WhatsApp and OpenBSD runs everything else on OpenSSH. ;) So, you may or may not know that, but you need FreeBSD and OpenBSD and they also need you! Every cent counts and so does every contributor, that helps the foundations keep their non-profit status. [0] https://www.freebsdfoundation.org/donate/ https://www.freebsdfoundation.org/donate/ [1] https://www.openbsd.org/donations.html https://www.openbsd.org/donations.html
- pyvpx 10y ago
  FreeBSD appreciates, but doesn't need donations like the OpenBSD foundation does. many FreeBSD committers are FTE for a number of commercial outfits and work on FreeBSD full time. OpenBSD has hackathons, that are funded by donations. if you use both, consider donating to OpenBSD first. if you use OpenSSH, consider donating more to OpenBSD :-)
  - markjdb 10y ago
    I'm a committer that works for such a commercial outfit, and I certainly don't get to work on FreeBSD full time (though I do work _with_ FreeBSD full time). Most of my contributions still come out of my spare time. I believe that's true for many others as well.
  - mioelnir 10y ago
    Please also note that while FreeBSD may have the bigger individual sponsors, the FreeBSD Foundation still relies on many small contributions as the tax-free non-profit status of the Foundation relies more on the number of contributors than the amount (at least that's how I understood it).
- jhlgkhkhil 10y ago
  > You may or may not be aware, but FreeBSD runs your movies on Netflix, your games on PlayStation 4 and Nitendo Switch Do Netflix, Nintendo and Sony contribute financially to the FreeBSD project? They are the ones making money off the project after all.
Esau 10y ago
When it comes to the BSDs, here is my impressions of them: NetBSD wants to run everywhere. OpenBSD wants to be secure. DragonFly BSD wants to advanced. FreeBSD wants to be Linux. TrueOS wants to be Ubuntu. (I don't list MacOS because I don't feel that it is a true BSD.)
- jrcii 10y ago
  This is true of NetBSD and what I see repeated everywhere, but it's also an oversimplification that doesn't quite do it justice. As important as the end of portability is the modular (proper) architecture of the code base that provides this. "Code quality and correctness" is a stated feature of the OS, and by and large it is there.
- JdeBP 10y ago
  Beware that this sort of grouping is as superficial and wrong as categorizing people into blondes, brunettes, and redheads. In truth, they all aim to be portable, advanced, and secure, with desktop and server support. And there is plenty of sharing from each to the others. The differences amongst them are, in reality, not so easily pigeonholed.

170 points by oherrala 10y ago

lacampbell 10y ago

Has anyone run both Linux and BSD on a server? What was your experience?

julie1 10y ago
It depends. If you call linux: debian or ubuntu or centOS, even with unsafe defaults freeBSD is secured. Compared to untuntu/debian/centOS freeBSD has got bleeding edge softwares coming from upstream. That is the power of SOURCE distribution. Theses packages being compiled it may suit you. I must admit FLAVORED packages (make.conf templates) make sense. I remember being a linux sysadmins and building my openLDAP/python/php packages from source by hand that were 4 years old with envy wondering WHY?! Since systemd and my migration to BSD I have no regrets. PF, ipfw are way more powerful than any linux firewall tools. I have upstream stable software in the stable distribution. I don't have systemd. I have jails... And I have no religion switching to openBSD for core servers that need security knowing I have very few knowledge costs in doing so. And be it capsicum or privilege dropping I look at linux containers techno as a smoke screen for poor man's security through obfuscation. My advice is be smart: don't trust me, but if you are in between experiment.

anw 10y ago

Warning: this takes you directly to a PDF which may automatically download (such as on Chrome for Android). — update: the title appears to now reflect that this is a PDF. It did not earlier.

peterwwillis 10y ago
The "[pdf]" in the HN story header indicates this.
eriknstr 10y ago
The title already has the pdf tag and I think that's automatic so it was there when you clicked the link also. The server does not send the Content-Disposition [1] header, so if your browser auto-downloads the PDF then either you've made poor choices about your browser config or you have a browser that can't itself show PDFs, in which case you may have made a poor choice of browser. [1]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Headers/Content-Disposition https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Headers/Co...
- JadeNB 10y ago
  > if your browser auto-downloads the PDF then … you have a browser that can't itself show PDFs …. Surely a browser that shows PDFs itself downloads them in order to do so? (I don't know for sure what was bothering anw, but I'm often on a limited data connection, and, whether the PDF is displayed in my browser or dropped in the download folder, it hits my data allowance the same.)
  - eriknstr 10y ago
    Of course it must be downloaded in order to display it. Obviously what I mean is that since they point out "auto-download" specifically I would think that they mean that it's saved to disk in your Downloads folder. Why this should be a problem somehow you'll have to ask them not me. If they file size was the concern, they would have said so. There are a lot of web pages that weigh in at more bytes than this PDF these days with all of their images and scripts and god-knows-what.
  - tedunangst 10y ago
    If a 100K download is of great concern, it's probably best not to click any link on HN. There are pages that have style sheets bigger than that.
oherrala 10y ago
I added the "[PDF]" in subject line when I posted the link.

donpdonp 10y ago

This paper appears to be an IRC session formatted in LaTEX. It'd be easier to read as text.

jlgaddis 10y ago
You can easily make your own plain text version [0]: $ wget https://www.bsdfrog.org/pub/events/my_bsd_sucks_less_than_yours-AsiaBSDCon2017-paper.pdf $ pdftotext \ my_bsd_sucks_less_than_yours-AsiaBSDCon2017-paper.pdf \ my_bsd_sucks_less_than_yours-AsiaBSDCon2017-paper.txt Or, if you prefer HTML [1]: $ pdftohtml -i -nomerge -s \ my_bsd_sucks_less_than_yours-AsiaBSDCon2017-paper.pdf \ my_bsd_sucks_less_than_yours-AsiaBSDCon2017-paper.html ETA: Surprisingly, the PDF is quite lightweight. File sizes, in bytes: PDF: 118,971 TXT: 90,912 HTML: 384,256 [0]: http://evilrouters.net/foo/my_bsd_sucks_less_than_yours-AsiaBSDCon2017-paper.txt http://evilrouters.net/foo/my_bsd_sucks_less_than_yours-Asia... [1]: http://evilrouters.net/foo/my_bsd_sucks_less_than_yours-AsiaBSDCon2017-paper-html.html http://evilrouters.net/foo/my_bsd_sucks_less_than_yours-Asia...
- jakebasile 10y ago
  I have my issues with HN, but this type of comment is one of parts I relish. Thanks!
  - jlgaddis 10y ago
    Indeed, learning new little tricks like this is one of the great things about HN! Many times, I get more "value" from the comments than I do the submissions.
- JdeBP 10y ago
  To be more in the spirit of the paper, you could perhaps give your instructions in terms of FreeBSD's own fetch command or OpenBSD's own ftp command, rather than wget from ports. (-:

Mark_B 10y ago

FYI - Abstract This paper will look at some of the differences between the FreeBSD and OpenBSD operating systems. It is not intended to be solely technical but will also show the different "visions" and design decisions that rule the way things are implemented. It is expected to be a subjective view from two BSD developers and does not pretend to represent these projects in any way. We don't want it to be a troll talk but rather a casual and friendly exchange while nicely making fun of each other like we would do over a drink. Of course, we shall try and hit where it hurts when that makes sense. Obviously, we both have our personal subjective preferences and we will explain why. Showing some of the weaknesses may encourage people to contribute in some areas. Most of the topics discussed here could warrant their own paper and talk and as such some may not get the deep analysis they deserve. This is a totally biased talk from two different perspectives.

mrstone 10y ago

I don't understand how this is a paper. It's just two dudes in a chatroom and the 'authors' felt it was necessary to format it with LaTEX? Also, the title has a spelling error in it.

brynet 10y ago
The authors of the paper are French, it's in the form of a loose transcript of a recent talk given at this years AsiaBSDCon. https://2017.asiabsdcon.org/program.html.en https://2017.asiabsdcon.org/program.html.en "P10A: Comprehensive and biaised comparison of OpenBSD and FreeBSD" In was probably presented and formatted this way because of tradition, also.. https://www.openbsd.org/events.html https://www.openbsd.org/events.html
- tedunangst 10y ago
  "Slides are useless. We want talk transcripts." Here's a transcript. "Take it away, take it away!"
  - sverige 10y ago
    "Or at least clean up their funny pronunciation and grammar first!"
- cperciva 10y ago
  AsiaBSDCon has a lot of attendees whose English is less than completely fluent. Having material in written form allows them to read at their own pace rather than struggling to keep up with a conference speaker.
- ajross 10y ago
  ... and the French are known for their affinity toward chat transcripts?
Nomentatus 10y ago
You'll want to stay strictly away from Plato (the philosopher, not the website) if you can't take information in dialogue form seriously.

ploek 10y ago

This appears to be a written down version of the talk they gave at FOSDEM: https://fosdem.org/2017/schedule/event/my_bsd_sucks_less/ https://fosdem.org/2017/schedule/event/my_bsd_sucks_less/

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

eriknstr 10y ago

Typo: >but the ports tree is a rolling release not tight to a FreeBSD release should be >but the ports tree is a rolling release not tied to a FreeBSD release

jlgaddis 10y ago
What is the point of mentioning this here as opposed to, say, e-mailing the authors? With -- at most -- a handful of exceptions (assuming maybe ajacoutot or bapt show up), no one here on HN has the ability to fix this so I really don't see the point.
- aairey 10y ago
  Also, I guess he gave up shortly after. There's way more than the single typo ...
  - jlgaddis 10y ago
    Yeah, I noticed that and that's part of the reason I asked. If one pointed out every typo in this document (as well as all other HN submissions), the signal-to-noise ratio of the comments section would be intolerable.
- eriknstr 10y ago
  I am counting on the authors seeing this thread.

r0brodz 10y ago

If I was on my rig right now I would definitely convert this PDF to text so everyone could access it.

jlgaddis 10y ago
Are there common platforms where PDFs are inaccessible?
- r0brodz 10y ago
  Not everyone runs GUI DESKTOP. Smartypants
  - tedunangst 10y ago
    Perhaps this is a good opportunity to teach those people about pdftotext. If you keep converting everything for them, how will they ever learn to do things on their own?
  - jlgaddis 10y ago
    It was an honest question. My interpretation of your comment was that there was some (not insignificant size) group of people who would be unable to view this document due to some inherent limitation of whatever platform they're using to access the Internet (e.g., some mobile phone OS that can't open PDFs or something similar). If I'm understanding correctly, however, your complaint is either that 1) nobody has provided you with an application to render PDFs on an 80x25 dumb terminal screen or 2) this document wasn't created in the format that you prefer. When you make a conscious decision to not utilize a "GUI DESKTOP" -- like >99.9% of the rest of the world -- you must be prepared to accept such inconveniences and/or find alternatives that meet your needs. The rest of the world has no burden or obligation to cater to your preferences. (FWIW, in an earlier comment, I posted instructions for converting this PDF to both text and HTML as well as performing the conversion myself and making available those versions of this document. You're welcome.)
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]

ploggingdev 10y ago

Very interesting read! As mentioned, the wireless and graphics areas are sorely lagging behind GNU/Linux os'. They only have support upto Haswell in the graphics department. Ouch. The priority of both BSDs is clearly not the regular desktop user where wireless and graphics support can be deal breakers. The FreeBSD based PC-BSD (now known as TrueOS) exists, but AFAIK it does not fix the wireless and graphics support situation. Given that GPU based computing is becoming more prevalent with the advent of ML/DL, I wonder if there are efforts to improve support for graphics. (It would have been interesting if a Linux guy also joined the conversation, along with a Windows guy and a MacOS guy.)

notaplumber 10y ago
> They only have support upto Haswell in the graphics department. Ouch. OpenBSD supports up to Broadwell graphics, but neither support Skylake or newer.. except in experimental branches, or patches. https://www.openbsd.org/59.html https://www.openbsd.org/59.html
jlgaddis 10y ago
I think the primary reason for this (graphics/wireless support, or lack thereof) with regard to FreeBSD is that a large number of the developers -- possibly even a majority, if what I've seen at conferences is any indicator -- don't run FreeBSD as their desktop OS. Instead, they seem to overwhelmingly run macOS. A larger percentage of OpenBSD developers do seem to run OpenBSD on their laptops, however. FWIW, I do recall hearing about some fairly extensive progress being made recently WRT both graphics and wireless support on both of the BSDs recently, so expect the situation to improve quite a bit in the near future if it hasn't already.
vasili111 10y ago
I think the lack of support for some graphic cards is not because of developers but because of hardware vendors. AMD, for example, does not support FreeBSD and OpenBSD officially but supports Linux.
boomboomsubban 10y ago
FreeBSD is fixing the graphics issue, their DRM-next branch is in or nearly in sync with Linux. It's not on 11 to my knowledge, still needs some testing, but TrueOS ships with it.

jcranmer 10y ago

One of the nice things about this is the last section (if you can bear to read that long). Both people comment on the strengths of the opponent's BSD: OpenBSD is complemented on "tackling very important project [sic] which would probably have never happened otherwise" (e.g., OpenSSH), particularly also the fact that OpenBSD cares to see their projects ported to !BSD (e.g., Linux). Meanwhile, FreeBSD is complemented on "its [sic] a real “enterprise” oper- ating system and I think it is slowly filling the spot left by Solaris." At the end of the day, both OpenBSD and FreeBSD are niche systems. They don't have the popularity of Linux, and they probably never will. But that's not a problem. Both of them are major operating systems that do innovate, and hence they're worth paying attention to. That's where the compliment of FreeBSD as becoming Solaris's successor is really telling--Solaris was the operating system that brought us DTrace and ZFS, and it was FreeBSD who I believe had the first container system (jail).

_delirium 10y ago
I can see FreeBSD picking up a good part of the ex-Solaris marketshare in terms of users, but have they really taken over the role in terms of development? As far as I can tell, ZFS in particular has its canonical upstream development in the Illumos repository (Illumos is the successor to OpenSolaris), which FreeBSD pulls from, rather than development having really moved to FreeBSD as the new canonical home. FreeBSD developers are certainly involved in contributing code upstream, but then, so are a number of other developers, including from the major Illumos vendors (OmniTI and Joyent), and even some from ZFSonLinux.
- RantyDave 10y ago
  SmartOS also has working Linux compatible Zones. Last time I looked, FBSD was a way short of this...
  - _delirium 10y ago
    Even without the Linux-compatible aspect, Illumos Zones are considerably ahead of FreeBSD jails these days imo. Better tooling, resource limiting infrastructure, etc., especially if you want to run multi-tenant with untrusted tenants. Jails did pioneer the concept, though.

tannhaeuser 10y ago

What could be done in order to help the BSDs to become mainstream or more visible as server-side alternative to Linux? I've operated a small FBSD mail server until 2004 (FBSD 4, vinum RAID, sendmail, cyrus IMAP) and was extremely pleased with the performance, robustness and overall coherency of it (though I wouldn't use that stack today). While Linux certainly works well, I'm instinctively against monocultures of any kind or form. With Linux-only containers (Docker and co.) there's now the danger that we're loosing the BSDs terminally as a replacement for Linux. But is the isolation (or lack thereof) and interfacing to the host system provided by Docker/runC/whatever really worth it (compared to portable POSIX-based primitives eg. chroot jails, or modern capabilities-based generalizations of it such as FBSD's capsicum)? It's also odd that a GPL-licensed OS, of all things, is making it to the top in containerland. But then the nominal "default" host OS for Docker (Alpine Linux) uses musl (MIT-licenses libc) rather than glibc. I'm not complaining, and there doesn't seem to be anything wrong with it legally, but the commercial Docker image ecosystem, to me, has the smell of a GPL-circumvention device of sorts in that many images routinely install the Debian/GNU userland tools on first load.

eatonphil 10y ago
FreeBSD jails are on a different level in terms of stability (and simplicity, that contributes to stability) compared to Docker. Personally -- having run Docker containers for over a year in testing -- I would take jails over containers in a heartbeat.
- lacampbell 10y ago
  how do they compare to LXC? I ran into a lot of annoying issues trying to set them up in ubuntu
- AsyncAwait 10y ago
  Yeah, I would take jails over Docker as well, but systemd is just so much better, (more so than jails over Docker in my opinion), than init, that I am hoping for a better tool to come about, the underlying LXC technology appears to be solid.

tachion 10y ago

While you're here, have you donated[0][1] yet? :) You may or may not be aware, but FreeBSD runs your movies on Netflix, your games on PlayStation 4 and Nitendo Switch, your files on FreeNAS and ZFS, your friends on WhatsApp and OpenBSD runs everything else on OpenSSH. ;) So, you may or may not know that, but you need FreeBSD and OpenBSD and they also need you! Every cent counts and so does every contributor, that helps the foundations keep their non-profit status. [0] https://www.freebsdfoundation.org/donate/ https://www.freebsdfoundation.org/donate/ [1] https://www.openbsd.org/donations.html https://www.openbsd.org/donations.html

pyvpx 10y ago
FreeBSD appreciates, but doesn't need donations like the OpenBSD foundation does. many FreeBSD committers are FTE for a number of commercial outfits and work on FreeBSD full time. OpenBSD has hackathons, that are funded by donations. if you use both, consider donating to OpenBSD first. if you use OpenSSH, consider donating more to OpenBSD :-)
- markjdb 10y ago
  I'm a committer that works for such a commercial outfit, and I certainly don't get to work on FreeBSD full time (though I do work _with_ FreeBSD full time). Most of my contributions still come out of my spare time. I believe that's true for many others as well.
- mioelnir 10y ago
  Please also note that while FreeBSD may have the bigger individual sponsors, the FreeBSD Foundation still relies on many small contributions as the tax-free non-profit status of the Foundation relies more on the number of contributors than the amount (at least that's how I understood it).
jhlgkhkhil 10y ago
> You may or may not be aware, but FreeBSD runs your movies on Netflix, your games on PlayStation 4 and Nitendo Switch Do Netflix, Nintendo and Sony contribute financially to the FreeBSD project? They are the ones making money off the project after all.

Esau 10y ago

When it comes to the BSDs, here is my impressions of them: NetBSD wants to run everywhere. OpenBSD wants to be secure. DragonFly BSD wants to advanced. FreeBSD wants to be Linux. TrueOS wants to be Ubuntu. (I don't list MacOS because I don't feel that it is a true BSD.)

jrcii 10y ago
This is true of NetBSD and what I see repeated everywhere, but it's also an oversimplification that doesn't quite do it justice. As important as the end of portability is the modular (proper) architecture of the code base that provides this. "Code quality and correctness" is a stated feature of the OS, and by and large it is there.
JdeBP 10y ago
Beware that this sort of grouping is as superficial and wrong as categorizing people into blondes, brunettes, and redheads. In truth, they all aim to be portable, advanced, and secure, with desktop and server support. And there is plenty of sharing from each to the others. The differences amongst them are, in reality, not so easily pigeonholed.