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It's likely a human resources problem. For every competent FreeBSD or Illumos sysadmin there are 10x equally experienced with Linux. And those numbers are much

It's likely a human resources problem. For every competent FreeBSD or Illumos sysadmin there are 10x equally experienced with Linux. And those numbers are much worse outside of major cities. The commercial support from Ubuntu tips the scales. I made this same decision at my last job. I ran Solaris and Illumos on our file servers and loved it, but a year before I left I ported all the pools to Ubuntu so my successor only needed to be Linux competent and ZFS trainable. Sometimes when choosing tech it's not what's technologically superior solution nor what you personally could run well, it's what's best for your coworkers, your successor and the organization in the long term.

rdeckard0104 9y ago
I disagree. FreeBSD is just as easy to administer as Linux. Solaris I find to be a bit more challenging. I can appreciate your commentary, but I challenge you to prove me wrong. Just for some color I've ran the Gambit of Unix and Linux systems in my career with FreeBSD being one of the easiest and most consistent out of the box technologies. Solaris had already been quite the opposite. I guess you could say AIX is a close second to Solaris, but I think that's a bit of a grey area considering how opinionated that operating system is. To be clear I'm not a FreeBSD zealot. I'm for what works. Right now what works is the emerging container based solutions albeit not relevant to this discussion.
- ethbro 9y ago
  > For every competent FreeBSD or Illumos sysadmin there are 10x equally experienced with Linux. Was parent wrong about that point?
  - chungy 9y ago
    Not exactly, but to any competent administrator, learning FreeBSD based on Linux experience is not that difficult. It's sort of like tasking someone to start working on a program written in Go even if they have only C++ experience. You can cope.
    - ethbro 9y ago
      I get a little annoyed with this line of reasoning though. "Anyone can learn anything" doesn't help me if I need an expert now. And it doesn't magically jump the gap between "functional" (I can make a thing work in an ugly and naive way) and "good" (I can weigh the trade-offs behind the scenes and choose the optimal from multiple alternatives). Unless the assertion is that FreeBSD / Go is easy, logical, and/or obvious enough that a master Linux / C++ programmer will be productive and community standard-compliant without any effective lag time. And I'm not trying to be obtuse. I honestly see it a lot and think it's a blind spot: reverse Pareto principle if you will. "Getting up to 80% proficiency is easy, so let's ignore the last 20% because it must also be easy."
      - johnwfinigan 9y ago
        Experts have to get made somehow. It's not as if Linux is a frozen target where you can count on being "productive and community standard-compliant without any effective lag time" without going back to the docs sometimes. A great example in my opinion: Red Hat RHEL7 introduced systemd. A lot changed versus RHEL6. RHEL6 "experts" turned into clumsy RHEL7 "80%-ers". We figured it out. Not to even mention that SuSE, RHEL, and Ubuntu are about as similar as "Linux" and FreeBSD, if you are worried about the finer points of best practice. We figure it out.
        ethbro 9y ago
        Absolutely. It happens. But to harken back to the original post, there are definite advantages to "technology with X experts available in the market" than "technology with Y experts available in the market". Where X > Y. And those advantages don't disappear even if Y is easy to learn.
        johnwfinigan 9y ago
        On that basic point, I agree -- although there are advantages to swimming upstream sometimes. Otherwise, given the landscape of 10-15 years ago, we'd be having this discussion about Windows servers instead of Linux! Besides, probably the best way to find out if it's a "big deal" is to ask your sysadmins. Or, generally, the people who are going to be stuck running it.
  - atmosx 9y ago
    > Was parent wrong about that point? I believe it was. See comment above. FreeBSD has excellent documentation on nearly every topic. Nearly every program has a manpage and there's always google to help you. For advanced topics (CARP, DTrace, ZFS, Jails, Accounting API) the docs are excellent and you'll have to some reading to properly implement any of those anyway. That's part of the job actually, reading/learning.
atmosx 9y ago
> For every competent FreeBSD or Illumos sysadmin there are 10x equally experienced with Linux That's the Nth I've read this quote on HN, it became a classic... You can't find a FreeBSD sysadmin but you can find a Linux admin. Where I work I have to deal with AIX, Solaris, Open/FreeBSD (Had Net before), Linux (all major flavours) and (god Forbid) Windows Server (2008, 12R2, 2016 and Nano). I've build packages for most of these systems. I don't know all of them inside/out but NEVER had problem implementing/setting/testing features in any of them. Can you tell me in a what way an intermediate (say 5 years) of experience, linux sysadmin would have problems managing a Free/Open/NetBSD?
- tedunangst 9y ago
  Guess it depends on the flavor of admin. With some regularity a linux admin "with decades of experience" will show up and announce that openbsd is terribly broken and nothing works, not even the most basic pkg-add command. Uh, did you mean pkg_add? See! Openbsd is so broken they called the command pkg_add while I typed pkg-add. I've never had this trouble with linux! I'd be worried about letting such a person admin linux servers, but I guess you can limp by as long as you keep your infra to what they already know. Ideally you'd weed such people out before hiring, but maybe if you need to hire an admin you don't know enough to do that?
  - atmosx 9y ago
    Totally agree. BTW, thanks for signify it is an awesome system for pkg signatures. It took me a while to get it working correctly for automatic pkg signing but once it all clicked together, the system was simple as any I've see! ps. The best documentation I've found, was the manpage[1]. [1] https://man.openbsd.org/signify https://man.openbsd.org/signify
- Spivak 9y ago
  It's hard enough to find Linux admins, even in major cities. There are people who will put Linux experience on their resumes, but almost nobody who can boast more than casual home use. We ended up giving up on finding a Linux admin after a few months of the job posting collecting dust and decided to just hire someone fresh out of college a train them from scratch. Then you run into the problem that BSD admins are even rarer, and AIX/Solaris even rarer than that. Someone with experience with Linux could likely find their way around any UNIX like system but given the choice we would rather deal with some awkwardness in a familiar environment where admins have far more experience and we can leverage our exiting infrastructure, scripts, and config management.

rdeckard0104 9y ago

I disagree. FreeBSD is just as easy to administer as Linux. Solaris I find to be a bit more challenging. I can appreciate your commentary, but I challenge you to prove me wrong. Just for some color I've ran the Gambit of Unix and Linux systems in my career with FreeBSD being one of the easiest and most consistent out of the box technologies. Solaris had already been quite the opposite. I guess you could say AIX is a close second to Solaris, but I think that's a bit of a grey area considering how opinionated that operating system is. To be clear I'm not a FreeBSD zealot. I'm for what works. Right now what works is the emerging container based solutions albeit not relevant to this discussion.

ethbro 9y ago
> For every competent FreeBSD or Illumos sysadmin there are 10x equally experienced with Linux. Was parent wrong about that point?
- chungy 9y ago
  Not exactly, but to any competent administrator, learning FreeBSD based on Linux experience is not that difficult. It's sort of like tasking someone to start working on a program written in Go even if they have only C++ experience. You can cope.
  - ethbro 9y ago
    I get a little annoyed with this line of reasoning though. "Anyone can learn anything" doesn't help me if I need an expert now. And it doesn't magically jump the gap between "functional" (I can make a thing work in an ugly and naive way) and "good" (I can weigh the trade-offs behind the scenes and choose the optimal from multiple alternatives). Unless the assertion is that FreeBSD / Go is easy, logical, and/or obvious enough that a master Linux / C++ programmer will be productive and community standard-compliant without any effective lag time. And I'm not trying to be obtuse. I honestly see it a lot and think it's a blind spot: reverse Pareto principle if you will. "Getting up to 80% proficiency is easy, so let's ignore the last 20% because it must also be easy."
    - johnwfinigan 9y ago
      Experts have to get made somehow. It's not as if Linux is a frozen target where you can count on being "productive and community standard-compliant without any effective lag time" without going back to the docs sometimes. A great example in my opinion: Red Hat RHEL7 introduced systemd. A lot changed versus RHEL6. RHEL6 "experts" turned into clumsy RHEL7 "80%-ers". We figured it out. Not to even mention that SuSE, RHEL, and Ubuntu are about as similar as "Linux" and FreeBSD, if you are worried about the finer points of best practice. We figure it out.
      - ethbro 9y ago
        Absolutely. It happens. But to harken back to the original post, there are definite advantages to "technology with X experts available in the market" than "technology with Y experts available in the market". Where X > Y. And those advantages don't disappear even if Y is easy to learn.
        johnwfinigan 9y ago
        On that basic point, I agree -- although there are advantages to swimming upstream sometimes. Otherwise, given the landscape of 10-15 years ago, we'd be having this discussion about Windows servers instead of Linux! Besides, probably the best way to find out if it's a "big deal" is to ask your sysadmins. Or, generally, the people who are going to be stuck running it.
- atmosx 9y ago
  > Was parent wrong about that point? I believe it was. See comment above. FreeBSD has excellent documentation on nearly every topic. Nearly every program has a manpage and there's always google to help you. For advanced topics (CARP, DTrace, ZFS, Jails, Accounting API) the docs are excellent and you'll have to some reading to properly implement any of those anyway. That's part of the job actually, reading/learning.

atmosx 9y ago

> For every competent FreeBSD or Illumos sysadmin there are 10x equally experienced with Linux That's the Nth I've read this quote on HN, it became a classic... You can't find a FreeBSD sysadmin but you can find a Linux admin. Where I work I have to deal with AIX, Solaris, Open/FreeBSD (Had Net before), Linux (all major flavours) and (god Forbid) Windows Server (2008, 12R2, 2016 and Nano). I've build packages for most of these systems. I don't know all of them inside/out but NEVER had problem implementing/setting/testing features in any of them. Can you tell me in a what way an intermediate (say 5 years) of experience, linux sysadmin would have problems managing a Free/Open/NetBSD?

tedunangst 9y ago
Guess it depends on the flavor of admin. With some regularity a linux admin "with decades of experience" will show up and announce that openbsd is terribly broken and nothing works, not even the most basic pkg-add command. Uh, did you mean pkg_add? See! Openbsd is so broken they called the command pkg_add while I typed pkg-add. I've never had this trouble with linux! I'd be worried about letting such a person admin linux servers, but I guess you can limp by as long as you keep your infra to what they already know. Ideally you'd weed such people out before hiring, but maybe if you need to hire an admin you don't know enough to do that?
- atmosx 9y ago
  Totally agree. BTW, thanks for signify it is an awesome system for pkg signatures. It took me a while to get it working correctly for automatic pkg signing but once it all clicked together, the system was simple as any I've see! ps. The best documentation I've found, was the manpage[1]. [1] https://man.openbsd.org/signify https://man.openbsd.org/signify
Spivak 9y ago
It's hard enough to find Linux admins, even in major cities. There are people who will put Linux experience on their resumes, but almost nobody who can boast more than casual home use. We ended up giving up on finding a Linux admin after a few months of the job posting collecting dust and decided to just hire someone fresh out of college a train them from scratch. Then you run into the problem that BSD admins are even rarer, and AIX/Solaris even rarer than that. Someone with experience with Linux could likely find their way around any UNIX like system but given the choice we would rather deal with some awkwardness in a familiar environment where admins have far more experience and we can leverage our exiting infrastructure, scripts, and config management.