7 ms·

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

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.
        ethbro 9y ago
        Granted on the upstream point! Especially with how quick transformative technology goes through its various phases, it may be essential (/Strangelove emphasis) to make the harder choice now so that you're not behind your competitors in the near future.
    - X86BSD 9y ago
      I think your argument lies more in the fact that linux is non standard to Unix. They have gone their own way and made it difficult to transfer knowledge. Ask anyone who has ported a Linux application to any other Unix. It's at best a PITA. At worst a nightmare. Can you do it? Sure. But it isn't pleasant. The Linux community is off in the weeds imo. Doing their own poor re-implementations of tech others have already done. See: Dtrace, Filesystems, Jails/zones, Networking, VM, Init systems, ... So I think trying to argue it's easier to install Linux because Linux folks can't transfer their knowledge to other OS's speaks volumes to it being a poor choice to invest skills in if you can't transfer them to other OS's
- 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.

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.
        ethbro 9y ago
        Granted on the upstream point! Especially with how quick transformative technology goes through its various phases, it may be essential (/Strangelove emphasis) to make the harder choice now so that you're not behind your competitors in the near future.
  - X86BSD 9y ago
    I think your argument lies more in the fact that linux is non standard to Unix. They have gone their own way and made it difficult to transfer knowledge. Ask anyone who has ported a Linux application to any other Unix. It's at best a PITA. At worst a nightmare. Can you do it? Sure. But it isn't pleasant. The Linux community is off in the weeds imo. Doing their own poor re-implementations of tech others have already done. See: Dtrace, Filesystems, Jails/zones, Networking, VM, Init systems, ... So I think trying to argue it's easier to install Linux because Linux folks can't transfer their knowledge to other OS's speaks volumes to it being a poor choice to invest skills in if you can't transfer them to other OS's
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.