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It seems to me like a list of things the Linux community is working on; and I think that's a bit of the problem with FreeBSD. For a long time, it was known as t
by pnako 7y ago
It seems to me like a list of things the Linux community is working on; and I think that's a bit of the problem with FreeBSD. For a long time, it was known as the "high-reliability / high-performance server OS". But Linux has mostly taken that crown now, for quite a few years. Where does that leave FreeBSD? I wouldn't be able to define FreeBSD's identity at the moment; but granted I'm more a OpenBSD user.
It's easier to define OpenBSD, beyond the obvious stuff (security). It's a system that does not really want to deviate too much from old-school Unix, and a community that firmly rejects any fad or fashion and embraces simple, and indeed sometimes simplistic solutions. That doesn't make it the best system for everything, but at least we know where it stands: the best old-school Unix OS. It's almost as if it lives in a parallel universe where time has stopped in 1990, and the OpenBSD developers are asymptotically converging to the perfect Unix system of that era. I'm not saying that as a criticism at all.
And NetBSD and Dragonfly BSD are also, more or less explicitly, research operating systems where individual developers can come and try stuff.
FreeBSD is still a very impressive project but I think they can do better than being just-like-Linux-but-five-years-later.
- pimeys 7y agoI found that FreeBSD has its use in NAS builds with its nicely integrated ZFS. Otherwise I'm all in for OpenBSD or Arch Linux.
- JdeBP 7y ago1988. OpenBSD does not have the waitid() library function.
- tedunangst 7y agoI think this is the first time I've heard of waitid.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- trasz 7y agoIn some cases it's linux-but-ten-years-earlier - think ZFS, or even trivial stuff like NFSv4 ACL support ;-) I think the result for what you're seeing is that both are similar in purpose and architecture, and thus it's not surprising that they are converging on a similar set of functionality.
- Carpetsmoker 7y agoThat's pretty old news though: 2008 for ZFS, and 2012 for NFSv4. I stopped using FreeBSD in 2013/2014a as pkgng was a completely broken mess of bugs and developers seemed uninterested in fixing things, but if I look to what's changed since then[1], then it all seem rather ... lacklustre. Sure, things have improved, but there's no "ohh, that's cool!" like ZFS, jails, etc. Certainly nothing that makes it markedly different from Linux. Compare this to OpenBSD pr Linux, both of which have had a number of innovative concepts since then. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FreeBSD_version_history https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FreeBSD_version_history
- trasz 7y agoFreeBSD sucks at marketing, that’s very true.
- JdeBP 7y agoIn my experience, that time was a particular low point for pkgng. It still breaks, of course. I've just been told that FreeBSD 12 has some bizarre manifest parsing bug that completely contradicts the doco. But it did get markedly better for a while in 10 and 11.
- angrygoat 7y agoSome things I like about FreeBSD in particular: - high quality docs, especially for development. In my experience manpages are to a higher standard than Linux, especially for syscalls and the like - `make install` - you can build userland, including libc, and the kernel in a couple of commands and then reboot into your new system (or fire up a VM). this is extremely hard to do on most Linux distributions. - a smaller community where it's perhaps a bit easier to meet people and contribute. I remember going to the AUUGN conferences and the *BSD folks there were always friendly All of that said, while I did use FreeBSD as my desktop OS at various times in the late 90s and 2000s, I haven't for years. Although I am now curious to see if I can fire it up on a Pi or something like that :)