4 ms·

I like what works. On servers, Linux seems to work. Maybe it's not as good as bsd in some cases, but I don't know those cases; and Linux has thus far worked.

by blunte 7y ago

I like what works. On servers, Linux seems to work. Maybe it's not as good as bsd in some cases, but I don't know those cases; and Linux has thus far worked. Where bsd has worked for me is on macOS. I think that's a bit less about bsd and more about desktop/UI decisions dating back to the Steve Jobs days (idiosyncrasies aside). But I have doubts about how much the underlying OS had to do with the experience at the UI level. Whether a bsd or linux, the desktop story is terrible compared to macOS. Even Windows has some advantage if certain app dependencies are considered. As a developer (who must still also perform some business tasks), macOS is the best option. Linux desktops are almost as good, with some big exceptions. BSD desktops might perhaps be on par with Linux, but they will fail on some of the development requirements. I know competition is good for innovation, but at some point I would like to see the highly fragmented OSS desktop efforts consolidate. At this point, long after Jobs's death, macOS has fallen greatly in terms of quality and usability; so surpassing it isn't _that_ hard. Windows still doesn't, but I doubt it ever will. In fact, Windows has increased significantly as a development platform while still remaining horrible from a desktop user perspective. macOS has slipped. Linux has gained only slightly. BSD, who knows... but it cannot have improved more than Linux. Whether Linux or BSD, there's plenty of achievable gains to make if motivated OSS folks would consolidate more.

haolez 7y ago
Linux works. Docker works. Node.js works. VSCode works. Until your competitor leverages outlier technologies to outcompete you. That's basically what Paul Graham did in the nineties :)
lmm 7y ago
> Linux has gained only slightly. BSD, who knows... but it cannot have improved more than Linux. Why is that so impossible? Konqueror had a tiny fraction of the contributors that Mozilla had, but since it was better designed it was still able to get ahead, and now almost everyone is using a Konqueror-derived rendering engine. If they had "consolidated" with Mozilla we would have missed out on that. Right now, FreeBSD does a lot of things better than Linux. ZFS is better than anything Linux can offer. Jails are still ahead of Linux containers. OSSv4 is still nicer than ALSA. FreeBSD ifconfig is still nicer than whatever you have to use to configure your wifi this week. I'm not going to switch to a worse OS, and I'm not sure why you'd expect anyone else to.
- thekyle 7y ago
  > ZFS is better than anything Linux can offer. It looks like Ubuntu has offered ZFS since 16.04. https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ZFS https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ZFS
  - lmm 7y ago
    As per the recent thread here, there are serious legal concerns about what they're doing.
- cosmiccatnap 7y ago
  I hear this all the time but see no proof. Why are jails better and if so why did they lose to containers? Why is OSS better when alsa could probably interface with one of those talking fish on the wall if you ask it nicely. Why is ZFS any better than the Linux implementation if freeBSD is backporting the Linux version now. Why is ifconfig better than network manager when there are no drivers for half the chipsets anyway. Linux is practical, and I think hate for it comes from BSD users frustrated that they dont want to learn how another kernel works but I share none of the problems BSD users often claim. Your hangup is on a distro or a filesystem but never the actual Linux kernel which it seems to me nobody bothers to learn before trashing anyway.
  - lmm 7y ago
    > Why are jails better and if so why did they lose to containers? They're better because they have actual security/isolation engineering. They lost because all people care about is having some kind of backend for orchestration systems that's capable of running Python. Even on Linux you can find all sorts of technical arguments about one form of container being better than another, but no-one actually cares beyond "does kubernetes use it as a backend? y/n". > Why is OSS better when alsa could probably interface with one of those talking fish on the wall if you ask it nicely. It offers a proper unixy API where you just have bytestream interfaces that you write to. You can use ordinary command line tools rather than needing a bunch of specialised programs. > Why is ZFS any better than the Linux implementation if freeBSD is backporting the Linux version now. There are more maintainers for ZFS on Linux - which should tell you something about how much better ZFS is than any Linux-native filesystem. The ZfsOnLinux codebase is fine, and if the licensing issues were ever resolved then one of the biggest reasons to use FreeBSD would go away. > Why is ifconfig better than network manager when there are no drivers for half the chipsets anyway. Because it works the way you'd expect, and stuff that works continues to work. E.g. fun story: Linux can't connect to my work VPN, because there's no way to pass a one time passcode through to a VPN login. Even though I've got the same version of OpenVPN installed on both FreeBSD and Linux, which has support for one time passcodes, on Linux that gets lost somewhere in the tightly-coupled layers in between that are necessary to have a network connection there. > Linux is practical, and I think hate for it comes from BSD users frustrated that they dont want to learn how another kernel works but I share none of the problems BSD users often claim. Your hangup is on a distro or a filesystem but never the actual Linux kernel which it seems to me nobody bothers to learn before trashing anyway. ZFS support is a kernel licensing issue. Jails are something that would require kernel-level support. Beyond that "Linux" is a pretty standard synecdoche for the whole OS; if there were reputable non-systemd/networkmanager/wayland distributions that would solve some of my problems, sure, but there aren't (I looked at installing Devuan but it seems to have already collapsed).
ClumsyPilot 7y ago
I think this comment is a perfect example of fundamental misunderstanding, when it comes to comparing Windows to MacOS. Their goals are totally different. Mac is a great consumer os, but it is horrible for business and continuity. They will unpredictably remove features and pull support. Just recently, apple removed support for 32 bit applications, thrre are many games and other software that have stopped working with this upgrade. They have no maintainer, in some cases companies that have produced them are gone, actual developer might have kicked the bucket. Sure, you get a sleek product. Compare this to Windows, where you can still run 16 bit software, and i have a game released in the 1999 that still works! Microsoft supports 3 parallel UI's: WinForms, WPF and UWP. That's why the system is bloated and looks a bit like a mess. But that's also why I can write and application that solves a problem, and be confident that it will function for a decade or more without my involvement. Working software should not rot without a team of developers behind it, constantly sprinting just to keep up with a platform moving out from under them. You can see this most clearly in IoT space, where every year a few services are shut down, turning thousands of perfectly functional devices into useless paperweights. Back to your comment at hand, I largely agree, I am a bit sick of the million options avaliable in linux for every given task, I wish they was more emphasis on getting the whole shebang to work together well and refining existing solutions, rather than creating yet take on a familiar problem.
cosmiccatnap 7y ago
For an OS that doesn't get any love it sure does show up here bi-weekly and is used as the backbone of all the biggest video streaming platforms... I think there is this idea that Linux can't or won't achieve what BSD has but after being a sysadmin for years in Linux systems running behind pfSense I can say that this is all a rose colored vision of a time gone by from people who had the misfortune to learn Unix before linux. They are both full of silly paradigms and pitfalls, inconsistency and sometimes even order but in equal parts if you actually understand them and how they are built. The only difference I see at 20 years at it is one of them has hardware, software, and documentation for any contingency even if it's lackluster and the other is freeBSD. I admire the nostalgia but its gotten old...I would go so far as to say for pure practicality that I can do anything on Linux I can do on BSD but Im not nieve enough to claim the opposite.

by blunte 7y ago

haolez 7y ago

Linux works. Docker works. Node.js works. VSCode works. Until your competitor leverages outlier technologies to outcompete you. That's basically what Paul Graham did in the nineties :)

lmm 7y ago

> Linux has gained only slightly. BSD, who knows... but it cannot have improved more than Linux. Why is that so impossible? Konqueror had a tiny fraction of the contributors that Mozilla had, but since it was better designed it was still able to get ahead, and now almost everyone is using a Konqueror-derived rendering engine. If they had "consolidated" with Mozilla we would have missed out on that. Right now, FreeBSD does a lot of things better than Linux. ZFS is better than anything Linux can offer. Jails are still ahead of Linux containers. OSSv4 is still nicer than ALSA. FreeBSD ifconfig is still nicer than whatever you have to use to configure your wifi this week. I'm not going to switch to a worse OS, and I'm not sure why you'd expect anyone else to.

thekyle 7y ago
> ZFS is better than anything Linux can offer. It looks like Ubuntu has offered ZFS since 16.04. https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ZFS https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ZFS
- lmm 7y ago
  As per the recent thread here, there are serious legal concerns about what they're doing.
cosmiccatnap 7y ago
I hear this all the time but see no proof. Why are jails better and if so why did they lose to containers? Why is OSS better when alsa could probably interface with one of those talking fish on the wall if you ask it nicely. Why is ZFS any better than the Linux implementation if freeBSD is backporting the Linux version now. Why is ifconfig better than network manager when there are no drivers for half the chipsets anyway. Linux is practical, and I think hate for it comes from BSD users frustrated that they dont want to learn how another kernel works but I share none of the problems BSD users often claim. Your hangup is on a distro or a filesystem but never the actual Linux kernel which it seems to me nobody bothers to learn before trashing anyway.
- lmm 7y ago
  > Why are jails better and if so why did they lose to containers? They're better because they have actual security/isolation engineering. They lost because all people care about is having some kind of backend for orchestration systems that's capable of running Python. Even on Linux you can find all sorts of technical arguments about one form of container being better than another, but no-one actually cares beyond "does kubernetes use it as a backend? y/n". > Why is OSS better when alsa could probably interface with one of those talking fish on the wall if you ask it nicely. It offers a proper unixy API where you just have bytestream interfaces that you write to. You can use ordinary command line tools rather than needing a bunch of specialised programs. > Why is ZFS any better than the Linux implementation if freeBSD is backporting the Linux version now. There are more maintainers for ZFS on Linux - which should tell you something about how much better ZFS is than any Linux-native filesystem. The ZfsOnLinux codebase is fine, and if the licensing issues were ever resolved then one of the biggest reasons to use FreeBSD would go away. > Why is ifconfig better than network manager when there are no drivers for half the chipsets anyway. Because it works the way you'd expect, and stuff that works continues to work. E.g. fun story: Linux can't connect to my work VPN, because there's no way to pass a one time passcode through to a VPN login. Even though I've got the same version of OpenVPN installed on both FreeBSD and Linux, which has support for one time passcodes, on Linux that gets lost somewhere in the tightly-coupled layers in between that are necessary to have a network connection there. > Linux is practical, and I think hate for it comes from BSD users frustrated that they dont want to learn how another kernel works but I share none of the problems BSD users often claim. Your hangup is on a distro or a filesystem but never the actual Linux kernel which it seems to me nobody bothers to learn before trashing anyway. ZFS support is a kernel licensing issue. Jails are something that would require kernel-level support. Beyond that "Linux" is a pretty standard synecdoche for the whole OS; if there were reputable non-systemd/networkmanager/wayland distributions that would solve some of my problems, sure, but there aren't (I looked at installing Devuan but it seems to have already collapsed).

ClumsyPilot 7y ago

I think this comment is a perfect example of fundamental misunderstanding, when it comes to comparing Windows to MacOS. Their goals are totally different. Mac is a great consumer os, but it is horrible for business and continuity. They will unpredictably remove features and pull support. Just recently, apple removed support for 32 bit applications, thrre are many games and other software that have stopped working with this upgrade. They have no maintainer, in some cases companies that have produced them are gone, actual developer might have kicked the bucket. Sure, you get a sleek product. Compare this to Windows, where you can still run 16 bit software, and i have a game released in the 1999 that still works! Microsoft supports 3 parallel UI's: WinForms, WPF and UWP. That's why the system is bloated and looks a bit like a mess. But that's also why I can write and application that solves a problem, and be confident that it will function for a decade or more without my involvement. Working software should not rot without a team of developers behind it, constantly sprinting just to keep up with a platform moving out from under them. You can see this most clearly in IoT space, where every year a few services are shut down, turning thousands of perfectly functional devices into useless paperweights. Back to your comment at hand, I largely agree, I am a bit sick of the million options avaliable in linux for every given task, I wish they was more emphasis on getting the whole shebang to work together well and refining existing solutions, rather than creating yet take on a familiar problem.

cosmiccatnap 7y ago

For an OS that doesn't get any love it sure does show up here bi-weekly and is used as the backbone of all the biggest video streaming platforms... I think there is this idea that Linux can't or won't achieve what BSD has but after being a sysadmin for years in Linux systems running behind pfSense I can say that this is all a rose colored vision of a time gone by from people who had the misfortune to learn Unix before linux. They are both full of silly paradigms and pitfalls, inconsistency and sometimes even order but in equal parts if you actually understand them and how they are built. The only difference I see at 20 years at it is one of them has hardware, software, and documentation for any contingency even if it's lackluster and the other is freeBSD. I admire the nostalgia but its gotten old...I would go so far as to say for pure practicality that I can do anything on Linux I can do on BSD but Im not nieve enough to claim the opposite.