4 ms·

Probably opening Pandora‘s box here, but I‘ve been wondering for a long time: why do people still use BSD? If memory serves me right, the *BSDs descend from the

by veddox 6y ago

Probably opening Pandora‘s box here, but I‘ve been wondering for a long time: why do people still use BSD? If memory serves me right, the *BSDs descend from the original Berkeley Unix from the 70s - but why stick to that „line of descent“ rather than going with the newer, Linux, line?

veddox 6y ago
This was not meant derogatorily, to whoever downvoted me... I‘m honestly interested. Obviously there has to be some advantage, otherwise it would have died out by now. I just don‘t know what that advantage is, never having used it myself.
- vertex-four 6y ago
  OpenBSD specifically has a very strong focus on security features - not just bolt-ons like containers and cgroups, but a code and development style which reduces the change of security-related bugs, and things like pledge(2) and unveil(2) which allow applications to reduce their privileges drastically through a far simpler interface than Linux's equivalents.
- floatboth 6y ago
  Alternatives always exist and should exist. Monocultures are bad! :P The community has existed for ages and it's not dying out because.. why would it? People just want to work on it for various reasons. From my perspective: it's easy to modify FreeBSD and contribute to upstream, the "monorepo" thing with keeping libc and the basic utilities developed together with the kernel is nice (no stupid "glibc devs don't want to make new syscall wrappers" situations lol), the kernel is less complex than Linux, and has made different (better) technical decisions in many cases (kqueue got pretty much everything right around 2000 while it took epoll and friends years to not suck; ALSA is.. baffling while FreeBSD's sound system is good; Capsicum is the right model for app self-sandboxing; "udev populates /dev by symlinking stuff from /sys" is nuts; jails are really hard to screw up, unlike the overly flexible linux namespaces; …)
petre 6y ago
Because it's stable, it works all the time, no systemd, no surprises, no bullshit. Not that Linux (the kernel) is any worse, but userspace is developed separately and it's not as slick. We're also using openSuSE Leap, Debian and Ubuntu on the desktop. Probably going to ditch the last one in favour of Debian thanks to the snap ecosystem.
pwdisswordfish2 6y ago
Why did Apple choose BSD and not Linux? Why did Netflix choose BSD and not Linux? Licensing is often a factor. The reasons however will not be the same for everyone. There are more similarities than differences between the two, however one difference IMO is that BSD has a level of "quality control", especially over the userland, that Linux does not. I find that my own sensibilities as a user align better with the relatively small number of people doing "quality control" and development for BSD projects than with the enormous number of people who work on Linux -- for me, the number of Linux contributors is too many to keep track of and I find it difficult to understand what all of their sensibilities are.
- scns 6y ago
  Whatsapp chose BSD too
  - pwdisswordfish2 6y ago
    Good example. There are so many, not all of them are made public.
- pyuser583 6y ago
  Use it for what? What does Netflix use bsd for?
  - nix23 6y ago
    For the CDN (the thing that streams the Contend to You): https://openconnect.netflix.com/en/appliances/ https://openconnect.netflix.com/en/appliances/
- nix23 6y ago
  Well the answer why Apple chose BSD is pretty simple...license and maturity. But Netflix chose it because of that: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KP_bKvXkoC4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KP_bKvXkoC4
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
Someone 6y ago
Why go for the unproven, when the old, reliable also is freely available :-) ? I think part of the reason is non-technical. Some companies won’t use Linux in their hardware because of its license. Similarly, some developers prefer working on BSD-licensed over working on GPL-licensed software. Some may also like working on systems with fewer developers, so that they can have greater impact on the direction of development.
abjKT26nO8 6y ago
This is a classic that may help you understand better why some people choose BSDs: http://www.over-yonder.net/~fullermd/rants/bsd4linux/01 http://www.over-yonder.net/~fullermd/rants/bsd4linux/01 Also, there are still new things being invented for BSDs (and Illumos) that aren't available in Linux. E.g. FreeBSD has Jails and Illumos has Zones which provide a complete solution for "containers" which are put together from different components in Linux which overall may not be as secure as Illumos Zones. Another one is the PF firewall. In OpenBSD they introduced security features like pledge and unveil. Another thing is ZFS: - on Linux there are legal problems with shipping it out of the box; - it's far more popular on FreeBSD and Illumos than on Linux, so it wouldn't surprise me if there are bugs that will show up on Linux, but not on the other two.
- lllr_finger 6y ago
  I'm posting this as someone who runs and enjoys both FreeBSD/OpenBSD: there are good reasons for running *BSD these days, but the ones you listed have lost a lot of their value. Regarding the Illumos/FreeBSD "trifecta" of zones/jails, ZFS, and DTrace - I prefer LXC, I treat laptops/workstations like cattle and only run FreeBSD+ZFS where its needed, and I don't need DTrace. Brendan Gregg can elaborate on these topics much better than I can, and his words probably carry more weight, given his involvement with Illumos: http://www.brendangregg.com/blog/2017-09-05/solaris-to-linux-2017.html http://www.brendangregg.com/blog/2017-09-05/solaris-to-linux...
lllr_finger 6y ago
I'm sorry you're being downvoted - it seems to be a question in good faith, there isn't a singular, obvious answer, and I think you'll get some good answers. For me, I use it for things that I want to be simple or unencumbered from licensing. Any sort of storage server in my house gets FreeBSD almost automatically. OpenBSD, I keep around mainly as a learning experience - it's really a simple, well-documented operating system, and it works flawlessly on a number of different Thinkpads. There are also plenty of opportunities to participate in the development of the OS itself or its packages.
combatentropy 6y ago
The lines of descent are not etched as deep as you suggest. > BSDs descend from the original Berkeley Unix from the 70s But they continue to be worked on. To wit, this announcement. > the newer, Linux, line Linux did not pop into existence. It traces its heritage too all the way back to Unix, which traces its way to MULTICS, which traces... "The success of UNIX lies not so much in new inventions but rather in the full exploitation of a carefully selected set of fertile ideas..." --- Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson

by veddox 6y ago

veddox 6y ago

This was not meant derogatorily, to whoever downvoted me... I‘m honestly interested. Obviously there has to be some advantage, otherwise it would have died out by now. I just don‘t know what that advantage is, never having used it myself.

vertex-four 6y ago
OpenBSD specifically has a very strong focus on security features - not just bolt-ons like containers and cgroups, but a code and development style which reduces the change of security-related bugs, and things like pledge(2) and unveil(2) which allow applications to reduce their privileges drastically through a far simpler interface than Linux's equivalents.
floatboth 6y ago
Alternatives always exist and should exist. Monocultures are bad! :P The community has existed for ages and it's not dying out because.. why would it? People just want to work on it for various reasons. From my perspective: it's easy to modify FreeBSD and contribute to upstream, the "monorepo" thing with keeping libc and the basic utilities developed together with the kernel is nice (no stupid "glibc devs don't want to make new syscall wrappers" situations lol), the kernel is less complex than Linux, and has made different (better) technical decisions in many cases (kqueue got pretty much everything right around 2000 while it took epoll and friends years to not suck; ALSA is.. baffling while FreeBSD's sound system is good; Capsicum is the right model for app self-sandboxing; "udev populates /dev by symlinking stuff from /sys" is nuts; jails are really hard to screw up, unlike the overly flexible linux namespaces; …)

petre 6y ago

Because it's stable, it works all the time, no systemd, no surprises, no bullshit. Not that Linux (the kernel) is any worse, but userspace is developed separately and it's not as slick. We're also using openSuSE Leap, Debian and Ubuntu on the desktop. Probably going to ditch the last one in favour of Debian thanks to the snap ecosystem.

pwdisswordfish2 6y ago

Why did Apple choose BSD and not Linux? Why did Netflix choose BSD and not Linux? Licensing is often a factor. The reasons however will not be the same for everyone. There are more similarities than differences between the two, however one difference IMO is that BSD has a level of "quality control", especially over the userland, that Linux does not. I find that my own sensibilities as a user align better with the relatively small number of people doing "quality control" and development for BSD projects than with the enormous number of people who work on Linux -- for me, the number of Linux contributors is too many to keep track of and I find it difficult to understand what all of their sensibilities are.

scns 6y ago
Whatsapp chose BSD too
- pwdisswordfish2 6y ago
  Good example. There are so many, not all of them are made public.
pyuser583 6y ago
Use it for what? What does Netflix use bsd for?
- nix23 6y ago
  For the CDN (the thing that streams the Contend to You): https://openconnect.netflix.com/en/appliances/ https://openconnect.netflix.com/en/appliances/
nix23 6y ago
Well the answer why Apple chose BSD is pretty simple...license and maturity. But Netflix chose it because of that: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KP_bKvXkoC4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KP_bKvXkoC4

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

Someone 6y ago

Why go for the unproven, when the old, reliable also is freely available :-) ? I think part of the reason is non-technical. Some companies won’t use Linux in their hardware because of its license. Similarly, some developers prefer working on BSD-licensed over working on GPL-licensed software. Some may also like working on systems with fewer developers, so that they can have greater impact on the direction of development.

abjKT26nO8 6y ago

This is a classic that may help you understand better why some people choose BSDs: http://www.over-yonder.net/~fullermd/rants/bsd4linux/01 http://www.over-yonder.net/~fullermd/rants/bsd4linux/01 Also, there are still new things being invented for BSDs (and Illumos) that aren't available in Linux. E.g. FreeBSD has Jails and Illumos has Zones which provide a complete solution for "containers" which are put together from different components in Linux which overall may not be as secure as Illumos Zones. Another one is the PF firewall. In OpenBSD they introduced security features like pledge and unveil. Another thing is ZFS: - on Linux there are legal problems with shipping it out of the box; - it's far more popular on FreeBSD and Illumos than on Linux, so it wouldn't surprise me if there are bugs that will show up on Linux, but not on the other two.

lllr_finger 6y ago
I'm posting this as someone who runs and enjoys both FreeBSD/OpenBSD: there are good reasons for running *BSD these days, but the ones you listed have lost a lot of their value. Regarding the Illumos/FreeBSD "trifecta" of zones/jails, ZFS, and DTrace - I prefer LXC, I treat laptops/workstations like cattle and only run FreeBSD+ZFS where its needed, and I don't need DTrace. Brendan Gregg can elaborate on these topics much better than I can, and his words probably carry more weight, given his involvement with Illumos: http://www.brendangregg.com/blog/2017-09-05/solaris-to-linux-2017.html http://www.brendangregg.com/blog/2017-09-05/solaris-to-linux...

lllr_finger 6y ago

I'm sorry you're being downvoted - it seems to be a question in good faith, there isn't a singular, obvious answer, and I think you'll get some good answers. For me, I use it for things that I want to be simple or unencumbered from licensing. Any sort of storage server in my house gets FreeBSD almost automatically. OpenBSD, I keep around mainly as a learning experience - it's really a simple, well-documented operating system, and it works flawlessly on a number of different Thinkpads. There are also plenty of opportunities to participate in the development of the OS itself or its packages.

combatentropy 6y ago

The lines of descent are not etched as deep as you suggest. > BSDs descend from the original Berkeley Unix from the 70s But they continue to be worked on. To wit, this announcement. > the newer, Linux, line Linux did not pop into existence. It traces its heritage too all the way back to Unix, which traces its way to MULTICS, which traces... "The success of UNIX lies not so much in new inventions but rather in the full exploitation of a carefully selected set of fertile ideas..." --- Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson