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I can't take this author seriously if he says FreeBSD is an "ugly old UNIX OS". In my experience with the *BSDs none of them are ugly under the surface, they ar

I can't take this author seriously if he says FreeBSD is an "ugly old UNIX OS". In my experience with the *BSDs none of them are ugly under the surface, they are pretty cohesive, well put together, no nonsense. I could see how one would prefer Mac for UI, but for those core pieces I would prefer them over the Darwin/XNU components in most cases.

willtim 6y ago
I think it's fair. Unix has a lot of legacy baggage. It's largely terminal-based with three character folder names and two character commands, a monolithic kernel, the C programming language. In contrast, Acorn's ARX was fully graphical, used a microkernel and was written in Modula 2+/3. It sounds like the hardware wasn't quite ready for it though.
- asveikau 6y ago
  But he was contrasting with Darwin/XNU in the statement. You may say it's visually pleasing but in many other senses it's uglier than any given *BSD.
lproven 6y ago
Heh. OK, I concede, I gave in to a tiny trollette there. I've been using *nix professionally since 1989. I work for a Linux vendor. I know my way around. But for the last 25 years, I've mainly worked with Linux. I quite like Linux, although it's getting a bit long in the tooth and bloated these days. But what strikes me every time that I try any of the BSDs is how little they have learned from Linux and what has made Linux so successful. Linux natively uses PC partitioning. BSD doesn't; you have to install into special BSD "disk slices" which must be in a primary partition. (I confess I have not tried on a UEFI box yet. I am sure GPT changes this, but I don't know how.) Linux natively uses the PC keyboard and framebuffer. It adapts to my screen size. It uses colours. BSD doesn't. I still see '80s nonsense like ^H sometimes. Linux usually detects and uses all my hardware. Even on quite recent kit, I've had BSD not recognise my network card, or my wifi adaptor, or whatever. Linux feels like a native OS on PCs and handles PC hardware gracefully. BSD, to me, doesn't - it feels like a 1970s minicomputer OS, reluctantly running on an alien platform. I started out on SCO Xenix 286 on an IBM PC-AT, when that was still fairly modern kit. FreeBSD doesn't feel much more advanced than that, and NetBSD and OpenBSD are worse. That is what I am getting at. There have been multiple efforts to incorporate some of the nice bits of OS X over the years, notably NeXTBSD. They failed completely. It seems to me that the BSD folks don't want nasty new tech. If it worked 50 years ago, it's still good enough.

willtim 6y ago

I think it's fair. Unix has a lot of legacy baggage. It's largely terminal-based with three character folder names and two character commands, a monolithic kernel, the C programming language. In contrast, Acorn's ARX was fully graphical, used a microkernel and was written in Modula 2+/3. It sounds like the hardware wasn't quite ready for it though.

asveikau 6y ago
But he was contrasting with Darwin/XNU in the statement. You may say it's visually pleasing but in many other senses it's uglier than any given *BSD.

lproven 6y ago

Heh. OK, I concede, I gave in to a tiny trollette there. I've been using *nix professionally since 1989. I work for a Linux vendor. I know my way around. But for the last 25 years, I've mainly worked with Linux. I quite like Linux, although it's getting a bit long in the tooth and bloated these days. But what strikes me every time that I try any of the BSDs is how little they have learned from Linux and what has made Linux so successful. Linux natively uses PC partitioning. BSD doesn't; you have to install into special BSD "disk slices" which must be in a primary partition. (I confess I have not tried on a UEFI box yet. I am sure GPT changes this, but I don't know how.) Linux natively uses the PC keyboard and framebuffer. It adapts to my screen size. It uses colours. BSD doesn't. I still see '80s nonsense like ^H sometimes. Linux usually detects and uses all my hardware. Even on quite recent kit, I've had BSD not recognise my network card, or my wifi adaptor, or whatever. Linux feels like a native OS on PCs and handles PC hardware gracefully. BSD, to me, doesn't - it feels like a 1970s minicomputer OS, reluctantly running on an alien platform. I started out on SCO Xenix 286 on an IBM PC-AT, when that was still fairly modern kit. FreeBSD doesn't feel much more advanced than that, and NetBSD and OpenBSD are worse. That is what I am getting at. There have been multiple efforts to incorporate some of the nice bits of OS X over the years, notably NeXTBSD. They failed completely. It seems to me that the BSD folks don't want nasty new tech. If it worked 50 years ago, it's still good enough.