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FreeBSD was the system where I really really learned to use UNIX like systems. I had a home server and followed book "How to Build a Server with FreeBSD 7" and

FreeBSD was the system where I really really learned to use UNIX like systems. I had a home server and followed book "How to Build a Server with FreeBSD 7" and that was a helpful guide. Michael Lucas' "Absolute FreeBSD" and his other BSD books are amazing resources. The FreeBSD documentation is also so well written there is little room for 3rd party books. The main reason I don't use BSD (well other than mac OS and iOS which you can argue are a fork of BSD) and go with Linux is because of work and if I do use Linux on a personal station there is just so much more software and more support. I would recommend any Linux user to go give the BSDs a try and see what a well thought out OS looks like.

mikece 6y ago
"I would recommend any Linux user to go give the BSDs a try and see what a well thought out OS looks like." While I can see where both kernel and userland being built by a single team can have advantages, why is it necessarily the Linux approach to bolting the userland items as needed necessarily a bad thing? If a fictitious userland app such as `hnget` doesn't have good documentation is that a weakness of the linux distro or the makers of `hnget`? Sure, having one team brings the opportunity to leverage peer pressure to improve documentation or even to impose a "system level of docs quality".... but is it really so bad in Linux-land?
- brobdingnagians 6y ago
  One example I like is the FreeBSD security page. It gives a nice overview of different things to think about and configure in relation to security. It brings a lot of information about separate systems into one conceptual place, which helps know if you are missing something obvious.
- massysett 6y ago
  As a user the end result is the same: my system has this thing ‘hnget’ that I need to use, yet it’s not documented. I don’t care whose fault it is. Linux land can certainly be bad in the sense that many distributors don’t document the system. They just bolt stuff together, sometimes with multiple layers of bolting (Distro X is based on Ubuntu that’s based on Debian, so which method am I “supposed to” use? If I use this new shiny package manager front end, will that interfere with the old command-line tool that works on Debian?) For this reason I shy away from derivative distributions. But even then, the Linux user land and kernel are not models of superior documentation.
- linguae 6y ago
  I've been using FreeBSD for servers and as an occasional daily driver for the past 16 years. Linux is a great operating system that I use for my work and also in situations where I have Linux hardware support but not for FreeBSD (I prefer Linux for laptops over FreeBSD). It's not a bad thing that Linux's core utilities are not developed alongside the kernel; in fact, part of what makes the GNU toolkit so flexible is the fact that it runs on a variety of Unix-like operating systems instead of just Linux, a great thing for BSD users as well as users of lesser-used Unix-like operating systems like Minix, Solaris, and GNU Hurd. But with that being said, what I love about FreeBSD is that the core utilities are very well documented. I believe the quality of FreeBSD's documentation is an artifact of the BSDs long-standing culture of providing high-quality documentation; some of the man pages have origins in AT&T Unix and the days of BSD up to 4.4BSD, but it's been updated over all these years to reflect changes. The AT&T Unix versions and the Berkeley-developed BSDs always had wonderful documentation, much of it written by Unix legends like Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, Bill Joy, Marshall Kirk McKusick, and others. Even the post-Berkeley documentation still captures this spirit. Plus, I happen to prefer man pages to the info pages that GNU utilities tend to prefer since I can never remember the keys used for navigating the hyperlinks found in info pages. I also like how FreeBSD ships with some traditional supplementary Unix documents, which have helpful tutorials for classic Unix tools. The FreeBSD handbook is very well written, and it can be easily downloaded. For people who sometimes need to do kernel hacking, there's Marshall Kirk McKusick et al.'s wonderfully written "The Design and Implementation of the FreeBSD Operating System, Second Edition," which I have a copy of. I find the source code of FreeBSD easier to read than the source code of Linux. FreeBSD reminds me a lot of PostgreSQL, another high-quality open source project with excellent documentation that happens to also derive from UC Berkeley.

mikece 6y ago

"I would recommend any Linux user to go give the BSDs a try and see what a well thought out OS looks like." While I can see where both kernel and userland being built by a single team can have advantages, why is it necessarily the Linux approach to bolting the userland items as needed necessarily a bad thing? If a fictitious userland app such as `hnget` doesn't have good documentation is that a weakness of the linux distro or the makers of `hnget`? Sure, having one team brings the opportunity to leverage peer pressure to improve documentation or even to impose a "system level of docs quality".... but is it really so bad in Linux-land?

brobdingnagians 6y ago
One example I like is the FreeBSD security page. It gives a nice overview of different things to think about and configure in relation to security. It brings a lot of information about separate systems into one conceptual place, which helps know if you are missing something obvious.
massysett 6y ago
As a user the end result is the same: my system has this thing ‘hnget’ that I need to use, yet it’s not documented. I don’t care whose fault it is. Linux land can certainly be bad in the sense that many distributors don’t document the system. They just bolt stuff together, sometimes with multiple layers of bolting (Distro X is based on Ubuntu that’s based on Debian, so which method am I “supposed to” use? If I use this new shiny package manager front end, will that interfere with the old command-line tool that works on Debian?) For this reason I shy away from derivative distributions. But even then, the Linux user land and kernel are not models of superior documentation.
linguae 6y ago
I've been using FreeBSD for servers and as an occasional daily driver for the past 16 years. Linux is a great operating system that I use for my work and also in situations where I have Linux hardware support but not for FreeBSD (I prefer Linux for laptops over FreeBSD). It's not a bad thing that Linux's core utilities are not developed alongside the kernel; in fact, part of what makes the GNU toolkit so flexible is the fact that it runs on a variety of Unix-like operating systems instead of just Linux, a great thing for BSD users as well as users of lesser-used Unix-like operating systems like Minix, Solaris, and GNU Hurd. But with that being said, what I love about FreeBSD is that the core utilities are very well documented. I believe the quality of FreeBSD's documentation is an artifact of the BSDs long-standing culture of providing high-quality documentation; some of the man pages have origins in AT&T Unix and the days of BSD up to 4.4BSD, but it's been updated over all these years to reflect changes. The AT&T Unix versions and the Berkeley-developed BSDs always had wonderful documentation, much of it written by Unix legends like Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, Bill Joy, Marshall Kirk McKusick, and others. Even the post-Berkeley documentation still captures this spirit. Plus, I happen to prefer man pages to the info pages that GNU utilities tend to prefer since I can never remember the keys used for navigating the hyperlinks found in info pages. I also like how FreeBSD ships with some traditional supplementary Unix documents, which have helpful tutorials for classic Unix tools. The FreeBSD handbook is very well written, and it can be easily downloaded. For people who sometimes need to do kernel hacking, there's Marshall Kirk McKusick et al.'s wonderfully written "The Design and Implementation of the FreeBSD Operating System, Second Edition," which I have a copy of. I find the source code of FreeBSD easier to read than the source code of Linux. FreeBSD reminds me a lot of PostgreSQL, another high-quality open source project with excellent documentation that happens to also derive from UC Berkeley.