8 ms·

As a longtime BSD user, I have my doubts about our future

61 points by protomyth 5y ago

inamiyar 5y ago
Overall a good post - but I'm not a fan of the constant off-hand jabs at codes of conduct from someone who got banned for "conduct issues." " But if everyone got offended and quit a project over someone saying mean 30 years ago, all FOSS would have quickly died out. " The snowflakes are invading FOSS and trying to take it out! We must protect ourselves!
- moron4hire 5y ago
  My experience has been, for each toxic person you eliminate, there are ten decent people waiting in the wings to replace them. The toxic folks are actively harming the project by keeping people away.
  - enriquto 5y ago
    can you point to a few concrete examples? (which are already public, please don't "out" anybody)
    - MBCook 5y ago
      Good people don’t wanna work with problematic people. Look at what’s going on at Basecamp. When it came out just how problematic they were and if they weren’t willing to fix things, they lost 30% of their employees. Reportedly it’s now up to 40-something percent.
      - refenestrator 5y ago
        'Problematic' is such a fantastic word. Labelling a person, in whole, as 'problematic' but we're the nice and inclusive ones.
        zxzax 5y ago
        For one, problematic refers to a behavior, not a person. If you find your behavior is causing problems for people, you can change that behavior (I encourage all employees/owners with a commitment to problem-solving to do this). For two, when the word is used in the context of inclusivity, usually the problem is that someone is behaving in a way that's exclusionary -- it's not being nice to encourage them to continue that behavior.
        refenestrator 5y ago
        Labelling someone problematic is super exclusionary. Usually more so than the 'problematic' behavior. Take a step back and it's cliques all the way down.
        zxzax 5y ago
        That's putting the cart before the horse -- in that context you would only see it used when the person's behavior already is super exclusionary. It's specifically used to describe that exclusionary behavior that has already happened. Of course people can get it mixed up but that's the job of the people doing the community management to make sure that doesn't happen.
        refenestrator 5y ago
        The comment I responded to said "how problematic they were" -- not "they were being". And it was about a case where a funny names list had circulated, the founders said "yeah, don't do that" but then objected to holocaust references in the reaction to it. This was extremely 'problematic' -- not the references, the objection to them. So, exclusionary to whom? Some people might value not dragging the dead into a dumb debate about a funny names list. It's not unreasonable.
        zxzax 5y ago
        I didn't make that comment, I agree that comment could have been worded better. I'm assuming by the use of past tense they didn't mean to suggest that they are inherently problematic for life. Edit: I don't have any additional comments on this particular happening, I believe there was several other HN threads with more than 1000 comments where this was discussed extensively.
      - lostinquebec 5y ago
        That's not an example because: 1. Basecamp is not OSS, and the people involved were all employees. 2. As employees, if you worked with someone for years,"it came out just how problematic they were" is a stretch.
stoolpigeon 5y ago
From the post and op's comments - they really hate a lot of stuff. I find that people like this who can't really handle changes they don't like have a tough time communicating about it in an effective way or doing anything about it that is meaningful. Mostly I see them try to stir up trouble that could have a negative impact on the people actually doing things and that's about it.
- bombcar 5y ago
  “Here are various problems and I can’t use the proposed solutions for unmentionable reasons.” Maybe Netcraft can be reached for comment on whether BSD is alive.
  - inopinatus 5y ago
    > Maybe Netcraft can be reached That was exactly the connection I made, then wondering if the author even realised the allusion. Claiming to be a “longtime BSD user”, but starting in 2013 means they’re not, not in the scheme of things, and by some decades.
MeinBlutIstBlau 5y ago
As a very generic and simple computer person, BSD was off the table for me the moment I had to bother with the terminal to install it with a gui environment. Unlike Linux, BSD has a high barrier to entry similar to arch. And frankly, work, school, and social life take priority over learning how to install an OS that requires more maintenance and messing around to get things to work than even an unstable Linux distro. I really do like the idea of BSD and have several major OS choices, but honestly Linux seems to be the solution for most "third way" OS problems until programming a new OS becomes common like 100+ years down the road. BSD just failed where Linux succeeded in being able to easily pull in the lazy nerds like me. Short of a basic terminal command and simple troubleshooting of course. BSD is like arch level of difficulty and maintenance and I don't care for it. Also it's kind of ironic that he bashes macOS when historically it's the successor of BSD. What it gets right, this guy complains about. It's simple, I don't need to worry about any of the issues he mentioned, and it's reliable. The reason other BSDs aren't is because you have to waste time making you're system work first before you can do anything else unlike almost every other major OS.
- pwdisswordfish8 5y ago
  > I really do like the idea of BSD What do you consider to be the idea of BSD?
  - MeinBlutIstBlau 5y ago
    Just another supported operating system. I think it's good that we have somewhat of a variety so that it's not just the big 3. I'd really hate to see an MS and OSX only market 40 years from now.
InTheArena 5y ago
I don’t see much future for BSD at this point - and I say that as someone who had their MBR overwritten by 386BSD core dumping once upon a time. I love BSD, and it’s simplicity, but outside of dedicated appliances, I think general purpose UNIX is long settled. What’s more is that Docker has become the one true way to distribute software for enterprises. The dependency and package management problems are not optional anymore, and the lack of a consistent structure makes image based deployments inevitable. Yes, someone will immediately bring up that BSD had these features first, but it ignores the two advantages of universal distribution and simplicity that Docker built.
- secondcoming 5y ago
  Isn't Docker dying?
  - wmf 5y ago
    Docker™ is dying but docker (e.g. k8s on containerd) is bigger than ever.
    - fmakunbound 5y ago
      What do you mean by Docker™?
      - rrdharan 5y ago
        The company, as opposed to the distribution format/ mechanism.
jl6 5y ago
Calls macOS’s interface “fischer price”, and complains about elitism in the same sentence... What this guy is observing is that BSD is a subculture getting swallowed by a dominant monoculture. There are a few strategies for dealing with this - one is to accept fate, give up, and join the monoculture. Another is to find a core differentiating purpose, rally around that, and hope that the monoculture sees you as complementary. This harder path does mean foregoing the benefits of economies of scale, such as having lots of other people writing drivers for you for free. So what is the core differentiating purpose of BSD that will win the hearts of developers and convince them to turn their efforts towards it?
- ecliptik 5y ago
  While not differentiating specifically for developers - as an end user, I’m gravitating more towards the BSDs since they don’t have systemd, wayland, pulsesudio, or all the other components that modern Linux has bolted on.
  - nine_k 5y ago
    Frankly, there are a few distros which don't require systemd (my laptop runs one, specifically Void). Wayland is not a requirement anywhere. Pulseaudio is also not a requirement; I happily live without it. You can do without all that, unless you want the latest Gnome. Red Hat way is not the only way with Linux, fortunately.
mnd999 5y ago
Lots of good points there, I’m a long time FreeBSD user too and I kinda feel the same about the continuing dependence on Linux in so many areas. I switched to Arch Linux for my day to day a couple of years ago, everything works better. It’s very hard to innovate when all your major drivers are lifted from elsewhere. I have less sympathy on the codes of conduct complaint. Codes of conduct are pretty straightforward to follow.
na85 5y ago
I think the poster is not seeing the forest for the trees. BSD has no real use case except as a way to subsidize giant megacorp development with volunteer work. Linux, for all its warts, is superior to BSD in nearly every way that matters to application developers and to companies who need a server OS. The areas in which BSD is superior to Linux simply aren't important enough to justify using BSD, unless you are a corporate parasite like Sony and need an operating system with a parasitism-enabling license but don't want to pay for more than a handful of developers. The market just doesn't seem big enough to support Linux and a handful of BSDs, and at the end of the day that's the real reason why BSD appears to be dying, because there's no reason to reach for BSD when Debian and Slackware exist.
- wmf 5y ago
  Are there any megacorps using BSD other than Netflix?
  - onethought 5y ago
    Apple do right?
    - CharlesW 5y ago
      Apple's Darwin is probably better thought of as a descendant of BSD (and other technologies).
  - rmwaite 5y ago
    Lots of things build on top of BSD. JunOS for example is the software that powers Juniper network devices and is based on FreeBSD (which depending on the platform may itself run in a VM on top of Linux).
  - di4na 5y ago
    Sony ?
  - mrighele 5y ago
    AFAIK WhatsApp used to be Erlang on FreeBSD, not sure if it is still the case (maybe, Facebook is a big FreeBSD sponsor)
thijsvandien 5y ago
I wish for BSD to stay around forever. Sure, on desktop it's a tricky option, but neither Linux meets my standards there. For server use, it's unmatched IMO. A polished product meant to be relied on; well-organized and pleasantly conservative—what works keeps working, what's learnt stays useful. Really hoping this sentiment won't gain too much ground.
enriquto 5y ago
I don't understand their problems with firefox. I'm a happy user of plain firefox (ESR) on OpenBSD. What are they talking about?
- rjsw 5y ago
  I run it on NetBSD (without dbus) fine as well.
  - zxzax 5y ago
    What is the issue with dbus? I've seen a lot of complaints about it but I have yet to see anyone bother to create a viable replacement for it, after several years.
    - rjsw 5y ago
      One of the points of the original rant was that it was required everywhere. This isn't true, Firefox works fine without it.
      - zxzax 5y ago
        Right, but Firefox is its own special case. I don't get that complaint in the context of GTK or Qt apps -- dbus is the native IPC there. Taking it out without a replacement is just going to break things, and any replacement has to happen at the toolkit level. It's not something that the apps would ever really want to handle, unless they're already built like firefox to be self-contained and not need IPC.
turminal 5y ago
I think the linux community really should listen to those criticisms, not only for BSD users' good but for their own as well. Unfortunately linux community is not a well defined term anymore, because there are too many people and interests involved.
ksec 5y ago
>As a longtime BSD user.... >I've used FreeBSD since 2013, NetBSD since 2015..... May be it is me, but I expect long time to be at least a decade for OS. Especially for a "category" of OS. > OpenZFS I do sort of understand the issue especially with OpenZFS. The change-log always mentions fixes were specifically for FreeBSD. Usually I am pessimistic in these scenario as part of a possible EEE cycle. But I do think OpenZFS, or ZFS needs FreeBSD to survive. As long as the economics and political support are there, It should be fine. And despite being a fan of BSD, there are increasingly less reason to go with BSD as all technical, and financial benefits gravitate towards linux. Minix is dead [1] because of similar reason. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26451540 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26451540
noT1 5y ago
“As a user, I’m entitled to others building a system that adheres to my elitist perspective.”
ajross 5y ago
I love that the numbered points 1-3 go on and on about the dangers of "Linuxisms" and the need to use BSD as a desktop vs. MacOS and the problems with taking a patched ZFS-on-Linux as the reference upstream. Basically the standard list of purity arguments one sees, nothing special. Then number four: "We need to stay out of the politics of the larger FOSS scene" Dude... (And yes, I know that the author means "politics" in a different sense. But still.)
- matheusmoreira 5y ago
  > Linuxisms What exactly is this? Linux features not standardized by POSIX?
  - wmf 5y ago
    The all-or-nothing FreeDesktop/GNOME/systemd thing seems to be unpopular in BSD land.
    - zxzax 5y ago
      Those pieces can all be separated, but increasingly few people seem to be interested in putting in the work to do it. In particular, freedesktop is mostly just a set of standards for common protocols and file formats for an open source desktop -- I doubt anyone wants to get rid of that stuff just to have their applications all break.
    - asveikau 5y ago
      It's unpopular, but I don't think most users are going to make it point 2 of a 4 point plan if it gets pulled in while installing desktop stuff from ports and packages.
diegocg 5y ago
Adoption of ZFS has been a real problem for BSDs. In one hand, ZFS gives them a good storage stack. In the other hand, it does not have BSD license, it does not integrate well with the rest of the kernel, and it does not differentiate them from any Linux distro with ZoL packages. They should come up with a new file system of their own, for all BSDs, or try to use Hammer, and stop using someone's else file system.
- mikem170 5y ago
  There is the Berkeley Fast File System (BSD Fast File System, FFS) [0]. OpenBSD defaults to it. FreeBSD defaults to the Unix File System (UFS). I'm not sure about NetBSD and the others, but I assume they are pretty much either FFS or UFS. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkeley_Fast_File_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkeley_Fast_File_System
seoaeu 5y ago
> We are all adults, we know what is and isn't generally acceptable on the internet. > I also, once upon a time, maintained some ports before getting banned for "conduct issues" shortly after John Marino left FreeBSD I'm going to go out on a limb and say that if you are getting banned for "conduct issues" perhaps you don't actually know what is and isn't acceptable.
- bigbillheck 5y ago
  He says elsewhere in that thread that he was a gamergate person, which checks out.
  - matheusmoreira 5y ago
    Wasn't gamergate about ethics in video game journalism?
    - seoaeu 5y ago
      There's been plenty written about it elsewhere, but the short answer is that there was a lot more to it than that.
    - bigbillheck 5y ago
      Maybe for the first 30 seconds or so, but that got pivoted away from pretty quick.
- davidgould 5y ago
  In 1994 I got a new 486 computer to run a unix as I was using a mix of unixes at work. It was hard to choose technically between the various BSD and Linux disks from Walnut Creek CDrom. So I took a look into the mailing lists. On the BSD lists they were having some sort of fractious food-fight, if I remember about something like whether to ban people who ask dumb questions. On the linux list it was like "hey we got NCR 810 scsi working in 1.18". Since I had an NCR 810, and some dumb questions, Linux (slackware) was what I tried first. 27 years later OP's post and the reddit thread confirm it was the right choice.
pdx6 5y ago
I’ve been running FreeBSD since 1998, 2.2.2, as well as pfsense and now currently TrueNAS. I’m satisfied with what I use, but there are some unbaked annoyances, like how jails basically don’t have an orchestrator. Another is how Salt seems to be falling behind, and Ansible just has ok support. No one seems to have bothered making a module for TrueNAS and Ansible. XI seems to want to move over to Linux with their SCALE product, which would be really annoying if in the end FreeBSD is dropped. I don’t have a whole lot of doubts, but I do have a wishlist and having more deployments at sites would keep the toolkits flowing.
- zxzax 5y ago
  I hate to say it, but wouldn't a jail orchestrator essentially be the BSD version of systemd, docker, k8s and friends? The (admittedly few) BSD people I've talked to seem to be hostile to this concept because it's too much of a "Linuxism" but I don't think it has to be.
  - pdx6 5y ago
    It could be. There is also an opportunity to make a new concept. For example, Joyent’s Triton can manage containers, zones, and servers. They are conceptually the same as FreeBSD and jails. My thought is having a competing distro is a good thing since there is an avenue for a new spin on the state of the art.
- yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago
  Have you seen https://github.com/samuelkarp/runj https://github.com/samuelkarp/runj ? I have some hopes for that as the glue to do orchestration on jails.
  - pdx6 5y ago
    I’m waiting for it to mature. It is somewhat better for me not to try bleeding edge.
bch 5y ago
> If you don't agree with me, you are certainly free to take your negativity elsewhere. Good to foster open discussion early.

61 points by protomyth 5y ago

Overall a good post - but I'm not a fan of the constant off-hand jabs at codes of conduct from someone who got banned for "conduct issues." " But if everyone got offended and quit a project over someone saying mean 30 years ago, all FOSS would have quickly died out. " The snowflakes are invading FOSS and trying to take it out! We must protect ourselves!

moron4hire 5y ago
My experience has been, for each toxic person you eliminate, there are ten decent people waiting in the wings to replace them. The toxic folks are actively harming the project by keeping people away.
- enriquto 5y ago
  can you point to a few concrete examples? (which are already public, please don't "out" anybody)
  - MBCook 5y ago
    Good people don’t wanna work with problematic people. Look at what’s going on at Basecamp. When it came out just how problematic they were and if they weren’t willing to fix things, they lost 30% of their employees. Reportedly it’s now up to 40-something percent.
    - refenestrator 5y ago
      'Problematic' is such a fantastic word. Labelling a person, in whole, as 'problematic' but we're the nice and inclusive ones.
      - zxzax 5y ago
        For one, problematic refers to a behavior, not a person. If you find your behavior is causing problems for people, you can change that behavior (I encourage all employees/owners with a commitment to problem-solving to do this). For two, when the word is used in the context of inclusivity, usually the problem is that someone is behaving in a way that's exclusionary -- it's not being nice to encourage them to continue that behavior.
        refenestrator 5y ago
        Labelling someone problematic is super exclusionary. Usually more so than the 'problematic' behavior. Take a step back and it's cliques all the way down.
        zxzax 5y ago
        That's putting the cart before the horse -- in that context you would only see it used when the person's behavior already is super exclusionary. It's specifically used to describe that exclusionary behavior that has already happened. Of course people can get it mixed up but that's the job of the people doing the community management to make sure that doesn't happen.
        refenestrator 5y ago
        The comment I responded to said "how problematic they were" -- not "they were being". And it was about a case where a funny names list had circulated, the founders said "yeah, don't do that" but then objected to holocaust references in the reaction to it. This was extremely 'problematic' -- not the references, the objection to them. So, exclusionary to whom? Some people might value not dragging the dead into a dumb debate about a funny names list. It's not unreasonable.
        zxzax 5y ago
        I didn't make that comment, I agree that comment could have been worded better. I'm assuming by the use of past tense they didn't mean to suggest that they are inherently problematic for life. Edit: I don't have any additional comments on this particular happening, I believe there was several other HN threads with more than 1000 comments where this was discussed extensively.
    - lostinquebec 5y ago
      That's not an example because: 1. Basecamp is not OSS, and the people involved were all employees. 2. As employees, if you worked with someone for years,"it came out just how problematic they were" is a stretch.

stoolpigeon 5y ago

From the post and op's comments - they really hate a lot of stuff. I find that people like this who can't really handle changes they don't like have a tough time communicating about it in an effective way or doing anything about it that is meaningful. Mostly I see them try to stir up trouble that could have a negative impact on the people actually doing things and that's about it.

bombcar 5y ago
“Here are various problems and I can’t use the proposed solutions for unmentionable reasons.” Maybe Netcraft can be reached for comment on whether BSD is alive.
- inopinatus 5y ago
  > Maybe Netcraft can be reached That was exactly the connection I made, then wondering if the author even realised the allusion. Claiming to be a “longtime BSD user”, but starting in 2013 means they’re not, not in the scheme of things, and by some decades.

MeinBlutIstBlau 5y ago

As a very generic and simple computer person, BSD was off the table for me the moment I had to bother with the terminal to install it with a gui environment. Unlike Linux, BSD has a high barrier to entry similar to arch. And frankly, work, school, and social life take priority over learning how to install an OS that requires more maintenance and messing around to get things to work than even an unstable Linux distro. I really do like the idea of BSD and have several major OS choices, but honestly Linux seems to be the solution for most "third way" OS problems until programming a new OS becomes common like 100+ years down the road. BSD just failed where Linux succeeded in being able to easily pull in the lazy nerds like me. Short of a basic terminal command and simple troubleshooting of course. BSD is like arch level of difficulty and maintenance and I don't care for it. Also it's kind of ironic that he bashes macOS when historically it's the successor of BSD. What it gets right, this guy complains about. It's simple, I don't need to worry about any of the issues he mentioned, and it's reliable. The reason other BSDs aren't is because you have to waste time making you're system work first before you can do anything else unlike almost every other major OS.

pwdisswordfish8 5y ago
> I really do like the idea of BSD What do you consider to be the idea of BSD?
- MeinBlutIstBlau 5y ago
  Just another supported operating system. I think it's good that we have somewhat of a variety so that it's not just the big 3. I'd really hate to see an MS and OSX only market 40 years from now.

InTheArena 5y ago

I don’t see much future for BSD at this point - and I say that as someone who had their MBR overwritten by 386BSD core dumping once upon a time. I love BSD, and it’s simplicity, but outside of dedicated appliances, I think general purpose UNIX is long settled. What’s more is that Docker has become the one true way to distribute software for enterprises. The dependency and package management problems are not optional anymore, and the lack of a consistent structure makes image based deployments inevitable. Yes, someone will immediately bring up that BSD had these features first, but it ignores the two advantages of universal distribution and simplicity that Docker built.

secondcoming 5y ago
Isn't Docker dying?
- wmf 5y ago
  Docker™ is dying but docker (e.g. k8s on containerd) is bigger than ever.
  - fmakunbound 5y ago
    What do you mean by Docker™?
    - rrdharan 5y ago
      The company, as opposed to the distribution format/ mechanism.

jl6 5y ago

Calls macOS’s interface “fischer price”, and complains about elitism in the same sentence... What this guy is observing is that BSD is a subculture getting swallowed by a dominant monoculture. There are a few strategies for dealing with this - one is to accept fate, give up, and join the monoculture. Another is to find a core differentiating purpose, rally around that, and hope that the monoculture sees you as complementary. This harder path does mean foregoing the benefits of economies of scale, such as having lots of other people writing drivers for you for free. So what is the core differentiating purpose of BSD that will win the hearts of developers and convince them to turn their efforts towards it?

ecliptik 5y ago
While not differentiating specifically for developers - as an end user, I’m gravitating more towards the BSDs since they don’t have systemd, wayland, pulsesudio, or all the other components that modern Linux has bolted on.
- nine_k 5y ago
  Frankly, there are a few distros which don't require systemd (my laptop runs one, specifically Void). Wayland is not a requirement anywhere. Pulseaudio is also not a requirement; I happily live without it. You can do without all that, unless you want the latest Gnome. Red Hat way is not the only way with Linux, fortunately.

mnd999 5y ago

Lots of good points there, I’m a long time FreeBSD user too and I kinda feel the same about the continuing dependence on Linux in so many areas. I switched to Arch Linux for my day to day a couple of years ago, everything works better. It’s very hard to innovate when all your major drivers are lifted from elsewhere. I have less sympathy on the codes of conduct complaint. Codes of conduct are pretty straightforward to follow.

na85 5y ago

I think the poster is not seeing the forest for the trees. BSD has no real use case except as a way to subsidize giant megacorp development with volunteer work. Linux, for all its warts, is superior to BSD in nearly every way that matters to application developers and to companies who need a server OS. The areas in which BSD is superior to Linux simply aren't important enough to justify using BSD, unless you are a corporate parasite like Sony and need an operating system with a parasitism-enabling license but don't want to pay for more than a handful of developers. The market just doesn't seem big enough to support Linux and a handful of BSDs, and at the end of the day that's the real reason why BSD appears to be dying, because there's no reason to reach for BSD when Debian and Slackware exist.

wmf 5y ago
Are there any megacorps using BSD other than Netflix?
- onethought 5y ago
  Apple do right?
  - CharlesW 5y ago
    Apple's Darwin is probably better thought of as a descendant of BSD (and other technologies).
- rmwaite 5y ago
  Lots of things build on top of BSD. JunOS for example is the software that powers Juniper network devices and is based on FreeBSD (which depending on the platform may itself run in a VM on top of Linux).
- di4na 5y ago
  Sony ?
- mrighele 5y ago
  AFAIK WhatsApp used to be Erlang on FreeBSD, not sure if it is still the case (maybe, Facebook is a big FreeBSD sponsor)

thijsvandien 5y ago

I wish for BSD to stay around forever. Sure, on desktop it's a tricky option, but neither Linux meets my standards there. For server use, it's unmatched IMO. A polished product meant to be relied on; well-organized and pleasantly conservative—what works keeps working, what's learnt stays useful. Really hoping this sentiment won't gain too much ground.

enriquto 5y ago

I don't understand their problems with firefox. I'm a happy user of plain firefox (ESR) on OpenBSD. What are they talking about?

rjsw 5y ago
I run it on NetBSD (without dbus) fine as well.
- zxzax 5y ago
  What is the issue with dbus? I've seen a lot of complaints about it but I have yet to see anyone bother to create a viable replacement for it, after several years.
  - rjsw 5y ago
    One of the points of the original rant was that it was required everywhere. This isn't true, Firefox works fine without it.
    - zxzax 5y ago
      Right, but Firefox is its own special case. I don't get that complaint in the context of GTK or Qt apps -- dbus is the native IPC there. Taking it out without a replacement is just going to break things, and any replacement has to happen at the toolkit level. It's not something that the apps would ever really want to handle, unless they're already built like firefox to be self-contained and not need IPC.

turminal 5y ago

I think the linux community really should listen to those criticisms, not only for BSD users' good but for their own as well. Unfortunately linux community is not a well defined term anymore, because there are too many people and interests involved.

ksec 5y ago

>As a longtime BSD user.... >I've used FreeBSD since 2013, NetBSD since 2015..... May be it is me, but I expect long time to be at least a decade for OS. Especially for a "category" of OS. > OpenZFS I do sort of understand the issue especially with OpenZFS. The change-log always mentions fixes were specifically for FreeBSD. Usually I am pessimistic in these scenario as part of a possible EEE cycle. But I do think OpenZFS, or ZFS needs FreeBSD to survive. As long as the economics and political support are there, It should be fine. And despite being a fan of BSD, there are increasingly less reason to go with BSD as all technical, and financial benefits gravitate towards linux. Minix is dead [1] because of similar reason. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26451540 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26451540

noT1 5y ago

“As a user, I’m entitled to others building a system that adheres to my elitist perspective.”

ajross 5y ago

I love that the numbered points 1-3 go on and on about the dangers of "Linuxisms" and the need to use BSD as a desktop vs. MacOS and the problems with taking a patched ZFS-on-Linux as the reference upstream. Basically the standard list of purity arguments one sees, nothing special. Then number four: "We need to stay out of the politics of the larger FOSS scene" Dude... (And yes, I know that the author means "politics" in a different sense. But still.)

matheusmoreira 5y ago
> Linuxisms What exactly is this? Linux features not standardized by POSIX?
- wmf 5y ago
  The all-or-nothing FreeDesktop/GNOME/systemd thing seems to be unpopular in BSD land.
  - zxzax 5y ago
    Those pieces can all be separated, but increasingly few people seem to be interested in putting in the work to do it. In particular, freedesktop is mostly just a set of standards for common protocols and file formats for an open source desktop -- I doubt anyone wants to get rid of that stuff just to have their applications all break.
  - asveikau 5y ago
    It's unpopular, but I don't think most users are going to make it point 2 of a 4 point plan if it gets pulled in while installing desktop stuff from ports and packages.

diegocg 5y ago

Adoption of ZFS has been a real problem for BSDs. In one hand, ZFS gives them a good storage stack. In the other hand, it does not have BSD license, it does not integrate well with the rest of the kernel, and it does not differentiate them from any Linux distro with ZoL packages. They should come up with a new file system of their own, for all BSDs, or try to use Hammer, and stop using someone's else file system.

mikem170 5y ago
There is the Berkeley Fast File System (BSD Fast File System, FFS) [0]. OpenBSD defaults to it. FreeBSD defaults to the Unix File System (UFS). I'm not sure about NetBSD and the others, but I assume they are pretty much either FFS or UFS. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkeley_Fast_File_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkeley_Fast_File_System

seoaeu 5y ago

> We are all adults, we know what is and isn't generally acceptable on the internet. > I also, once upon a time, maintained some ports before getting banned for "conduct issues" shortly after John Marino left FreeBSD I'm going to go out on a limb and say that if you are getting banned for "conduct issues" perhaps you don't actually know what is and isn't acceptable.

bigbillheck 5y ago
He says elsewhere in that thread that he was a gamergate person, which checks out.
- matheusmoreira 5y ago
  Wasn't gamergate about ethics in video game journalism?
  - seoaeu 5y ago
    There's been plenty written about it elsewhere, but the short answer is that there was a lot more to it than that.
  - bigbillheck 5y ago
    Maybe for the first 30 seconds or so, but that got pivoted away from pretty quick.
davidgould 5y ago
In 1994 I got a new 486 computer to run a unix as I was using a mix of unixes at work. It was hard to choose technically between the various BSD and Linux disks from Walnut Creek CDrom. So I took a look into the mailing lists. On the BSD lists they were having some sort of fractious food-fight, if I remember about something like whether to ban people who ask dumb questions. On the linux list it was like "hey we got NCR 810 scsi working in 1.18". Since I had an NCR 810, and some dumb questions, Linux (slackware) was what I tried first. 27 years later OP's post and the reddit thread confirm it was the right choice.

pdx6 5y ago

I’ve been running FreeBSD since 1998, 2.2.2, as well as pfsense and now currently TrueNAS. I’m satisfied with what I use, but there are some unbaked annoyances, like how jails basically don’t have an orchestrator. Another is how Salt seems to be falling behind, and Ansible just has ok support. No one seems to have bothered making a module for TrueNAS and Ansible. XI seems to want to move over to Linux with their SCALE product, which would be really annoying if in the end FreeBSD is dropped. I don’t have a whole lot of doubts, but I do have a wishlist and having more deployments at sites would keep the toolkits flowing.

zxzax 5y ago
I hate to say it, but wouldn't a jail orchestrator essentially be the BSD version of systemd, docker, k8s and friends? The (admittedly few) BSD people I've talked to seem to be hostile to this concept because it's too much of a "Linuxism" but I don't think it has to be.
- pdx6 5y ago
  It could be. There is also an opportunity to make a new concept. For example, Joyent’s Triton can manage containers, zones, and servers. They are conceptually the same as FreeBSD and jails. My thought is having a competing distro is a good thing since there is an avenue for a new spin on the state of the art.
yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago
Have you seen https://github.com/samuelkarp/runj https://github.com/samuelkarp/runj ? I have some hopes for that as the glue to do orchestration on jails.
- pdx6 5y ago
  I’m waiting for it to mature. It is somewhat better for me not to try bleeding edge.

bch 5y ago

> If you don't agree with me, you are certainly free to take your negativity elsewhere. Good to foster open discussion early.