4 ms·

Honestly, the biggest advantage OpenBSD has always had for me was its internal consistency and excellent documentation. If you’re a heavy command line user, you

by messe 5y ago

Honestly, the biggest advantage OpenBSD has always had for me was its internal consistency and excellent documentation. If you’re a heavy command line user, you can usually figure out either what command you need to run or what you need to look up in the man pages. It’s also great for C development, as it has far better docs for libc than glibc does. If you have supported hardware (and that’s a bit if and caveat; smaller than it used to be, but still quite large), then everything just works. Even little things like the built-in screen brightness buttons, just work regardless of if you’re in x11 or a terminal (same with volume buttons), because it’s designed as a complete system rather than a distribution of otherwise unrelated open source projects.

brundolf 5y ago
Sounds like it might address a lot of the misgivings I have with using Linux as a workstation; maybe I'll play with it some time
- messe 5y ago
  It’s not a perfect OS, but it’s definitely pleasant to use. These days I’m on macOS, mainly because of the hardware but also a few pieces of software that I have hard time replacing (Scrivener and Mathematica).
  - ILMostro7 5y ago
    I know that Mathematica is available on Linux. I wonder how much more would be needed for Wolfram to make a FreeBSD release.
    - perihelions 5y ago
      I think it already runs on FreeBSD. It's in the handbook somewhere: - "Linux® Binary Compatibility" - "Describes the Linux® compatibility features of FreeBSD. Also provides detailed installation instructions for many popular Linux® applications such as Oracle® and Mathematica®." https://docs.freebsd.org/en/books/handbook/book/#preface-overview https://docs.freebsd.org/en/books/handbook/book/#preface-ove...
      - ILMostro7 5y ago
        That's excellent! Thanks for that. I wasn't able to find that exact reference in the docs of the current release (using a mobile device at the moment). However, there is a very useful forum thread for anyone interested. It's not a straightforward install, but it's definitely possible to install/use Mathematica on FreeBSD. https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/freebsd-13-0-runs-mathematica-11-fully-gl-accelerated-nvidia.80361/ https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/freebsd-13-0-runs-mathema...
  - tksb 5y ago
    Scrivener is a gem for sure, but I'm always curious if anyone actively using it has tried Highland? I guess I'm biased as it feels extremely "at home" on macOS.
    - messe 5y ago
      It looks nice, I'll be sure to try it out! Upfront, I don't think it'll cover all my scrivener uses (it seems to be missing a lot of the outlining and research features—please correct me if I'm wrong), but I'm curious enough to try it for a short story or two.
paulmd 5y ago
Ya, same for FreeBSD. You can literally operate a system with nothing but the handbook in most cases - the documentation is much more systematic and developed than Linux. What you get isn't just a "how to use a GUI" tutorial or manpages, it's a comprehensive look at how you do routine sysadmin tasks. The kind of thing that Linux pushes off to web tutorials or stackoverflow. Compare: https://help.ubuntu.com/lts/ubuntu-help/index.html https://help.ubuntu.com/lts/ubuntu-help/index.html https://docs.freebsd.org/doc/13.0-RELEASE/usr/local/share/doc/freebsd/en/books/handbook/ https://docs.freebsd.org/doc/13.0-RELEASE/usr/local/share/do... It of course helps that nothing ever changes in BSD-land. After 50 years of development, they are largely feature-complete and are not going to be doing massive changes just for the sake of massive changes. As such they get much lower levels of "documentation rot", things rust a lot slower when nothing ever changes and as such it's a lot easier (and more productive) to build comprehensive documentation. But the amount of churn in linux is insane, Ubuntu has used three completely different init systems in the 15 years since I started using Linux seriously. For java development, I routinely see and use StackOverflow answers from like 2009 that are completely valid still, and yet answers from that era are completely useless for Linux, which has invalidated that acquired-knowledge twice since then. You can pretty much sysadmin FreeBSD out of the handbook, and if you need to search then an answer from 2009 is usually still valid. It's absolutely a cathedral-vs-bazaar situation. Cathedral is presented as a negative in that metaphor, but the cathedral ensures enough stability that you can start Having Nice Things instead of just constantly scrambling to rewrite everything every time a vendor thinks they've built a better mousetrap.
- stjohnswarts 5y ago
  How does it compare to some of the better run wikis like the Arch wiki? I think I'll take a look around, never thought about checking there freebsd for info on general command line stuff.
- zozbot234 5y ago
  > ...it's a comprehensive look at how you do routine sysadmin tasks. The kind of thing that Linux pushes off to web tutorials or stackoverflow. A lot of useful material with near-official status is kept under the Linux Documentation Project, https://tldp.org/ https://tldp.org/ They have a git repository at https://github.com/tLDP/LDP https://github.com/tLDP/LDP There are some cases of real churn in Linux but they're rare. The new init systems and such come with plenty of useful features that simplify many administration tasks: the reason for people being so unsatisfied with them is that they bring lots of what's effectively cowboy-coded hacks and prototype-quality code in order to enable these features. But rewriting all of this stuff from the ground up with a clean, Unix-like design (or rather, Plan9-, Limbo- or Amoeba-like, given that Linux now supports the needed foundational features for these) while preserving its feature set would involve more rather than less churn.

by messe 5y ago

brundolf 5y ago

Sounds like it might address a lot of the misgivings I have with using Linux as a workstation; maybe I'll play with it some time

messe 5y ago
It’s not a perfect OS, but it’s definitely pleasant to use. These days I’m on macOS, mainly because of the hardware but also a few pieces of software that I have hard time replacing (Scrivener and Mathematica).
- ILMostro7 5y ago
  I know that Mathematica is available on Linux. I wonder how much more would be needed for Wolfram to make a FreeBSD release.
  - perihelions 5y ago
    I think it already runs on FreeBSD. It's in the handbook somewhere: - "Linux® Binary Compatibility" - "Describes the Linux® compatibility features of FreeBSD. Also provides detailed installation instructions for many popular Linux® applications such as Oracle® and Mathematica®." https://docs.freebsd.org/en/books/handbook/book/#preface-overview https://docs.freebsd.org/en/books/handbook/book/#preface-ove...
    - ILMostro7 5y ago
      That's excellent! Thanks for that. I wasn't able to find that exact reference in the docs of the current release (using a mobile device at the moment). However, there is a very useful forum thread for anyone interested. It's not a straightforward install, but it's definitely possible to install/use Mathematica on FreeBSD. https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/freebsd-13-0-runs-mathematica-11-fully-gl-accelerated-nvidia.80361/ https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/freebsd-13-0-runs-mathema...
- tksb 5y ago
  Scrivener is a gem for sure, but I'm always curious if anyone actively using it has tried Highland? I guess I'm biased as it feels extremely "at home" on macOS.
  - messe 5y ago
    It looks nice, I'll be sure to try it out! Upfront, I don't think it'll cover all my scrivener uses (it seems to be missing a lot of the outlining and research features—please correct me if I'm wrong), but I'm curious enough to try it for a short story or two.

paulmd 5y ago

Ya, same for FreeBSD. You can literally operate a system with nothing but the handbook in most cases - the documentation is much more systematic and developed than Linux. What you get isn't just a "how to use a GUI" tutorial or manpages, it's a comprehensive look at how you do routine sysadmin tasks. The kind of thing that Linux pushes off to web tutorials or stackoverflow. Compare: https://help.ubuntu.com/lts/ubuntu-help/index.html https://help.ubuntu.com/lts/ubuntu-help/index.html https://docs.freebsd.org/doc/13.0-RELEASE/usr/local/share/doc/freebsd/en/books/handbook/ https://docs.freebsd.org/doc/13.0-RELEASE/usr/local/share/do... It of course helps that nothing ever changes in BSD-land. After 50 years of development, they are largely feature-complete and are not going to be doing massive changes just for the sake of massive changes. As such they get much lower levels of "documentation rot", things rust a lot slower when nothing ever changes and as such it's a lot easier (and more productive) to build comprehensive documentation. But the amount of churn in linux is insane, Ubuntu has used three completely different init systems in the 15 years since I started using Linux seriously. For java development, I routinely see and use StackOverflow answers from like 2009 that are completely valid still, and yet answers from that era are completely useless for Linux, which has invalidated that acquired-knowledge twice since then. You can pretty much sysadmin FreeBSD out of the handbook, and if you need to search then an answer from 2009 is usually still valid. It's absolutely a cathedral-vs-bazaar situation. Cathedral is presented as a negative in that metaphor, but the cathedral ensures enough stability that you can start Having Nice Things instead of just constantly scrambling to rewrite everything every time a vendor thinks they've built a better mousetrap.

stjohnswarts 5y ago
How does it compare to some of the better run wikis like the Arch wiki? I think I'll take a look around, never thought about checking there freebsd for info on general command line stuff.
zozbot234 5y ago
> ...it's a comprehensive look at how you do routine sysadmin tasks. The kind of thing that Linux pushes off to web tutorials or stackoverflow. A lot of useful material with near-official status is kept under the Linux Documentation Project, https://tldp.org/ https://tldp.org/ They have a git repository at https://github.com/tLDP/LDP https://github.com/tLDP/LDP There are some cases of real churn in Linux but they're rare. The new init systems and such come with plenty of useful features that simplify many administration tasks: the reason for people being so unsatisfied with them is that they bring lots of what's effectively cowboy-coded hacks and prototype-quality code in order to enable these features. But rewriting all of this stuff from the ground up with a clean, Unix-like design (or rather, Plan9-, Limbo- or Amoeba-like, given that Linux now supports the needed foundational features for these) while preserving its feature set would involve more rather than less churn.