3 ms·

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

by 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.
- silverlyra 5y ago
  > or rather, Plan9-, Limbo- or Amoeba-like [design], given that Linux now supports the needed foundational features for these I‘d be curious to hear more about what you're referring to, if you were willing to expand. What foundational features are new to Linux that would be really useful for cleaner init system (etc.) designs?
  - adastra22 5y ago
    Given the examples maybe he is referring to heterogeneous single-system images over a local or wide area network?
tux2bsd 5y ago
> It of course helps that nothing ever changes in BSD-land. ZFS would like a word. FreeBSD, for all intents and purposes, pioneered the adoption of ZFS for the everyday enthusiast. I'm yet to dive in, I've only dabbled.
- paulmd 5y ago
  Yeah, it's great! Even if you don't get deeply into it, the ability to take and send snapshots, the intelligent caching layer, and the data integrity stuff is all super useful. It's the same stuff that BTRFS sells but it actually, you know, works without constant intervention and data loss. And Zed is great, it ties the whole snapshot thing into the software update process and so on. It's definitely a bit heavier than other filesystems but it's one of those things where I can't imagine setting up a Linux/Unix system without it anymore. I wouldn't exactly classify ZFS as a "new" feature though. ZFS dates to 2004, OpenZFS dates to 2006, and OpenSolaris dates to 2010. 20 years is pretty well into "mature technology" by most standards, even 16 years is very mature by software standards.

by paulmd 5y ago

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.

silverlyra 5y ago
> or rather, Plan9-, Limbo- or Amoeba-like [design], given that Linux now supports the needed foundational features for these I‘d be curious to hear more about what you're referring to, if you were willing to expand. What foundational features are new to Linux that would be really useful for cleaner init system (etc.) designs?
- adastra22 5y ago
  Given the examples maybe he is referring to heterogeneous single-system images over a local or wide area network?

tux2bsd 5y ago

> It of course helps that nothing ever changes in BSD-land. ZFS would like a word. FreeBSD, for all intents and purposes, pioneered the adoption of ZFS for the everyday enthusiast. I'm yet to dive in, I've only dabbled.

paulmd 5y ago
Yeah, it's great! Even if you don't get deeply into it, the ability to take and send snapshots, the intelligent caching layer, and the data integrity stuff is all super useful. It's the same stuff that BTRFS sells but it actually, you know, works without constant intervention and data loss. And Zed is great, it ties the whole snapshot thing into the software update process and so on. It's definitely a bit heavier than other filesystems but it's one of those things where I can't imagine setting up a Linux/Unix system without it anymore. I wouldn't exactly classify ZFS as a "new" feature though. ZFS dates to 2004, OpenZFS dates to 2006, and OpenSolaris dates to 2010. 20 years is pretty well into "mature technology" by most standards, even 16 years is very mature by software standards.