3 ms·

NixBSD: Project Mixes FreeBSD and NixOS in One

27 points by pabs3 3y ago

tracker1 3y ago
This is definitely a very cool project to see. Outside of some embedded environments where GPL is a no go, I'm afraid BSD may largely fade into more obscurity, which is a shame.
- bionsystem 3y ago
  I think it's a great combination, but with jails, ports and boot environments, FreeBSD has everything to achieve similar features than nix. What FreeBSD really needs is more packages and nix may help, but the big work is porting the packages, not the package manager I'm afraid. That say I'm all for it, I think nix is great and is a very viable alternative/complement to containers and config management.
- wkat4242 3y ago
  I see it becoming bigger really. I use FreeBSD as daily driver for years now and judging by the community groups it's growing. Of course when you're such a small community (I recently saw FreeBSD has 0.01% of the desktop market :) ) it's not very hard to have big relative growth. But I don't mind being part of a small community. The maintainers are great. I wouldn't want to use NixBSD though for that purpose, I don't like declarative management on my desktop. FreeBSD already has the best part of it with its central rc.conf file. But I want to keep manual control of installed software. This could be nice though for containers (or jails as they're called on bsd)
- 3abiton 3y ago
  As a Linux user, it's hard to see the appeal of BSD, or to appreciate it enough to make the jump. At least for me, still haven't found a good reason yet.
  - BSDobelix 3y ago
    >At least for me, still haven't found a good reason yet. Look, it's like a car. I can tell you a lot of good things about Free-BSD, but also some bad things (like not being able to control the GPU fans, or the suboptimal WIFI situation). But as a full-time user of FreeBSD (Laptop, Workstations and Servers), and a former Linux-User since ~1998, give it a test drive for a month and see for yourself ;)

3 ms·

NixBSD: Project Mixes FreeBSD and NixOS in One

27 points by pabs3 3y ago

tracker1 3y ago
This is definitely a very cool project to see. Outside of some embedded environments where GPL is a no go, I'm afraid BSD may largely fade into more obscurity, which is a shame.
- bionsystem 3y ago
  I think it's a great combination, but with jails, ports and boot environments, FreeBSD has everything to achieve similar features than nix. What FreeBSD really needs is more packages and nix may help, but the big work is porting the packages, not the package manager I'm afraid. That say I'm all for it, I think nix is great and is a very viable alternative/complement to containers and config management.
- wkat4242 3y ago
  I see it becoming bigger really. I use FreeBSD as daily driver for years now and judging by the community groups it's growing. Of course when you're such a small community (I recently saw FreeBSD has 0.01% of the desktop market :) ) it's not very hard to have big relative growth. But I don't mind being part of a small community. The maintainers are great. I wouldn't want to use NixBSD though for that purpose, I don't like declarative management on my desktop. FreeBSD already has the best part of it with its central rc.conf file. But I want to keep manual control of installed software. This could be nice though for containers (or jails as they're called on bsd)
- 3abiton 3y ago
  As a Linux user, it's hard to see the appeal of BSD, or to appreciate it enough to make the jump. At least for me, still haven't found a good reason yet.
  - BSDobelix 3y ago
    >At least for me, still haven't found a good reason yet. Look, it's like a car. I can tell you a lot of good things about Free-BSD, but also some bad things (like not being able to control the GPU fans, or the suboptimal WIFI situation). But as a full-time user of FreeBSD (Laptop, Workstations and Servers), and a former Linux-User since ~1998, give it a test drive for a month and see for yourself ;)