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When you choose BSD, many common Linux frustrations evaporate. :)

mananaysiempre 1y ago
Rusty Russell’s old iptables HOWTO was okay—or as okay as an iptables anything can be. An nftables HOWTO covering basically the same issues that The Book of PF does has the potential to be much better, simply because it would concern a much less messy system, but somebody has to write it. There’s little Linux-specific about this situation.
- quesera 1y ago
  It is Linux-specific to some degree. There's a culture of documentation in BSD which exceeds Linux. There's a larger commercial/reputational market for a Linux book of course, but that attracts different writers, who are often not as good/knowledgeable/motivated/dedicated/etc as the BSD documentation writers. Additionally, BSD has a culture of simplicity and consistency which is entirely absent in Linux. This makes documentation more clear and much more durable.
znpy 1y ago
yeah, but many new ones appear, sadly. (I've used both FreeBSD and NetBSD in the past, this is not a baseless claim)
fidotron 1y ago
Yeah, but some of us like pf and systemd. It's so confusing.
- quesera 1y ago
  Oh come now, no one likes systemd! I kid. Sort of. Systemd is a great startup launcher -- maybe even an improvement over rc.d. Although I confess I've never had any issues with rc.d. Systemd can be quicker, which is nice, but 15 seconds saved on a server that reboots very infrequently is not super interesting. More importantly, the rest of systemd is less compelling.
  - pull_my_finger 1y ago
    Now a comprehensive book on systemd would be really nice. Most of the stuff out there is focused on service files, but there's a LOT of other stuff in the systemd ecosystem that doesn't have much easily accessible content available.
    - jcgl 1y ago
      I think I agree that there’s not a _ton_ of content out there on 80%+ of the systemd featureset. However, the first-party docs are really quite good. Considering that some blog posts are written to compensate for a lack of docs, I wonder if there’s a causal relation there.
AnonymousPlanet 1y ago
But then you're stuck in the 90s together with the two aging guys who maintain it. I'm joking of course, but that is a bit how I always feel when trying BSD. It reminds me a lot of Linux in the 90s, plus its development appears kind of glacial compared to Linux.

Rusty Russell’s old iptables HOWTO was okay—or as okay as an iptables anything can be. An nftables HOWTO covering basically the same issues that The Book of PF does has the potential to be much better, simply because it would concern a much less messy system, but somebody has to write it. There’s little Linux-specific about this situation.

quesera 1y ago
It is Linux-specific to some degree. There's a culture of documentation in BSD which exceeds Linux. There's a larger commercial/reputational market for a Linux book of course, but that attracts different writers, who are often not as good/knowledgeable/motivated/dedicated/etc as the BSD documentation writers. Additionally, BSD has a culture of simplicity and consistency which is entirely absent in Linux. This makes documentation more clear and much more durable.

znpy 1y ago

yeah, but many new ones appear, sadly. (I've used both FreeBSD and NetBSD in the past, this is not a baseless claim)

fidotron 1y ago

Yeah, but some of us like pf and systemd. It's so confusing.

quesera 1y ago
Oh come now, no one likes systemd! I kid. Sort of. Systemd is a great startup launcher -- maybe even an improvement over rc.d. Although I confess I've never had any issues with rc.d. Systemd can be quicker, which is nice, but 15 seconds saved on a server that reboots very infrequently is not super interesting. More importantly, the rest of systemd is less compelling.
- pull_my_finger 1y ago
  Now a comprehensive book on systemd would be really nice. Most of the stuff out there is focused on service files, but there's a LOT of other stuff in the systemd ecosystem that doesn't have much easily accessible content available.
  - jcgl 1y ago
    I think I agree that there’s not a _ton_ of content out there on 80%+ of the systemd featureset. However, the first-party docs are really quite good. Considering that some blog posts are written to compensate for a lack of docs, I wonder if there’s a causal relation there.

AnonymousPlanet 1y ago

But then you're stuck in the 90s together with the two aging guys who maintain it. I'm joking of course, but that is a bit how I always feel when trying BSD. It reminds me a lot of Linux in the 90s, plus its development appears kind of glacial compared to Linux.