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I've been seeing a lot of new activity around FreeBSD and it's great... I think it has a bit of an opening given the outrageous fragmentation of the Linux ecosy

by api 12y ago

I've been seeing a lot of new activity around FreeBSD and it's great... I think it has a bit of an opening given the outrageous fragmentation of the Linux ecosystem. There are what... three different inits?

logn 12y ago
Is it really that fragmented? There's essentially RedHat, Debian, and Slackware. At the level of app development for servers, everything seems pretty compatible. As a desktop user I just switched from Xubuntu to Debian+Xfce and it's nearly identical. I'm sure that people who work at the OS level see a lot of fragmentation and headaches, but to their credit it's largely hidden from the masses. I think the opening for FreeBSD and everyone else is that with containers and virtualization, the movement is towards picking an OS per app, not an OS to run your entire business on.
- ivoras 12y ago
  And SUSE enterprise is another actually popular version, at least what I've seen in the telecom industry. So that's at least 4. Then, there's Arch which is popular with enthusiasts, and Ubuntu has become sufficiently different from Debian that it requires thinking when switching from one to the other. Gentoo seems to be getting less and less popular, but it's still kicking. And yes as the parent post said, it's the unexpected differences that are stressful: different init systems, selinux vs apparmour vs nothing, different locations of config files, different whole /etc structures, that sort of things. The distros are diverging fast, and switching from RHEL to Ubuntu nowadays feels like it's a whole new system.
- GalacticDomin8r 12y ago
  > I just switched from Xubuntu to Debian+Xfce and it's nearly identical. So you went from downstream to upstream and the view was largely the same. Yeah that's expected. > I think the opening for FreeBSD and everyone else is that with containers and virtualization FreeBSD has had container based virtualization for 15 years. I know it's the Brittany Spears of the linux dev group ATM, but I doubt it and Docker are as big a thing as it seems now. Container based virtualization is great, but it's not a substitute for a real hypervisor. As more people realize the last fact, the shine will wear off.
danieldk 12y ago
I think it has a bit of an opening given the outrageous fragmentation of the Linux ecosystem. There are what... three different inits? And in BSD the fragmentation is not only in inits, but the whole kernel and base system. We have FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, and DragonFly BSD. Then there are sort-of-forks like Darwin and JunOS. If we divide the number of active developers by the number of variants, I am pretty sure that Linux is doing much better. There are good reasons for using BSD, but the lack of fragmentation is not one of them.
- justincormack 12y ago
  Linux has enormously more developers than all the BSDs put together. However the BSDs still manage to provide useful platforms that work well for large numbers of use cases, and provide innovation.

by api 12y ago

logn 12y ago

Is it really that fragmented? There's essentially RedHat, Debian, and Slackware. At the level of app development for servers, everything seems pretty compatible. As a desktop user I just switched from Xubuntu to Debian+Xfce and it's nearly identical. I'm sure that people who work at the OS level see a lot of fragmentation and headaches, but to their credit it's largely hidden from the masses. I think the opening for FreeBSD and everyone else is that with containers and virtualization, the movement is towards picking an OS per app, not an OS to run your entire business on.

ivoras 12y ago
And SUSE enterprise is another actually popular version, at least what I've seen in the telecom industry. So that's at least 4. Then, there's Arch which is popular with enthusiasts, and Ubuntu has become sufficiently different from Debian that it requires thinking when switching from one to the other. Gentoo seems to be getting less and less popular, but it's still kicking. And yes as the parent post said, it's the unexpected differences that are stressful: different init systems, selinux vs apparmour vs nothing, different locations of config files, different whole /etc structures, that sort of things. The distros are diverging fast, and switching from RHEL to Ubuntu nowadays feels like it's a whole new system.
GalacticDomin8r 12y ago
> I just switched from Xubuntu to Debian+Xfce and it's nearly identical. So you went from downstream to upstream and the view was largely the same. Yeah that's expected. > I think the opening for FreeBSD and everyone else is that with containers and virtualization FreeBSD has had container based virtualization for 15 years. I know it's the Brittany Spears of the linux dev group ATM, but I doubt it and Docker are as big a thing as it seems now. Container based virtualization is great, but it's not a substitute for a real hypervisor. As more people realize the last fact, the shine will wear off.

danieldk 12y ago

I think it has a bit of an opening given the outrageous fragmentation of the Linux ecosystem. There are what... three different inits? And in BSD the fragmentation is not only in inits, but the whole kernel and base system. We have FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, and DragonFly BSD. Then there are sort-of-forks like Darwin and JunOS. If we divide the number of active developers by the number of variants, I am pretty sure that Linux is doing much better. There are good reasons for using BSD, but the lack of fragmentation is not one of them.

justincormack 12y ago
Linux has enormously more developers than all the BSDs put together. However the BSDs still manage to provide useful platforms that work well for large numbers of use cases, and provide innovation.