BSD Experiment

[Anthony de Boer]

Peter King wrote:
>  ... Well, time to be broad-minded, to
> see what FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and NetBSD have to offer.
> 
> The first thing that seriously put me off was finding
> out that none of the *BSDs -- none! -- have anything to
> equal the console framebuffer in Linux. ...

To be fair, there are a bunch of differentiating features, and strategic
choice of one of them can put any of several projects out front.

ZFS is still a sore point in Linux, with early attempts to bring it in
either relying (slowly!) on FUSE or on recent attempts to bridge the GPL
and CDDL worlds.  FreeBSD is probably a better choice for a fileserver
there, though OpenSolaris via its recent Illumos/OpenIndiana fork would
be strong choices to get closer to the headwaters of that.

But competition is good, and encourages each group to stay on its toes
and push the others along.  Linux wouldn't have grown as fast as it did
without Unix to first provide a model to try to match in the early years
and then become an opposing player to outplay.  And the others have been
playing catch-up to Linux a lot!

Too, we tend to learn the shortcomings best in what we're actually
using, and tend to notice bits of grass that look greener on the other
side of the fence.  I may poke at the others, but this keyboard is
plugged into a Linux box.

Meanwhile, my major experience of console framebuffer involved a Ubuntu
install that didn't make it as far as X, an older CRT that wasn't as
bright as it had been, the setting sun in the window behind it, and my
eyes not being teenaged anymore either, and *just* being able to read
the wee tiny letters on the screen.  That was painful.  80x24 and I have
a long history together and we're used to each other now, though I spend
most of my time in front of a proper X desktop.

> I'm willing to believe the *BSDs make great servers. But
> they didn't make good desktops for me, ...

Linux gets a lot more attention on the desktop front, and I'm not sure
I'd want to try to run Free/Open/Net BSD there either.  But any major
mall will have a shrine to OSX-flavoured BSD on the shiny white desktop
and on the iPhone that goes with that.

> I have run OpenBSD on a server in the past, and it was very
> reliable. That seems to be the proper use of *BSD. But then
> again, most versions of Linux are very reliable, and they do
> not put you through some of the idiocies mentioned above.
> While pf (the equivalent of iptables) is indeed a thing of
> beauty, and the maniacal focus on security rewarding, in the
> end there aren't any compelling reasons to prefer *BSD. Or
> at least, so it seems to me. YMMV.

Last time I ran an OpenBSD server, I was surprised at how primitive the
RAID support was: they seem *very* oriented toward defending against
malicious threats to your data over the wire but much less toward the
routine natural threat of a drive crashing.

There's the chance that a project like that is worth supporting more as
a concept, as someone carrying the security torch, than as something
you'd actually run on your own hardware.  The example they set, and the
security code and patches they offer, gets reflected in everyone else
having to pull their socks up and make sure their own level of security
doesn't send people running to OpenBSD.  And this in turn benefits your
distro of choice, so you don't have to give up security to get the rest
of the features you want.

-- 
Anthony de Boer
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