[GTALUG] curious... Linux vs BSD ?

Ansar Mohammed ansarm at gmail.com
Thu Sep 29 18:52:14 EDT 2016


I have been using Linux (Debian primarily),FreeBSD, OpenBSD and Solaris for
about 15 years now.

IMHO with Linux, generally things just work, drivers, dependencies, X etc.
The kernel comes with more features and capabilities and is generally more
useful and practical.

In contrast, FreeBSD and OpenBSD take longer to introduce features to the
base distribution and kernel.

Case in point, FreeBSD and NetBSD both have raspberry PI support. The GPIO
capability on FreeBSD and NetBSD is pretty poor as compared to Rasbian.
OpenBSD hasn't even started to port to Raspberry PI yet.


The one thing that OpenBSD has that is much better than all the other
platforms is the PF firewall. The variant of PF included with FreeBSD is a
fork that
has not kept up with the advances on OpenBSD.

I had hoped with Apple's use of the FreeBSD kernel in OSX and its
subsequent acquisition of a lot of very talented BSD folks that there would
have been a huge contribution back to the open source community.

FWIW, I don't care too much about supporting 64 CPUs. Both FreeBSD and
Linux had at one point BGL issues that affected SMP performance.

However over the last 10 years most Linux distributions have become like
the "kitchen sink" in that they throw everything in (both in the Kernel and
userland). Installation sizes are incredibly bloated now.

I work with a lot of enterprise sized companies (>1000 servers). I don't
see any other FOSS OSes other than Linux. If you interest is widening your
scope for work, then IMHO learn Solaris. If you want to have a lot of fun
and turn a few hairs grey, try PF on OpenBSD.

On Thu, Sep 29, 2016 at 4:14 PM, Christopher Browne via talk <
talk at gtalug.org> wrote:

> On 29 September 2016 at 11:00, Myles Braithwaite via talk
> <talk at gtalug.org> wrote:
> > William Park via talk wrote:
> >> To those who knows/uses both BSD and Linux...  Should I learn BSD, and
> >> which one?
> >
> > If you read to HackNews we are currently in the systemd apocalypse and
> > Linux's user base is shrinking every day and good ethical people are
> > moving to BSD to the warm embrace of init.
>
> There is something to be worried about there...
>
> Though the answer seems unlikely to keep heads in the sand, as the reasons
> that systemd emerged include some pretty valid ones....
>
> > Without sarcasm, learning another system is always a good idea because
> > it gives you more insight on how others work. As an example I would have
> > never been able to understand how Google's open source Python code
> > worked without some knowledge of Java.
>
> There's a Debian port to FreeBSD
> <https://www.debian.org/ports/kfreebsd-gnu/>, so you could have a
> mostly-GNU userspace that presumably lacks systemd.
>
> I'm occasionally attracted to take a peek at Dragonfly BSD, as it has
> been trying to do some substantial reimplementations of some of the
> internals with particular view to improving performance and supporting
> clustering.  The HAMMER filesystem is one of the interesting bits;
> some data deduplication capabilities, and a BSD flavour on the
> "advanced" stuff like snapshotting, journalling, et al.
>
> Mind you, the idea hasn't been interesting enough to lead to my having
> any systems running such.  I considered throwing Debian/kfreebsd onto
> my media box, but the curious inability to get it to boot off CDROM
> wound up curbing experimentation.  (I wound up using PXE to pull a
> recent Debian image off another machine; "thanks Scott for your PXE
> talks!!!")
> --
> When confronted by a difficult problem, solve it by reducing it to the
> question, "How would the Lone Ranger handle this?"
> ---
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>
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