[GTALUG] curious... Linux vs BSD ?

[Alvin Starr]

On 09/29/2016 11:52 PM, Peter King via talk wrote:
> On Thu, Sep 29, 2016 at 10:45:09AM -0400, Lennart Sorensen via talk wrote:
>   
>> So for me, bsd is only a necessary evil to be used if linux won't run
>> on the hardware, and the last time I had to resort to netbsd to get a
>> machine running and doing useful stuff was about 18 years ago.
This is the GTALinuxUserGroup...

In general I am not a fan of BSD and my experiences go back as far as 
the 80's
Once I found linux and started downloading the floppy sets I never 
looked back.

I have run into the argument of people claiming that some BSD variant is 
better than linux in some way or other and often when pressed the 
comparison is years old and based on a 0.99 version of the Linux kernel.

Because of its dominant position Linux tends to vacuum up good ideas 
from all other operating systems.

> The *BSD software ecosystem lags behind Linux in hardware support; as far
> as I'm concerned, the ports/packages system is years behind Gentoo, Debian,
> Arch, and others; the communities are smaller and much less open.
In general linux packaging systems under linux have moved forward 
greatly over the years and for the most part it seems that the packaging 
system is what tends to be the first discriminator between distributions.

>
> For all that...
>
> OpenBSD is where we get things like openssh from.  Their packet-filtering
> system, PF, is a joy and a delight.  The continuous code-auditing means
> that kernelspace *and* userspace programs that make up the system are often
> rewritten to get rid of cruft, and run cleanly and efficiently.  They are a
SSH and PF were developed in the days when linux was not a real option 
for people working in research and since then both features have been 
included in linux along with a lot of linux only development.

I cannot comment much on the code auditing but that will be a small 
subset of the software that people commonly think of as the "system".
For example I am sure the code auditing does not include things like X 
and the associated window managers which most people would think of as 
part of the "system".

When someone installs Ubuntu they get a whole environment installed by 
default not just a kernel, package manager and some utilities(ala 
slackware et al on floppies).


> remarkable implementation of UNIX, without the ``better ideas'' such as
> systemd, and they are all phenomenally stable -- even more so than Linux.
Not sure why people have a hate on for systemd.
It is a pain to learn a new way to manage your systems but it solves a 
number of problems and gets systems into a usable state faster in the 
face of startup problems.
I curse systemd on a daily basis because my fingers know init but quite 
frankly having to wait 30 minutes for a system to boot up with init 
because some network connections need to time out is a major pain when 
its a critical system and the phones are all lit up.
systemd removes the single threaded-ness of init and also provides a 
much better mechanism for dependency resolution.

Linux is also amazingly stable if you are willing to stay away from the 
bleeding edge.
I am sure you will spend lots of time rebooting if you like to run the 
BSD nightly releases.
I have a lot of Linux systems that I need to support that are well over 
10 years old.

> Granted, some of that comes from not having drivers for the latest hardware
> and innovations.  But if clean and debugged code matter to you, if you want
> better deep ideas like privilege separation and default security, then I'd
A number of that security ideas go back to the 80s.
Sun was selling Compartment Mode workstations in the 90's
Some very inserting work was done on secure operating systems at the 
UofT using the Turing programming language and a complete redevelopment 
and redesign of a unix compatible OS.

Linux now has selinux after a lot of work from the NSA and it 
incorporates ideas back to the 80s' and before.

Linux has cgroups that are the basis of the container boom but it has a 
number of interesting abilities when used for complex network 
configurations.

> say there is a reason to have a look at OpenBSD.  If you run a server, then
> you should definitely look at it.  There's a reason why the internet ran on
> *BSD for so long, and why much of it still does.
I would kind of dispute that much of the internet runs on BSD.
The guys at Cisco would be way more aggressive about refuting that.
I still have the SUN information highway T-shirt but at the time I was 
working there I was running my ISP on linux.
If you look at just about every home router appliance out there you will 
find it has a whole lot of GPL code built in with the kernel included.
So by sheer numbers of computers BSD is going to be way down there.
Then you have all the android devices.....

>
> FreeBSD is the most common platform but has fewer distinctive features.
>
> NetBSD runs on almost anything, including toothbrushes, but is otherwise
> pretty plain vanilla.
>
>
LUGians unite we can defeat the evil hoards of OS disbelievers ;)

-- 
Alvin Starr                   ||   voice: (905)513-7688
Netvel Inc.                   ||   Cell:  (416)806-0133
alvin at netvel.net              ||

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