As a seasonned SRE it is a breathe of fresh air in this world where everything else seems to change from one version to another and nothing seems to work at first try, ever.

You try them out. To jump distro to distro. Linux to BSD to Linux to Amiga EMU to C64 to BSD again. It’s a short circuit of the brain. One that thinks if they just learn one more thing. In the end, learning how these things work makes us better engineers. Knowing how compilers work makes us better engineers. Knowing how our mind works makes us better engineers. If you don’t want to go down the rabbit hole, don’t. Enjoy the Vista, or National Parks, or whatever you got going on. Some of us like digging underground.

(This is just fun poking at what I’ve observed and in no way represents you, the OP, or my employer.)

For example, the reduced attack surface area of OpenBSD hardware support is a kick in the pants for average users, but desirable for hardened system design.

Why does none of this really matter practically? (seriously it doesn't)

In general, Linux has so many people looking at its code, that the CVE and driver issues will be addressed with higher frequency. Thus, FreeBSD/OpenBSD lower 0-day incident rates tend to be illusionary, as the security incidents in fringe OS always have lower discovery probability.

I am a fan of most things posix, and acknowledge most problems originate from Application space rather than the OS itself. =3

https://download.freebsd.org/releases/arm64/aarch64/ISO-IMAG...

Like how people look up what links got lots of engagement two years ago and then re-post them for a new audience.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

People often post follow-ups but they're usually the opposite of what we want, since the idea is to have 30 buckets of the frontpage hashed out evenly over the topic space.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

It also has better storage (ZFS), although this is now implemented in Linux, it is not as stable as BSD which developed it specifically for their OS.

I've found that on RedHat based distro's you have to at least enable different repo's (epel, rpmfusion, el) just to get the packages required. Debian you're already out of date but that's for security, so fair enough. It's under corporate control, Ubuntu (Canonical) is corporate, anything RedHat (IBM) are corporate. You try to look online for a reason why SSSD is failing and the actual answers are hidden behind a paywall on redhat.com

We have aggressive HP machines designed for Windows with 4000RTX's which get used for rendering. They get thrashed and for the studio to obtain further TPN status I am moving from Windows to Linux. The struggles on a good day to operate with them is insanity. I'm now drinking 2x double shot lattes a day from just a single, double shot. Next it will be whisky, some days I have snuck in a shot of Mezcal before work in hope the Mezcal gods save the day.

FreeBSD handles them like a champ. TPN doesn't recognize FreeBSD so it has to be Rocky Linux.

I needed a PXE server, this shop only had a old 2009 mac mini left over in the cupboard. It does the job, 100Mbit is fine for provisioning, and if I want more I'll just use a USB Ethernet dongle. Linux, failed. FreeBSD, booted off memory stick and has been working flawlessly. I now have a working PXE server coded in TCL and running on FreeBSD. It's glorious and because so I've now been told going forward all my future creations must be Python. Urgh but fair enough, TCL is niche.

ZFS <3, why the hell TrueNAS went Linux is beyond my grasp.

I run FBSD 16 (bleeding edge) on my main rig, 4x screens. 2x27' 4K, 2x27' all work flawlessly with Xorg.

Jails are fantastic, my web browsers never touch the OS and at any point I can torch them and roll back to a clean snapshots. Thanks ZFS.

Four of my colocated servers are running FreeBSD. Two of them have over 1000 days uptime.

    mookie@cookie:~ $ uname -a && uptime
    FreeBSD cookie.server 12.2-BETA1 FreeBSD 12.2-BETA1 r365618 GENERIC  amd64
    10:39PM  up 1699 days,  1:31, 1 user, load averages: 0.64, 1.30, 1.31

I didn't see you give any reason to why you don't like FreeBSD. because what you can do on Linux, you can do on FreeBSD.

./configure, make, make install. Nothing else is required unless you want docker, then eww. go away.

My life of a FreeBSD admin has been a large weight off my shoulders. And I was there when Linux was on the 2.x branch kernel & you had to write your own X config without internet at the age of 13. If it wasn't for Minix pissing off Linus, Linux wouldn't of existed. The only distribution if forced would be Slackware.

I use Arch for superior hardware support on the laptop and FreeBSD on the server for superior software management.

In all that time, I've never felt like I suffered from lack of information on how to get things done: the documentation is generally good, and I've always been able to fill in any missing details by reading shell scripts and, very very rarely, source code.