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.)
This feels a bit like dumping the manual to a Toyota Camry without explanation. It’s technical, but what’s interesting?
Maybe there is interesting stuff in here - but I’d love to see submissions do some kind of analysis to justify it - like an appreciation of an example of well-run user documentation, or a highlighting a clear and concise explanation of how a particular subsystem works.
These posts just rocket to the top of Hacker News with no discussion.
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...
Refuses to elaborate
Leaves
Like how people look up what links got lots of engagement two years ago and then re-post them for a new audience.
- Charles Manson quoting NBC in Family Guy
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.
The idea is it would be nice to have an OS that is a little easier to learn for the next generation of devs.
What are the alternatives? I had to do a little windows shell programming when working on Chef orchestration to set up windows servers.
There was "flow" programming in WebMethods I had to work on that tried to provide a snap in place component GUI to program data transformation.
I would say that there is something limiting in all the GUI based interfaces I have had to work with. Some option you can not get to, or it is not apparent how two things can communicate with each other.
Text based options have always seem more open to inspection, and, hence, easier to reason about how it works. YMMV.
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...
I currently work on FreeBSD servers pretty much exclusively for my job and I have a really hard time grokking why I would want to use them over some flavor of Linux. I also work (and have worked in my career) with Linux servers (Ubuntu and Debian primarily, and things like alpine in docker) and there isn't anything I do that I think "I wish I was on FreeBSD", the opposite is not true, I semi-regularly pine for X tool or Y program that doesn't run on FreeBSD (or is harder to run).
It's very possible that I am just not using/experiencing the full power of FreeBSD (as in: I'm too dumb to know how great it is) but if I had pro/con columns for FreeBSD I can think of a number of cons and very few pros that Linux doesn't share. Again, there is a very good chance that I'm "holding it wrong", but I've heard "oh, but not on FreeBSD" or "Hmm, they don't support FreeBSD" about too many things that might have solved issues we've run into at my job.
Maybe I'm boring or maybe I'm just lazy but I feel like Linux is the past of least resistance, it has the most info online available, the most guides, blog posts, LLM training, etc.
I'd be interested to hear what people on HN like best about FreeBSD so I can see if it applies to my usage or not and to see if I can't learn new tips/tricks.
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.
e.g. Thin Jails
https://docs.freebsd.org/en/books/handbook/jails/#thin-jailh...
jmclnx•1h ago
browningstreet•1h ago
bionsystem•1h ago
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.