Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

BSD vs. Linux (2005)

over-yonder.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 371 posts

Re: BSD vs. Linux (2005)

#51

Post by _qc3o »

teacup50 wrote: post #46
dkarapetyan wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't want that separation in a consistent and coherent system. User vs base is artificial. What I care about is the end result the overall system accomplishes and base vs non-base doesn't really factor into that. What does it matter to me if nginx is part of the base system or not? I need a web server. Arbitrarily choosing apache/httpd vs nginx to include as part of the base system is incidental complexity where I…

> User vs base is artificial. No. It's not. If nginx releases an update, do you also need to update your OS? No, because the user dependency graph isn't shared with the base OS. If you update your OS, do you also need to update nginx? No, because there's backwards ABI compatibility. The split is not artificial.

You're talking about kernel vs userland. That's not base vs non-base. The BSD distributions unintentionally muddy the waters by calling what is an equivalent of a linux distribution a base system and so lose out on the distinction you are drawing.

Re: BSD vs. Linux (2005)

#54

Post by ktRolster »

badsock wrote: post #50
nixos wrote: post #12

I know Linux (Debian) quite well and would like an excuse to try learning FreeBSD, but I just can't find any serious use-cases where FreeBSD would be of any advantage. I run a small site on a VPS, so: 1. I don't have GBs of free memory for ZFS 2. I don't have GB of RAM, CPU and HD space to build everything from ports, and most importantly, no need. Except for an Application Firewall for nginx, what does ports have ov…

One big thing for me is that I trust the FreeBSD devs to not completely reinvent things unless they're sure it's an improvement. I got sick of the churn in Linux, having to relearn things all the time and then find out when I'm done that it's not any better, just different. Things I learned how to do in FreeBSD a decade ago still work. For example, to get a NIC configured I can either put one or two lines of text in…

Watching iptables get replaced was a really depressing example of that, after the developers swore that "this time we got it right" when replacing ipchains......

Re: BSD vs. Linux (2005)

#55

Post by teacup50 »

_qc3o wrote: post #51
teacup50 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> User vs base is artificial. No. It's not. If nginx releases an update, do you also need to update your OS? No, because the user dependency graph isn't shared with the base OS. If you update your OS, do you also need to update nginx? No, because there's backwards ABI compatibility. The split is not artificial.

You're talking about kernel vs userland. That's not base vs non-base. The BSD distributions unintentionally muddy the waters by calling what is an equivalent of a linux distribution a base system and so lose out on the distinction you are drawing.

No, I'm talking about the Operating System vs. Applications.

Drawing the line at the kernel syscall ABI is arbitrary; no other major operating system other than Linux does so.

Consider how difficult it is to ship 3rd-party applications for Linux and all its myriad of distributions; the only thing you can truly rely on is the anemic syscall ABI provided by the kernel (vs. userland).

Re: BSD vs. Linux (2005)

#56

Post by siddhant »

vivin wrote: post #5

I was a long-time FreeBSD user. Started using it in college and continued for a long time. I started using Linux because I had bought myself a new laptop and BSD didn't recognize the wifi card. I continued using FreeBSD at home for a few more years on my webserver before ultimately moving to dreamhost (I just didn't have the time to keep maintaining my own server). I like using Linux, but I still miss the predictabil…

> you know where things are, and where they are supposed to be

Does this not depend on the distro you're using?

Re: BSD vs. Linux (2005)

#57

Post by kriro »

My perspective as someone who is mostly a desktop user/dev and rarely dives into server related issues other than setting up a home network and maybe sshing into a server somewhere in the magical cloud:

* The BSDs feel more elegant, the Linux distributions feel more complete/up to date (and are probably more performance optimized due to enterprise embrace but that's only speculation on my part).

* I sympathize with the BSD license philosophy and agree that the BSD-license is in theory freer but don't care too much either way

* OpenBSD is awesome (yes even for desktops, with the right hardware) and I install it every now and then but ultimately I'm too familiar with Linux to switch. I do like that they keep fighting the good security fight, don't care about supposed personality quirks of some devs. Keep up the good work

* At the end of the day I use Linux because that's what I grew up with and it tends to "just work" (for the record all BSDs I installed in recent memory pretty much worked out of the box). I am kind of forced to use OS X at work but other than that it's Linux on all machines. The parents also use it by now.

Re: BSD vs. Linux (2005)

#58

Post by int_19h »

746F7475 wrote: post #47
aaron-lebo wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's really not just a rationalization. BSDs control the kernel and the userland, meaning that file system layout is coherent. Check any Ubuntu installation and packages are all over the place. This is perhaps unavoidable. Also, OpenBSD, DragonflyBSD, and FreeBSD can all be used as server or desktops without much fiddling. Their installers are better than anything in the Linux world. You can have one up and running w…

Whenever I hear "BSD" I always think: "if you want to use BSD you have to build a machine for it". This isn't really based on any real world experience, but whenever BSD comes up as a topic only thing that sticks with me is: "it only likes very specific hardware" which makes me very hesitant to ever consider trying it. I've had so many hardware incompatibility problems with Ubuntu, which is suppose to support almost…

Hardware can actually be a mixed bag between BSD and Linux. In my experience (which is several years dated by now), BSDs seemed to do better with various less popular WiFi chipsets.

Re: BSD vs. Linux (2005)

#59

Post by teacup50 »

mjg59 wrote: post #48
merlincorey wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It isn't actually as nice and tidy as it would seem because you do not have a direct separation between system configuration and application configuration. It's a small, subtle detail that for many is less important today than it once was; however, if I have two FreeBSD systems of mostly equal versions and I want to migrate applications and/or users from one to the other, I know ALL I have to do is copy from /usr/loc…

This is an increasingly solved problem in the post-systemd world - /etc contains local configuration, system configuration is in /usr. We (CoreOS) support you doing mkfs on / in order to return to a default configuration built from the /usr config.

If that's your definition, then FreeBSD and Solaris solved this without paying the systemd tax, via ZFS-based boot environments.

https://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=beadm&sektion=&man...

NeXt->Apple also avoided anything like systemd via a configuration system that supported inheritance across search domains (User, Local, Network, System):

https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/documentation/Cocoa/...

Re: BSD vs. Linux (2005)

#60

Post by ktRolster »

nixos wrote: post #30
anexprogrammer wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ZFS only needs GBs if you need deduplication. 99% don't, almost everyone is better off with compression. 1GB is the min for ZFS though it can run in a little less.

Too much. I've got a 700-800 MB system. It's unfortunate, as I'd love to have a versioned FS

Wow, with RAM costing something like $5 a gigabyte these days....do you want us to take up a collection to help you out? I'm not above a little charity, I'll send you a fiver to help you get a real computer!
Post reply on HN