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

151–160 of 371 posts

Re: BSD vs. Linux (2005)

#151

Post by _delirium »

vivin wrote: post #39
_qc3o wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But I thought BSDs where more monolithic and coherent systems. How is drawing a distinction between base system and non-base system make that true? If anything Linux embodies that philosophy much better. There is no ad-hoc and arbitrary decision between what is part of the base system and what is not. The system as whole is coherently laid out without drawing any base/user distinctions. Daemons are daemons, binaries…

Have you read the article? It isn't an ad-hoc distinction. You get the base system with a FreeBSD install. It includes the kernel and everything else that makes it a "FreeBSD system". This is stuff maintained by the BSD team. Everything else is an add-on. If you blew away /usr/local, you would be left with a pristine (mostly) BSD install. An analogy is a base windows install and all the associated tools and drivers.…

You get the base system with a FreeBSD install. It includes the kernel and everything else that makes it a "FreeBSD system". This is stuff maintained by the BSD team. Everything else is an add-on.

This is why I typically find Debian to be a more cohesive system than FreeBSD. If I could run only the base system, or only the base system plus maybe one or two packages, FreeBSD would have a very good story about being developed in a unified, coherent way. But in practice I need a bunch of stuff from ports, and on FreeBSD that much more clearly falls into the "everything else is an add-on" category. There's relatively little integration testing or attempts to make the software in ports do things in a coherent "FreeBSD-style" way; it's a bunch of third-party software delivered mostly as-is. Whereas Debian considers anything in the 'main' Debian repository part of the official release, subject to release-management and integration testing, and ensures it works in a more or less "Debian way". Whether that matters depends on your use case, but for me that makes Debian feel more like a unified system.

I'm thinking mostly about servers here fwiw. On desktop the base/applications distinction works better for me, so I could run "FreeBSD" as a coherent base system and then install some separate applications on top of it, which is all fine. But on servers I prefer the coherent base system to be more "batteries included", including integrated release management of all the major libraries and software packages I'm likely to need. If I deploy on "Debian 8" vs. "FreeBSD 10", for example, the former gives me a much larger set of stable components that work together in a reasonable way, while the latter leaves me to more DIY it outside of the relatively small base system. (Whether this matters of course depends on what you're building.)

Re: BSD vs. Linux (2005)

#152

Post by Anthony-G »

eropple wrote: post #110
_wdzx wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Enlighten me - what's the problem with the linux desktops?

I would suggest reading (and comprehending) this excellent post for a review as to some of the tire-fire issues of X: http://blog.mecheye.net/2012/06/the-linux-graphics-stack/ DRI2 is an improvement over DRI, of course (which was already about five to eight years behind SOTA for GPUs when it came out ), but it's still a rickety, insecure mess--for one, any application can fire messages at any window in the X environm…

Thanks for the informative link on the technologies that comprise the graphics stack on a typical GNU/Linux system. I see the author also has a great explanation of the different code components that form part of the Direct Rendering Infrastructure (DRI): http://blog.mecheye.net/2016/01/dri/

Re: BSD vs. Linux (2005)

#153

Post by lisivka »

throwaway2048 wrote: post #122
lisivka wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use Mate at Fedora. I see none of your bugs.

I'm sure that's of great value to him.

For me, it looks like a lie, because of no information about hardware, distro, kernel, etc.

For example, pulseaudio works fine for me for at least 6 years on 6 notebooks and 2 workstations of various vendors (HP, Dell, Acer, Medion). But if it will work badly under heavy load, then obvious command will fix that: `sudo renice -n -10 $(pgrep pulseaudio)` .

Re: BSD vs. Linux (2005)

#154

Post by lottin »

hiram112 wrote: post #108
_wdzx wrote: post #86

> I like FreeBSD, and I use it as a server OS and on a NAS box but you only need look at https://wiki.freebsd.org/Graphics to understand that if the "Linux Desktop" is a joke compared to MacOS and Windows then the "FreeBSD Desktop" is even more so. I've never heard anything good about the "MacOS desktop" and I'm pretty sure that the "windows desktop" is far behind the "linux desktop"(plugins, performance, menus etc.)…

Linux on the desktop is still full of issues that were solved by Windows and Mac a decade ago. Fonts still look like crap (Ubuntu is an exception), and even with patches there are still problems with Java, old GTK libs, etc. I could care less about games, MS Office, a d a lot of other things that are deal breakers for some, but I have tried Linux on the desktop and it is still lacking.

I agree that Linux on the desktop has issues but fonts isn't one of them. Linux has had excellent open-source fonts and font rendering for a long time.

Re: BSD vs. Linux (2005)

#155

Post by cm3 »

smegel wrote: post #8

BSD has a wonderful, unified events system. That incorporates blocking disk IO. Linux has epoll. https://www.nginx.com/blog/why-netflix-chose-nginx-as-the-he...

FreeBSD also has Netmap and DTrace out of the box. They will also get TLS support in sendfile(2) as soon as the patches from Netflix land in HEAD.

Re: BSD vs. Linux (2005)

#156

Post by dsp1234 »

idobai wrote: post #141
microtonal wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For a start, X11's security model. Every X11 application can read all keystrokes, mouse events, do screengrabs of other window's contents, etc. In other words, your browser can snoop on what passwords you type into an X terminal if it wanted to or is compromised.

Windows10 is already recording every keystroke/data of yours - what's the difference here? Also, Canonical's snappy packages can kinda solve this problem.

Since about the time of Windows Vista, non-administrative windows aren't able to hook keyboard events for administrative windows.[0]

So while it's possible for a program to listen to keyboard events for other non-administrative windows (such as the password for a browser), it isn't possible for a non-administrative window to grab keyboard input for stuff like windows password prompts, or information typed into administrative console windows, etc.

[0] - http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3169675/how-to-use-setwin...

Re: BSD vs. Linux (2005)

#157

Post by tobik »

knorker wrote: post #123
dkarapetyan wrote: post #15

I tried freebsd. Gone back to ubuntu. In this day and age not having proper dependency resolution for packages is not acceptable. I've more than once had some tool based on ports just go into an infinite cycle when asked to upgrade some packages. The philosophy laid out in this article seems more like rationalization of historical accidents more than anything else. Linux file system layout is just as predictable as a…

> In this day and age not having proper dependency resolution for packages is not acceptable. It still doesn't? Haha! I remember ranting about this 10 years ago, with a friend who went to a conference in France… that was dedicated to package management in BSDs. I asked him how I "just upgrade all the packages" (apt-get upgrade). I'd found two-three ways, but couldn't get them to work. He said that yeah there are thre…

> I thought surely they'd fixed it by now.

They did. pkg has gotten a lot better the past 3 years.

Re: BSD vs. Linux (2005)

#158

Post by snuxoll »

voltagex_ wrote: post #146
snuxoll wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your L2ARC shouldn't be bigger than 5x your system memory, ZFS has to keep mapping tables in-memory to determine where data on the L2ARC is stored, the bigger it gets the more memory you take away from your in-memory ARC, which can lead to worse performance than before since more data is having to come from your much higher-latency and lower bandwidth L2ARC or straight from spinning disks. RAIDZ is a performance kill…

Also, where should I read up about DAS arrays? I didn't even know that was an option when I started building. Edit: thanks for your help here - you don't have an email address listed in your profile but I'd like to discuss this further if you have the time.

DAS arrays are extremely easy to understand, they're just "expanders" - SAS has special support built in for this, in servers you typically have the front drive bays connected to a single SAS port on the board instead of individual cables running to each drive, a DAS is the same thing just as an external enclosure with separate power. You connect it to a basic SAS HBA with an external SAS port (SFF-8088), like the LSI 9200-8e I mentioned and it just shows up as a bunch of drives to your operating system. There's some special control services you have to the enclosure depending on the model through a protocol called SAS Enclosure Services (SES), my Lenovo SA120 uses this to manage things like fan speeds (very important, because every time it loses power it resets to HIGH which is VERY LOUD, I have a boot script on my FreeNAS box to set this back down to LOW which is much more manageable).

This seems like a lot, but you can ignore most of the technical details I just posted. Buy a SAS HBA with external ports, buy a SAS DAS array, plug it in and you see a bunch of drives - no fuss. Since SAS controllers can also support SATA drives you can save yourself $10-20 a drive and buy normal SATA disks, or you can get some added reliability (multi-pathing and error handling) and buy near-line SAS drives for a small premium (I don't bother personally, but I only have one controller installed in my SA120 so I have no second path for data to travel in the event of a failure anyway).

Feel free to hit me up anytime, I'm /u/snuxoll on reddit (pretty active on /r/homelab) and you can email me at stefan [a] nuxoll.me.

Re: BSD vs. Linux (2005)

#159

Post by Anthony-G »

_wdzx wrote: post #104
redwall_hp wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ChuckMcM's criticisms seem to be of the X Window System, not of any particular desktop environment. Architecturally, it really doesn't fit with modern systems and has a lot of legacy baggage. It doesn't matter what DE you like, X still powers it, and it's the issue. Wayland is on the way, which may bring Linux graphics into the 21st century, but I haven't been following that very closely. Apple's way more on the ball…

Enlighten me - what's the problem with the linux desktops?

Back in 2011, security researcher, Joanna Rutkowska wrote a very enlightening article on the inherent security deficiencies of the X server architecture which allows allows any windowed application to control any other one: http://blog.invisiblethings.org/2011/04/23/linux-security-ci...

Re: BSD vs. Linux (2005)

#160

Post by belorn »

merijnv wrote: post #127
aaron-lebo wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Based on this thread, I'd say the problem is a lot of people haven't given them the time. If you select your hardware, they work pretty flawlessly. Certainly right there with Windows or OSX or anything else. In a lot of cases you don't even need to be very selective, you just need to have a modern machine.

> Based on this thread, I'd say the problem is a lot of people haven't given them the time. > If you select your hardware, they work pretty flawlessly. Maybe the fact that I have to give them time is one of the major problems? You know how much time I invested in getting my Windows and OSX desktops to work flawlessly? Zero.

I do a windows reinstallation about once every second year, and I routinely get problems.

Network drivers are almost always missing. Looking at the device manager, about 5-10 different devices fails to auto-install, all part of the motherboards. The default graphic drivers tend to "start", but is limited in refresh rate and resolution, and moving around windows shows a noticeable stutter until I install some official drivers from the graphic card manufacturer. Sound normally works without issues.

On linux, the problems are almost the reverse. I have yet to have network problems on a fresh debian installation. Graphic is a all-or-nothing deal, which means either x-server starts up normally or it refuses to start completely. Sound is normally a pain, but looks to have better default behavior in the last 3 years or so.

Post reply on HN