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Ask HN: I'm a Linux guy. Tell me about all those BSDs

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Re: Ask HN: I'm a Linux guy. Tell me about all those BSDs

#61

Post by jolan »

jrockway wrote: post #55
jolan wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imagine if OpenSSH were GPL'd and every vendor who implemented it got sued for not releasing a few patch files specific to their product.

I'm imagining it. Posting a patch to your website is surely better than rewriting ssh from scratch or licensing SSH.com SSH. (Sure, BSD requires less effort on your part, but the community gets less in return. That's not good for the continued existence of the project.)

Complete secrecy is the typical modus operandi of companies. You'd probably be paying extra for SSL telnet.

Re: Ask HN: I'm a Linux guy. Tell me about all those BSDs

#62

Post by nailer »

silentbicycle wrote: post #36

I've been using OpenBSD for several years (since 3.4...wow, that's almost seven years), as my primary OS. I had been running Debian for 2~3 years, and Red Hat (briefly, ick) before that. A lot has been covered already, but: 1. The BSDs feel significantly more cohesive to me. Other people have mentioned this, but it deserves greater emphasis. The config files, man pages, etc. are quite a bit more consistent, and my fi…

That's not correct re File system. Red hat linux usr local has always installed empty. Slash is used for essential binaries, usr for un essential binaries per the fhs.

Re: Ask HN: I'm a Linux guy. Tell me about all those BSDs

#63

Post by fjarlq »

bl4k wrote: post #58

I have been an OpenBSD and FreeBSD user, as well as minor contributor, since the mid-90s. All the answers here are good, and I would like to add: * FreeBSD is on the cutting edge of performance. Because it is a total OS (as opposed to just a kernel), performance improvements are made and integrated into the binary packages and ports build options of common packages. FreeBSD was one of the first operating systems to i…

Re: "15. FreeBSD hasn't had a default install, STABLE security advisory in ~10 years."

You make several good points here, but I'm not sure what you mean by that one.

Consider the most recent advisory, FreeBSD-SA-10:07.mbuf, listed here:

http://www.freebsd.org/security/advisories.html

default install: yep, kernel mbuf code

STABLE: yep, FreeBSD 7.1 and later

security advisory: yep, privilege escalation

in the past 10 years: yep, three weeks old

Re: Ask HN: I'm a Linux guy. Tell me about all those BSDs

#64

Post by Lammy »

dschobel wrote: post #39

I've been using FreeBSD since the 8.1 release a few weeks back and as my first *BSD experience it is fantastic. The only thing which will keep me from committing to it is the absence of a stable and/or official version of Google Chrome (the only freebsd versions of Chromium I've found have been very much alpha software). I (like a lot of people I suppose) spend too much time in my browser to have this be a negotiable…

I'm using the official port right now with no trouble: http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/query-pr.cgi?pr=146302

It's not in the tree yet due to some licensing problems that need to be sorted out. The newest shar file as of this writing is here: http://chromium.hybridsource.org/chromium-stable-125.shar.tx...

Re: Ask HN: I'm a Linux guy. Tell me about all those BSDs

#65

Post by caf »

cperciva wrote: post #12

(Speaking as a FreeBSDer here -- I'll let NetBSD and OpenBSD folks cover those, since I don't follow them closely enough to offer accurate comments.) 1. We don't let licenses get in the way of making good technical decisions. This means that, for example, we had no problem with importing DTrace and ZFS. 2. We have more of an emphasis on doing things right. This often means that it takes longer before we acquire new f…

Point 4 applies as much in Linux as it does in FreeBSD. I've got binaries I compiled against 2.0 and 2.2 kernels in the mid to late 90s that will still run on 2.6 kernels today. Stable userspace ABIs are something that everyone agrees on.

Re: Ask HN: I'm a Linux guy. Tell me about all those BSDs

#66

Post by tzs »

One nice thing about the BSDs is that their users don't get annoying things like this when they look for basic manual pages:

    The GNU folks, in general, abhor man pages, and create info documents
    instead.  The maintainer of tar  falls  into  this  category. This man
    page is neither complete, nor current, and was included in the Debian
    Linux packaging of tar entirely to reduce the frequency with which the
    lack of a man page gets reported as a bug in our defect tracking system.

    If you really want to understand tar, then you should run info and read
    the tar info pages, or use the info mode in emacs.

    Problems with this man page should be files as bugs against the Debian
    tar package, not submitted to the tar maintainers.
There is a fair amount of truth in the old joke that BSD is for people that love Unix, and Linux is for people that hate Microsoft. As the name says, GNU is not Unix, and that shows through in most Linux distributions.

Re: Ask HN: I'm a Linux guy. Tell me about all those BSDs

#67

Post by caf »

sigil wrote: post #47

I've been using FreeBSD and Linux side by side for about 10 years. FreeBSD appeals strongly to the developer side of me: a typical install puts the complete kernel source code in /usr/src, includes a compiler and other build tools, section 3 man pages, and Makefiles for 20,000+ software packages (the ports system). On Debian-based systems at least, these are things I have to ask for later, and there always seems to b…

I quite like Debian for development - when installing a new system there's a slew of packages I always add (eg "manpages-dev"), and after that it's plain sailing.

Re: Ask HN: I'm a Linux guy. Tell me about all those BSDs

#68

Post by caf »

126 wrote: post #4

The FreeBSD Portage System kept me there, until ubuntu did something similar, then the community got bigger and faster, then the portage feature + the community was better... so I stayed with ubuntu. Plus, FreeBSD is an ex-girlfriend type operating system now. Sure, you could go back and teach it... but... (I too used FreeBSD since the '90s, for whatever it's worth. Still love it, but cannot justify keeping it foremo…

Don't tell your current girlfriend that you still love your ex, though ;)

Re: Ask HN: I'm a Linux guy. Tell me about all those BSDs

#70

Post by Schmidt »

jolan wrote: post #54
jrockway wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. I always read BSD discussions and think "what a bunch of licensing fanbois". I guess since the OS and the license have the same name... Anyway, here's why I support Linux and the GPL: the WRT54G. Linksys would have never released the source code for the router's kernel without being forced to. But when they did it, an amazing thing happened, third-party developers made their product one of the most popular w…

Imagine if OpenSSH were GPL'd and every vendor who implemented it got sued for not releasing a few patch files specific to their product.

How many lawsuits figuring with the GPL have you seen? I know of a handful and I've read and heard that the focus is not to sue but to educate the companies in compliance.
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