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

Post by silentbicycle » Tue, Aug 03, 2010, 2:08 PM UTC

sethg wrote: post #104

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…

I used to use OpenBSD as a personal mail/web server on a freecycled 486, and decided to go with Linux when I upgraded to newer and faster machines. My rationale was that even though I respect OpenBSD’s security philosophy, if anyone pwns my server, they’re not going to go through a hole in the base system; they’re going to go through a hole in the PHP scripts that run my blog. (Where, oh where, is a featureful blog-s…

Post by _pra » Tue, Aug 03, 2010, 2:12 PM UTC

nailer wrote: post #97

may wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, I meant in terms of "plug it in and it appears on your desktop". When I'm coding, I don't have a desktop, nor any wish for one. All I do on this box -- by design -- is code and spend too much time on e-mail/HN/reddit/etc. If I need to work with a digital camera or a flash drive, I just reboot into Ubuntu and do it quickly there. FreeBSD is strictly for work (in theory). I've only mounted stuff under FreeBSD may…

> When I'm coding, I don't have a desktop, nor any wish for one. How do you read docs without a web browser?

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Aug 03, 2010, 2:19 PM UTC

ciupicri wrote: post #108

silentbicycle wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, ok, it may have just put them in /etc, /usr/opt, /etc/local, and /moustache. It wasn't that it did or didn't put things in /usr/local, but that there wasn't a consistently followed layout like OpenBSD's ( http://www.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/man.cgi?query=hier ). Also, like I said - it's probably gotten better since ten years ago. It was really annoying, though, and I'm not misremembering things: I specifically switc…

Linux had and still has the Linux Filesystem Hierarchy ( http://tldp.org/LDP/Linux-Filesystem-Hierarchy/html/index.ht... ). It's true that it hasn't been 100% stable, but things do evolve and it's quite logical.

Post by nailer » Tue, Aug 03, 2010, 2:27 PM UTC

_pra wrote: post #114

nailer wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> When I'm coding, I don't have a desktop, nor any wish for one. How do you read docs without a web browser?

He probably means he's using a simple window manager (twm, fvwm, etc) instead of the fancy everything-managers that include desktop functionality. X alone doesn't provide that -- think back to Windows 3.1 days. You had a background, but not a desktop.

Post by silentbicycle » Tue, Aug 03, 2010, 2:31 PM UTC

sethg wrote: post #119

silentbicycle wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not really a web developer, but FreeBSD might be a better fit there. OpenBSD is a great dev platform, though, and an excellent firewall. You could run your blog stuff chrooted / in a process jail, either way.

The last time I looked at the procedure for running Perl/PHP within a jail, it looked like a sysadmin’s nightmare. Of course, that was a while ago, in the pre-kernel-virtualization era. (There must be a way to run one virtual machine inside another, right?)