Doesn't look like anyone's mentioned another unique feature of a BSD: every OpenBSD release comes on a CD with funky artwork, stickers, and an original song. See http://openbsd.org/art1.html and http://openbsd.org/lyrics.html for more.
Ask HN: I'm a Linux guy. Tell me about all those BSDs
151–160 of 167 posts
Re: Ask HN: I'm a Linux guy. Tell me about all those BSDs
#152Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Different systems simply have different conventions, and GNU picked GNU Info over man pages. Sure, but that's no reason to be hostile to man pages. Ideally you have a man page, which provides a standard quick reference for those how know the command, and then other documents (such is Info) for people who need more detailed information, complete manuals, etc.. In fact, that's how it was way back in the Seventh Editi…
> Sure, but that's no reason to be hostile to man pages. They're not being hostile to man pages. They just don't maintain them. They're no more hostile to man pages than FreeBSD is to info pages. > Ideally you have a man page [...] That doesn't sound very ideal. man pages and info pages are formatted differently and take a different approach to explaining things. Having both would mean that the maintainer of each pac…
But FreeBSD would not stand in your way if you wanted to take their documentation and incorporate it into whatever format documentation you wanted on your system. The GNU folks, on the other hand, will not allow people to take text from Info pages and incorporate it into BSD or Linux man pages.
Re: Ask HN: I'm a Linux guy. Tell me about all those BSDs
#153Die hard OpenBSD fan. ( http://www.flickr.com/photos/kc-bike/2894306940/ ) The primary functional differences are a more mature code base (I didn't say more technically advanced or superior) and in general a unified system. What most people have come to know as "Linux" or "GNU/Linux" is a kernel mashed together with the GNU userland. And most distributions then further pile things onto it, kind of assuming they know…
FreeBSD 5.x was the learning curve for SMP (and also brought in a lot of other technologies such as power control); there was a tremendous amount of changed code. For some people it worked fine; for many it was pretty rough.
The decision for 5.x was to gamble that single-core systems were going to become less important than multi-core systems, and that FreeBSD should push to optimize for the latter. Around the 7.0 timeframe, that promise finally started paying off. By that time, performance and stability on SMP were on a par with what 4.x had had on single-core.
Let's put it this way: there were no tears shed when 5.x went EOL :-) (fwiw, the last maintenance release of 5.x was in 2006.)
For anyone whose last experience was 5.x, 8.1 will be a difference of night-and-day.
Re: Ask HN: I'm a Linux guy. Tell me about all those BSDs
#154Earlier 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?
_pra is right. I use a very lightweight tiling window manager called dwm (http://dwm.suckless.org/).
I do have a desktop background, though I rarely ever see it.
What I meant was I don't have a desktop in the Windows/Mac OS X sense -- a place with icons, documents, mounted drives and the like.
Re: Ask HN: I'm a Linux guy. Tell me about all those BSDs
#155Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Sure, but that's no reason to be hostile to man pages. They're not being hostile to man pages. They just don't maintain them. They're no more hostile to man pages than FreeBSD is to info pages. > Ideally you have a man page [...] That doesn't sound very ideal. man pages and info pages are formatted differently and take a different approach to explaining things. Having both would mean that the maintainer of each pac…
But FreeBSD would not stand in your way if you wanted to take their documentation and incorporate it into whatever format documentation you wanted on your system. The GNU folks, on the other hand, will not allow people to take text from Info pages and incorporate it into BSD or Linux man pages.
Relly? When have they ever stood in someone's way if they wanted to do that? And was that GNU policy or just some lone grumpy maintainer?
Re: Ask HN: I'm a Linux guy. Tell me about all those BSDs
#156I used to play the "what distro are we running this week" game. Most were too big, others too small. Some had great communities, but lacked a killer feature. Etc. etc. Then I found FreeBSD. The learning curve was steeper, you had to know more about how things actually worked under the hood (a plus, in my book) and the system was elegantly clunky. A cohesive whole -- more or less -- instead of endless re-packaging of…
> And it's a single community, without the balkanization of GNU/Linux.
FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, Dragonfly BSD, BSDI, Darwin, PCBSD... ;-)
The Linux kernel isn't (at the moment) balkanized.
Re: Ask HN: I'm a Linux guy. Tell me about all those BSDs
#157Earlier 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.
Huh? Who are all of these vendors with secret OpenSSH patches?
Re: Ask HN: I'm a Linux guy. Tell me about all those BSDs
#158I have an impression that FreeBSD are being strongly supplanted by Linux in these days of virtualization. There were times where jails ruled the parties, but now these days are over and Linux has a number of great virtualization solutions like KVM or Xen while there is no much progress on jails.
Also, for some reason it's not very popular in enterprise despite of API and ABI stability, i.e. one could hardly find enterprise products like e.g. IBM WebSphere available on FreeBSD. One probably could use Linux ABI support but I'm not sure how reasonable that is.
I used to work at ISPs few years back and FreeBSD was very popular in this circles. At one place we had FreeBSD running on absolutely all servers and in other one we had only one RHEL box which was a requirement for some VoIP billing.
About two years ago I moved to a software development organization which is quite close to enterprise and virtualization and I've seen 'live' FreeBSD only once and the folks are going to migrate to Linux in the near future (I don't know what their reasons are though). And that's quite sad because I really like FreeBSD.
Re: Ask HN: I'm a Linux guy. Tell me about all those BSDs
#159I 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…
Thanks a lot for sharing so accurately. Now all I want to so is get rid of my ArchLinux and give FreeBSD a shot :).
Or perhaps do this so you'll have less regrets:
sudo pacman -S virtualbox-oseRe: Ask HN: I'm a Linux guy. Tell me about all those BSDs
#160I work on both BSDs and Linux boxes and this fact struck me recently: for i in /bin /usr/bin /usr/local/bin; do ls $i|wc -l; done Linux: 124 2155 67 FreeBSD: 44 430 1067 On BSD, you clearly see which programs are essential for your system to be up & well, which are service additions and which are 3rd party stuff (yeah I missed sbin but you see the picture). On Linux there's a big bag of /usr/bin and a beginner can ha…
Arch Linux: 87 845 0
That's installed as a desktop about a month ago, with all the basic stuff I need installed.