FreeBSD Handbook Improvement Survey

What is also baffling is the new state of the FreeBSD Handbook. I am a newcomer, so my voice probably doesn't matter much - I've been running FreeBSD since 9 as my primary desktop. The Handbook was a neat collection of formatted HTML pages. The contents section was where you'd expect it - at the top. Typography, code colors, vertical and horizontal indents were all well-thought - it was easy to find the stuff you need fast. The person(s) who made it were concentrated on delivering information.

The new Handbook is really bad. The contents in split HTMLs is on the left, but then there is another contents section on the right. There contents in single HTML is on the right (why?) Typography is a weak mix of serif and sans-serif and italics in illogical places. Interline spacing is bad - the feeling is that instead of a reference book we are now looking at a poorly designed advertisemsent brochure, but still structured as a book. Chapters, sections and subsections are poorly demarcated - you can't tell when things end and new things begin. Horizontal and vertical indents separating coherent blocks of text are all broken - you simply can't easily find the information you need.

Maybe I'm an old fart, and I like Beastie more than this soul-less flat demon, but I think the new person in charge of the Handbook is concentrated on "design" more than on the content. Sorry for the off-topic, fellas. Just needed to get it out.

The discord community seems acutely aware of this. When I first became acquainted with the system last year I made an effort to document my confusion when hitting roadblocks after reading the handbook to them, and most of them came down to usability issues with the implementation of the pages. The response was always the same "we know, and thanks for the report."

This isn't a direct answer, but I think it'll help understand their relationship/how similar they're likely to be.

All of the above are descendants of an OS that Berkeley released called "BSD". BSD only ran on PDP-11s, and then, VAX minicomputers, with a few proprietary ports to expensive workstations (SunOS, Sony NEWS, etc).

The code was a "distribution" of modifications on top of AT&T UNIX, so it couldn't be freely shared to people without a UNIX license. So the developers released part of their own code separately, the most important released called "Net/2".

Two alumni of Berkeley worked on expanding the free distribution to be 1) a full OS and 2) run on regular Intel 80386 PC clones. This was called "386BSD".

The last "official" BSD was 4.4BSD, which had the goal of wider software and hardware compatibility, adding support for a wide range of computers.

Disagreements with the developers of 386BSD led to a fork, eventually named "FreeBSD" (as in Free86BSD, I think). They continued the goal of a PC compatible BSD.

Another group took 386BSD and reintegrated 4.4BSD code back in, continuing the Berkeley goal of "wide hardware compatibility", which became NetBSD. "Internal disagreements" eventually led to one of the core developers leaving to make OpenBSD, which differed in that the development source repository was always publicly available (at the time NetBSD only released source for a full release, only team members could pull from the CVS repo).

All that to say, FreeBSD is sort of its own thing, with NetBSD and OpenBSD sharing much more. They've all diverged quite a bit, but have simultaneously shared a lot of code (especially things like device drivers).

So, broadly speaking, using any BSD will make you "familiar with BSD", but they really are quite distinct at this point.

That's the equivalent of "we'll get back to you". If they know and not doing anything about it they're not doing their job.

That's not so bad for a free project but if they pay someone to do it that sounds like a bigger problem.

Edit: In reply to the comment below which I can't reply to: Someone else mentioned the person doing the server was being paid for the work on the handbook.

Conducive to mass “BSD is dying” trolling, BSD vs. Linux flamewar and such.