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Technical reasons to choose FreeBSD over GNU/Linux (2020)

unixsheikh.com

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Re: Technical reasons to choose FreeBSD over GNU/Linux (2020)

#371
post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A guy I know (relatively skilled) spent a whole week setting up Linux on his laptop the other day. So I don't think it's always as predictable as to say there's never a challenge involved in 2022.

Not sure what do you want to prove with that anecdotal point. I've seen coworkers spend a month or 2 with both their new and old mac or windows laptops because they weren't seeing the end of migrating their stuff from one computer to another and setting up their dev environment. Some people are just bad at this.

Why are your anecdotes better than that post's anecdotes?

Re: Technical reasons to choose FreeBSD over GNU/Linux (2020)

#372
post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A guy I know (relatively skilled) spent a whole week setting up Linux on his laptop the other day. So I don't think it's always as predictable as to say there's never a challenge involved in 2022.

Just install Ubuntu if you quite literally cannot grasp GNU/Linux. No, your "guy" is not "relatively skilled", that's an absurd claim when it took an entire week setting up Linux on a laptop. It has never, ever taken me more than an hour or two with mainstream distros, or more than 3 days max. for more complicated distros such as Gentoo or Arch - but the system would be minimally operational within a day, always. You…

Out of curiosity, how hard would Linux have to be to setup for you to no longer define "relatively skilled" as "able to setup Linux in < a week"?

Re: Technical reasons to choose FreeBSD over GNU/Linux (2020)

#373
post #80
post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A guy I know (relatively skilled) spent a whole week setting up Linux on his laptop the other day. So I don't think it's always as predictable as to say there's never a challenge involved in 2022.

He should try putting OSX on the hardware. Wouldn't even start to work. Clearly OSX is not ready for the desktop yet.

It's too bad Linux's success isn't defined as "Can be installed on as many types of hardware as OSX" then, eh?

Re: Technical reasons to choose FreeBSD over GNU/Linux (2020)

#374
post #7

I'm a huge fan of FreeBSD, though I have to admit - when I was looking at the Vulnerability Statistics chart I wondered to myself "are there fewer identified FreeBSD vulnerabilities because there are way fewer FreeBSD users (than Linux)".

I thought the same thing. And also there is probably more code compiled in the majoroty of Linux deployments and that widens the attack surface. So just comparing the absolute vulnerability counters is not useful IMO.

Re: Technical reasons to choose FreeBSD over GNU/Linux (2020)

#375
post #62

I am using freebsd since version 8 for all my server needs (was using linux, but got repelled by its chaos which I dont care about on my laptop, but it pisses me off on server). Some more points: - bhyve, developed by netapp, they ditched all old technologies support and it works faster on my i5 server than kvm on my i7 laptop. Snapshoting using ZFS is not a feature to discard either. - FIBs, absolute miracle routing…

jails and lxc are great but Docker won out because they made those features significantly more user friendly and spent serious (VC-supported) coin on marketing that.

Re: Technical reasons to choose FreeBSD over GNU/Linux (2020)

#376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> (Yes, Netflix runs FreeBSD HEAD. I think they're nuts.) Sounds like chaos engineering to me ;)

Oh, they absolutely justify it on the basis that if a CDN node is unstable they'll just fail traffic across to another node. And as a FreeBSD developer I have to say that it's great having the OS (or at least the parts Netflix uses) stress tested -- you can't reproduce "1/3 of all internet traffic" in a test lab. The reason I think they're nuts isn't stability but rather security . I guess since they're shipping thes…

> The reason I think they're nuts isn't stability but rather security. I guess since they're shipping these boxes around the world there's nothing really sensitive on them; but still, if I were in their shoes I would be worried about security bugs being introduced.

Perhaps they have some really awesome IDS, and honeypots, and good security boundaries between components, etc. A company like that surely has a good plan in place.

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