I'm halfway through switching all of my personal machines from Linux to BSD for pretty much this exact reason. It's going very well so far.
I'm stuck with Linux on an nVidia Jetson that is locked by the manufacturer to Ubuntu :(
Switching customers from Linux to BSD because boring is good
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Re: Switching customers from Linux to BSD because boring is good
#12Switching your customers from Linux to BSD sounds like the opposite of the "boring" choice to me. The boring choice would be to leave them on their functioning Linux boxes. But I guess that wouldn't make an interesting conference talk.
Re: Switching customers from Linux to BSD because boring is good
#13I feel that “it just works and you don’t need to maintain it” is less an OS feature, and more about what you are doing with it.
Yes, the most concrete issue the article mentions is losing data on Btrfs, but that is well known to be a flaky, semi-experimental file system, the operating system has very little to do with it. The equivalent would be running Debian on ext4
Also, the article mentions Kubernetes a few times, which quite fairly has a reputation for massive complexity, but is again entirely optional, and a piece of software entirely separate from the operating system.
I agree with the basic point of achieving reliability by using the simplest technology available, but the focus on the operating system for me is misguided here, and at best a temporary fix. If BSD were to catch on for that reason, Kubernetes would be ported to BSD, and the same problem would arise there
Re: Switching customers from Linux to BSD because boring is good
#14A server whose uptime goes to X years is a server that wasn't updated in X years. I'm proud of my old XigmaNAS (FreeBSD) ~15 months uptime years ago that only a blackout did interrupt (yep, I had no UPS), and I write this as a mostly Linux user, but I'm not sure it's a good thing to aim for in production or in anything connected to the Internet.
Yeah, the article links another post which talks about a machine with a 9 year uptime as if it's a good thing. 9 years without a NetBSD release update (or kernel upgrade) is not something to be proud of.
Re: Switching customers from Linux to BSD because boring is good
#15I'm halfway through switching all of my personal machines from Linux to BSD for pretty much this exact reason. It's going very well so far.
I'm stuck with Linux on an nVidia Jetson that is locked by the manufacturer to Ubuntu :(
There is a Yocto solutin in Github.
But I don't know how good it is about NVIDIA AI libraries.
https://github.com/OE4T/meta-tegra
Re: Switching customers from Linux to BSD because boring is good
#16Switching your customers from Linux to BSD sounds like the opposite of the "boring" choice to me. The boring choice would be to leave them on their functioning Linux boxes. But I guess that wouldn't make an interesting conference talk.
“Boring” in this instance obviously means some weird tech culture virtue signal. The situations in which Linux isn’t at least ‘just fine’, and a BSD is better enough to justify SWITCHING, are, well, I’m skeptical of the author’s reasoning.
Re: Switching customers from Linux to BSD because boring is good
#17> One of Stefano Marinelli's NetBSD boxes sat quietly serving for a decade, because everyone forgot about it. This is how Unix is meant to be. I remember someone mentioning they did this with Linux back in 1994 or 1995. Not for a decade obviously but it had been running for at least a year with no reboots or needing maintenance
The classic urban legend is of a Novell server rediscovered four years after being walled in, https://www.theregister.com/2001/04/12/missing_novell_server... .
See also https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/32502/did-a-com... .
The Reg also has articles like https://www.theregister.com/2016/01/20/486_fleet_still_in_pr... 'Eighteen year old server trumped by functional 486 fleet!'
Re: Switching customers from Linux to BSD because boring is good
#18This is my article -- but it's also a dupe... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41776849
Probably merged now
Re: Switching customers from Linux to BSD because boring is good
#19I feel that “it just works and you don’t need to maintain it” is less an OS feature, and more about what you are doing with it.
I agree. I have had several services run for a decade on a company LAN using Linux. They did boring things well. They will still work in 20 years if the hardware is still there.
To be fair I've had Debian boxes with uptimes of many years and
service lives of a decade. A sarge install doing nothing but DNS (on
metal not VM) from 2006 lasted until 2015. So it isn't just a Linux -
BSD thing it's a mindset of simplicity and focus of function. But
since about 2020 my love for Debian waned, what with the systemd and
ugly internal politics. Nowadays I'm inclined to look at whether a BSD
or other operating system [0] might be a good fit for someones
needs. Basically I find the most mature mindset exists wherever it's
furthest away from the GAFAM/Bigtech values which corrupt,
over-complicate everything and try to suck you into ongoing unstable
dependency relation. Using "unfashionable" technology is pretty much
always a win in my experience.
[0] https://www.techradar.com/news/best-alternative-operating-sy...
Re: Switching customers from Linux to BSD because boring is good
#20> One of Stefano Marinelli's NetBSD boxes sat quietly serving for a decade, because everyone forgot about it. This is how Unix is meant to be. I remember someone mentioning they did this with Linux back in 1994 or 1995. Not for a decade obviously but it had been running for at least a year with no reboots or needing maintenance
There's an order of magnitude difference between running for a year and a decade... That's a lot.
Yep. Not rebooting for a decade is in most cases an irresponsible ‘advanced rookie’ move. I’m more than aware of the greybeard-era uptime fetishism. I’ve more than dabbled in it. I’ve typed /exec uptime into my IRC client more times than I dare admit.
But come on…
All that’s been said about security updates etc aside (some of which can be mitigated with that fancy in-place kernel update stuff), If something hasn’t rebooted in 10 years I’m going to be a bit nervous about what happens when it does reboot. If it’s in an uptime fetishist environment, chances are that it’ll be rebooted at a time that’s…inconvenient to say the least. Are you SURE that nothing has changed in that time? Some people are! Moreso than others at least. But that’s extra work, and my bet is most places with these high-uptime machines aren’t putting that work In, or think they are and are doing it poorly.