Switching customers from Linux to BSD because boring is good

I just don’t buy the story that Linux is unreliable.

It’s kind of a ridiculous thing to claim without very substantial proof.

I think it’s made up to justify installing BSD.

I suppose it's about kernel and driver packages mostly.

A couple of years ago at work, we came across a Linux (virtual) server related to a customer project that had been running for some 2.5 or 3 years since the last reboot. Pretty much by accident. I think we rebooted it for good measure (applying security updates, making sure it still booted cleanly, etc.) but there was no immediate need for doing that just to keep it functional.

It's entirely possible that BSD is more stable and lends itself better to running for really long times uninterrupted. But Linux systems running for years really aren't unheard of, and by no means is one year the top of the range.

Whether you should do that is another question. Over the course of a decade, there could well be even kernel-level vulnerabilities discovered, let alone ones in other services running on top of it. You might have a system running without a reboot for years as long as you make sure to update (and restart) user space services as needed. But leaving an entire server unattended for years doesn't sound like a good idea generally.

That may not be as much of a concern if what the box is running is a limited set of services or functionality with little exposed surface. But that then comes more down to "what you're doing with it" rather than "which OS you're using".

The generally less conservative development culture around Linux leans more towards moving fast and breaking things, although generally while trying to avoid the latter. Perhaps that makes things like low-level OS vulnerabilities or whether the system still restarts cleanly after a decade more important in the Linux land, and what counts as prudent administration in Linux might be less of a concern in BSD.

But if you can have a BSD box running for a decade, with some particular set of services, in an internal network(?), and then compare that to someone else's report of a Linux box running for (at least) a year, in 1994 or 1995, probably running an entirely different workload, in a different environment (perhaps externally exposed?), and with no indication of why it may or may not have been restarted after that time, that's not really a fair comparison either.

It's interesting, because around 2004-06 was when I struggled mightily with hardware issues, especially audio, and Chris Siebenmann was the one who urged me to "install Ubuntu and be done with it."

And Ubuntu really was the value-add, turnkey solution for someone who needed a desktop system as "daily driver" without endless tinkering and custom fixes.

But by 2018, Ubuntu was making enough proprietary additions that I didn't need, and I began to notice Debian's maturity and feature parity. But Debian still had a reputation for being extremely stable. So some new installs were Debian, and in 2018 when I purchased a Lenovo notebook, some were Ubuntu-certified, and I chose Red Hat certified, which ultimately ran Fedora quite smoothly.

(There were no BSD-certified notebooks.)

> If you need a stable desktop put z/OS on it

You mean use a mainframe remotely ?