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Ask HN: Can we talk about FreeBSD vs. Linux?

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Re: Ask HN: Can we talk about FreeBSD vs. Linux?

#181

Post by nieve »

malandrew wrote: post #83
near wrote: post #27

Like others have said, being unbiased is difficult, but I'll try. First, Linux v FreeBSD is really tough, so I will instead approach this from Debian v FreeBSD. I really like how easy Debian on the desktop is: install it, apt-get install xfce, and I have a nice desktop. It's very easy to add Adobe Flash, Steam, Skype, etc. The FreeBSD desktop isn't as nice. You can add things like Flash and Skype on FreeBSD, but you…

This is OT, but since you seem to know a fair bit about filesystem types and their trades and have an opinion on sane patching behavior, I have a question you might be able to answer: Why aren't modern filesystems based on a content-addressable-store where the content is 100% separated from the organization of the filesystem itself? It seems to me like it would make more sense to have only one copy of a file ever sav…

openSUSE uses btrfs's copy-on-write behavior to allow rollbacks. Any time you use the package management system to change system state on a machine using btrfs the package manager actually snapshots the filesystem before (and I believe after) the install or remove. Due to COW this effectively only wastes the space for new versions of old files and snapshots can be cleared at will. It's a little weird to get used to, but it's actually a far more powerful "Oh Shit" button than package level rollback - a bad post-install script in a package that trashes /usr can usually be recovered easily if you read the docs and still have snapper (or can get a copy of it). Unfortunately RDBMSes don't usually play nice with copy on write filesystems, so it's much harder to do rollback there.

Re: Ask HN: Can we talk about FreeBSD vs. Linux?

#182

Post by Aloha »

emcrazyone wrote: post #91

These discussions usually amount to flame wars but I will offer some real world usage perspective. I use to work for a fortune-5 company that standardized on Linux. We compiled our own Linux kernel and we used the SUSE distribution from Novell. The main driver behind this was two fold. (1) Novell indemnifies us from a legal perspective and (2) they support us on IBM hardware. Any problem from drivers, to user space a…

For what its worth, when I test drove an XTS I was incredibly impressed with CUE. Though if I had my druthers, I'd prefer a good old fashioned knob and button interface for the radio.

Re: Ask HN: Can we talk about FreeBSD vs. Linux?

#183

Post by hiphopyo »

debacle wrote: post #71

I love the BSD ecosystem, but until FreeBSD is as easy to use and as maintained as Debian, I can't see myself switching over. Debian is just far to convenient, not because it is better, but because it probably has 100 fold the maintainers that FreeBSD does.

I'll take 10 skilled maintainers over 100 not-so-skilled ones any day. It's like that Swedish proverb, "the more chefs, the worse the soup". The better the OS, the less maintenance it needs. Just look at OpenBSD.

Re: Ask HN: Can we talk about FreeBSD vs. Linux?

#184

Post by chrismsnz »

wtracy wrote: post #177
kchoudhu wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just don't change root's shell to something like bash. BAD THINGS WILL HAPPEN.

Care to elaborate? Does FreeBSD make assumptions about the root user's shell that Linux doesn't?

Yes, root's shell should be one provided by the distribution's base install.

I think the biggest worry is that if you need to do something like boot into single user mode for an emergency recovery, and /usr or /usr/local (with root's shell in it) is on a different or unmountable partition then you will not be able to do anything.

Re: Ask HN: Can we talk about FreeBSD vs. Linux?

#185

Post by psture »

byuu wrote: post #114
malandrew wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is OT, but since you seem to know a fair bit about filesystem types and their trades and have an opinion on sane patching behavior, I have a question you might be able to answer: Why aren't modern filesystems based on a content-addressable-store where the content is 100% separated from the organization of the filesystem itself? It seems to me like it would make more sense to have only one copy of a file ever sav…

I'm not an FS expert and others have answered your question much better, but I don't want you think I am ignoring you, so I'll talk about this part instead: > the filesystem could offer an abstraction over a patch and pointer to the original file I've implemented a delta-based patching system before: the idea is that, given two binary buffers (ostensibly files), encode the differences between them. I have no idea how…

The basis for transferring file metadata is already there in zip in the form of -V for VMS file system metadata. This works well and can be used to transfer files via intermediate platforms which don't support that metadata.

It's not as seamless as one might wish; you do have to use zip. do the transfer and then unzip on the target, and of course remember to use -V in the first place.

FTP implementations also exist in the VMS world for transferring the file metadata, but I haven't used these myself so can't comment on their usability in practice.

Re: Ask HN: Can we talk about FreeBSD vs. Linux?

#186

Post by ptman »

wtallis wrote: post #144
eeZi wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the few feature btrs has which ZFS hasn't.

At this point, I don't think it's fair to imply that btrfs is lagging behind ZFS. Yes, there are quite a few things that ZFS does better than btrfs, but btrfs isn't following in ZFS's footsteps and has some killer features that ZFS will never have, like on-the-fly changing between RAID modes and resizing arrays in either direction.

ZFS would need block pointer rewrites to implement those features, right? I don't think ZFS developers are opposed to that, but progress is just stalled. So I think "will never have" is a bit strongly worded.

Re: Ask HN: Can we talk about FreeBSD vs. Linux?

#187

Post by knob »

hiphopyo wrote: post #175
tedunangst wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why OpenBSD is the superior desktop operating system. Fixed months ago. :)

Indeed. This thread should really be titled OpenBSD vs. Linux. I'm sure most people here don't even know it's the only OS in the world allowing you run Xorg as an unprivileged user. Just like Linux taught me to appreciate FreeBSD, FreeBSD taught me to appreciate OpenBSD. OpenBSD -- the world's simplest and most secure Unix-like OS. Creator of the world's most used SSH implementation OpenSSH, the world's most elegant…

Personally, I love FreeBSD's beastie. Don't care much if it is "satanical" or whatnot.

Re: Ask HN: Can we talk about FreeBSD vs. Linux?

#188

Post by knob »

chrismsnz wrote: post #184
wtracy wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Care to elaborate? Does FreeBSD make assumptions about the root user's shell that Linux doesn't?

Yes, root's shell should be one provided by the distribution's base install. I think the biggest worry is that if you need to do something like boot into single user mode for an emergency recovery, and /usr or /usr/local (with root's shell in it) is on a different or unmountable partition then you will not be able to do anything.

Additionally, if you upgrade your shell, or something gets borked, then... you now don't have a shell.

Re: Ask HN: Can we talk about FreeBSD vs. Linux?

#189

Post by byuu »

gillianseed wrote: post #174
near wrote: post #27

Like others have said, being unbiased is difficult, but I'll try. First, Linux v FreeBSD is really tough, so I will instead approach this from Debian v FreeBSD. I really like how easy Debian on the desktop is: install it, apt-get install xfce, and I have a nice desktop. It's very easy to add Adobe Flash, Steam, Skype, etc. The FreeBSD desktop isn't as nice. You can add things like Flash and Skype on FreeBSD, but you…

>and just in general I favor the BSD/MIT/ISC licenses to the GPL. Curious then as to your choice of licensing your Higan/BSnes emulators under GPLv3.

I work on about 20+ projects, and my emulator is the only one that is GPLv3 licensed. The rest are all ISC licensed. (Note that parts of higan are ISC licensed, and I have granted other emulator authors exemptions, eg Snes9X now uses my audio core.)

The reason in higan's case, is because of the culture of the emulation community. There's a long, dark history of closed source emulators (even now with SuperGNES, no$sns and SNESGT), and I feel that emulation is a bit different from ordinary software: here, we are working under the threat of time. We realistically only have another 10-20 years to improve SNES emulation before finding a working system and persons interested in reverse engineering it are impractical.

I think it's very shallow and narcissistic to take the research of others, and not contribute back your own findings. I view this as more of an academic / historical preservation project than a regular desktop application. To end users, it's just for playing games, and not tied to any other system components, so I feel less bad about it.

To give a real world example, I encountered a bug in SuperFX (GSU1) emulation, and found that FuSuYa had a tracer-based fork of Snes9X: he basically added in a few fprintf() statements, and then refused to release the source to his changes. That would have been fine, but he botched something and introduced a very serious bug, one that I was also experiencing in my emulator. If I were able to diff his source to the official Snes9X source, I would have found and been able to fix that bug in a few minutes. Instead, it took me about two weeks to track it down.

Once I feel that SNES emulation has reached its limits in terms of research, I'll likely release the emulator under an ISC license as well.

Now I'm sure you can view this as me being hypocritical, and maybe it is, but that's my answer: I feel there's something more important than licensing at stake here.

Re: Ask HN: Can we talk about FreeBSD vs. Linux?

#190

Post by the_why_of_y »

hiphopyo wrote: post #175
tedunangst wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why OpenBSD is the superior desktop operating system. Fixed months ago. :)

Indeed. This thread should really be titled OpenBSD vs. Linux. I'm sure most people here don't even know it's the only OS in the world allowing you run Xorg as an unprivileged user. Just like Linux taught me to appreciate FreeBSD, FreeBSD taught me to appreciate OpenBSD. OpenBSD -- the world's simplest and most secure Unix-like OS. Creator of the world's most used SSH implementation OpenSSH, the world's most elegant…

> I'm sure most people here don't even know it's the only OS in the world allowing you run Xorg as an unprivileged user.

Maybe the first, but these articles claim Fedora can do it too, although currently you need to edit a config file, and it only works if you invoke startx(1), not when logging in from gdm.

http://hansdegoede.livejournal.com/14446.html http://hansdegoede.livejournal.com/14268.html

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