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Debian developer prompted to revisit FreeBSD after 20 years

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21–30 of 113 posts

Re: Debian developer prompted to revisit FreeBSD after 20 years

#21
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Nothing like Dropbox -- that's not a bug, it's a feature. What a horribly arrogant and conceited thing to say.

It's also wrong. FreeBSD supports the best there is: Tarsnap.

There's also the syncthing port and owncloud sync support via mirall.

Re: Debian developer prompted to revisit FreeBSD after 20 years

#22
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Nothing like Dropbox -- that's not a bug, it's a feature. What a horribly arrogant and conceited thing to say.

It's also wrong. FreeBSD supports the best there is: Tarsnap.

That's a backup solution which you can also run on Linux without an issue. Dropbox is more for collaboration. It's often the only tool in its class used by smaller publishers or marketing companies. They don't have an ftp or webdav server. And it sure beats emailing files around.

Re: Debian developer prompted to revisit FreeBSD after 20 years

#23
post #7

The article makes some good points, and I'm glad it didn't just rail on one single part/component since linux distrobutions have so much variety. ZFS is really a killer FS, and unfortunately Linux just doesn't have a native answer just yet (although BtrFS does have some promising parts). There's a lot of people either threatening to switch or are switching to one of the BSD's as a result of being dissatisfied with th…

I don't think there were too many people in that debate who were dissatisfied with the idea of a new init system. People were dissatisfied with systemd specifically, because of various architectural choices that it made. The fact that FreeBSD might adopt a new init doesn't in itself mean that those people will be scared off.

Re: Debian developer prompted to revisit FreeBSD after 20 years

#24
post #14
post #12

He seems to think in his comparison Debian comes on top. However, the points which he thinks are where Debian is stronger illustrate precisely where Linux has lost its way. Laptop support is lacking -- assuming you care about laptops, and care about suspend working out of the box. Guess what, suspend didn't work out of the box under Debian, either. Storage, he's forgetting that zfs is both a filesystem, and a volume…

> Nothing like Dropbox -- that's not a bug, it's a feature. What a horribly arrogant and conceited thing to say.

Not only that, but it also misses the point in the original context. Missing an inotify equivalent can be a handicap for a number of different applications. Whether kqueue is an acceptable alternative sounds like it's worthy of a separate discussion.

Re: Debian developer prompted to revisit FreeBSD after 20 years

#25
"There are some other issues, too: FreeBSD ports make no distinction between development and runtime files like Debian’s packages do. So, just by virtue of wanting to run a graphical desktop, you get all of the static libraries, include files, build scripts, etc for XOrg installed."

That's definitely a feature, not a bug! I hate how Linux distributions require you to install a thousand "-dev" or "-devel" packages. All headers should always be present on a Unix system!

Also, you don't need HAL/PolicyKit/dbus on FreeBSD. xorg-server recently switched the default configuration option from HAL to devd. And you can compile things like Firefox WITHOUT="DBUS" :-)

Re: Debian developer prompted to revisit FreeBSD after 20 years

#26
post #12

He seems to think in his comparison Debian comes on top. However, the points which he thinks are where Debian is stronger illustrate precisely where Linux has lost its way. Laptop support is lacking -- assuming you care about laptops, and care about suspend working out of the box. Guess what, suspend didn't work out of the box under Debian, either. Storage, he's forgetting that zfs is both a filesystem, and a volume…

> Nothing like Dropbox -- that's not a bug, it's a feature.

I dunno about that, but there's always OwnCloud which runs anywhere you can get PHP running (yeah, 2 minute hate on PHP, who cares it works.) and has clients for iOS, Android & everything else you can think of

Re: Debian developer prompted to revisit FreeBSD after 20 years

#27
I think that a lot of this depends on whether you want to run a desktop or server - a lot of comparisons focus on how Linux/FreeBSD compare as a user workstation. To be honest I wouldn't recommend anyone use FreeBSD as a desktop/laptop OS but if you want a 'production' server there is a lot to be said for simplicity and avoiding too many 'clever' features.

Re: Debian developer prompted to revisit FreeBSD after 20 years

#29

"There are some other issues, too: FreeBSD ports make no distinction between development and runtime files like Debian’s packages do. So, just by virtue of wanting to run a graphical desktop, you get all of the static libraries, include files, build scripts, etc for XOrg installed." That's definitely a feature, not a bug! I hate how Linux distributions require you to install a thousand " -dev" or " -devel" packages.…

But not everyone that uses Linux compile X libs or Firefox themselves (a very tiny fraction do). Why does it make sense to have include headers and source?

Re: Debian developer prompted to revisit FreeBSD after 20 years

#30
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Nothing like Dropbox -- that's not a bug, it's a feature. What a horribly arrogant and conceited thing to say.

Not only that, but it also misses the point in the original context. Missing an inotify equivalent can be a handicap for a number of different applications. Whether kqueue is an acceptable alternative sounds like it's worthy of a separate discussion.

No kqueue is not an acceptable alternative as it uses file descriptors to "watch" for changes :(
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