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BSD vs. Linux (2005)

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Re: BSD vs. Linux (2005)

#221

Post by jlgaddis »

ktRolster wrote: post #54
badsock wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One big thing for me is that I trust the FreeBSD devs to not completely reinvent things unless they're sure it's an improvement. I got sick of the churn in Linux, having to relearn things all the time and then find out when I'm done that it's not any better, just different. Things I learned how to do in FreeBSD a decade ago still work. For example, to get a NIC configured I can either put one or two lines of text in…

Watching iptables get replaced was a really depressing example of that, after the developers swore that "this time we got it right" when replacing ipchains......

... and ipchains (in 2.2) replaced ipfwadm.

Re: BSD vs. Linux (2005)

#222

Post by Freaky »

snuxoll wrote: post #131
voltagex_ wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah crap. The advice I got was just about the opposite - I wanted an L2ARC device in my system for performance. Atom C2758, 32GB ECC RAM, 4x4TB in RAIDZ2 (losing that much storage was painful , and the $1200AUD upgrade path to 4x8TB even more so) with a 128GB SSD as L2ARC. I found out some time later that I probably wanted an SLOG device instead but I'm really too afraid to touch my config. FWIW it's pretty stable on…

Your L2ARC shouldn't be bigger than 5x your system memory, ZFS has to keep mapping tables in-memory to determine where data on the L2ARC is stored, the bigger it gets the more memory you take away from your in-memory ARC, which can lead to worse performance than before since more data is having to come from your much higher-latency and lower bandwidth L2ARC or straight from spinning disks. RAIDZ is a performance kill…

> if your SLOG is corrupted you just lost your entire pool

As far as I'm aware, SLOG loss does not jeopardise the pool, only the transactions that are in the SLOG. The pool may violate synchronous write guarantees in that supposedly committed writes that were in the SLOG effectively get rolled back (or rather, never get applied to the underlying pool), but that's about it.

Re: BSD vs. Linux (2005)

#223

Post by talideon »

simula67 wrote: post #77

Very informative article, thank you. This article is missing discussion on ArchLinux ( probably because it is very old ? ). Arch has a minimal base system ( no X etc ) and you can build the system you most like. Also Linux now uses git for development. > And normally, you do the whole rebuild process in four steps. You start with a make buildworld which compiles all of userland, then a make buildkernel which compiles…

Yes, the article is very old.

> Wow, so painful.

And also something that hasn't been true for ages. By way of anecdote, I've had to do config merges on major version upgrades more on Debian systems than FreeBSD systems, but even then the difference hasn't been all that great: major version upgrades just work. And the last time I had to build a custom kernel was FreeBSD 6, which was about a decade ago.

Any remaining pain is largely a consequence of the freebsd-update works and should mostly go away once the base system is packaged (which should also make security updates a little faster to install).

Re: BSD vs. Linux (2005)

#224

Post by talideon »

corv wrote: post #7
teacup50 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A consistently designed well-documented system is probably easier to use, all else being equal.

In day to day use I agree, although it is harder to get exotic software to work on the BSDs.

That's a consequence of that software being written with only Linux in mind, not a problem with the BSDs as such. Also, somebody needs to write a port, and the only person who'll do that is somebody with skin in the game.

Obviously I'm an outlier, but if I need some software on FreeBSD, I'll contribute a port. Most of the time, it's almost trivial, and it's only with very obscure (maude is one that I'm currently working on) or newish (RethinkDB, which isn't written in a super portable manner - it doesn't even use pkg-config and has a hand-written configure script!) where there's an issue.

Re: BSD vs. Linux (2005)

#225

Post by criddell »

eropple wrote: post #111
aaron-lebo wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Based on this thread, I'd say the problem is a lot of people haven't given them the time. If you select your hardware, they work pretty flawlessly. Certainly right there with Windows or OSX or anything else. In a lot of cases you don't even need to be very selective, you just need to have a modern machine.

I run a Linux desktop for work (typing on it right now) as a dual-boot with my Windows setup. It is a "modern machine", at least if an i7-6700K and a 980Ti are modern, and I couldn't get X to start with Ubuntu 16.04 LTS. And yet it did with Ubuntu 14.04, which is bizarre. My time is valuable enough that I didn't debug it further than that--if I wanted to light my time on fire I'd just go set up a Hackintosh and have…

> if I wanted to light my time on fire I'd just go set up a Hackintosh and have a better desktop experience

As I understand it, installing macOS on non-Apple hardware is a license violation. Your employer is okay with that?

Re: BSD vs. Linux (2005)

#226

Post by joonoro »

Ahh, this old article again.

>"But Linux is more popular." >So? Windows is even more popular. Go use that.

This slope is so slippery I broke my neck when I fell.

Re: BSD vs. Linux (2005)

#227

Post by radicalbyte »

vetinari wrote: post #186
brulard wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've never heard the opposite. I've switched to OsX 4 years ago after being completely unhappy and irritated with Windows for over 12 years. Now after months of using Ubuntu (unity, xfce) and Mint (Cinnamon) I'm convinced that OsX is best for average (and power) desktop user by a huge margin. Although I would be much more happy with something Open Source.

I've got other experience: - random failures to mount network shares, - drag-and-droping files between Finder windows suddenly stops working, - the file rename edit widget appearing in random part of the screen that are bugs, that should not appear in the supposedly best desktop OS.

I can recommend using Forklift. It has its own share of bugs, but you don't get the freezing and general crappy experience of Finder when accessing network shared :)

Re: BSD vs. Linux (2005)

#228

Post by na85 »

VLM wrote: post #210
vertex-four wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most people, otoh, enjoy playing games, watching videos, that sort of thing. Some people even do work that's dependent on the graphics card. Just because you use your computer for a very minimal amount of tasks doesn't mean everyone else does.

Everybody does that stuff in the browser now a days, which works fine in freebsd.

"Everybody" certainly doesn't play games in the browser.

Most PC gamers will tell you that the experience usually sucks and is often poorly performant.

Re: BSD vs. Linux (2005)

#229

Post by wtbob »

8183138921 wrote: post #194
behnamoh wrote: post #170

Something I don't understand about FreeBSD is why they use the evil daemon for the logo? Whatever story behind it, I just think there are many other alternatives they could use as the logo.

What is wrong with beastie? Unlike backwards religious fundamentalists, the cute little devil hasn't harmed a single person.

> Unlike backwards religious fundamentalists, the cute little devil hasn't harmed a single person.

Even if one doesn't believe in the Devil, surely it seems in poor taste to use as a mascot a mythological creature who is reputed to be the source of every single evil, cruel, horrible thing in all of history. It's almost as bad as naming a piece of encryption software 'felony.'

Re: BSD vs. Linux (2005)

#230

Post by [deleted] »

_wdzx wrote: post #86

> I like FreeBSD, and I use it as a server OS and on a NAS box but you only need look at https://wiki.freebsd.org/Graphics to understand that if the "Linux Desktop" is a joke compared to MacOS and Windows then the "FreeBSD Desktop" is even more so. I've never heard anything good about the "MacOS desktop" and I'm pretty sure that the "windows desktop" is far behind the "linux desktop"(plugins, performance, menus etc.)…

[deleted]
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