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Comment by naivepiano | Hacker News Reader

I see that this change (systemd) is mostly driven by desktop software dev teams. If linux chooses to care mostly about the desktop aspect (IMHO previous such experiments like Unity were total flops but I'm not an expert) instead of its server one then maybe that's the opportunity for BSDs to cover up the void. Not a bad thing at all.

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No, I think it's good change. Last year I stopped contributing to ArchLinux, I'm seriously considering doing the same for FreeBSD/PC-BSD now. BSDs have a lot to catch-up, even things like network-manager don't work on BSD, it have to be ported, or network connections have to be configured manually in rc files. Personally it's ok for me to work like that. OpenVPN configuration in FBSD was EASIER than doing the same in UI on KDE5 nm-applet. (Personal opinion->) I think connection to VPN providers is more stable and I lose less data on BSD than on Arch. So it was another benefit :) Generally a lot of things are much easier in BSDs, there is literally ONE manual for everything and it applies from FBSD-NetBSD-OpenBSD-DragonFlyBSD. When one manual for a thing for ArchLinux doesn't apply to Ubuntu or even worse tutorial from Ubuntu doesn't work on Debian, things become ugly... I value it a lot.

things like network-manager don't work on BSD

That is a feature not a bug.

Why? My parents are using openSUSE because it's very Windows-like, they would have no chance against PC-BSD.

This was what irked me personally about Linux. I am a BSD fan and went the BSD direction because there was essentially one popular distro (FreeBSD) and at the system level they all worked the same way.

It was bizarre to me that a few years ago even changing your host name at the command line was different between the various Linux distros.

> even changing your host name at the command line was different between the various Linux distros

That was one of the things that the systemd people set out to remedy, in fact. Now, you run a Desktop Bus client that talks to a system-wide Desktop Bus server using a Desktop Bus protocol.

* https://freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/hostnamectl.htm...

* https://freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/systemd-hostnam...

* https://freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd/hostnamed/

I am using PC-BSD and the network is configured with a GUI and working fine. I don't know what's about network-manager.

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