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Comment by Philipp__ | Hacker News Reader

Absolutely no! Maybe it is because people at FreeBSD and it's users believe in OS.

Don't be so sure - I used to be an Arch guy because I loved their dead simple config, everything in rc.conf, etc. One of the big pushes for arch early on was that it was BSD-like.

Arch progressively lost this feature and was one of the first distros to adopt systemd which was the last nail in Arch's coffin. When their docs suggested I manually write a unit file to configure networking rather than having 1 line in rc.conf, I was done.

My move was to go to FreeBSD. I feel like I'm right back to what I liked about Arch originally. So yeah, I'm sure some people are well served by making this move.

>the last nail in Arch's coffin

Has Arch dropped in popularity since then, or do you mean "in Arch's coffin [for me]" ?

Total anecdata, but the usual amount of HN comments on how this and that "just works" in Arch, seems to have dropped recently. It's still #9 on Distrowatch (I'm pretty sure at one point it was in the top 5), so it's not disbanded or anything.

I could see how the core Arch users would despise systemd anyway. For all protestations to the contrary, Arch is pretty hardcore ("all upstream all the time! Configure everything yourself!"). Hardcore old-hat sysadmins are the ones most affected by systemd reinventing the init wheel.

Ha, I did exactly the same thing. FreeBSD is well-organized and generally makes sense. It stays out of the way and just works.

BSD documentation culture is also second-to-none. Seriously, the manual for every BSD is incredible.

FreeBSD's cousin DragonFlyBSD is also (IMO) doing some of the most interesting research in Unix-like OSes right now. It's a sort of hybrid of FreeBSD and Plan9, with a cutting-edge-and-more-stable-than-btrfs filesystem.

BSD is for people who love Unix, Linux is for people who hate Microsoft.

>BSD is for people who love Unix, Linux is for people who hate Microsoft.

OpenBSD is for people who love the UNIX equivalent of Dwarf Fortress. I call it a full contact OS because of what will happen to you upon asking an easily googled question.

THIS!

That's the reason I'm a DragonFlyBSD user. Plus the lovely community there.

The dragonflybsd community is great. When I was experimenting with it, their freenode channel was super helpful, often with Matt himself answering questions. I ran into a bug after an upgrade and he had a patch up in like an hour.

I've been deploying my stuff in linux containers recently, and I really like that flow. I really hope something like Jetpack (https://github.com/3ofcoins/jetpack) can eventually provide a solid OCI implementation on top of jails and hammer (not sure what containers demand of a filesystem, I know jetpack is currently focused on ZFS).

Yes, Berkeley sockets are a true embodiment of the Unix nature.

I'd say Linux is for those who have a job to do and are bored to death with OS wars.

If you have a job to do I'd rather use FreeBSD but unfortunately lot's of support for popular software is missing.

I thought about using it for a big Hadoop cluster due to ZFS and jails but at that time there was no recent Hadoop port and some tinkering is often required to get rid of glibc specifics or dependencies on Linux only APIs (epoll and stuff like that)

https://svnweb.freebsd.org/ports/head/devel/hadoop2/files/

However I guess even with a good working port it's difficult to convince a team that only uses Linux for like their whole life. We somehow decided on btrfs at that time (around Linux 3.16) and I've was busy reading stacktraces and debugging hangups for a while... Hadoop somehow also triggered some bug in transparent hugepages...

So yes, Linux is mostly plug'n'play if you need a VM for a Wordpress but IMHO digging into Linux internals can be fare more challenging than grasping FreeBSD - I guess if I had the task again I'd definitely would go with FreeBSD.

BtrFS on 3.16 is a brave decision.

It bothers me that too much is Linux-only (or worse: Linux+x86-only) these days, making assumptions about the system that we just couldn't (and were forced to do it right) in the IRIX/Solaris/AIX days.

As someone who uses Linux, OSX, Homebrew (why, oh why?) and MacPorts daily, I can readily say we don't make our software as easily portable as we used to.

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