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Comment by turndown | Hacker News Reader

IMO a migration path between kernels would be expecting too much out of an OSS project, but maybe I just have lower expectations for these things.

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It's probably not a matter of technical capability to implement, rather lacking the support staff to handle all the requests they get when edge case users have a failed migration.

I think they’re trying to get around this by explicitly saying there will be no migration path, but it’ll be interesting to see whether they actually get away with that.

They are a niche distribution of a niche distribution of one of the BSDs. They are moving to being a downstream of the 40th most popular Linux distribution by DistroWatch's measures. What is there to get away with? I suspect most of the people using this are the ones making this decision.

https://www.distrowatch.com/dwres.php?resource=popularity

Meanwhile, Microsoft provided the ability to migrate between kernels in the early 90s.

Money is the magic that makes everything possible:)

The true irony to me is that they probably could support it if they were going the other direction, since FreeBSD does have a Linux-compatible personality. Actually, you might still be able to leverage that going the other way... release X is based on FreeBSD, release X+1 uses the FreeBSD kernel but migrates to Void Linux userland complete with actual Linux ELF binaries and can still run FreeBSD binaries, release X+2 switches to just running the Void Linux binaries on a Linux kernel, and only moving one release at a time is supported. It'd just be an insane amount of work.

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