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Comment by kstrauser | Hacker News Reader

Especially in the case of NetBSD and OpenBSD, it's nice to SSH into a system, run ps, and be able to identify on sight every single running process. It's easy to know what everything is, and more importantly, why it's there. That's a beautiful starting position for building other systems even when you're not trying to boot it on a toaster oven.

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I'm unfamiliar with BSD. Are you saying there are significantly fewer processes on BSD to be aware of when looking through ps?

I had always assumed (probably ignorantly) that BSD basically runs all of the same or similar processes to a similarly featured Linux distro.

I’d say BSD (esp Net and Open, as mentioned above), just don’t run as many processes, by design. BSDs are *nix, like Linux, but with their own traditions. If you, familiar with Linux, sat down at a NetBSD box, you’d be able to easily get around like a little girl[0]. You wouldn’t find systemd, though, you’d see a “wheel” group, your login shell might not be bash. The BSDs just decorate their houses differently than Linux[1].

[0] https://youtu.be/URVS4H7vrdU

[1] https://youtu.be/B19a2i3HnJM

I'd say it depends on the Linux distribution. Things like Ubuntu would be much like mentioned [1], packing just about everything¹, while on something like openwrt you would probably recognize or easily find out the function of all userspace processes - I counted 13 on my router.

It doesn't help that linux (kernel and userspaces) tends to resemble chaotic patchwork more¹ than a reasonably designed system.

¹ exaggeration

Of course you are correct; “Linux” is a big landscape, and descriptions of instances run the gamut (eg: OpenWRT vs Ubuntu). When I was writing above I had (eg) Red Hat or Ubuntu in mind.

yeah, distros like archlinux have pretty thin base install and I always rejoy watching htop process list fit onto a third of the screen

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