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Comment by brobdingnagians | Hacker News Reader

There are some cases where squeezing every ounce of performance out of the hardware matters, but for most use cases there is a reasonable "good enough"; and these results show that BSD and Linux are comparable. I think the killer feature that the BSDs have, which Linux can't match, is how well designed, integrated, predictable, and simple they are. That is why I run more BSD servers than Linux servers. I do run Linux servers for some cases, and they work well for those cases, but I much prefer working with BSD.

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I like the BSD simplicity, but it's not just hardware, it's software. I want to spin up an X stack in docker? Can't do that, docker doesn't work. There's jails but without any image repositories I'm trading a lot of convenience for simplicity.

There's also software like dotnetcore which will just not build. The situation in the desktop is even more problematic. I wish it wasn't so, I like the separation of concerns quite a bit with FreeBSD but it's not something that unfortunately fits my use cases.

Some people run BSD to avoid needing containers. There are different approaches to keeping the entropy under control.

Try BastilleBSD - https://bastillebsd.org/ - which uses FreeBSD Jails and offers templates/images for many use cases - https://gitlab.com/bastillebsd-templates

> docker doesn't work

Doesn't work on macos or windows either; macos "docker" uses a linux VM.

Personally I prefer jails anyway.

Docker on Windows exists in two variants, one of them uses windows containers.

Pretty sure to run a Linux docker image it uses a Linux kernel; as you know, the current WSL is implemented as a Linux kernel running in Hyper-V, i.e. a Linux VM.

I am not an expert in Windows though; perhaps you are referring to a version of docker that I'm not familiar with which doesn't support Linux services but instead runs Windows services in a native Windows container system? That would be cool and interesting but obviously it wouldn't run most docker images.

There are docker images for Windows software, and those are the ones I care about, which yes are based on Windows containers that are even capable of running directly on top of hyper-v, bypassing most of the kernel fat.

> how well designed, integrated, predictable, and simple they are.

Yeah, and the good documentation. Wish more open source projects had these.

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