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Comment by JoshTriplett | Hacker News Reader

Part of the job of a Linux distribution is to provide policy, conventions, and similar consistency.

If you install everything from sources directly, or directly from upstream vendors, you may get inconsistencies, but if you install everything from your Linux distribution, you should get reasonable consistency, just as if you install everything from your BSD distribution.

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even in a distro, you'll get various syntax variations for instance

Syntax of what?

cli programs, they all have different ways to handle arguments, options, help

ps: another instance, albeit not a BSD strength either, would be data format, every output is different, I, like a few people too wanted some json as pivot representation to cut the thousands of papercuts, that kind of uniformity is what I expect from "system"

Lots (just some? most? I haven't really used it much) of FreeBSD system utilities are using libxo for output, so you can use e.g.

    ps --libxo json

and get json output, or xml/html

I didn't know bsd already adopted it, only heard a few passing mentions. That's great, though, and note that I mostly meant that about linux.

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