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Comment by lmm | Hacker News Reader

ZFS is great, jails are great (much clearer and simpler than the complexity of containers on Linux), the properly integrated OS can still do little usability things that Linux can't like ^T. But mostly it's just stable and reliable and doesn't keep changing how everything works. Sound is still OSS. Network configuration is still ifconfig. The whole devfs/hal/udev mess was much less of a mess. I don't have to deal with systemd changing how everything works.

Frankly I'd turn your question around: FreeBSD does everything that Linux used to do for me, better than Linux does. So what's the point of Linux today?

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Since the original post is about OpenBSD and the parent is about FreeBSD, just some addition:

1. ZFS is not supported in OpenBSD. Here's why OpenBSD doesn't have ZFS (pretty much every other BSD does): https://old.reddit.com/r/openbsd/comments/7xsx8u/why_doesnt_... (There's probably a better link out there)

2. Jails are not supported in OpenBSD. AFAIK, they are a FreeBSD-only feature.

I'm caught in a strange situation where my MacBook Pro wireless is supported by OpenBSD (and not FreeBSD) but I really like ZFS and Jails. Some features like those about trackpads, sound, wireless "just work" in a basic Arch install but not on FreeBSD. So I'd take "FreeBSD does everything that Linux used to do for me" with a grain of salt, because that has not been true for me.

OpenBSD does have pledge, on the other hand. And yeah, different systems have different features and tradeoffs; some people could legitimately say to take "Linux does everything that FreeBSD used to do for me" with a grain of salt, because that has not been true for them (say, if they like ZFS + boot environments, which is a relative pain on Arch).

I still haven't gotten boot from encrypted root pool with GRUB set up properly; it fails and drops to initramfs, I manually import and mount, after which it continues boots fine ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

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