Out of the box ZFS is a big selling point for me. Jails are just lovely. The rc system is very easy to reason with. I've had systems that were only stable on freebsd that would crash using windows or various Linux.
I used (and pushed) it everywhere I could and first encountered on Solaris before FBSD. Even had it on my Mac workstation almost 18 years ago (unsupported) -- aside I will never forgive that asshole Larry Ellison for killing OpenSolaris. NEVER.
Systemd is the worst PoS every written. RCs are effective and elegant. Systemd is reason enough to avoid Linux but I still hold my nose and use it because I have to.
This is especially true compared to how beautifully well and consistently the BSDs tend to document their init and configuration systems. Or Mac OS, again—launchd is still way easier to use and far more of a "fire and forget" system without adding complicated interfaces for unrelated stuff like network interfaces and logging. But that has always been true as well.
Something I love with systemd is how I can get very useful stats about a running process, e.g. uptime, cumulated disk & network IOs, current & peak mem usage, etc.
Also the process management (e.g. restart rules & dependency chain) is pretty nice as well.
Is that doable with RC (or other BSD-specific tooling) as well?
In terms of uptime or IO and stuff, those metrics are already available. Be that via SNMP or other means. Say you start an nginx in systems, which network and disk usage does it report? Just the main process or all its forks? Same problem in RC.
But that is part of the point. Why in the ever-loving existence should an INIT system provide stats like disk usage? That is NOT what an init system is for.
If you need memory usage or IO usage or uptime, there are so many other tools already integrated into the system that the init system doesn't need to bother.
Init systems should only care about starting, stopping and restarting services. Period. The moment they do more than that, they failed at their core job.
This might came across stronger than meant to, but still holds true.
BSDs are about "keep it simple, keep it single purpose" to a "I can live with that degree". What you get though is outstanding documentation and every component is easily understandable. Prime examples are OpenBSD/FreeBSD PF. That firewall config is just easy to grok, easy to read up on and does 99.999% of what you ever need out of a firewall.
Well, the main process and its whole hierarchy, that's what you would expect of an init system monitoring its services, right? And what's nice with systemd is that I can get that from a simple `systemctl status my-service` – of course I could deploy a whole observability stack, but better if I can avoid it.
But there is no need to be defensive, it RC can that's nice, if it can't, then well, too bad.
> there are so many other tools already integrated into the system that the init system doesn't need to bother.
That's what I'd love to hear about, what are the equivalent in the BSDs world.
Or you just grab the PID and get it through that. A bit more manual, but composable.
Ditch the LLMs (not insinuating that you use them, but just in case), try to use the Handbooks and the man pages.
If you ever feel the need that you have so many interdependent services that you need something more complex than RC, then you might have an actual architectural problem to be honest.
Bang on.
I love the simplicity of RC scripts. Easy to understand, easy to debug, it just fucking works.
Simplicity is king, because it's understandable. A behemoth like systemd feels like it requires a PhD.
Systemd also runs 100% against the Unix/Linux philosophy of composability and single purpose.
You’re handwaving away something that is pretty important. You can say that having 500 services is its own problem but it’s also a reality, even on desktop operating systems.
So go and count all the services that are not base install and tell me how many you have.
Linux is "just" the kernel and every distro invites new solutions to perceived core problems whereas the BSDs have a whole base system that comes from one source, reducing the chance of a systemd popping up there. Both approaches have their ups and downs.
In reality systemd is 69 different binaries (only one of which runs as pid 1), all developed under the same project, designed to work together.
They’re designed to work together but as far as I am aware there’s no reason you couldn’t replace individual binaries with different ones, though admittedly I have never done that.
Linux is a monolith that includes a bunch of drivers for things you will never need (on a typical distro, not when you compile your own kernel). It does way more than I need it to, and it most definitely does more than one thing. But of course that's ok in that case
There's pretty much nothing I can't do on FreeBSD that I would get with one Linux or another. Not much of a gamer so maybe that factors in..