Comment by stackghost | Hacker News Reader

Comment by stackghost | Hacker News Reader

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A not-insignificant chunk of the userbase of the various BSDs is there because they were turned off of Linux after controversial things like Gnome 3, systemd being shoved down users' throats despite being a broken mess, wayland (though nobody was as arrogant about wayland as Poettering was about systemd), etc.

All that to say, the BSD userbase as a sizeable subset that are there for countercultural reasons, rather than technical. These are the people who buy into, say, OpenBSD's vaunted security reputation, or believe that "linux bad because reasons", so you're always going to get people in here bragging, because "not using linux" has become part of their identity.

I run a mix of FreeBSD and Linux on my personal devices. The ground truth is that FreeBSD is yet another unix-like OS written in C, and thus not immune from the types of bugs that stem from that lineage. None of the BSD distros are materially more secure or better than a properly-configured and patched Linux.

The person 'bragging' was not a countercultural user, but rather the FreeBSD engineering lead. They were, however, talking about FreeBSD's response to security vulnerabilities, in contrast to Linux's response.

> thus not immune from the types of bugs that stem from that lineage

They never claimed that FreeBSD didn't have vulnerabilities. I honestly have no idea why grandparent decided to bring up their comment when it exactly validates what the person they were criticising says. GP admits the response to the vulnerability was well-coordinated. The response to security vulnerabilities was the exact, and only, subject of the post they're calling out.

I wouldn't call it countercultural. And Wayland actually runs on freebsd these days.

I use Linux as well but I really like FreeBSD for a number of technical reasons. Like the ports collection, the jails, the first-class citizen ZFS.

And Gnome 3 doesn't really have anything to do with Linux. It is also available for FreeBSD if you want it (I don't, I hate the minimalist opinionated design style so I use KDE, also on Linux).

But I use Linux on servers where I run docker for example. It's not about "not using linux".

> And Gnome 3 doesn't really have anything to do with Linux.

There's a very hard push on getting Gnome 3 aligned to systemd. Gnome is actually my preferred DE on Linux when I choose to use one. But compatibility with Unix systems is becoming harder every day.

Yes even KDE recently introduced a new display manager that is completely tied to systemd. For that reason it's not supported on FreeBSD. But sddm still works of course. But it is a worrying precedent.

From the gnome team this was to be expected because they are beholden to RedHat/IBM and the other big distros who push systemd heavily. But from the KDE team I didn't.

I've stopped my monthly KDE donations for this reason. Just to send a message that this isn't ok.

I also use a mix. I moved to FreeBSD initially after a rough period w/Linux in the late 90's. Today, my FreeBSD machines are all VMs running on Linux hosts!

Hah I'm your mirror version -- my linux machines are all VMs running on FreeBSD hosts!

Is bhyve working well for you? Maybe I'll try that in my next rev of my home lab.

Oh you use bhyve?

I've tried to use it but I dound it pretty difficult for systems that need a GUI. Maybe I should revisit.

Yep, most of my linuxes are headless -- but I do have a VM which I pass a graphics card through to for games and ai stuff though -- works really well (as long as you don't reboot the VM, it has a hard time attaching to the gfx card the second time for some reason, not looked into it much)

sysutils/vm-bhyve makes it quite friendly.

I wouldn't use it for work, though, just personal. Work is all enterprisey kubernetes stuff.

Edit: there is a 'proxmox-like' for FreeBSD out [0] -- I did try it on a couple machines and couldn't get the network working, but consoles seemed to work.. Kinda.

0: https://sylve.io

Ah I don't really have a second GPU to dedicate to it though. A virtual console like in VMware or QEMU/KVM would be great. Thanks for the heads-up about sylve! I'll check it out.

For me it's all personal too. For work we still use VMWare a lot.

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