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Comment by VLM | Hacker News Reader

"But I can’t stay at some early jessie checkpoint forever."

We're all moving to freebsd.

PC-BSD[0] (the desktop-focused fork of FreeBSD) does look like quite a promising systemd-free alternative to Debian. One potential problem is, as always, that the graphics drivers[1] lag behind Linux, so the latest stuff might not be supported.

And until bhyve[2] adds support for Windows guests (which they plan to do) I still need Linux's KVM.

[0] http://www.pcbsd.org/

[1] https://wiki.freebsd.org/Graphics

[2] https://wiki.freebsd.org/bhyve

I noticed the other day that KDE 4 (my current favorite WM) is now running on OpenBSD -- I'm due for a new desktop next year, I'm pretty sure it'll be OpenBSD. I've been looking forward to running that as a daily desktop for years.

I just started exploring freebsd for this very reason.

What would make you pick FreeBSD over, say, Illumos?

More eyes and hands means better faster security patches and similar issues. That's why I don't use "three guys and a github" specialized linux distros. If you follow a similar outlook (and what works for me might not work for you) then a crude google search result indicates the community for freebsd is about 30 times more talkative (30 times bigger?) and some more wikipedia searches reveal freebsd is five times the age WRT stability.

I have never heard of Illumos which also implies I've never heard anything bad about it. Although I do personally know people who swear by freebsd, so ...

I would probably use a *bsd to avoid all possibility of systemd issues, and

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_BSD_operating_sys...

implies the big "thing" for freebsd is "usable for any purpose" which is the old Debian "universal OS" concept I like so much.

I would strongly consider openbsd for something bare out on the internet not behind a stateful firewall and my limited experience with netbsd is its pretty awesome but being able to boot on a PDP11 necessitates some excessive old code. I'm astounded by retroBSD on PIC32 arch.

>I'm astounded by retroBSD on PIC32 arch.

And now I am, too. Thanks for this.

Thank you for the explanation--I'm looking at different high-reliability OS's for long-time embedded deployments, and xBSD flavors are looking pretty promising.

> I have never heard of Illumos which also implies I've never heard anything bad about it.

It's the open fork of OpenSolaris after the Oracle takeover of Sun. Many ex-Sun engineers work at companies that use/contribute to Illumos.

For me, package management on OpenIndiana sucks. OpenCSW doesn't support IPS yet, the Oracle IPS repo is way outdated, and the SmartOS/pkgsrc packages don't install/build correctly. Compare this with my FreeBSD setup, where I'm building my own package repository with poudriere (which also handles my build customizations) and easily pushing packages and configuration data with Salt. I was especially disappointed with pkgsrc, since I figured that would be easy to get running.

That said, I haven't had a chance to try other Illumos distributions like SmartOS or OpenSXCE. Maybe the sysadmin experience is better on them.

I rest on my Slack :)

Volkerding is taking a pragmatic view of all this (as you might have expected). May have to go systemd at some point in the future due to mudballing tendency. [1]

[1] http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/interviews-28/interv...

Ctrl-F systemd for the section around the middle. I imagine it depends on udev/eudev and logind dependencies in desktops and then d-bus.

Try Gentoo first.

As a fellow gentoo-user, I am extremely happy with it.... until it's kernel upgrade time. I've managed to forget the set of flags needed to make my system work as desired. So it's a pretty painful process.

run `zcat /proc/config.gz > ~/kernelconfig` (i believe that's the right filename for the average Gentoo kernel; haven't booted Gentoo in a long time) and you'll end up with a full list of all the options you chose for your currently running kernel.

This shows all the config options. Options change from kernel to kernel so doing a simple diff does not always reveal the user's intentional config changes. Otherwise gentoo is painless.. in the long term.

Run "make oldconfig" after zcat. Then the previous config changes are applied.

I never used genkernel. When I compile a new kernel version I just eselect it, cd into /usr/src/linux, "zcat /proc/config.gz > .config; make oldconfig" and go through the new options manually. I also have scripts for the modules/kernel installation and the recompilation of packages with kernel modules.

Indeed - for all folks disillusioned by systemd, Gentoo is a source based rolling release distro whose fundamental tenet is choice - so it shouldn't be a surprise that it is possible to use alternate init systems on Gentoo, in fact Gentoo liveCD/handbook defaults to OpenRC while providing the choice to run other init systems (I run systemd with a somewhat complicated RAID setup with no problems).

All five of you.

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