Comment by eleitl | Hacker News Reader

Comment by eleitl | Hacker News Reader

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He seems to think in his comparison Debian comes on top.

However, the points which he thinks are where Debian is stronger illustrate precisely where Linux has lost its way. Laptop support is lacking -- assuming you care about laptops, and care about suspend working out of the box. Guess what, suspend didn't work out of the box under Debian, either.

Storage, he's forgetting that zfs is both a filesystem, and a volume manager.

Support of alien file systems, really? Irrelevant for servers, for everything else mount it via NFS.

Virtualization -- between jails and Virtual Box (on desktops) what is the use case for a different product here?

Nothing like Dropbox -- that's not a bug, it's a feature.

Desktop environments need configuration -- why I am migrating from Linux, you think? If I already have to use alternative window managers and desktops on Linux, where is the big difference?

Package managers, now that is a good point. XML config, that too. Nigh everything else is missing the point.

I never said Debian comes out on top. In fact, I went out of my way to say "use the right tool for the job." There are cases where FreeBSD is better and cases where Debian is better. To take something as complex as a modern operating system and say one or the other is always better would be foolish.

But, to address the questions: suspend does work out of the box for many laptops on Debian, including suspend on lid close, and has for years.

ZFS as a volume manager - I specifically addressed this. ZFS is not a suitable volume manager for everyone because it is fairly rigid once a zpool is set up. You cannot expand a raidz1 nearly as easily as a RAID-5 in Linux. (You have a stripe the data across another storage group.) You can't shrink a zpool at all. These are limitations that matter in some, but not all, setups.

Support of alien filesystems may be irrelevant for many servers, but it is not for all. But anyhow, people use an OS for more than just servers.

Virtualization -- believe it or not, there are people that need ways to run Windows. Sometimes a whole lot of Windows.

Dropbox -- lacking something that can to instant auto-syncs is a feature? That's pretty presumptious.

There is a big difference on desktop environments and configuration. Install Debian and with a simple selection of "desktop environment", it boots up into a working DE. FreeBSD -- not so much. Install a bunch of packages, exit some polkit and hal files, and then you'll get there. Well, if you thought to run pkg inside typescript so you see what pkla files to edit.

Things are looking a little brighter on the ZFS pool shrinking front thanks to Delphix working on device removal: http://blog.delphix.com/alex/2015/01/15/openzfs-device-remov...

> Nothing like Dropbox -- that's not a bug, it's a feature.

What a horribly arrogant and conceited thing to say.

Not only that, but it also misses the point in the original context. Missing an inotify equivalent can be a handicap for a number of different applications. Whether kqueue is an acceptable alternative sounds like it's worthy of a separate discussion.

No kqueue is not an acceptable alternative as it uses file descriptors to "watch" for changes :(

Um, yes it is.

https://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=kqueue&sektion=2

It's also wrong. FreeBSD supports the best there is: Tarsnap.

I use Tarsnap and Dropbox. They aren't the same at all:

* You run Tarsnap whenever you want to push changes; Dropbox automatically pushes changes.

* Tarsnap is for 'real' computers only; Dropbox runs on my phone (which is very useful for photos, among other things).

* Tarsnap is billed by usage (at a very small amount); Dropbox has a free tier.

* Tarsnap doesn't have a natural sharing usecase; Dropbox does.

* Fundamentally, Tarsnap is backup, and Dropbox is sync. They are two different things. Not to mention that Tarsnap is also supported just fine on Linux.

That's a backup solution which you can also run on Linux without an issue. Dropbox is more for collaboration. It's often the only tool in its class used by smaller publishers or marketing companies. They don't have an ftp or webdav server. And it sure beats emailing files around.

There's also the syncthing port and owncloud sync support via mirall.

> Nothing like Dropbox -- that's not a bug, it's a feature.

I dunno about that, but there's always OwnCloud which runs anywhere you can get PHP running (yeah, 2 minute hate on PHP, who cares it works.) and has clients for iOS, Android & everything else you can think of

I'm typing this on my Debian X200. Suspend works just fine.

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