I am not quite sure what this means. I had a jail a few years ago and I remember there was a utility to "back" the jail up so you could put it on another system. Are there constraints with that utility. It seemed to work, maybe I am forgetting something ?
In any case I still think Jails are much better than the things Linux has. To me, it is creating a jail that is more difficult. There were ports that made it easier, I used one of them, but that port was abandoned at some point. I think it was "ezjail".
After IBM destroyed CentOS, all the Xorg politics nonsense, the list goes on with Linux, not interested. I just want something quiet and boring and stable and correctly designed. NetBSD would be my first choice but they don’t get the $ they need for drivers.
For a while even used it on the desktop, but was too much trouble due to specific tools we need that weren't supported properly. so we're using Linux on the desktop.
FreeBSD is stable, lightweight, gets out of the way, and without drama.
Unless we’re assuming here that the BSD community is free from that.
Uh... Xorg is packaged by FreeBSD too...
Really the whole theme that (from the article) "FreeBSD ships as a complete, coherent OS" is belied by this kind of nonsense. No, it's not. Or, sure, it is, but in exactly the same way that Debian or whatever is. It's a big soup of some local software and a huge ton of upstream dependencies curated for shipment together. Just like a Linux distro.
And, obviously, almost all those upstream dependences are exactly the same. Yet somehow the BSD folks think there's some magic to the ports stuff that the Linux folks don't understand. Well, there isn't. And honestly to the extent there's a delta in packaging sophistication, the Linux folks tend to be ahead (c.f. Nix, for example).
What specifically are you trying to cite here? Which package can I install on Debian or Fedora or whatever that "bricks the system"? Genuinely curious to know.
This kind of problem happens frequently when users add repositories such as Packman on Linux providing dependencies versions different from the ones used by the base system of the distro.
Experienced people know how to avoid these mistakes, but this whole class of problem does not exist on FreeBSD.
This is no longer the case in "immutable" distros such as Bluefin/Aurora, which uses ostree for the "base" distro, while most other user packages are installed with homebrew. Nix and Guix solve it in a very different way. Then there's flatpak and snap.
A lot of poor *BSD advocacy likes to deride Linux for its diversity one moment, then switch to treating it as a monolith when it's convenient. It's a minority of the users for sure, but they naturally make an outsized share of the noise.
I think you missed the point in my original comment. I explained I moved my platform with all dependencies and had 1 bug which was actually a silent bug in Linux.
In other words, it works. Your particular stack might have a different snag profile but if I can move my giant complex app there, yours is worth a shot.
FreeBSD is more complete than you make out. They also have hard working ports maintainers.
Well, sure, but that's a ridiculous double standard. You're making the claim (or implying it, at least) that FreeBSD is fundamentally superior because it's a unified piece of software shipped as a holistic piece of artifice or whatever. And that by inferrence it's unlike all that kludgey linux stuff that you can't trust because of politics or whatever.
But your evidence that it's actually superior? "it works". Well, gosh.
You'll tar the competition with all sorts of ambiguous smears, but all you ask from your favorite is... that you got your app to work?
Linux is to *BSD as
VHS was to Betamax.
Don't get me wrong, FreeBSD is simple, elegant, consistent and well manicured. It seems to have picked up some pace again. I'm rooting for it.
Likely is has a good place at the low end.
In enterprise mode, you want something like an AWS to hide the pain of those large-scale details that Linux is bringing.
It is not incorrect but ... do people really care about that distinction?
Because in most situations I know of, when people refer to Linux, they almost never refer to the linux kernel. They refer to the whole operating system stack, which is typically put down via a distribution. So, Fedora, Gentoo, Arch, and so forth, are all "kind of" Linux. Barely anyone refers to the linux kernel if you look at all the discussions on the world wide web.
> FreeBSD ships as a complete, coherent OS
The BSDs often promote that aka "Linux is chaos, we are coherent and consistent operating system following intelligent design". Well ... this is the rise of worse is better, repeated: https://dreamsongs.com/WorseIsBetter.html
It is a great analogy that works on so many levels. Broken down to Linux versus the BSDs, I think 500 out of 500 top supercomputers running Linux kind of show which philosophy is better. The one that works better. That does not mean the BSDs are useless, but I am getting tired of the promo used by the BSD as "we are order, Linux is chaos". I compare this more to Lego building blocks. With Linux there is a stronger focus on having building blocks available. You can build up things. You have projects such as LFS/BLFS (Linux from scratch). The BSDs do not have something comparable. Which operating system is the better tinker OS? Which community created git? (Ok ok that was Linus so not really a community per se, but it originated from Linux and perhaps that was not an accident either.)
> FreeBSD pioneered the practical implementation of what we now call containers.
Ok great. Many modern programming languages learned from older languages; many of these older languages are dead now. You need to keep on innovating. Why is BSD so dead set on the past?
> FreeBSD reached that third stage in 2000. Linux wouldn't get there until 2008 with LXC.
Dumdedum ... it kind of sounds as if the FreeBSD guys are sad that Linux went on to dominate. It reminds me of NetBSD aka "we work on every toaster in the world". Then suddenly on a mailing list many years ago "wait a moment ... Linux now works on more toasters than we do". The BSDs don't seem to understand how momentum can be dominating.
> Technical superiority doesn't win ecosystem wars. Linux won through a combination of fast decisions, the viral GPL licence, and strong enterprise backing from Red Hat and IBM. Then Google, Facebook, and Amazon happened — hungry for datacenters, developing tools to manage growing infrastructure at scale. They set the direction for the entire industry.
Ok that flat out is incorrect. First - GPL worked well for the linux kernel, that is true. But the ecosystem includes many BSD-licences programs too, on Linux. So that explanation fails already here. LLVM has Apache License 2.0 which I kind of feel is a mix between GPL and BSD (not quite true but this is how I remember it).
Then the claim is Linux won because of Red Hat. I actually find Red Hat annoying and I am glad to not depend on it. Linux is way bigger than Red Hat. IBM? I don't see what IBM did for Linux really. So that explanation also does not work.
Google, Facebook, and Amazon - well, they profited from Linux. They didn't really ENABLE Linux. They would not have used Linux if Linux would have been useless. So that part came afterwards.
So none of those explanations really work well here.
> Linux rapidly went from "the free OS for people who can't afford commercial licences" to "the only acceptable OS for servers".
That is true but not for the claims made, e. g. "because of Google". The more important question is: why did the BSDs fail?
> To solve the distribution and isolation problem, Linux engineers built a set of kernel primitives (namespaces, cgroups, seccomp) and then, in a very Linux fashion, built an entire ecosystem of abstractions on top to “simplify” things
No, that is also incorrect. cgroups are also very different to seccomp and the latter is even maintained independently: https://github.com/seccomp/libseccomp/releases
> Somehow we ended up with an overengineered mess of leaky abstractions for cloud-based, vendor-locked infrastructure.
Wait a moment - he cites Docker. That's owned by a private company. What does this have to do with Linux? If company xyz does something based on FreeBSD, we would then say company xyz is responsible for FreeBSD failing or not failing? How does that work?
> And this complexity has quietly reshaped how the industry thinks about deploying software. Today, if you want to run an application in a larger system, the implicit assumption is that you containerise it with Docker and orchestrate it with Kubernetes.
Personally I find all this abstraction crap. With all their failures, though, things such as docker kind of present a "download this one file, then it will work fine". And that is kind of true. I saw that in in-campus use for life science faculty clusters and what not. It simplifies things for the admin there. People give a similar rationale for systemd. Personally I don't think systemd should exist, but there are people who benefit from it - that simply is a factual statement.
All in all this is a very strange point of view from FreeBSD folks. At the least the NetBSD folks back then on the mailing list acknowledged the situation and then tried to find alternative strategies and in some ways succeeded (although I am not sure whether NetBSD right now runs on more toasters than Linux does - anyone has updated statistics for that?).
Or is it because it's what they're used to. I saw this argument elsewhere where the respondent went on to show that the users were Linux specialists and that's why Linux was used.
Maybe opting for a better-written WAF could boost the reach?