Subj : Re: NetBSD 10
To   : Gamgee
From : Arelor
Date : Tue Apr 02 2024 06:46 pm

  Re: Re: NetBSD 10
  By: Gamgee to tenser on Tue Apr 02 2024 04:53 pm

 > I've "wanted" to try/use the BSDs over the years, and have tried a few
 > times - found them aggravating and strange.  With the state of Linux
 > what it is today, I can find no valid reason to fuss with a BSD.
 >

They are only strange if you try to use them as you would use a Linux, which they aren't. I got into Linux before I got into BSD so I know some differences break your train of thought if you are not expecting them.

Realistically, the reason to deal with a BSD these days would be wanting to use a system that possesses the following characteristics:

1) Third party components can be built from source and installed automatically, patched and rebuilt if need be, and integrating your own components with the build system is trivial. ie. if you make a program for yourself you can add it to the build system and the build system will make and install a package for it as if it belonged to an official repository.

2) Standard packages are still available from the repositories so you may install a big application without having to compile, without the need to give up on 1).

3) First-party components (aka. the core Operating System) are developped and deployed as a block, so you can assume an install of a given BSD fullfills a number of minimum requisites and contains certain components. Compare this to Linux, in which a Linux distribution is not even guaranteed to use a given libc flavor and the filesystem hierarchy is mutable. If a third-party application is described as Linux compatible it might mean it only works on certain distribution and fails to work on the rest.

4) It has proper release engineering and predictable roadmaps and release schedules.

And, in the case of OpenBSD

5) Their sandboxing frameworks are much simpler to understand and blow Linux equivalents our of the water for applications in small deployments.

6) BSD Auth makes more sense than PAM.

7) Userspace utilities just rock. OpenSMTPD allows you to set an SMTP server in like 5 lines of configuration, OpenHTTPD gives you a lightweight HTTP server you can run serious applications on with minimal configuration. The reverse proxy developed in house follows suit. A firewall can be set with way less lines that you'd expect. And so on. This also leads to ease of maintenance since everything is so easy to understand.

8) The installation procedure is blazing fast.

Quite frankly, for small server deployments, the real question is why should somebody use anything other than a BSD. This question has some valid answers, but in practical terms I suspect most people are running with Linux because if you want to run $some_random_blog there are plenty copypasteable tutorials for common Linux distributions to use.


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