[HN Gopher] FreeBSD has serious problems with focus, longevity a... ___________________________________________________________________ FreeBSD has serious problems with focus, longevity and lifecycle Author : rsync Score : 33 points Date : 2022-01-24 20:18 UTC (2 hours ago) (HTM) web link (lists.freebsd.org) (TXT) w3m dump (lists.freebsd.org) | shimont wrote: | Who uses FreeBSD those days? As a company that runs on the cloud, | AWS/GCP/Azure you run windows/linux, and on desktop people mainly | run MacOS/Windows/Linux. | | I am really asking as for what is the main use case of FreeBSD in | 2022? | LeoPanthera wrote: | Domain-specific derivatives of FreeBSD are still very popular, | such as TrueNAS, pfSense, OPNsense, and so on. | rsync wrote: | We[1] have our entire infrastructure on FreeBSD - and always | have. | | That's why this has been frustrating - we have a history of | committing real money[2][3] to the project in an attempt to | make investments ... but there is never a fixed target to make | those investments in. | | It is a matter of fact that our own use of FreeBSD - in live | production for a business - is _completely divorced_ from the | experience and day to day usage of FreeBSD developers. | | [1] rsync.net and, previously, JohnCompanies | | [2] https://www.rsync.net/resources/notices/2007cb.html | | [3] | [deleted] | rsync wrote: | I wrote this in 2012 - almost _exactly ten years ago_ - and it | remains true. | | Looking at freebsd.org right now I see that my options for | production, release systems are 12.3 and 13.0 ... | | ... which means that if 12.1-RELEASE came out at the end of 2019 | and 13.0-RELEASE came out in April of 2021, you had _all of 16 | months_ to make investments in the 12 branch before it was | hopelessly passe and all queries regarding it would be answered | with: | | "That's fixed in current ..." | | The 4.x nostalgia is justified: it was polished and polished and | polished over many years and many organizations were incentivized | to invest in that branch | LeoPanthera wrote: | Just because you think it's still true doesn't mean you're | justified in not putting (2012) in the title. | VWWHFSfQ wrote: | Is this partly because there is no (or very little) commercial | support for FreeBSD and therefore nobody is all that interested | in the boring bits like long-term stability releases such as the | 5 year release, 5 years of support suggestion in that thread? The | volunteers want to do new and interesting things. They don't want | to backport fixes for 5 year old bugs anymore when most likely | the subsystem that contained that bug has already been replaced | in current anyway, so "what's the point?". And if nobody is being | paid to do it, if there's nobody _to pay_ to do it, then nobody | is going to do it. This has always been the problem with FreeBSD. | Despite some great technology the operating system itself has | mostly fallen by the wayside in the grand scheme of things. | There's way too much FreeBSD "religion" in that community IMO. | KindOne wrote: | Needs (2012) in the title. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2022-01-24 23:03 UTC)