URI:
        _______               __                   _______
       |   |   |.---.-..----.|  |--..-----..----. |    |  |.-----..--.--.--..-----.
       |       ||  _  ||  __||    < |  -__||   _| |       ||  -__||  |  |  ||__ --|
       |___|___||___._||____||__|__||_____||__|   |__|____||_____||________||_____|
                                                             on Gopher (inofficial)
  HTML Visit Hacker News on the Web
       
       
       COMMENT PAGE FOR:
  HTML   Back to FreeBSD: Part 1
       
       
        smitty1e wrote 22 hours 14 min ago:
        Is this fair?
        
        Linux is to *BSD as
        
        VHS was to Betamax.
       
        lizknope wrote 22 hours 20 min ago:
        > 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.
        
        In the mid 1990's the hardware driver support on Linux was much
        broader.
        
        Copy / paste of my comment from last year about FreeBSD
        
        I installed Linux in fall 1994. I looked at Free/NetBSD but when I went
        on some of the Usenet BSD forums they basically insulted me saying that
        my brand new $3,500 PC wasn't good enough.
        
        The main thing was this IDE interface that had a bug. Linux got a
        workaround within days or weeks. [1] The BSD people told me that I
        should buy a SCSI card, SCSI hard drive, SCSI CD-ROM. I was a sophomore
        in college and I saved every penny to spend $2K on that PC and my
        parents paid the rest. I didn't have any money for that.
        
        The sound card was another issue.
        
        I remember software based "WinModems" but Linux had drivers for some of
        these. Same for software based "Win Printers"
        
        When I finally did graduate and had money for SCSI stuff I tried
        FreeBSD around 1998 and it just seemed like another Unix. I used
        Solaris, HP-UX, AIX, Ultrix, IRIX. FreeBSD was perfectly fine but it
        didn't do anything I needed that Linux didn't already do.
        
  HTML  [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CMD640
       
        mono442 wrote 1 day ago:
        > FreeBSD reached that third stage in 2000. Linux wouldn't get there
        until 2008 with LXC.
        
        OpenVZ and Linux vserver are older than LXC and were commonly used,
        though they required a patched kernel.
       
        razighter777 wrote 1 day ago:
        I frequently see freeBSD jails as a highlighted feature, lauding their
        simplicity and ease of use. While I do admire them, there are benefits
        to the container approach used commonly on linux. (and maybe soon
        freebsd will better support OCI).
        
        First it's important to clarify "containers" are not an abstraction in
        the linux kernel. Containers are really an illusion achieved by use of
        a combination of user/pid/networking namespaces, bind mounts, and
        process isolation primitives through a userspace application(s)
        (podman/docker + a container runtime).
        
        OCI container tooling is much easier to use, and follows the "cattle
        not pets" philosophy, and when you're deploying on multiple systems,
        and want easy updates, reproducibility, and mature tooling, you use OCI
        containers, not LXC or freebsd jails. FreeBSD jails can't hold a candle
        to the ease of use and developer experience OCI tooling offers.
        
        > 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.
        
        This was an intentional design decision, and not a bad one! cgroups,
        namespaces, and seccomp are used extensively outside of the container
        abstraction. (See flatpak, systemd resource slices, firejail). By not
        tieing process isolation to the container abstraction, we can let
        non-container applications benefit from them. We also get a wide
        breadth of container runtime choices.
       
          znpy wrote 1 day ago:
          > lauding their simplicity and ease of use
          
          Spawning a linux container is much simpler and faster than spawning a
          freebsd jail.
          
          I don’t know why i keep hearing about jails being better, they
          clearly aren’t.
       
          Melatonic wrote 1 day ago:
          Jails have been around a long time in comparison
          
          I still see FreeBSD as being great for things like networking devices
          and storage controllers. You can apply a lot of the "cattle vs pets"
          design one level above that using VMs and orchestration tools.
       
        shevy-java wrote 1 day ago:
        > FreeBSD is worth a brief aside here, because it differs from Linux in
        a fundamental way. Linux is a kernel. What most people call "Linux" is
        actually that kernel combined with a GNU userland, a package ecosystem,
        and a set of choices that vary from distro to distro — Ubuntu,
        Fedora, and Arch are all running the same kernel but are meaningfully
        different systems underneath.
        
        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: [1] 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: [2] > 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?).
        
  HTML  [1]: https://dreamsongs.com/WorseIsBetter.html
  HTML  [2]: https://github.com/seccomp/libseccomp/releases
       
          assimpleaspossi wrote 23 hours 54 min ago:
          >>I think 500 out of 500 top supercomputers running Linux kind of
          show which philosophy is better.
          
          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.
       
        efortis wrote 1 day ago:
        A two-server networking setup with VNET Jails:
        
  HTML  [1]: https://ericfortis.com/blog/freebsd-jails-network-setup
       
        jmclnx wrote 1 day ago:
        >but they don't have a native answer to shipping
        
        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".
       
        user3939382 wrote 1 day ago:
        I switched my startup’s whole infra to FreeBSD a couple months ago.
        Found a use after free bug that Linux’s memory management was just
        fine with in Gnome XSLT lib that FreeBSD properly refused. Other than
        that smooth sailing, jails work great.
        
        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.
       
          rednb wrote 1 day ago:
          Done the same since 2018 circa, never looked back.
          
          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.
       
          ajross wrote 1 day ago:
          > all the Xorg politics nonsense
          
          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).
       
            user3939382 wrote 23 hours 41 min ago:
            > a huge ton of upstream dependencies
            
            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.
       
            rednb wrote 1 day ago:
            The key thing is that on freebsd you do not risk bricking your
            system by installing a port. Even though this guarantee has become
            less true with PkgBase
       
              ajross wrote 1 day ago:
              > The key thing is that on freebsd you do not risk bricking your
              system by installing a port
              
              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.
       
                rednb wrote 23 hours 33 min ago:
                I was referring to the need to be careful to not modify/update
                packages also used by the base system. Since all packages are
                treated the same on Linux, you often can't tell which package
                can put you in trouble if you update it along with the
                dependencies it drags with it.
                
                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.
       
          manuelabeledo wrote 1 day ago:
          You don’t need to follow the news cycle to use an operating system.
       
            user3939382 wrote 23 hours 36 min ago:
            I do follow the news cycle and if I’m hearing about a software
            package in it, something is wrong with the people making the
            software and I don’t trust them. Software is an engineering
            discussion or at least it’s supposed to be. Here’s my community
            guidelines: everyone be nice and respectful engage in good faith
            and focus on the math. Being social is fine so long that it
            doesn’t become a diversion from the engineering discussion.
            We’re talking about code not a philosophical treatise. There are
            civil ways  to settle disagreements. I’m so sick to death of the
            politics.
       
              manuelabeledo wrote 22 hours 27 min ago:
              It sounds like software projects are built by humans. Nothing
              wrong with that.
              
              Unless we’re assuming here that the BSD community is free from
              that.
       
        flipped wrote 1 day ago:
        Anyone looking to use jails might find BastileBSD helpful. It's a nice
        and modern jail manager.
       
          paul_h wrote 1 day ago:
          I was looking at TrueNAS CORE to see if it was a viable way to
          bsd-jail Linux containers. I'm really only doing this to get some
          protection from supply chain attacks given I'm fairly promiscuous at
          git-clone-and-run-a-build.  Before that I was aiming for the same
          with Bastille and had got to the give up stage because it felt too
          fiddly to set up. This was a year ago. Maybe its better now
       
        flipped wrote 1 day ago:
        Is there any technical writeup which explains how the isolation exactly
        works, on containers and VMs? I have always heard the high level
        arguments of weak isolation, same kernel, etc but never the
        implementation details.
       
        NooneAtAll3 wrote 1 day ago:
        "failed to verify your browser"
       
          m132 wrote 1 day ago:
          Getting the same thing, "Failed to verify your browser. Code 11".
          Some noise about WebGL in the browser console, getExtension() invoked
          on a null reference. LibreWolf on Linux + resist fingerprinting.
          
          Maybe opting for a better-written WAF could boost the reach?
       
        matheus-rr wrote 1 day ago:
        The jails vs containers framing is interesting but I think it misses
        why Docker actually won. It wasn't the isolation tech. It was the
        ecosystem: Dockerfiles as executable documentation, a public registry,
        and compose for local dev. You could pull an image and have something
        running in 30 seconds without understanding anything about cgroups or
        namespaces.
        
        FreeBSD jails were technically solid years before Docker existed, but
        the onboarding story was rough. You needed to understand the FreeBSD
        base system first. Docker let you skip all of that.
        
        That said, I've been seeing more people question the container stack
        complexity recently. Especially for smaller deployments where a jail or
        even a plain VM with good config management would be simpler and more
        debuggable. The pendulum might be swinging back a bit for certain use
        cases.
       
          KronisLV wrote 1 day ago:
          > the container stack complexity
          
          I'm using either Docker Compose or Docker Swarm without Kubernetes,
          and there's not that much of it, to be honest. My "ingress" is just
          an Apache2 container that's bound to 80/443 and my storage is either
          volumes or bind mounts, with no need for more complexity there.
          
          > The jails vs containers framing is interesting but I think it
          misses why Docker actually won. It wasn't the isolation tech. It was
          the ecosystem: Dockerfiles as executable documentation, a public
          registry, and compose for local dev. You could pull an image and have
          something running in 30 seconds without understanding anything about
          cgroups or namespaces.
          
          So where's Jailsfiles? Where's Jail Hub (maybe naming needs a bit of
          work)? Where's Jail Desktop or Jail Compose or Jail Swarm or
          Jailbernetes?
          
          It feels like either the people behind the various BSDs don't care
          much for what allowed Docker to win, or they're unable to compete
          with it, which is a shame, because it'd probably be somewhere between
          a single and double digit percent userbase growth if they decided to
          do it and got it right. They already have some of the foundational
          tech, so why not the UX and the rest of it?
       
            jacquesm wrote 23 hours 19 min ago:
            > I'm using either Docker Compose or Docker Swarm without
            Kubernetes, and there's not that much of it, to be honest.
            
            On the outside. But that's a lot of complexity hidden from view
            there, easily a couple of million lines of code on top of the code
            that you wrote.
       
          user3939382 wrote 1 day ago:
          You can also run Linux containers on FreeBSD
          
  HTML    [1]: https://youtu.be/HV-wUUzRCMo
       
          chuckadams wrote 1 day ago:
          Docker's client/server design also allowed for things like Docker
          Desktop, which made the integration seamless with non-linux systems. 
          Jails have nothing like that, so the only system that will ever run
          jails is FreeBSD.  Also, I'm not up to speed enough to know, but do
          jails even have a concept of container images?
       
          wolvoleo wrote 1 day ago:
          Jails were never going to 'win' because they're only on an OS with
          0.1% marketshare.
          
          But it's not a competition. FreeBSD does its thing and Linux does
          another. That's why I use FreeBSD.
       
            aswanson wrote 1 day ago:
            What is your use case for BSD?
       
          steve1977 wrote 1 day ago:
          Maybe FreeBSD doesn't want a jails "ecosystem"?
       
          steve1977 wrote 1 day ago:
          > You could pull an image and have something running in 30 seconds
          without understanding anything
          
          Fixed that for you ;)
       
          torstenvl wrote 1 day ago:
          > Jails solve the isolation problem beautifully, but they don't have
          a native answer to shipping. That gap is real, and it's one of the
          main reasons the ecosystem around jails feels underdeveloped compared
          to Docker's world.
          
          The link literally uses the term ecosystem. Several times actually.
       
          sthuck wrote 1 day ago:
          I don't think article misses it, it's exactly the point it makes
       
        lifeisstillgood wrote 1 day ago:
        I ran a whole company on top of FreeBSD back in the day (2005 ish). It
        was great, and ran all my personal pcs the same way (hell, refusing to
        install windows to try out this bitcoin idea is even now a good idea).
        
        But somehow Linux still took over my personal and professional life.
        
        Going back seems nice but there need to be a compelling reason -docker
        is fine, the costs don’t add up any more. I do t have a real logical
        argument beyond that.
       
          adrian_b wrote 23 hours 15 min ago:
          In the early years after 2000, FreeBSD 4 had a much better
          performance and reliability in any networking or storage applications
          in comparison with the contemporaneous Linux and Windows XP/Windows
          2000.
          
          However, in 2003 Intel introduced CPUs with SMT and in 2005 AMD
          introduced multi-core CPUs.
          
          These multi-threaded and/or multi-core CPUs quickly replaced the
          single-threaded CPUs, especially in servers, where the FreeBSD
          stronghold was.
          
          FreeBSD 4 could not handle multiple threads. In the following years
          Linux and Windows have been developed immediately to take advantage
          of multiple threads and cores, while FreeBSD has required many years
          for this, a time during it has become much less used than before,
          because new users were choosing Linux and some of the old users were
          also switching to Linux for their new computers that were not
          supported by FreeBSD.
          
          Eventually FreeBSD has become decent again from the PoV of
          performance, but it has never been again in a top position and it
          lacks native device drivers for many of the hardware devices that are
          supported by Linux, due to much fewer developers able to do the
          necessary reverse engineering work or the porting work for the case
          when some company provides Linux device drivers for their hardware.
          
          For the last 3 decades, I have been using continuously both FreeBSD
          and Linux. I use Linux on my desktop PCs and laptops, and in some
          computational servers where I need software support not available for
          FreeBSD, e.g. NVIDIA CUDA (NVIDIA provides FreeBSD device drivers for
          graphic applications, but not CUDA). I continue to use FreeBSD for
          many servers that implement various kinds of networking or storage
          functions, due to exceptional reliability and simplicity of
          management.
       
          flipped wrote 1 day ago:
          Never understood why satoshi was a prime windows user.
       
            earthscienceman wrote 1 day ago:
            I know this comment is effectively a side tangent on a side
            tangent. but that was always the strangest thing to me as well. I
            remember in 2012 when I was debating fiddling around with Bitcoin.
            that was one of the things that turned me off. I was sure that
            there was no way something as brilliant as this was supposed to be
            was developed by windows user.
            
            Which surely says something about all these ideological purity
            tests
       
              dijit wrote 1 day ago:
              Windows developers (like sysadmins) are of two kinds in my
              experience.
              
              People who don't understand shit about how the system behaves and
              are comfortable with that. "I install a package, I hit the
              button, it works"
              
              .. and
              
              People who understand very deeply how computers work, and
              genuinely enjoy features of the NT Kernel, like IOCP and the
              performance counters they offer to userland.
              
              What's weird to me is that the competence is bimodal; you're
              either in the first camp or the second. With Linux (+BSD/Solaris
              etc;) it's a lot more of a spectrum.
              
              I've never understood exactly why this is, but it's consistent.
              There's no "middle-good" Windows developer.
       
                anthk wrote 22 hours 58 min ago:
                Unix is easier to understand than the NT mess and everything
                it's in the open and documented, so you can achieve a good
                level of knowledge in the middle. OTOH in order to understand
                NT deeply you must be a reverse engineer. Also, on the other
                side, crazy experts under Wine (both ways, Unix and NT) OpenBSD
                and 9front do exist on par of these NT wizards. It just happen
                with Unix/9f you climb an almost flat slope (more in the
                second) due to the crazy simple design, while with NT the
                knowledge it's damn expensive to earn.
                
                With 9front you OFC need expertise on par of NT but without far
                less efforth. The books (9intro), the papers, CSP for
                concurrency... it's all there, there's no magic, you don't need
                ollyDBG or an NT object explorer to understand OLE and COM for
                instance.
                
                RE 9front? Maybe on issues while debugging, because the rest
                it's at /sys/src, and if something happens you just point Acid
                under Acme to go straight to the offending source line. The man
                pages cover everything. Drivers are 200x smaller and more
                understandable than both NT and Unix. 
                Meanwhile to do that under NT you must almost be able to design
                an ISA by yourself and some trivial compiler/interpreter/OS for
                it, because there's no open code for anything. And no, Wine is
                not a reference, but a reimplementation.
       
                salvesefu wrote 1 day ago:
                Probably bc, Windows users live in walled knowledge domains
                that tend to reinforce levels of competence (or lack of
                competence).
                
                Gamers tend to be somewhere in the middle though.
       
          dijit wrote 1 day ago:
          Yeah, I have a similar situation; FreeBSD is a great operating
          system, but the sheer amount of investment in Linux makes all the
          warts semi-tolerable.
          
          I'm sure some people have a sunk-cost feeling with Linux and will get
          defensive of this, but ironically this was exactly the argument I had
          heard 20 years ago - and I was defensive about it myself then.. This
          has only become more true though.
          
          It's really hard to argue against Linux when even architecturally
          poor decisions are papered over by sheer force of will and
          investment; so in a day-to-day context Linux is often the happy path
          even though the UX of FreeBSD is more consistent over time.
       
        palata wrote 1 day ago:
        Nice article!
        
        > 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: [...] Somehow we ended up
        with an overengineered mess of leaky abstractions
        
        Not sure I like the value judgement here. I think it's more of a
        consequence of Linux' success. I am convinced that if it was reversed
        (Linux was niche and *BSD the norm), then a ton of abstractions would
        come, and the average user would "use an overengineered mess" because
        they don't know better (or don't care or don't have a need to care).
        
        Not that I like it when people ship their binary in a 6G docker image.
        But I don't think it's fair to put that on "those Linux engineers".
       
          jacquesm wrote 23 hours 22 min ago:
          I don't agree with that. FreeBSD has more of an engineering than a
          hacking mentality and it shows in the various architectural choices.
          
          And containers really are a VM-light, so you might as well use the
          real thing, in fact, VMWare for a long time thought that their images
          would be a container like thing and many larger installations used
          them as such.
       
          realusername wrote 1 day ago:
          I don't think it's necessarily true, compare the BSD utils to the GNU
          utils and the style difference is very visible.
          
          On the other hand, I don't think the comparison between jails and
          docker is fair. What made Docker popular is the reusability of the
          containers, certainty not the sandboxing which in the early days was
          very leaky.
       
            shevy-java wrote 1 day ago:
            > compare the BSD utils to the GNU utils and the style difference
            is very visible.
            
            Well, what style difference exactly? GNU utils tend to be more
            verbose. Other than that, what is the difference in style?
       
              adrian_b wrote 22 hours 28 min ago:
              I do not know which is the difference, but you really feel a
              difference.
              
              It might be of homogeneity, i.e. the FreeBSD tools behave in a
              consistent way, while there are significant differences between
              the Linux tools, depending on which were the opinions of their
              particular authors about how the traditional UNIX tools should be
              changed.
              
              For instance, at some point in time, long ago, in Linux the
              traditional "ifconfig" and a few related commands have been
              replaced by "ip", for managing networking.
              
              The Linux "ifconfig" needed an upgrade, as it could do only a
              small fraction of what the FreeBSD "ifconfig" could do.
              Nevertheless, until today, decades later, I have been unable to
              stop hating the Linux "ip".
              
              I cannot say why, because in other cases when some command-line
              or GUI utility that I had used for many years was replaced by an
              alternative I instantly recognized that the new UI was better and
              I never wanted to use the old UI again.
              
              So while both FreeBSD and Linux have started with the same
              traditional UNIX utilities, they have evolved divergently and now
              they frequently feel quite differently, in the sense that the
              various options in commands or in configuration files may match
              your expectations only when taking into account the identity of
              the OS. Overall FreeBSD has been more conservative, but there are
              also cases when it has made bigger changes, but such changes seem
              more carefully planned and less haphazard than in the Linux
              world.
       
            NooneAtAll3 wrote 1 day ago:
            what do you mean by reusability?
       
              maxloh wrote 1 day ago:
              For example, you can build a Python image, and reuse it on every
              Python apps you have.
       
                fragmede wrote 1 day ago:
                And for the whole world, too. I don't need to build my own
                local stripped down version of Alpine Linux with python,
                somebody's already dike that for me.
       
                  irusensei wrote 22 hours 16 min ago:
                  I don't like that aspect of OCI containers. You shouldn't be
                  running or building on top of random images made by unknowns.
       
        nesarkvechnep wrote 1 day ago:
        I’m always going to like articles introducing people to FreeBSD.
       
       
   DIR <- back to front page