As soon as they came out with scale, I knew core was going to be cut off when scale got good enough. There are just more possibilities with what you can do with Linux. The extra community support can not be understated as valuable to a profit driven company. At the end of the day, they gotta eat too and having one base system instead of two is the way they need to do it. The features are growing much faster on scale than they ever were on core in my opinion.
Even before that (by about 2 years, I believe), when ZFS on Linux became OpenZFS as the shared upstream, that constituted the proverbial 'writing on the wall'.
“We had a huge chunk of our engineering staff spending time improving FreeBSD as opposed to working on features and functionalities. What’s happened now with the transition to having a Debian basis, the people I used to have 90 percent of their time working on FreeBSD, they’re working on ZFS features now … That’s what I want to see; value add for everybody versus sitting around, implementing something Linux had a years ago. And trying to maintain or backport, or just deal with something that you just didn’t get out of box on FreeBSD.”
I still hold much love for FreeBSD, but this is very much indicative of my experience with it as well. The tooling in FreeBSD, specifically dtrace, bhyve, jails, and zfs was absolutely killer while Linux was still experiencing teething problems with a nonstandard myriad of half developed and documented tools. But Linux has since then matured, adopted, and standardized. And the strength of the community is second to none.
Much depends on your use cases I figure. Here's an example about my mixed feelings for Linux : I use Debian among others on the desktop. I noticed that when I log out from the GUI and return to the Display Manager a lot of processes keep running in the background all owned by my user. Maybe not a problem but I do not like it so much. I compared it with an OpenBSD installation I have. The same happens except for less processes and none of them is owned by my user.
To add some more : Done FreeBSD and OpenBSD installations here this month. Having FreeBSD on a Raspberry Pi was much easier than expected and boots from USB (yay!). Installing OpenBSD with disk encryption was also much easier than before because the installer has build in support. One day I'd like to have an OpenBSD server running with Honk on it for simple micro blogging, and maybe wireguard VPN.Perhaps with https://openbsd.amsterdam
I got a spare RPi3. Seems the hardware support is great, even with wifi. RTC seems to be unsupported tho. Such a shame since I got a DS3231 just for the Pi.
I got a spare RPi3. Seems the hardware support is great, even with wifi. RTC seems to be unsupported tho. Such a shame since I got a DS3231 just for the Pi.
What's DS3231 ?
How’s your overall experience?
So far I've only been using ssh to log in to the FreeBSD stick on the pi4, and have been testing it with a GELI encrypted USB disk to explore that and learn some more, besides using LUKS with Linux. I have been thinking about making desktop backups to the Geli disk via rsync. I find it interesting to learn some more internals of BSD again (like years ago). For example in Linux the default command to check your own local IP address is ip. The command ifconfig has been deprecated on Linux. But on FreeBSD and iirc OpenBSD it is - tada! - ifconfig. I'm curious to have a look at Bastille given enough time.
DS3231 is an I2C based high accuracy RTC chip, usually comes in breakout modules. Mine was packaged in such a way you can plug in the header directly to the expansion pins of the Pi.
What you just described sounds wild to me. I'll check it out!
If you're trying to use it as a workstation or a laptop, you won't find much compelling. It's built with the intent to act as a server. In fact, as a web server or networking server it's second to none.
Administrating BSD is lovely. It's well documented and everything is very stable, understandable, and predictable.
