[TUHS] FreeBSD kernel not OK? (was: What do you currently use for your primary OS at home?)

[Will Senn]

+1, installing FreeBSD takes me on average 5 minutes. 5 more to apply updates. With ZFS system restores take less than 5 and getting things configured the way I like them is another hour if it’s not a restore. GUI? KDE and Xfce work... not my faves, but better than Gnome for my taste. My only gripe with it is that I run a huge number of programs regularly and they slowly find their way into the package system. Zoom works, but only in the browser, Outlook works, sort of, rstudio kinda works, dotnet doesn’t work at all... These all work and work well on Linux. If they worked on FreeBSD, I would never need another environment. FreeBSD is sane when it comes to init. System-D is for some other use-case than mine, but I’ll put up with init madness if the next time I download a new dev tool, it just works...

Will

Sent from my iPhone

> On Mar 8, 2024, at 5:18 PM, Greg 'groggy' Lehey <grog at lemis.com> wrote:
> 
>> On Thursday,  7 March 2024 at 19:42:59 -0800, Larry McVoy wrote:
>>> On Thu, Mar 07, 2024 at 08:15:43PM -0500, Jeffry R. Abramson wrote:
>>> On Thu, 2024-03-07 at 13:08 +0000, Ben Kallus wrote:
>> 
>> FreeBSD and me got reconnected when Netflix wanted to hire me a
>> while back.  While the kernel may be OK (it's not, ask me how I
>> know, I walked the code)
> 
> OK, I'm asking.  I've been there too, and I don't see any obvious and
> serious deficiencies.
> 
>> FreeBSD is stuck in the 1980s.  Raise your hand if you have
>> installed FreeBSD in the last 20 years.
> 
> /me raises.
> 
>> That "UI" for partitioning the disks, so arcane.  The whole install
>> experience is _awful_.
> 
> Agreed, some of the installation tools could do with improvement.  But
> how often do you install FreeBSD?  As I have already noted, I've been
> using it for 25 years or so, and in the early days I held classes on
> installing FreeBSD.  By about 2000 they seemed a little pointless.  In
> general, once it's there, it's there.  You seem to be emphasizing the
> wrong part of the system.
> 
>> SunOS was a bug fixed BSD, so I really loved BSD.  But BSD is so
>> dead it is not even funny.  Linux is light years ahead.  Here is an
>> example from more than 20 years ago.  I was installing RedHat Linux
>> and the machine I was installing on didn't have a mouse.  The
>> installer was graphical and it was just easier to tab through the
>> options than go find a mouse.
> 
> Again, installation.  How about *using* the system?  And why should
> you need a *mouse* to install software?
> 
> Greg
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