[TUHS] UNIX of choice these days?

[Lyndon Nerenberg]

> On Sep 19, 2017, at 5:39 PM, Dave Horsfall <dave at horsfall.org> wrote:
> 
> Definitely FreeBSD, because it's solid, has thousands of ports, and well, is BSD...  And I access it via my MacBook :-)

Free is nice as a desktop environment, but over the last several years it has accreted a lot of bloat.  Ever since clang arrived I've become much less enamoured with it, despite being an active user since the 1.x days.  As a server platform, anything I cannot remotely install over the network using PXE, tftp, and http via the IPMI console is a non-starter.  That's the show stopper that's keeping it out of our data centres right now.

At $WORK I'm using Open for more than just firewalls these days.  It's so light weight, and bloat free.  The threading support in the network stack is great to see.  And even in its current state, we're running busy nginx/haproxy servers on really light weight Supermicro hardware where the machines barely wake up. 

For big server applications I would prefer to be using a Solaris derivative.  The way it lets you tune scheduling, processor affinity, kernel resources, etc., is remarkable.  But trying to sell that to anyone corporately these days is hopeless.  Hell, you can't even sell it 'technically' to people who should (and do) know better.

--lyndon