[zxcvcxz]

I don't know how anyone can lump Linux in with Windows when it comes to security from NSA spying and then say OpenBSD is a good alternative.

HN seems to love the anti-Linux FUD though. Anything that further fractures the OSS community is upvoted fast.

I like the BSDs too, but there are a ton of reasons Linux is the most popular kernel in the world, it's not just because the NSA makes it so.

[dijit]

it's not just that though, there's the push for systemd which was not welcomed and alienated a lot of sysadmin folk who frequent hackernews.

personally I felt rather shafted by systemd, not because it's bad, but because my arguments were never even met, it was just a brushing off from some of the people who had already accepted it.

So I tried the BSD's and they were significantly better than I imagined they would be, I would put money on this being the case for other people who are upvoting these topics.

[gkya]

I'm 23, I used GNU/Linux since I was 11, and about at the beginning of this year (2016) I switched to FreeBSD. It was the first time I had an easily and consistently configurable, recreatable, understandable, enjoyable PC system that went out of the way once configured. It is so pleasurable that I don't even care I can't suspend and hibernate yet, even though I'd hardly turn of my computer and my workflow used to rely on having my laptop on for ten-twenty days and reboots were seldom and because of me forgetting to plug the thing in, or I updated the system. Also, I updated from 10.2 to .3, and it was the most pleasurable, most silent and non-destructive update I ever did. I just merged from /etc and /usr/local/etc to my config repo, and good to go (I have two scripts to copy back and forth the config files into my repo). I expect a mass migration to BSDs to happen soon. They are decent desktops, and soon they'll do better on laptops.

[dijit]

FWIW I did what you did, Linux -> FreeBSD, but when I moved "further" away from linux-land and went to openbsd I was surprised at how much more polished things are.

My laptop (thinkpad X201s) used to idle very rough under FreeBSD and suspend didn't work, but under openbsd it did.

Also there were some hardware drivers which appeared not to work at first but running 'fw_update' caused openbsd to download the device drivers I needed and they started working perfectly.

I'm still shocked how easy it was, sure I miss all my software that depends on /proc and I miss zfs.. but I can't think of an operating system that would fit my thinkpad better.

[gkya]

Well if only I could run OpenBSD on my X51RL... That is, it runs fine, but my wifi card doesn't work. I actually just asked a question on /r/openbsd about that: https://www.reddit.com/r/openbsd/comments/4ilko3/drivers_con... Hope to get some helpful answers there, the case with ath5k is so complicated, reading mailing list and glimpsing over the related C files (I know little C and no hardware) didn't provide any info.

[cm3]

There's also systemd's constant regressions and awkward interfaces and limited functionality when they replace existing solutions. It should have stopped at unifying init scripts, although upstart had that, SMF had it, so it's great to see nosh being cross-platform and able to import system unit files.

[cm3]

Speaking of SMF, it's interesting that the seemingly little effort to recreate it led to systemd, while nobody attempts to create a read/write implementation of ZFS. I mean, if you can accept the license of ZFS (huge piece of code), we could have just as well forked SMF, but a clean slate with a different license may have been a favorable choice.

[protomyth]

as to other init systems, OpenBSD did some work on their's http://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article&sid=20160508140927&mo...

[cm3]

Interesting, thanks for the pointer.

[vox_mollis]

Indeed. If systemd were just a parallelized init system with better unit management, far more would be okay with this shift.

But that wasn't enough. They had to hijack bootloading, logging, device management, network, etc. For reasons that nobody seems to be able to actually explicate.

[cm3]

They want to control it all to give the best possible user experience but fail short and introduce bugs I've never had since the first day I've installed Linux in the 90s.

[PhantomGremlin]

They want to control it all to give the best possible user experience

Or perhaps, since Poettering et al. are Red Hat employees:

Red Hat want to control it all ... for reasons

[the_why_of_y]

OpenBSD's CVS contains implementations of bootloading[1], logging[2], device management[3], network[4], etc. For the simple reason that you need all that to have a useful operating system.

[1] http://cvsweb.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb/src/sys/stand/boot/

[2] http://cvsweb.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb/src/usr.sbin/syslog...

[3] http://cvsweb.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb/src/sbin/atactl/

[4] http://cvsweb.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb/src/sbin/ifconfig/

[digi_owl]

Best i can tell, is a "developers developers developers" thing. The goal is to present a set of APIs that abstract away the underlying OS.

Sadly though this has been done multiple times over, but then discarded because of CADT.

Pop over to Freedesktop.org and you will find the remains of a number of discarded projects. Most of them discarded just as they are 99% feature complete and the devs face the prospect of doing janitorial maintenance.

[Wildgoose]

Not just sysadmin folk. I'm a long time Linux user (since 1993) who has just switched his main machine to Gentoo in order to avoid systemd and has just installed OpenBSD on an old laptop to try it out.

[nickysielicki]

You don't have to be a sysadmin to think it's a bad idea for pid 1 to have a hard dependency on glibc.

It's a nightmare. And it's incredibly ironic that the solution seems to be that you should migrate to operating systems where the userland and kernel are coupled together.

And that's the crux of the argument against systemd. Is clean service management more important than portability? Of course not! Linux has always been interesting because it's portable, not because it's easy or streamlined or standardized.

[Qwertious]

"Linux has always been interesting because it's portable, not because it's easy or streamlined or standardized."

Pretty sure Tanenbaum would disagree. That said, I do agree that portability really is important. For that matter, I'd really like a decent FOSS microkernel.

[ben_bai]

Since you mentioned Tanenbaum. What about Minix 3, It's basically a new/modern Microkernel with the NetBSD userland.