[rdeckard0104]

I disagree.

FreeBSD is just as easy to administer as Linux. Solaris I find to be a bit more challenging. I can appreciate your commentary, but I challenge you to prove me wrong. Just for some color I've ran the Gambit of Unix and Linux systems in my career with FreeBSD being one of the easiest and most consistent out of the box technologies. Solaris had already been quite the opposite. I guess you could say AIX is a close second to Solaris, but I think that's a bit of a grey area considering how opinionated that operating system is.

To be clear I'm not a FreeBSD zealot. I'm for what works. Right now what works is the emerging container based solutions albeit not relevant to this discussion.

[ethbro]

> For every competent FreeBSD or Illumos sysadmin there are 10x equally experienced with Linux.

Was parent wrong about that point?

[chungy]

Not exactly, but to any competent administrator, learning FreeBSD based on Linux experience is not that difficult. It's sort of like tasking someone to start working on a program written in Go even if they have only C++ experience. You can cope.

[ethbro]

I get a little annoyed with this line of reasoning though.

"Anyone can learn anything" doesn't help me if I need an expert now. And it doesn't magically jump the gap between "functional" (I can make a thing work in an ugly and naive way) and "good" (I can weigh the trade-offs behind the scenes and choose the optimal from multiple alternatives).

Unless the assertion is that FreeBSD / Go is easy, logical, and/or obvious enough that a master Linux / C++ programmer will be productive and community standard-compliant without any effective lag time.

And I'm not trying to be obtuse. I honestly see it a lot and think it's a blind spot: reverse Pareto principle if you will. "Getting up to 80% proficiency is easy, so let's ignore the last 20% because it must also be easy."

[johnwfinigan]

Experts have to get made somehow. It's not as if Linux is a frozen target where you can count on being "productive and community standard-compliant without any effective lag time" without going back to the docs sometimes.

A great example in my opinion: Red Hat RHEL7 introduced systemd. A lot changed versus RHEL6. RHEL6 "experts" turned into clumsy RHEL7 "80%-ers". We figured it out.

Not to even mention that SuSE, RHEL, and Ubuntu are about as similar as "Linux" and FreeBSD, if you are worried about the finer points of best practice. We figure it out.

[ethbro]

Absolutely. It happens. But to harken back to the original post, there are definite advantages to "technology with X experts available in the market" than "technology with Y experts available in the market". Where X > Y.

And those advantages don't disappear even if Y is easy to learn.

[johnwfinigan]

On that basic point, I agree -- although there are advantages to swimming upstream sometimes. Otherwise, given the landscape of 10-15 years ago, we'd be having this discussion about Windows servers instead of Linux!

Besides, probably the best way to find out if it's a "big deal" is to ask your sysadmins. Or, generally, the people who are going to be stuck running it.

[X86BSD]

I think your argument lies more in the fact that linux is non standard to Unix. They have gone their own way and made it difficult to transfer knowledge. Ask anyone who has ported a Linux application to any other Unix. It's at best a PITA. At worst a nightmare.

Can you do it? Sure. But it isn't pleasant. The Linux community is off in the weeds imo. Doing their own poor re-implementations of tech others have already done. See: Dtrace, Filesystems, Jails/zones, Networking, VM, Init systems, ...

So I think trying to argue it's easier to install Linux because Linux folks can't transfer their knowledge to other OS's speaks volumes to it being a poor choice to invest skills in if you can't transfer them to other OS's

[cyphar]

That's not really a fair statement. First of all, Linux started as Linus just reimplementing the Unix semantics, so edge cases and subtle semantics should be expected to be different. Secondly, most Unix-based OSes are barely compatible in their facilities.

Sure, you have DTrace (which only macOS, illumos and FreeBSD have) and ZFS (which only illumos and FreeBSD have) but the rest is similarly incompatible. Solairs/illumos even has a complete NIH-reimplementation of FreeBSD's kqueue (event ports). They have different views on containerisation (Zones/Jails). They've historically had very different opinions on /proc and ioctls, not to mention that they were developed separately for such a long time that their shared history is not very recent.

As a result, porting from Solaris to FreeBSD is also difficult. Maybe it's harder or easier than porting to GNU/Linux, but I wouldn't just flat-out claim that GNU/Linux is the only member doing things that are incompatible.

[X86BSD]

Sun's event ports are so similar to kqueue cantrill has said they should have just adopted kqueue.

And there are not different views on zones and jails. They are the same thing. Sun just took the idea of jails and flushed them out further adding a separate network stack for each zone, which jails now also have. But they operate on the same principle and ideas. Jails was bare bones at inception. Jails shared their IP stack with the host, this was before cloud computing and the need for separate network stacks. They both started with being secure and then adding features where the Linux container mess started with features and then continues to try and address the fact they are insecure by design. So jail and zones are similar.

Porting from FreeBSD to Solaris and vice Versa is easier than you think. If it was insanely hard FreeBSD wouldn't have zfs or Dtrace from Sun. Dtrace was almost single handedly ported by one engineer. An amazing engineer, but he Was the only one. Same with ZFS. And illumos ported the FreeBSD installer. Also done by one individual. All very good engineers but still just one.

[binarycrusader]

event ports is not an NIH reimplementation. It was a framework intentionally developed to meet specific business and technical needs within the Solaris threading model at that time.

It's far closer to Windows IOCP than FreeBSD kqueues IMHO.

It's also been one of the most successful features added to Solaris and is used throughout the system.

[atmosx]

As long as you can pay. You can find anything[1].

[1] https://www.freebsd.org/commercial/consult_bycat.html

[atmosx]

> Was parent wrong about that point?

I believe it was. See comment above. FreeBSD has excellent documentation on nearly every topic. Nearly every program has a manpage and there's always google to help you.

For advanced topics (CARP, DTrace, ZFS, Jails, Accounting API) the docs are excellent and you'll have to some reading to properly implement any of those anyway.

That's part of the job actually, reading/learning.