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by stingraycharles 2643 days ago
I really like BSD myself, I used it as my primary OS for both desktop and server back in the early 00s.

Nowadays, with a container-centric cloud architecture, it seems like BSD doesn't really have a good answer to Kubernetes, Nomad, etc. If anything, the projects are experimental and/or hobby projects.
2 comments
ivoras 2643 days ago
Which is a bit bizarre because FeeeBSD jails were world's first containers on a vaguely desktop-ish unix-ish systems.

The crowd just never had the hype power of Linux and no big player took to developing cool things on top.

It just shows you that having a technically good solution is irrelevant if there's no marketing behind it.

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ignoramous 2643 days ago
> no big player took to developing cool things on top.

Just one data-point, but WhatsApp engineering was adamant that FreeBSD was a key precursor that allowed them to scale 2m+ connections per host on their (rather beefy) boxes: https://youtu.be/TneLO5TdW_M

> It just shows you that having a technically good solution is irrelevant.

True. I've seen many promising projects die/stagnate at the hands of unpopularity, *BSDs wouldn't be the first. Sigh.

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tannhaeuser 2643 days ago
It maybe also shows how brainwashed or resume-oriented the tech crowd is.
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lima 2643 days ago
Network effects are real though.
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pjmlp 2643 days ago
I remember using Tru64 and HP-UX containers before any BSD got them.
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inferiorhuman 2643 days ago
And Solaris zones. But FreeBSD is far more desktop oriented than anything Sun or HP put out (and yes I ran Solaris as a desktop OS for a bit, but still).
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stingraycharles 2643 days ago
Exactly, Docker was able to get a lot of traction because of a variety of reasons (timing and usability, to name a few), even though from a technical perspective it's very much a suboptimal implementation.

And right now you just have a huge network effect around containers + linux: the tooling + support is the most compelling reason to "suck it up" and just fire up Ubuntu and call it a day.

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inferiorhuman 2643 days ago
Given its scope, iocage has been an excellent way to manage jails for me. What docker brings to the table is a fairly easy way to build the containers themselves.
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