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by lproven 90 days ago
FWIW, agreed.

It is very odd to me that I often read people asking about alternative OSes -- Linux compared to Windows, or FreeBSD compared to Linux, or OpenBSD compared to FreeBSD -- and they say that they want to move except that they desperately need to keep {something arcane}...

And often that arcane thing is why I am interested in getting off the original system under discussion.

1 comments

The appeal of the BSDs has always been an incredibly stable entire system that means you don't need Docker to run fifteen variations of the various libraries necessary to (Stallman) build a GNU/Linux.
While I entirely take your point and am not arguing with it, sadly, running Docker commands is now the only way that many relatively new Linux folks now how to assemble and deploy systems.

Which is why the podman support in FreeBSD 14.2 was a big deal that wasn't really trumpeted enough. Podman is Red Hat's all-FOSS daemonless Docker clone, and now, FreeBSD can just understand Docker commands and run the results using Linuxulator jails.

For similar reasons, this is why MS hired Lennart Poettering: to get systemd working in WSL2, because so many "techies" don't know anything else but systemd commands.

They know (ish) that Ubuntu has systemd, they ran Ubuntu in WSL2, `systemctl start foo` didn't work, therefore, WSL2 was broken and incompatible.

Result: hire Lenny P, get it working, let him go again. Job done.

I fully understand and appreciate the gifts that things like Docker and systemd and even Caddy have brought to the table, and I use them.

But sometimes I'm wistful over the fact that those that come after me will not be exposed to the things that taught me what I know.