[bigfishrunning]

As a 25 year Linux user (for work and at home), I've been experimenting with FreeBSD in the last year or so and I've found its simplicity refreshing. Maybe I'm swimming against the current, but I'm sure there are dozens of us!

[jjav]

Same here, using Linux since the beginning (1993) but slowly migrating machines to FreeBSD (some to OpenBSD) as Linux slowly becomes ever more like windows which is exactly the opposite of what I want.

[asimovfan]

how so? could you please elaborate?

[felixgallo]

As an example, I had a headless devuan instance that took an extra ~50s to ssh to today, repeatably. Checked to see if it was DNS -- wasn't DNS. Checked to see if it was misconfigured ssh -- wasn't misconfigured ssh. Eventually it turned out to be that /etc/pam.md/common-session was misconfigured by installation default to have 'pam_elogind.so' set up, which was trying to do some cockamamie dbus bullshit to communicate with some linux desktop nonsense that wasn't even installed, and there were a bunch of extremely poorly configured timeouts (!) (!!!) which eventually caused ssh to hang.

Each of these components was obviously written by some deeply incompetent junior developer at IBM working on a jira ticket as part of the continuing effort to slather enough janky nonsense on top of linux that it might maybe behave one day enough like windows 95 to be usable as a desktop environment by normal people. And then the default was set by some deeply incompetent environment package maintainer and accepted by some deeply incompetent debian committee.

This lumbering corporate enshittification of what at the core used to be a simple and comprehensible system is why things like freebsd and alpine (and, to a certain extent until today, devuan) are a breath of fresh air to use. When the system is not being actively undermined by a bunch of new grads with jira tickets and no understanding of the entirety of the system, it's amazing what you can get done.

[close04]

Your 1 user issue is not proof of anything that follows, and most of the comment looks more like getting some frustration out in an aggressive and unpleasant manner.

Just to be clear, you’re not entirely wrong. Linux is not about being simple and comprehensible anymore because that only serves a small subset of users. As the userbase grew, the needs and demands grew with it and so did the solution. But your problem isn’t a sign of “becoming shit” more than finding some hardware not fully supported by *BSD or middling performance optimizations justify some rant about its developers.

Just for the sake of it I whipped up a Devuan VM, SSH worked as expected.

[M95D]

It is becoming shit. There is no need for ssh to integrate with logind and even less reason to interact with dbus or any desktop components. Unix philosophy was there for a reason.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_philosophy

[close04]

It’s becoming too mainstream is what they mean. Any other not immediately obvious parallel to Windows would have warranted an explanation from the get go.

[bigfishrunning]

Not too mainstream, and i still use Linux in a ton of places. Mostly freebsd is simpler and more consistent; having the whole operating system in a single place means that the documentation is better and I don't have to worry if some setting is in /etc or in some database somewhere or in one config language vs another.

I still really like Linux, but I think it's healthy to have multiple viable open source operating systems.

[nine_k]

Linux on servers has been very mainstream for last like 20 years.

Big distros like Ubuntu become ever more complicated though, they run a ton of stuff by default, like Windows. OpenBSD is, first of all, very small in comparison. Then, it's obscure enough that most online attackers do not target it.

[jjav]

There might be a correlation with mainstreaming, but that's not the root cause. I'm happy to use a mainstream OS if it is awesome.

A full honest answer is too long for a HN comment, could write a long article about it but won't do that.

I need an OS which is fully comprehensible and fully configurable to my exact taste and fully diagnosable at all levels. So basically the exact opposite of windows which is a massive blob of obscurity. Mac OS has been great for a couple decades, but the enshittification accelerates. As a tiny example, dtruss doesn't even work on newer Mac OS. That kind of nonsense is unacceptable.

An OS is supposed to be a platform & toolkit to enable me to use and diagnose the computer any way I need. Linux is still that, sure, but enshittification is creeping in. Wayland/systemd/gnome/etc is all movement in the wrong direction.

FreeBSD and OpenBSD are a breath of fresh air.

[fsflover]

Have you considered Qubes OS then?

[nine_k]

Try e.g. Void Linux, it's built by BSD-inclined people and is also refreshingly simpler than most big distros. (It's my daily driver for the last 8 years.)

But if you want tighter integration of userland and kernel, I suppose what RedHat is doing is closer to that. They pursue a non-Unix way though: an immutable distro, ideally only running systemd and podman in the userland, put everything into containers.