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by penland
4529 days ago
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It's worth trying to grind through a few months of Free-BSD after using Linux to get a feel for it. One of my favorite quotes on the differences is, "FreeBSD is what you get when a bunch of old school Unix beard brigade hackers sit down to write a port to the PC. Linux is what you get when you take a bunch of hackers raised on Windows and PCs that try to port Unix to the PC". In a lot of ways that is two sides of the same coin, but really digging in to the BSD way of things opens up a new view point on Operating Systems . . . FreeBSD old school Unix assembly versus NASM, the Kqueue vs ePoll system implementations, FreeBSD's near instantaneous embrace for ZFS while the Linux community held back for "OS theological" concerns over the FileSystem implementation. I've jumped between Debian and FreeBSD for my development boxes for a few years now. To butcher Dijkstra, "Operating Systems shape developers as much as violins shape violinists". When I find myself on FreeBSD I make great use of D-Trace - running vagrant FreeBSD boxes, the pulling the trace output into Instruments to analyze. With the release of Trim for ZFS, ZFS pooling for logging should be obscenely fast and offer some serious performance increases for things like proper Hadoop workloads. When I find myself on Debian I'm enthralled by the ease of use around layouts and the API ( kqueue / epoll excluded ). The package management system is far superior to portsnap, though neither system really does modern package management really well imo. Personally, I think it's worth trying to run BSD and all it's tools just to understand the system better, and to see how it influences you as a developer. The active utilization of D-Trace changed me as an engineer just as much when I first started using functional programming concepts in my regular code |
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