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by FooBarWidget 4511 days ago
OpenBSD only has a small number of precompiled packages, and usually extremely outdated. If you want to get anything useful you have to compile ports. As for the question of whether Linux being widespread is due to marketing or quality: that is completely irrelevant. The fact that Linux is more widespread is all that matters. We don't live in a theoretical world where only theoretical technical superiority is the only thing that matters.

You are right, no management and administration tool is more superior than the Unix command line. The thing is, Puma's Unix command line tooling is almost nonexistant. All of Passenger's management and administration tools are command line tools.

You are also correct in that you don't need fancy software to do things for you when you can do all that stuff yourself. It's a bit like saying that Docker has no added value because you can setup LXC yourself. But it's not hard to imagine why so many people do find value in Docker.

As for spam: yes you are right, there have been times in the past when we were overly eager with promotion. I apologize for that, and we've since adjusted our strategy.

Having said that, our claims have always only been based on facts. For example: how do I find out what requests my Puma processes are currently handling, and how long they've been active? Where are the tools to query that information?

2 comments

I have no experience with ruby / passenger / puma etc, but what you say about OpenBSD is wrong.

From the OpenBSD FAQ[1]:

"As mentioned in the introduction, packages are compiled from the ports tree. In this section we will explain how the ports tree works, when you should use it and how you can use it. "

The 'extremely outdated' part is also wrong. See ajacoutot@ answer on openbsd-misc[2]: " => on -current (soon to be 5.5) you end up with the same GNOME version (and assorted \ dependencies) as with the latest Fedora.

We have the latest version of gnome, cups, gnutls, libgcrypt, ..................... We have KMS with state of the art acceleration on Intel and ATI." [1] http://www.openbsd.org/faq/faq15.html#Ports [2] http://marc.info/?l=openbsd-misc&m=139188821027488&w=2

You have probably never even tried OpenBSD or you wouldn't even be saying this. You are saying factually incorrect things about OpenBSD, in fact blatantly false libelous lies. OpenBSD has a huge number of precompiled packages, the needs of the average user are probably covered with the available packages. The only thing I miss in OpenBSD is VirtualBox and the Android SDK other than that every other piece of software I used in Linux is available as a package. I can do the same things in OpenBSD as I can in Linux, music, videos, Libre Office, web browsing, programming, etc. Software is not extremely outdated, some packages do get a little outdated from release to release, this is barely noticeable and not a huge issue.

http://www.openbsd.org/

https://stable.mtier.org/

http://openports.se/

In fact I have multiple OpenBSD and FreeBSD virtual machines installed. I run them regularly to test software. But my OpenBSD installs are from several years ago so maybe things have changed nowadays. However, on FreeBSD 9, all the stuff I can get from pkg_add is old. I always end up having to compile from ports. Years ago I had a FreeBSD 6 server. Ports updates always ended up breaking things (in addition to taking forever to compile) so I switched away from FreeBSD at some point.

I'm not saying that there are no software for OpenBSD. I'm not saying that OpenBSD is not capable of running lots of stuff. I'm saying that for anything recent, you often end up having to compile software from source, which wastes CPU. I'm saying that if things go wrong then finding someone who can provide support is much harder than with Linux.

> I'm saying that for anything recent, you often end up having to compile software from source...

With regards to OpenBSD, your statement is factually incorrect. Most packages are up to date with OpenBSD. FreeBSD is not OpenBSD. Users of OpenBSD are discouaraged from compiling direclty from ports unless they have a good reason (and 99% of the time there is not a good reason.)

Interesting, I guess my exposure to OpenBSD has been too limited.