> I'd love to try Haiku or BSD one day soon. What motivates people to invest in these very niche systems?
My interest in FreeBSD began about 12 years ago, when a friend of mine told me about the BSD operating systems and he said that the one he was using was very secure (OpenBSD) and that it had good documentation and that these BSD operating systems (FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and others) are each developed "as a whole", as opposed to Linux which I had recently begun seriously using but which is developed as a bunch of separate much more loosely-tied projects and then bundled together in the form of various distros.
I installed FreeBSD and liked it a lot. I just felt at home, somehow. And for a good while I was running FreeBSD also on my desktop and my laptop.
Fast-forward to present day. On my laptop I run macOS. On my servers I run FreeBSD. My MacBook Pro M1 laptop is my daily driver. I have a desktop that I run Linux on but I rarely boot it because mostly I have no reason to. Almost everything I do I can do with my MacBook Pro M1 and with my servers that run FreeBSD.
But even though I like FreeBSD so much, I feel and fear that Linux keeps advancing in much bigger strides than FreeBSD, because of the many many more people contributing to Linux compared to how many people are developing FreeBSD.
I really want to get into eBPF on Linux soon and explore that. It seems like it could help me gain both insights into the execution of the software that I develop, even more than is possible with DTrace maybe. And I want to explore what can be done on Linux using kTLS and eBPF together. And I am curious to find out more about things like what they talk about at https://pchaigno.github.io/ebpf/2020/11/04/hxdp-efficient-so...
And all of those things have me thinking a lot about whether the positives of using FreeBSD (jails, OpenZFS in base, a system that is developed as a whole, etc) actually justify staying with FreeBSD. Or if I should ditch FreeBSD and focus my energy on Linux instead of on FreeBSD.
My interest in FreeBSD began about 12 years ago, when a friend of mine told me about the BSD operating systems and he said that the one he was using was very secure (OpenBSD) and that it had good documentation and that these BSD operating systems (FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and others) are each developed "as a whole", as opposed to Linux which I had recently begun seriously using but which is developed as a bunch of separate much more loosely-tied projects and then bundled together in the form of various distros.
I installed FreeBSD and liked it a lot. I just felt at home, somehow. And for a good while I was running FreeBSD also on my desktop and my laptop.
Fast-forward to present day. On my laptop I run macOS. On my servers I run FreeBSD. My MacBook Pro M1 laptop is my daily driver. I have a desktop that I run Linux on but I rarely boot it because mostly I have no reason to. Almost everything I do I can do with my MacBook Pro M1 and with my servers that run FreeBSD.
But even though I like FreeBSD so much, I feel and fear that Linux keeps advancing in much bigger strides than FreeBSD, because of the many many more people contributing to Linux compared to how many people are developing FreeBSD.
I really want to get into eBPF on Linux soon and explore that. It seems like it could help me gain both insights into the execution of the software that I develop, even more than is possible with DTrace maybe. And I want to explore what can be done on Linux using kTLS and eBPF together. And I am curious to find out more about things like what they talk about at https://pchaigno.github.io/ebpf/2020/11/04/hxdp-efficient-so...
And all of those things have me thinking a lot about whether the positives of using FreeBSD (jails, OpenZFS in base, a system that is developed as a whole, etc) actually justify staying with FreeBSD. Or if I should ditch FreeBSD and focus my energy on Linux instead of on FreeBSD.