Honestly, the biggest advantage OpenBSD has always had for me was its internal consistency and excellent documentation. If you’re a heavy command line user, you can usually figure out either what command you need to run or what you need to look up in the man pages. It’s also great for C development, as it has far better docs for libc than glibc does.
If you have supported hardware (and that’s a bit if and caveat; smaller than it used to be, but still quite large), then everything just works. Even little things like the built-in screen brightness buttons, just work regardless of if you’re in x11 or a terminal (same with volume buttons), because it’s designed as a complete system rather than a distribution of otherwise unrelated open source projects.
Ya, same for FreeBSD. You can literally operate a system with nothing but the handbook in most cases - the documentation is much more systematic and developed than Linux. What you get isn't just a "how to use a GUI" tutorial or manpages, it's a comprehensive look at how you do routine sysadmin tasks. The kind of thing that Linux pushes off to web tutorials or stackoverflow.
It of course helps that nothing ever changes in BSD-land. After 50 years of development, they are largely feature-complete and are not going to be doing massive changes just for the sake of massive changes. As such they get much lower levels of "documentation rot", things rust a lot slower when nothing ever changes and as such it's a lot easier (and more productive) to build comprehensive documentation.
But the amount of churn in linux is insane, Ubuntu has used three completely different init systems in the 15 years since I started using Linux seriously. For java development, I routinely see and use StackOverflow answers from like 2009 that are completely valid still, and yet answers from that era are completely useless for Linux, which has invalidated that acquired-knowledge twice since then. You can pretty much sysadmin FreeBSD out of the handbook, and if you need to search then an answer from 2009 is usually still valid.
It's absolutely a cathedral-vs-bazaar situation. Cathedral is presented as a negative in that metaphor, but the cathedral ensures enough stability that you can start Having Nice Things instead of just constantly scrambling to rewrite everything every time a vendor thinks they've built a better mousetrap.
There are some cases of real churn in Linux but they're rare. The new init systems and such come with plenty of useful features that simplify many administration tasks: the reason for people being so unsatisfied with them is that they bring lots of what's effectively cowboy-coded hacks and prototype-quality code in order to enable these features. But rewriting all of this stuff from the ground up with a clean, Unix-like design (or rather, Plan9-, Limbo- or Amoeba-like, given that Linux now supports the needed foundational features for these) while preserving its feature set would involve more rather than less churn.
> or rather, Plan9-, Limbo- or Amoeba-like [design], given that Linux now supports the needed foundational features for these
I‘d be curious to hear more about what you're referring to, if you were willing to expand. What foundational features are new to Linux that would be really useful for cleaner init system (etc.) designs?
Yeah, it's great! Even if you don't get deeply into it, the ability to take and send snapshots, the intelligent caching layer, and the data integrity stuff is all super useful. It's the same stuff that BTRFS sells but it actually, you know, works without constant intervention and data loss. And Zed is great, it ties the whole snapshot thing into the software update process and so on.
It's definitely a bit heavier than other filesystems but it's one of those things where I can't imagine setting up a Linux/Unix system without it anymore.
I wouldn't exactly classify ZFS as a "new" feature though. ZFS dates to 2004, OpenZFS dates to 2006, and OpenSolaris dates to 2010. 20 years is pretty well into "mature technology" by most standards, even 16 years is very mature by software standards.
How does it compare to some of the better run wikis like the Arch wiki? I think I'll take a look around, never thought about checking there freebsd for info on general command line stuff.
I think it already runs on FreeBSD. It's in the handbook somewhere:
- "Linux® Binary Compatibility"
- "Describes the Linux® compatibility features of FreeBSD. Also provides detailed installation instructions for many popular Linux® applications such as Oracle® and Mathematica®."
I wasn't able to find that exact reference in the docs of the current release (using a mobile device at the moment). However, there is a very useful forum thread for anyone interested. It's not a straightforward install, but it's definitely possible to install/use Mathematica on FreeBSD.
Scrivener is a gem for sure, but I'm always curious if anyone actively using it has tried Highland? I guess I'm biased as it feels extremely "at home" on macOS.
It looks nice, I'll be sure to try it out! Upfront, I don't think it'll cover all my scrivener uses (it seems to be missing a lot of the outlining and research features—please correct me if I'm wrong), but I'm curious enough to try it for a short story or two.
If you have supported hardware (and that’s a bit if and caveat; smaller than it used to be, but still quite large), then everything just works. Even little things like the built-in screen brightness buttons, just work regardless of if you’re in x11 or a terminal (same with volume buttons), because it’s designed as a complete system rather than a distribution of otherwise unrelated open source projects.