On 29 September 2016 at 11:00, Myles Braithwaite via talk <talk@gtalug.org> wrote:
William Park via talk wrote:
To those who knows/uses both BSD and Linux... Should I learn BSD, and which one?
If you read to HackNews we are currently in the systemd apocalypse and Linux's user base is shrinking every day and good ethical people are moving to BSD to the warm embrace of init.
There is something to be worried about there... Though the answer seems unlikely to keep heads in the sand, as the reasons that systemd emerged include some pretty valid ones....
Without sarcasm, learning another system is always a good idea because it gives you more insight on how others work. As an example I would have never been able to understand how Google's open source Python code worked without some knowledge of Java.
There's a Debian port to FreeBSD <https://www.debian.org/ports/kfreebsd-gnu/>, so you could have a mostly-GNU userspace that presumably lacks systemd. I'm occasionally attracted to take a peek at Dragonfly BSD, as it has been trying to do some substantial reimplementations of some of the internals with particular view to improving performance and supporting clustering. The HAMMER filesystem is one of the interesting bits; some data deduplication capabilities, and a BSD flavour on the "advanced" stuff like snapshotting, journalling, et al. Mind you, the idea hasn't been interesting enough to lead to my having any systems running such. I considered throwing Debian/kfreebsd onto my media box, but the curious inability to get it to boot off CDROM wound up curbing experimentation. (I wound up using PXE to pull a recent Debian image off another machine; "thanks Scott for your PXE talks!!!") -- When confronted by a difficult problem, solve it by reducing it to the question, "How would the Lone Ranger handle this?"