Originally posted by Luke_Wolf
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Originally posted by Luke_Wolf View PostSome more points while I'm thinking about it more as to why BSD has stayed down- Canonical, while I don't buy that they brought in as many people vs those who would have come in normally as they claim, as they didn't exactly advertise outside of what were already OSS contexts. Canonical did massive evangelization *inside* the OSS community to the point where it became the face of Linux and arguably of open source. Their CD programs along those lines were particularly important in an era where the internet was slow, and dial-up was still commonplace. Ultimately Canonical managed to grab a mindshare at the cost of everyone else.
- The "If we build it, they will come" mindset of most OSS projects, including the BSDs and most Linux distros means that you have to know to go looking for them, particularly when you've got a loud noisy group like the Ubuntu people drawing all of the attention. Red Hat and SUSE only really care about the enterprise market, and basically own it and so couldn't care less what Canonical is doing in the hobbyist space. What this means is that a project can't just sit there and expect to win, if they want to break into enterprise they have to fight Red Hat and SUSE, and if they want to break into the hobbyist market they have to take on Canonical. The BSDs (and for that matter most other linux distros) haven't been doing that.
- The BSDs up until 2006 didn't have a preconfigured distro for desktop users (PC-BSD), which meant that they were naturally limiting their target audience to the more hardcore geeks and sys admins, much the same as Gentoo and Arch do.
- While PC-BSD is doing a lot to solve the previous point, only in the past few years has it realized what it has to do and it's still working on getting there, however it's going to need a lot of work and polish. That said the direction and approach they're taking could in my opinion lead to a BSD renaissance (at least once FreeBSD catches up on hardware support)
- While ports are cool, BSD package management has until recently been absolute garbage. PBIs were there to work around it yes, but pkgng finally gives the overall system modern package management. I have no doubt in my mind that this has held them back
- BSD has lagged hard on modern graphics support, although this is in many respects a manpower issue, the BSDs are only now beginning to catch up to where Linux is, and they're still a long way off.
- The BSDs also seem to be lagging on wifi support, Broadcom AFAICT for instance appears to be completely unsupported
- Linux is wildly popular in the tech media whereas rarely anybody talks about BSD, that said the FreeBSD Foundation, iXSystems and a couple other organizations are beginning to do their own magazines to work on this problem.
In 5-6 years will BSD finally be a serious contender against Linux in terms of mind/market share? I don't know, but because they're finally working on solving some of their most pressing issues preventing them from being so, they have a chance. Just as Linux has a chance at finally competing against Windows over the next few years due to Valve. Regardless, the future will be very interesting over the next few years as we're entering another critical segment in open source history.
I'm not trying to prop up BSD here, but BSD always had proper integration with ifconfig for Wi-Fi (as opposed to typical Linux hack iwconfig) and at one time (if not still) OpenBSD was considered king of Wi-Fi support of ALL Unix-like distributions.
And UMS/KMS issues aside, nVidia always provided bleeding edge support in its drivers to FreeBSD. Graphcis support has always been reasonable.
No, anything you said technical about BSD is not even wrong.
How about VFS? Where do you mention that (at one time you couldn't even unplug USB devices without a kernel trap). Or lack of journaled file systems (softupdates does not account for the disk re-ordering writes for example). How about lagging behind in kernel level MP support? Where's that point?
Wi-Fi and graphics support? You don't know anything about BSD!
Oh, and you also forgot that BSD always had package management (but nobody used it!) ... this is ancient history even before PC-BSD and PBI. You had pkg_add and friends and in fact people still ask about the relevance of pkgng when those tools existed all along!
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Originally posted by endman View Post
No conclusion, none whatsoever may be drawn from this data
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Originally posted by nslay View PostI'm not trying to prop up BSD here, but BSD always had proper integration with ifconfig for Wi-Fi (as opposed to typical Linux hack iwconfig) and at one time (if not still) OpenBSD was considered king of Wi-Fi support of ALL Unix-like distributions.
Originally posted by nslay View PostAnd UMS/KMS issues aside, nVidia always provided bleeding edge support in its drivers to FreeBSD. Graphcis support has always been reasonable.
Originally posted by nslay View PostNo, anything you said technical about BSD is not even wrong.
How about VFS? Where do you mention that (at one time you couldn't even unplug USB devices without a kernel trap). Or lack of journaled file systems (softupdates does not account for the disk re-ordering writes for example). How about lagging behind in kernel level MP support? Where's that point?
Wi-Fi and graphics support? You don't know anything about BSD!
Originally posted by nslay View PostOh, and you also forgot that BSD always had package management (but nobody used it!) ... this is ancient history even before PC-BSD and PBI. You had pkg_add and friends and in fact people still ask about the relevance of pkgng when those tools existed all along!Last edited by Luke_Wolf; 29 September 2014, 02:31 AM.
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Originally posted by Luke_Wolf View PostYou noticed I was talking about drivers not tools right? The number of supported chipsets seems limited in the documentation, and broadcom in particular seems lacking vs what Linux provides, and I was reading in a recent mailing list thread that the wifi chipsets of the Thinkpad T440 are lacking drivers in FreeBSD which meant that particular user was SOL because the Thinkpad UEFI apparently checks whether the internal components are the same as in it's whitelist
That's nice if you've got an NVidia card, and don't have Optimus, for everyone else they've got a lot of catching up to do as FreeBSD itself admits by it's upcoming XDC presentation. I for instance exclusively use AMD at this point because Radeon works so wonderfully under Linux since dynamic power management landed, which just also happens to be my blocker for throwing FreeBSD on actual hardware.
Last time I used AMD on Linux, fglrx was a terrible driver (and ATi wasn't bought by AMD yet). Apparently that's changed.
Power has never been well supported on BSD. But I wouldn't consider that something that kept BSD down.
Yeah well, I've been a Linux user for almost 10 years now, and have only been been paying attention to and playing with BSD for about a year and a half and only seriously looking into it since the release of FreeBSD 10 as opposed to just toying with it, so no I don't know that much about BSD. What I do know is from having read through the FreeBSD handbook, and online documentation, various wikipedia articles, as well as recent mailing list archives, playing around with PC-BSD 9.1 and now the 10 release in a VM, and various books, documentaries, and articles on the open source movement. I'm working on learning this stuff though, and if you want to make your own list go right ahead I'd appreciate seeing it, as it'll give me additional puzzle pieces.
If you really want to learn BSD, then my advice is to play with FreeBSD itself and not PC-BSD. The whole point of PC-BSD was that you didn't have to know FreeBSD well to set it up to be your workstation. You literally start with nothing and get a getty login on your first boot. But then, FreeBSD never tried to appeal to Windows power users (which definitely helps keep it obscure and unpopular). But seriously, don't bother unless you have some time or some kind of Unix hobby. You know Linux well and it does the job for you.
Notice that I didn't say BSD lacked package management, I said it was garbage. pkg_add and friends are garbage, hence as you say nobody used it which is why they finally went and made pkgng which is finally a nice modern package manager.
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Originally posted by gamerk2 View Post
In the linux world the only people really paying attention, security wise, to the linux kernel seem to be the PaX and grsecurity people. You know, people linus doesn't like (because he doesn't like "black and white" people).
What does linus like? He's pretty milquetoast... as far as I can tell the only thing he really likes, the thing that really gets him going and revved up... is Fat not so pretty Bitches(or women, or could be both).
Man. Fuck. Just look that shit up. I really do not understand it.
He threw away the only possible part of his life that could be good.
He got himself a fattie.
WTF. Atleast bill gates got a somewhat sorta more or less passable woman.
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Originally posted by mark45 View PostProof? Maybe you also need an official statement?
Nobody will give you "proof", proof is for sheeple waiting for fact handouts (when it's too late).
But smart people knew the government is spying on anyone the can reach out to long before any "proof" from Snowden and such.
link
link
The CPUs aren't the only type of compromised hw.
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Originally posted by nslay View PostOh, and you also forgot that BSD always had package management (but nobody used it!)
No, dudes, we are not going to reduce our demands when it comes to operating systems. You either have to match expectations or you'll go to oblivion. And somehow just loud words instead of proper technical solutions would not do. Sorry about that.
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