The Top BSD News This Year: Ubuntu Atop BSD, FreeBSD 11.0, DragonFly's HAMMER2

[phoronix]

Phoronix: The Top BSD News This Year: Ubuntu Atop BSD, FreeBSD 11.0, DragonFly's HAMMER2

Continuing our end-of-year recaps for the most popular stories on Phoronix, when we're not busy covering Linux, the BSD operating systems get their share of interest on Phoronix. Here is a look at the exciting BSD advancements made in 2016...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Top-BSD-News-2016

[rabcor]

Just out of curiosity, what is it that people see in the BSDs? I can't see a single reason to use any of them over available Linux options. I'm not saying it's bad or anything but just... What is there to it?

[Gapil301]

Better quality code, bsd license... Maybe?

[andrei_me]

License, whole OS instead of mix of parts like a distro, better TCP stack, don't really know...

[wikinevick]

Just out of curiosity, what is it that people see in the BSDs? I can't see a single reason to use any of them over available Linux options. I'm not saying it's bad or anything but just... What is there to it?

Precisely that it's NOT linux. It doesn't share the same vulnerabilities, it doesn't have and will never inherit systemd, Variety is simply good, and in the case of FreeBSD it has many features that are desirable: clang and all the LLVM toolchain, ZFS and you can still run the most nice things from Linux and it keeps getting better

[Luke_Wolf]

Just out of curiosity, what is it that people see in the BSDs? I can't see a single reason to use any of them over available Linux options. I'm not saying it's bad or anything but just... What is there to it?

Well, most of the stuff is the same between them as both use much of the same userspace software, however the things that are specific to the BSDs tend to be better thought out than those things that are specific to Linux (FreeBSD snd vs ALSA + Pulse, pf vs iptables, BSDinit vs SysV init, having a pluggable userspace ABI system instead of a single userspace ABI, etc). However because of the vast difference in marketshare the BSDs are less developed in a lot of areas compared to Linux, and are having to catch up (for example replacing BSDInit and bringing their KVM competitor up to speed, and previously kernel space graphics drivers had heavily lagged behind)

[yogi_berra]

Just out of curiosity, what is it that people see in the BSDs? I can't see a single reason to use any of them over available Linux options. I'm not saying it's bad or anything but just... What is there to it?

Less fiddling after updates.

[rabcor]

Just out of curiosity, what is it that people see in the BSDs? I can't see a single reason to use any of them over available Linux options. I'm not saying it's bad or anything but just... What is there to it?

Better quality code doesn't mean much unless you get performance out of it. Based on benchmarks I see BSD rarely outperform linux in anything and stability is harder to measure but they're both very stable from what I gather. Rest of the comments above made a bit more sense but these are all very minor differences we're talking about... I stick with Linux mostly because of the performance thing.

[Luke_Wolf]

Better quality code doesn't mean much unless you get performance out of it. Based on benchmarks I see BSD rarely outperform linux in anything and stability is harder to measure but they're both very stable from what I gather. Rest of the comments above made a bit more sense but these are all very minor differences we're talking about... I stick with Linux mostly because of the performance thing.

Eh... Most of the Phoronix benchmarks have shown them to perform within the same realm as each other except in a few benchmarks here and there, which are sometimes BSD losses and sometimes Linux losses, depending upon what in particular is being tested, and okay if you want performance of the kind that Linux has over *BSD that's fine, but just generally stating that Linux is faster than *BSD is a nope. The more honest reasons to use Linux over *BSD are:

• Better Hardware Support, which affects the slice of the population that happen to have hardware that Linux supports that *BSD don't, which may not be you
• Much more mature desktop support,
• Features that Linux has that *BSD really doesn't have a proper (read: Not a work in progress) alternative to right now (KVM, systemd, etc)
• (Generally Proprietary) Software that Linux supports that *BSD doesn't, most notably Steam

otherwise it's just a matter of preference and philosophy

[nasyt]

Just out of curiosity, what is it that people see in the BSDs? I can't see a single reason to use any of them over available Linux options. I'm not saying it's bad or anything but just... What is there to it?

And I can't see a single reason to use "available Linux options" over available Windows Server options (except the price).