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Comment by stirfrykitty | Hacker News Reader

It's all in what people are willing to tolerate or change. Obviously, the gentlemen over at Haiku feel they have something to offer, as small as it may be. I always though that BeOS was somewhat revolutionary in its approach.

I'm still somewhat bothered that Apple let their server offering go. And yes, FreeBSD replaces Linux easily. Not everyone runs their stuff in the cloud. It's not the be-all and end-all. Serious non-IT businesses are still on mainframes, BSD, and other, and there are plenty of them. A friend of mine is a COBOL programmer for a large financial house, and he's set for as long as he wants to work there, and at almost $80hr (Texas), he's making better coin than most programmers here.

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> And yes, FreeBSD replaces Linux easily.

No, it doesn’t. Take any non trivial system running Linux and try to run it in FreeBSD. You may get it running in little time, however the number of issues you would have would be big.

Remember that the modern stack have multiple layers of complexity, Linux, your app, SomethingSQL, AnotherThingDb, Kubernetes, AWS/GCE/Azure, etc. Since FreeBSD is not the common choice to run those things you will probably hit a issue here, another issue there, a combination of issue in one layer with another, etc.

Yeah, this may say more about our current systems than anything, however to say that it is easy to substitute Linux with FreeBSD is simply not true.

For the core parts, such as database engines, webservers, programming languages, etc. then you should not encounter any trouble. I've done this and found little trouble.

For glue like kubernetes, yes, you're going to find differences or even lack of support for that specific tool. Ansible works pretty well, in my experience. But this is the more superficial stuff. If you're going to migrate for whatever reason, then updating the automation tooling around the systems you're managing is not that difficult.

Depends on the system. For a desktop enviornment you are correct, *bsd is at best an after thought to pretty much all projects. However "serious" server programs tend to get much more testing on BSD. I don't think you will have any issues running a database on BSD, and probably not a web server (though some web frameworks are Linux first so YMMV)

The biggest problem in "FreeBSD desktop" is not the "FreeBSD" part - that works pretty much fine.

I run a FreeBSD desktop. There are enough problems that I wouldn't install that for my family. Too many blank windows and the like (I suspect graphics driver issues but have no idea how to debug further)

I wouldn't install it for my family either, but I wouldn't do that with Linux either. It can be fine for chromebook-like usage, but not as the usual desktop.

Please elaborate on "more and more IT guys I know move over to Free/OpenBSD" and your mentioned easiness of migration.

I know former colleagues on the East coast and in the EU who I stay in contact with who, oddly enough, they are all looking at NetBSD for embedded HW work. We all used to work together at a small startup in NOVA, but we all parted ways about 12 years ago. All four of us did *nix stuff and more or less still do, but I'm pure SW, while they are more HW/SW integration.

These are but a few. Here in the Houston area, there are tons of FreeBSD/OpenBSD users.

> and at almost $80hr (Texas), he's making better coin than most programmers here.

Not sure about all programmers but I'm at $200 and I'm underpaid compared to my coworkers. Big telco.

You're underpaid at $200 an hour?

If I was making what my father was making at my age for doing the same job relative to the size of the economy at the time I should be getting paid 1.125 million.

Yes $200/h is underpaid, it should be what people working at Walmart get paid.

And in the world where people in Walmart are paid $200 an hour, what price does Walmart sell a jar of pickles for?

In real terms, exactly what it cost in 1980.

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