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Comment by gtirloni | Hacker News Reader

And that would make me switch from Linux why exactly?

Don't get me wrong, I was a BSD user for many years (FreeBSD 3.5-5.0) but I don't think that's enough reason to switch.

Reason for my switch was that some key things (for me) were designed in a way that seemed more right that on linux and this is totally subjective opinion.

I am still running ubuntu on laptop and will switch when the next install is a thing, but I am running freebsd on server for years now and while i tremble on each update for the laptop, I dont for freebsd, even when updating from 12.x to 13.x.

Based on years of experience on both operating systems. I was surprised only once when freebsd made change where the base network settings weren't by default copied into fibs (you wont encounter this... probably ever) and even then I needed an hour to figure what the change was.

On the other side, I no longer count the nasty surprises the linux distributions played on me (like /etc/resolv.conf being overwritten by systemd resolv, just as trivial change). My laptop is unbootable for a year as they messed something regarding the order of zpool import (bpool being imported before rpool - probably a race condition) so i have to import it manually or it doesnt boot, while I have freebsd zfs root for ~10 years and it never failed me.

Details like that made me insecure about linux. And on the other side, made me highly secure about freebsd.

I think that (again, this is subjective, speaking only for myself)...

I... trust... BSD... guys. Based on experience.

I... dont trust linux... distributions. Based on experience.

But it might just be me.

Not to be that guy, but your Linux complaints sound like systemd complaints.

Not sure the teething process has finished there, but I share the sentiment.

Naah, systemd is not bothering me at all, i dont have issues if they change the way how resolve information is stored.

What bothers me that the old way is still there (/etc/resolv.conf) while it is being generated by systemd. I can accept the change where the dns information is stored. Fine, it is no longer the same file, I dont care. While on the other side, if I get parallel mechanism, that is keeping the old, this is really an annoyance. That is hard to identify.

The ZFS has nothing to do with systemd and I havent even touched stuff like jails/lxc, byhve/kvm, memory consumption, quality of code,... as I have said it, it is subjective and it is about trust into operating system. Linux distributions dont have it. They blew it just too many times. BSD didnt.

It is hard to be objective there, just try the BSD. And please do report your findings.

It made me switch from Linux.

If it doesn't sound compelling to you, that's okay too, Linux is great. But I do think focusing on the consistency of design really is the best high-level summary of the difference between Linux and OpenBSD.

Consistency is great, but there's no equivalent to NixOS for the BSDs -- that I know of.

Am I actually wrong about that? Is there some declarative configuration system I should be using, which I've simply never heard of?

I think we're talking about different definitions of consistency.

In the BSD context, consistancy is that human effort has been put in to get the userspace to look similar. Similar behavior of command line tools, similar documentation, similar configuration, etc.

It looks like you're talking about consistancy of packages across installs, which is a totally different issue.

No, that's the sort of consistency I was thinking of. I simply want that and all the niceties I'd get from NixOS.

I was actually looking into this as well. I recently switched my server to NixOS and the declarative configuration has been really nice to work with and fits easily into my workflow/tools (emacs with tramp).

I’d be really interested in seeing a variant on top of openbsd that has a comparable declarative layer. If anyone knows of such projects, please share!

There are a couple issues tracking FreeBSD support for Nix [0,1], the package manager indicating it works there. Depending on the level of integration you want that might be sufficient, that would already be enough to generate the system config files for example, but to get the sort of integration you get on NixOS with different generations and the ability to rollback at boot would require more work. This would look something more like nix-darwin [2] than NixOS really.

I wouldn't be entirely surprised if OpenBSD works too, I might spin up a VM and see...

[0] https://github.com/NixOS/nix/issues/3280

[1] https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/81459

[2] https://github.com/LnL7/nix-darwin

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