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Comment by heywoodlh | Hacker News Reader

As far as I understand it, anything a user installs with pkg that isn't included with the base system is installed into /usr/local.

For me, this is a nice benefit because I can know that anything installed into /usr/local can be removed and won't break the basic system's functionality. This organizational structure I think is also just very sensible imo.

Note: I'm mostly a Linux user but I play around with FreeBSD a lot. I wish that by default my Arch machine organized things similarly, but ultimately it's minor enough for me that I haven't switched

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>As far as I understand it, anything a user installs with pkg that isn't included with the base system is installed into /usr/local. > >For me, this is a nice benefit because I can know that anything installed into /usr/local can be removed and won't break the basic system's functionality. This organizational structure I think is also just very sensible imo.

I don't really see how it is relevant. First I don't see why would anyone want to randomly remove things. On my linux system everything that I compile or install by myself goes to /usr/local. Everything managed by packages goes to /usr, any thing that comes from a precompiled tarball is better installed in /opt. How is that different?

What I liked about freebsd when I was using it was the handbook that was fairly complete.

On FreeBSD you can quickly tell what is a part of the base system vs not based on where it is located. Your /usr directory typically isn't empty on a new Linux install, whereas /usr/local is totally empty on FreeBSD when you install it.

A simple example is if you run 'which vim'. If you have installed vim through pkg on FreeBSD it will show up in /usr/local/bin/vim. Whereas if you run 'which vim' on Ubuntu, it will show up in /usr/bin/vim -- but on Ubuntu Desktop (when I last used it) vim is preinstalled. You can't just look at the /usr directory on a Linux machine in most cases and know what was installed when you installed the machine.

I mean, try debloating an Ubuntu Desktop machine that's been used for a while and tell me if by looking at the /usr directory what was included in the install vs what you installed post-install.

Just out of my curiosity, what would be that little thing which could make you switch to FreeBSD from Linux ?

cgroups and as great as zfs is, an overlayfs is missing for a better jail experience.

I heavily rely on Linux-based containerization for a lot of my tooling and workflows. This allows me to bring most of my workflows to Windows, MacOS and of course Linux as tooling like Docker Desktop is cross-platform.

Is randomly deleting stuff from /usr a big part of your use case?

From viewpoint of organizing backups separating system stuff from host specific makes some sense. Also, you can put /usr/local on separate volume, this allows mounting rootfs read-only which can be useful in some cases.

No, but you can quickly tell what is a part of the base system vs not based on where it is located. Your /usr directory typically isn't empty on a new Linux install, whereas /usr/local is totally empty.

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