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Comment by reidacdc | Hacker News Reader

I think this would be a useful conversation.

The userlands are pretty similar, I think, they both support the GNU tools, as is attested to by the existence of Debian/kFreeBSD.

I don't know what the OP's motivation is, but I'm an enterprise server admin, with lots of Debian experience, but no real FreeBSD knowledge at all. I've been looking at Debian/kFreeBSD off and on for a while as a way to get at ZFS, and possibly better NFS performance. I was actually planning on deploying some experimental Debian/kFreeBSD systems when Jessie releases, but it now looks like that might not be such a good plan: http://lwn.net/Articles/614142/

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You can install GNU tools, but the base system is not very GNU, eg now has clang not gcc, BSD Make not Gnu make and so on.

The Gnu tools are of course portable, so you can install them from ports - you will need them for compiling software that assumes Gnu options for example.

Debian/kFreeBSD is a weird idea for me, you will have no support either form the FreeBSD community or the Debian community. I would go straight for FreeBSD proper, it is very well documented.

Debian does have some support for GNU/kFreeBSD. It was an official port of the last stable release. There are also good reasons to want to use it:

https://wiki.debian.org/Debian_GNU/kFreeBSD_why

The reasons listed to use it over FreeBSD are:

1. If you like the Debian package system (or its package set) more than FreeBSD ports (just a matter of preference).

2. If you like GNU userland more than BSDish one (again, just a matter of preference).

3. If you don't have anything against GPL or other copylefted free software licenses, you'll appreciate that useful kernel modules like ext2fs driver, the upcoming reiserfs and xfs, or the upcoming ethernet driver for Xbox are (or will be) compiled in on the default kernel.

4. If you're concerned about running a 100% free system, our commitment to the Debian Free Software Guidelines (DFSG) guarantees that Debian GNU/kFreeBSD doesn't contain any non-free software. In fact, we have removed some non-free binary-only drivers that are contained in the upstream FreeBSD tree (see 903_disable_non-free_drivers.diff in kernel sources for a list).

Of which 1, 2 are just "you prefer it", 3 you can compile those drivers into FreeBSD if you want them. 4 is reasonable, but overall the reasons to use it over the better supported FreeBSD are weak.

Unfortunately kfreebsd will not be an official Debian 8 release architecture: https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2014/11/msg00...

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