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[...] The BSDs long ago lost relevance. Pretty much there is not a thing that they do better than Linux and there is a lot that they do not do that Linux can do. [...]

Linux will always be shit because of the license.

FreeBSD is a dream UNIX system for anyone who doesn't drink the GPL kool-aid, especially with the transition from GCC to Clang. All the best server-side technologies (Node.js, Nginx, Redis, PostgreSQL, etc) are permissively licensed, and BSD constitutes the OS of that new stack. And, if you use (jailed) Opera (which doesn't require "half of gnome" in dependencies, the way Chromium does), you can have a fully functional HTML5 client system without a drop of GPL!

I also find FreeBSD to be a very stable system. Many times I've had a Linux system fail to start because I installed something bad in Synaptic (or for an undetermined cause), but the FreeBSD base system is bulletproof. It forces you to learn a few things in the beginning (as do the best Linux distros, like Gentoo and Arch), but after that it's very easy. Building from the FreeBSD ports tree always "just works", which isn't the case on Gentoo. Plus pretty much all Linux distros are bloated - for example, can you name one that doesn't absolutely mandate perl?

And, regarding the acknowledged Linux performance advantage (especially in fs) - DragonFly BSD is starting to catchup!

It is painfuil to install [...]

To each his own. I can get OpenBSD installed, pkg_add everything I need, untar everything I need to untar, etc - all in the time it takes a popular Linux distro installer just to load Gnome3 on its massively bloated LiveCD!

One major installation convenience weakness that BSD's still have is the difficulty of dealing with partitions. If you're switching between Windows and Linux, you can use something like gparted to shrink your old partition, create a new one, move files over, delete old partition, and then resize the new to fill the disk. If switching to/from or between BSDs (and not using multiple HAMMER volumes), then you're gonna have to back up to another drive... With cheap USB3 HDDs that's no longer as much of an issue though, and keeping such a drive for backup is a good idea in any case.

[...] and the hardware support is worse than Windows.

All UNIXen, including Linux, have inferior desktop hardware support to Windows. No wonder - desktop device manufacturers must place the needs of the >90% first!

BSD's (if not one then another) are pretty good at keeping up with Linux on server hardware that most people use. Sometimes Linux will include a proprietary BLOB to support a device, while the OpenBSD people will make the effort of writing a fully open source driver.

I cant see a a strength to it.

BSD is for people who care about freedom, first and foremost. It has some technical merits (which I hope will grow over time, as more and more people understand the downsides of GPL, switch to a BSD OS, and contribute), but that comes secondary.

--libman

DragonFly BSD lead Matt Dillon is planning to integrate ZFS support. The core kernel being BSD-licensed, integrating files with CDDL (or GPLv3) licenses are OK. The problem with including ZFS support in Linux (unless Sun, being the copyright owner, dual-licensed ZFS under GPL2) is not allowed because GPLv3 is likely to be more restrictive than GPLv2, and thus GPLv2 would disallow the ZFS code from being linked against the kernel.

It would help you to know that, although the DragonFly BSD code is cleaner, they still haven't actually lifted the giant lock from most subsystems, so in actual fact a DFly system is probably WORSE in terms of raw parallelism than a FreeBSD 6 system, which has had at the very least many more drivers lifted. But then Linux 2.6 is probably even better in this regard.

However, in terms of cleanliness of the system and the code, and the guarantee of a better future, yes DragonFly BSD is a terrific choice, however you will still need to do frequent rebuilds of everything as system calls and structures are still being added or changed (see http://www.shiningsilence.com/dbsdlog/ for heads up). DFly will be still undergoing years of restructuring and there is no reason to believe that at any point will it become properly 'stable' in terms of development (though in my experience it is remarkably stable for actual usage), but if you're a BSDophile you're already used to rebuilds and tracking mailing lists or at least blogs like the above.

One final mention is that software availability for DragonFly BSD is still lower than for FreeBSD, which is still slightly lower than for Linux. This situation is greatly improving, but I still haven't heard of anyone running a native Java environment on DFly, which may be a problem for some people (heck I know I would love a JDK/JRE on DFly, I quite like Java as a language). However it's possible that one of the 'Java for Linux' projects (there are at least 10) has bothered being portable. Whether or not it goes so far as to use kqueue for SelectorProviders and so on I can't even begin to guess.

Funny, the Slashdot blurb accuses him of saying that no other system today does SSI, while according to the article he simply said their (future, potential) SSI plans will beat GNAA/Linux's (present, working) SSI clustering.

Anybody have thoughts comparing the DragonFly SSI [shiningsilence.com](warning, PDF) and the GNAA/Linux [sourceforge.net] one?
(Open)Mosix has had craploads of work done on it, and by the time DragonFly's is done, it will be even further ahead. I somehow doubt DragonFly's will end up being better.

PK mo

Funny, the Slashdot blurb accuses him of saying that no other system today does SSI, while according to the article he simply said their (future, potential) SSI plans will beat GNAA/Linux's (present, working) SSI clustering.

Anybody have thoughts comparing the DragonFly SSI [shiningsilence.com](warning, PDF) and the GNAA/Linux [sourceforge.net] one?
(Open)Mosix has had craploads of work done on it, and by the time DragonFly's is done, it will be even further ahead. I somehow doubt DragonFly's will end up being better.

PK xbp

Funny, the Slashdot blurb accuses him of saying that no other system today does SSI, while according to the article he simply said their (future, potential) SSI plans will beat GNAA/Linux's (present, working) SSI clustering.

Anybody have thoughts comparing the DragonFly SSI [shiningsilence.com](warning, PDF) and the GNAA/Linux [sourceforge.net] one?
(Open)Mosix has had craploads of work done on it, and by the time DragonFly's is done, it will be even further ahead. I somehow doubt DragonFly's will end up being better.

PK gwl

Funny, the Slashdot blurb accuses him of saying that no other system today does SSI, while according to the article he simply said their (future, potential) SSI plans will beat GNAA/Linux's (present, working) SSI clustering.

Anybody have thoughts comparing the DragonFly SSI [shiningsilence.com](warning, PDF) and the GNAA/Linux [sourceforge.net] one?
(Open)Mosix has had craploads of work done on it, and by the time DragonFly's is done, it will be even further ahead. I somehow doubt DragonFly's will end up being better.

PK ow

Funny, the Slashdot blurb accuses him of saying that no other system today does SSI, while according to the article he simply said their (future, potential) SSI plans will beat GNAA/Linux's (present, working) SSI clustering.

Anybody have thoughts comparing the DragonFly SSI [shiningsilence.com](warning, PDF) and the GNAA/Linux [sourceforge.net] one?
(Open)Mosix has had craploads of work done on it, and by the time DragonFly's is done, it will be even further ahead. I somehow doubt DragonFly's will end up being better.

PK lsi

Funny, the Slashdot blurb accuses him of saying that no other system today does SSI, while according to the article he simply said their (future, potential) SSI plans will beat Linux's (present, working) SSI clustering.

Anybody have thoughts comparing the DragonFly SSI(warning, PDF) and the Linux one?
(Open)Mosix has had craploads of work done on it, and by the time DragonFly's is done, it will be even further ahead. I somehow doubt DragonFly's will end up being better.

PK

It's going, it's healthy, give them at least a few more months before you can expect a "consumer"-ready release. (Or even a "consumer"-ready preview. Doing a far-reaching overhaul of the FreeBSD kernel is 'easy,' especially since the work is about getting rid of stupid ways for things to break. Adding the userland sugar - the new installer, package/port management features, etc - will take a little more time, as human interfaces are naturally tricky to get right.)

Obviously, if you're familiar with the BSDs already, you can run with what they've got now. Follow the action over here, read the Slashnet Q&A, and dive in on the newsgroups or mailing lists (messages are mirrored between mail and news) if you're ready to help out!