DragonFly BSD Introduces A 'Stable' CVS Tag

bsdman writes "The DragonFly BSD project have recently introduced a new 'stable' tag in their cvs. If you ever wanted to use DragonFly BSD but was scared of any instability - now is your chance!"

Comments

Which one?

[El Icaro]

What are it's advantages over other BSD's? I have a starange feeling that even if there isn't such a huge difference in required knowledge between linux and BSD, BSD is for more professional uses. I can clearly see the differences in linux distro's. But other than portability, and security, what other differences/uses are there? (Just in case, i'm referring to Open, Free, Net and Dragonfly BSD)

Re:Which one?

[Dan Ost]

My understanding is that rather than continue to make incremental improvements
to FreeBSD, the DragonFly BSD folks are ripping out entire subsystems and
replacing them with new designs that they think will scale better, be easier
to maintain, and, ultimately, make it much simpler to make incremental
improvements on than the current FreeBSD design.

Take a look at their website. They have some excellent explanations of their
goals.

Re:Which one?

[Santana]

That's the main difference: goals.

Goals make you take different decisions. They all write very good and consistent operating systems. All of them share code. OpenBSD takes drivers from Net and Free, and these have taken pf, OpenSSH and spamd; the list of shared code is huge (and that's the point of BSD).

But every BSD has different policies. OpenBSD is the more pedantic about licenses and code quality. For some people it could seem absurd, but time has proven OpenBSD is right.

It's my impression that OpenBSD is in the perfect balance between NetBSD (privileging portability) and FreeBSD (privileging efficiency and software availability).

But I'm biased :>

Re:Which one?

[noselasd]

Anyone know if they'll change the VM subsystem?
Pulling in NetBSD's UVM would be great.

Re:Which one?

[El Icaro]

Hmmm... licenses.. code quality... That's all great but now look at it from a sixteen year-old geek's point of view. My intention is to learn as much as I can about IT and to increase my knowledge about all this stuff (It's cool ;)). I've tried TONS of distro's and there are clear differences. Now I don't know about marketing and economics, but people would probably look at ease of use, support, and software-base (that's shared code probably, so that's out of question) among other superficial stuff like preformance (BSD is for servers and not gaming, I think). If someone mentions goals, it might seem very honorable, but my goal in life is to become an excentric millionaire and it probably won't happen. Maybe "goals" are a new concept i'll have to assimilate. What about actual "ooo.. shiny!" features? I mean those that actually make you decide that THAT is your OS of choice. I haven't googled for it cause i'm a bit lazy but the main websites don't seem to be very informative about that aspect.

Re:Which one?

[Santana]

One shiny feature that might not be obvious the first time you see a BSD box is ease of administration. Which is a consequence of a clean and integrated system. OpenBSD specially has a proactive approach to security, which is an important "feature".

Maybe this doesn't seem like fancy features to a teenager geek, but they are so important if you want to take *nix administration seriously.

Re:Which one?

[Brandybuck]

I can clearly see the differences in linux distro's. But other than portability, and security, what other differences/uses are there?

Frankly, who cares about the differences? The purpose of the BSDs isn't to be different.

This is very different from the Linux community. Linux users, in general, tend to chase after the latest "hot" distro. Almost like flash mobs. The latest seems to be Ubuntu skyrocketing up the distrowatch charts. I can't understand why someone happy with their current distro would switch just because everyone's talking about something new. But apparently a lot of you do.

Re:Which one?

[Eivind Eklund]

Seems unlikely - the last rewrite of the FreeBSD VM system was done by Matt Dillon, the founder of DragonFlyBSD.

And I don't know of any particular advantage of UVM in practice; as far as I've understood, the performance in practice is not as good with FreeBSD.

If you've got information to the contrary, please share!

Eivind.

Re:Which one?

[Draco_es]

It's my impression that OpenBSD is in the perfect balance between NetBSD (privileging portability) and FreeBSD (privileging efficiency and software availability).

I think OpenBSD is the less performant and scalable of the three, has less ports and suffers at high loads much more than the others. But it has better security defaults and pf is great. Don't you agree?

Re:Which one?

[sp0rk173]

FreeBSD, and BSD in general, is an OS that once you learn...you will love forever. It's an OS you can love without becoming a zealot. It's pragmatic, intelligently designed, and the code is very clean, relative to linux. You'll also be working in an OS that really just has one goal - to be as good an OS as it can. Not to overthrow microsoft, not to overthrow linux, not to fight against Mac OS as the primary underdog. That, in my opinion, is the main appeal of the BSDs. They're there just to be there, to represent different models and ideas in computer science, and show how these different ideas might work. Linux does this, too, but there are ulterior motives that sometimes draw away from the goal of being the best that it can be. Though, Linus does a damn good job of keeping things on track and focused.

Now, BSD is mainly for servers, but i would venture to say that most BSD developers use it daily as their main workstation. It's a completely viable system to fill that role, and it does a damn good job. Also...nvidia puts out 3D drivers for FreeBSD, you can play almost all linux games in FreeBSD, usually as fast, if not faster, than under linux. I have no evidence of this...but it's what I hear...and people do play linux games on FreeBSD (think wolfenstein, 3D FPSes). So...it can be a platform for gaming. But yeah, to enter the BSD world you have to realize goals. If you want a firewall or a gateway, you can't go wrong with OpenBSD. If you want a nice fast workstation or a high-load network server Get yourself a copy of FreeBSD-STABLE (the 4.X series) or track DragonFly's development. If you want to see BSD die, get a copy of FreeBSD-RELEASE (the 5.X series). If you want to see somethign that will run on anything, and run pretty damn well, then it's all about NetBSD. If you want point and click prettiness with a terminal, OS X is BSD-based. I recommend trying all of them, because they all offer something different for the 16 year-old nerd to learn.

Re:Which one?

[tedu]

if goals aren't really your thing, there's a few other OSs out there with lots of "features" but short on goals. :)

Re:Which one?

[Anonymous Coward]

Every other OS out there pissed me off because of haphazard system layout, and pain-in-the-ass administration; and there was usually also some poor-quality code - which always seemed to exist in the distro's highly-touted admin tools and/or highly-touted upgrade mechanism.

The ports system just plain WORKS, dammit!

I think that the older geeks value the BSD's goals because they also remember being pissed off by OS's that only focused on the "shiny" factor.

The shiny stuff is fun for a while, but someday you'll be using a new Linux distro and you won't be able to print that all-important term paper because you're stuck in some circular-RPM-dependency hell (sure you can fix it, but not before you have to take an Incomplete) - then you'll wish to God you had an OS that just worked, and the shiny new distro won't seem so damn shiny any more.

BTW, don't let other geeks hear you say that performance is "superficial"!

Re:Which one?

[JamesTRexx]

Maybe they don't want to admit they're not as happy with their distro as they say? Or maybe they're just the kind of poeple that want to "oohhh shiny!" kick from installing something new. (and maybe installing stuff is the only thing they do with it because they use their Windows box for games)
And then there might still be people who want to try them all because they can.

Re:Which one?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, a linux user is used for ages to:

* Pretend things work when they don't (90's USB, ext2, etc)
* When busted, explain things were fucked but are really ready now (desktop environment, packages dependencies, robust filesystems, vm managment, etc)
* Upgrade and break its system every other week (new kernel, new gnome, new X, new nvidia driver, etc, etc)
* Ready to jump to whatever fad is current (live CD, rebuild everything from source including the base distribution because some asshole said it was better, etc)
* Live in a undocumented perpetual beta state (which is, btw, now official in lkml)

Of course, this population is trained to change distro instead of fixing the current ones.

Re:Which one?

[Anonymous Coward]

> The latest seems to be Ubuntu skyrocketing up the distrowatch charts

Oh, great. http://www.ubuntulinux.org/ubuntu/philosophy/. Compare with http://www.debian.org/social_contract. What a waste of time...

Re:Which one?

[Anonymous Coward]

As a NetBSD user for 5 years, FreeBSD 1 year and Linux for 6 years, honestly tell you that my Gentoo laptop did not break for the last 18 month, is very fast and stable, just works.

Do I think everything is perfect ? No.
But unfortunately neither is BSD, all distros has their strength and I run servers here at work that have 8 cpu and 32GB RAM(several) on Linux.

Do you have a BSD that can provide a better SMP then Linux today ? No.
Hopefully FreeBSD 5.4 but you see I need these in production NOW.

Just to be fair. I love BSDs by the way so there.

Re:Which one?

[Anonymous Coward]

What are it's advantages

"its".

Re:Which one?

[FullMetalAlchemist]

I thought the deal was that it fitted better in with the NetBSD philosophy, that the code is simpler and therefor better in the long run for the project.

Matt has the same goal, but not in code, but in concept. I could be wrong though, I have not done my homework on UVM.

Re:Which one?

[Anonymous Coward]

I was just in a flamy mood. I used linux at 0.99 kernel time and 2.0.36, for quite a long time. Rocked, but entropy always won. Each time I beleived that something was really better and tried again (my main OS was NeXTstep), it wasn't reallly fixed, but would be RealSoonNow. Kinda like windows.

Went BSD a few years ago, never had problem understanding what the system did, and the fact that I can recompile the whole base distribution is a major win to me (I see /anything/ I don't ike, I can dig the source, change it, make, make install and it is done). My platform are now OSX + BSD, and I don't feel the need to touch linux again.

Re:Which one?

[the chao goes mu]

A bit unfair to the 5.X series, don't you think? Don't get me wrong, I have in the past stopped upgrading BSD (at 2.2.8 and 3.4, if I recall) because of shortcomings in a given release(3.[01] and 4.[012], also if I recall), but I don't think 5.2.1 is anywhere near as bad as you suggest.

Re:Which one?

[m.dillon]

No, the VM subsystem... that is, the concept of using stackable VM Objects, is going to stay in. I do want to implement a copy-on-write mechanism for pages owned by in-progress I/O to avoid stall situations that still exist in FreeBSD (despite Kirk's filesystem bitmap hacks, which only really fixed the worst of the stalls). There are also some kernel memory subsystem interactions with the VM system that need cleaning up to make things more MP friendly, and vm_map's and a few other areas need some algorithmic cleanups... but it's just cleaning up, not a rewrite. Generally I believe the VM Object based VM subsystem used in FreeBSD and DragonFly to be superior to the mechanisms used in other BSDs and in Linux.

-Matt

Re:Which one?

[Anonymous Coward]

how can bsd be for servers when they don't scale up that well?

Re:Which one?

[Rich]

> It's my impression that OpenBSD is in the perfect balance between NetBSD (privileging portability) and FreeBSD (privileging efficiency and software availability).

I think that's a largely a question of what you want to do with the machine. For example I like linux because it works with all my hardware from TV tuner cards to my NVidia graphics card.

Re:Which one?

[Anonymous Coward]

> What are it's advantages over other BSD's?

A message-based architecture, a bit like BeOS. One of the advantages of that is you can set up message endpoints with a syscall then use messages instead of syscalls for a great many things. The message queueing system is smart enough to know how to turn a great many (synchronous) messages into plain old function calls, which is *much* faster than the syscall overhead (which requires an interrupt and two context switches).

Anecdotal reports are that it's a good deal faster than FreeBSD 5.x and possibly faster than 4.x (5.x took a big speed hit on uniprocessors).

ISO's only?

[Coneasfast]

is there any other way to install other than ISO? i want to test it out, would be nice if there was another option, at least install from fat partition or something.

Re:ISO's only?

[Holi]

From the download section of their website:

CD Images
DragonFly CDs are 'live', meaning these CDs will boot your system and let you log in as root (no password). You can use this feature to check for hardware compatibility and play with DragonFly a little before actually installing it on your hard drive. The CD includes an installer that can be run at the console, or (experimentally) via a web browser. Make sure you read the README file for more information. To activate the installer, boot the CD and login as 'installer'. See the 'Download Site' list below for a list of download locations.

Re:ISO's only?

[Anonymous Coward]

What I wanna know is why you can't boot from a usb key. Boot floppies must go the way of all floppies.

Re:ISO's only?

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.livebsd.com/

Live cd's. Enjoy,.

Great, but...

[ArbitraryConstant]

"BSD
4 more"

When was the last time anyone saw that? It's like a creepy zombie movie. /hopes the mods can tell a joke from a troll

Re:Great, but...

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't you just love the sweet smell of desperation. :)

Re:Great, but...

[be-fan]

I don't get it.

Nice, but...

[Anonymous Coward]

What's with the adoption of the "3 clause" BSD license? That's rather tacky of you, Matt. Especially when you founded DragonFlyBSD in the first place to get your ideas out in the open.

Re:Nice, but...

[sp0rk173]

it's the OSI approved version of the license. Apparently some old files had the old 4-clause license hanging around.

This is an improvement, and isn't making it any harder for Matt and other's ideas to get out. It's actually making the code MORE open, from the GNU/FSF/OSI standpoint. Nice attempt at a troll, though.

poor grammar

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow. 2 sentences and 2 mistakes. Let me help out:

The DragonFly BSD project has recently introduced a new 'stable' tag in their cvs. If you ever wanted to use DragonFly BSD but were scared of any instability - now is your chance!

Re:poor grammar

[torstenvl]

Two sentences, one mistake.

The DragonFly BSD Project (TDFBSDP) is not *just* Matt. It's multiple people. It's plural. "have"

Silly American. </playfulness>

Seriously though, we don't have a verbal inflection category for collectives. Americans conjugate as though each noun were singular. Brits conjugate as though each noun were plural. It's rather arbitrary and neither one is "right" or "wrong".

In fact, the way it was before was more grammatically correct than yours. "have...their" is correct, but if you write "has...their" you're wrong; "their" is only used as a gender-neutral singular possessive for ANIMATE nouns (as opposed to "his/her". As it's an inanimate noun, if you deem that TDFBSDP is singular, you need to use "its".

Re:poor grammar

[d'fim]

"The DragonFly BSD Project has recently introduced a new 'stable' tag into its CVS."

"The members of the DragonFly BSD Project have recently introduced a new 'stable' tag into their CVS."

A single project with multiple members.

The project is not the people - unless you're a motivational speaker or some other such person who's paid to speak in warm fuzzies. The project is (at least) the sum of its parts: the people, the ideas, the sweat, the worry, the capital resources, et cetera. In other words, the project is a superset, and thus gets the status of singular noun.

<Yakov Smirnov> But only in America - what a country! </Yakov Smirnov>

Of course, all of the above is only true for those who accept set theory into their paradigm of what constitutes logical speech. Remember: "the members of a set are not the set itself." (Note British punctuational style - gotta admit that that's the better way to go!) Unless it's a self-inclusive set, but that would be strangely loopy...

Re:poor grammar

[Anonymous Coward]

As already noted, "The DragonFly BSD Project" is a singular entity. It is proper to say "has" instead of "have". You are wrong. If talking about the members of TDFBSDP then it would be "have". You can check with your English teacher ;)

Re:poor grammar

[Anonymous Coward]

Interesting.... So the Brits would say "The car have gas"?

Re:poor grammar

[Burb]

We would, in fact say "This car has petrol". But there has been a tendency in recent years to treat collective nouns as plurals, as in "The Manchester United football team are overpaid". I don't see this as a Brit/Yank difference.

Re:poor grammar

[Anonymous Coward]

This phenomenon doesn't happen in the USA. At all.

But these people who are shouting about right or wrong... they're stupid. English majors are pathetic excuses for linguists.

Re:poor grammar

[Anonymous Coward]

From http://holistech.co.uk/cassidy/index.php

April Microsoft Patches Wednesday 14th April 2004 Microsoft have released three new critical patches: A cumulative update to Outlook Express (fixes the Microsoft Help bug discussed below) A cumulative RPC/DCOM update And a bundle of other patches

From: http://www.bcentral.co.uk/issues/security/software /buyinglicenses.mspx

If you have heard that Microsoft have changed their licensing programmes then read on to find out what those changes mean, does it affect you and what your options are in the future when buying software.

From http://tutorials.beginners.co.uk/read/id/380

Windows NT has been with us for almost eight years, and as the product has matured, Microsoft have added more features in an effort to address users' needs and administrators' requirements.

From: http://www.pjb.co.uk/8/Exchange.htm (written, apparently, by a professor)

Microsoft claim that more than 60,000 users at corporations, government agencies and universities have already used beta versions of Microsoft Exchange Server. More than 130 software developers have or will soon announce products built on top of Microsoft Exchange, and 30 of these products are expected to ship within 90 days of the Microsoft Exchange ship date. Several of these products are in the area of Bulletin Board systems including some interesting names including PacerForum and TeamTalk. A very impressive feature of the launch of Exchange is the online documentation that Microsoft have assembled on all aspects of it - surf to Microsoft's main Web site http://www.microsoft.com/exchange/ for a cornucopia of documentation, case studies, technical reports and competitive evaluations.

From: http://education.guardian.co.uk/higher/worldwide/s tory/0,9959,847454,00.html

The army have abused her, the police have sexually harassed her

From: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/wales/1805008.stm

His family claim the army have not learned the lessons of past casualties and said they should now reconsider their policy of using live ammunitions in training exercises.

From: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/talking_point/3570352.s tm

The US army have no right what so ever to be in Najaf neither the so called governor of Najaf.

From: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/northern_ireland/294400 7.stm

The BBC's John Ware: "The army have always contended that Nelson never told them about the targeting of Pat Finucane"

Yes, I would have to say, judging by its use on BBC and by a professor, that conjugating collectives as plural is perfectly acceptable in the UK.

Re:poor grammar

[norkakn]

If I was good at grammer, I'd pay more attention to what you say.

Re:poor grammar

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, I would have to say, judging by its use on BBC and by a professor, that conjugating collectives as plural is perfectly acceptable in the UK.

Results 1 - 10 of about 1,140 from bbc.co.uk for "microsoft has".

Results 1 - 10 of about 168 from bbc.co.uk for "microsoft have".

Lets find yet more wisdom within the BBC.

Results 1 - 10 of about 946 from bbc.co.uk for embarrass.

Results 1 - 10 of about 41 from bbc.co.uk for embarass.

Results 1 - 10 of about 999 from bbc.co.uk for preceding.

Results 1 - 10 of about 46 from bbc.co.uk for preceeding.

Results 1 - 5 of about 1,490 for bbc.co.uk pronunciation.

Results 1 - 10 of about 73 from bbc.co.uk for pronounciation

So now the misspelled words "embarass", "preceeding", and "pronounciation" are perfectly acceptable in the UK?

In the US the words lie and lay are so often mixed up that any mistakes in their use are overlooked. That doesn't mean it's right to do so.

And besides, even the BBC disagrees with you.

Re:poor grammar

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh does it?

"This is an area of some debate, but as they are treated as a singular unit, collective nouns usually take the singular verb form."

Nope. It just says that it's not the most common form.

Your statistics back this up. "ms has":"ms have" = 1140:168. "pronunciation":"pronounciation" = 1490:73. x:n and y:m in which y = x+a and m = 1/2n -b do not show that n and m have the same respective relationships to x and y.

In laymen's terms, if "ms have" were as much of an abomination of "ms has" as "pronounciation" is of "pronunciation", we would expect that it would occur with similar frequency relative to the 'correct' form. This is not the case. "ms have" appears more than twice as often as "pronounciation" despite the fact that "ms has" occurs less often than "pronunciation".

Your prescriptivist notions are stupid. Lay has been used intransitively in the same way as lie since the fourteenth century. That is, I believe, longer than we have said "caught" as the past participle of "to catch". The fact that one is regarded as an inferior form and the other is regarded as obligatory usage is based exclusively upon the arbitrary opinions of self-righteous elitists like yourself.

Get over yourself. People talk this way. So people write informally this way. And Slashdot is *not* a doctoral dissertation. If it were, I would have a few things to say about your grammar:

"besides" is not a word to be used in formal writing. You may use "beside that" which adheres to the form of a prepositional phrase, that is, a preposition followed by a noun phrase, in this case a pronominal form. In addition, a better choice would be the word "regardless".

"Lets" is the verb "to let" in the third person singular indicative. You meant "Let's", which is a contracted form of "Let us", used in English to denote a first person plural imperative.

If you front an adverb, you must follow it with a comma. "In the US, ..." for example.

"mixed up" is conversation and not to be used in formal writing. Please replace with "confused".

I can suggest many more. Instead of returning your pedantry, however, I'll simply ask you to reflect before attacking others, which was my intent when I posted in the first place.

Don't worry

[Inf0phreak]

By the Axiom of Foundation such a set does not exist in ZF so there is no such problem.

" If you want to see BSD die, get 5.X series "

[Ricin]

Insightful, my rim!

Not that big a deal.

[m.dillon]

Oh for heaven's sake. It's not *that* big a deal! It's there so all the new VFS work, which is virtually guarenteed to create some destabilization despite our best efforts (because we are literally ripping out and replacing the entire VFS interface), doesn't screw up people trying to use DragonFly as a production platform.

Wait a few months and there will really be some new cool things to brag about. The new VFS layering is going to allow us to implement a generic journaling interface (read: real time continuously streaming fs backups and other cool things).

-Matt

Re: new cool things

[Anonymous Coward]

I realize that these are probably dumb questions, but how does this VFS work tie into your plans to make DragonFly a clustering capable operating system?

What other things will this work enable DragonFly to do? Userspace filwsystem drivers? Something like FreeBSD's jails on steroids?

New MOD category needed

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd like to propose a new, negative, MOD category: Unhumorous Grammar Nazi.

It's purpose would be to get the Grammar Flames below the radar as quickly as possible. Of course if the poster is pointing out a hysterically funny typo, then it shouldn't be modded down.

The parent does not seem to contribute to the discussion or have appreciable humor.

Re:New MOD category needed

[torstenvl]

Woah woah woah.

I seem to be a grammar nazi?

I was responding to SOMEONE ELSE'S criticism of the grammar of the original poster. I didn't say anything about anyone's grammar being wrong.

Don't be a troll.

Re:New MOD category needed

[d'fim]

Far from being a "Flame", I thought that torstenvl's comment was pretty cool - and informative.

If I thought that he had been flaming then I would not have replied to his comment.

It is possible to point out grammar issues without resorting to flames, and torstenvl did just that.

If you want humor then you've got the whole internet from which to choose.

Grow up.

Re:New MOD category needed

[Anonymous Coward]

Thanks mate. :-)

I'm a student in linguistics so this kind of thing fascinates me (which is why I even noted the collective/plural thing in the UK in the first place, as I'm an American).

All in good spirit.

Re: new cool things

[phoenix_rizzen]

Read through the archives of the kernel mailing list archive. These kinds of questions pop up now and then and Matt and co have responded to them in length over the past month or so. Very informative, and not too technical.

Mod parent down

[HenryKoren]

How did this guy get modded insightful? By having proper grammar?

If you want a firewall or a gateway, you can't go wrong with OpenBSD. If you want a nice fast workstation or a high-load network server Get yourself a copy of FreeBSD-STABLE (the 4.X series) or track DragonFly's development. If you want to see BSD die, get a copy of FreeBSD-RELEASE (the 5.X series)

This poster is slinging poo, but has he even tried 5.X or does he just not like it's "goals"?

The 5.1 gateway server I have running at my company has performed flawlessly.
The 5.2.1 server I have at my home has 547 packages on it, and is used as a desktop machine as well as a server. It also is an excellent performer.

So where does the hate for 5.X come for? I'd really like to know.

I'm a FreeBSD zealot, and I'm proud of it. What's bad for BSD is the forking and the in-fighting amongst the leaders of the respective forks who can't come to a consensus on their "goals". Parallel efforts are a waste. We need unity in the BSD community. And that means supporting the most prominent release: FreeBSD, not some disgruntled developers fork of an older version.

Re:Mod parent down

[sp0rk173]

Sorry for the late reply. I do use 5.2.1 as my webserver at home. It runs, and it runs well. But I've read the technical flaws that Matt has with it, and I agree with them. I think Matt's fork is more than just a "disgruntled developer's fork." He's making major, major changes to the base, and the resulting API design is just much nicer, from a programmer's point of view. The theory behind his model also just makes sense to me. I recommend you put down your religious zealotry, put on a nice little "skeptic" hat, and review Dragonfly for what it is. Check out the actual code changes, the clean ups, etc, and see what you think. I'm not here to change your mind, I'm just here to open it. And for the sake of all truth, the FreeBSD developers are still people. They can make wrong decisions, go down the wrong design path. Just because it works doesn't mean it's ideal, or that it's the best solution. For example, Linux runs beautifully...but compared to FreeBSD it's code is a mess, for a while it's TCP/IP stack was inferior...but it still ran, and people still rallied behind it. FreeBSD had a better solution, technically speaking, but since the stack in linux worked, there wasn't much of a drive to change it.

It's important to point out that I don't *hate* FreeBSD. It was my first real OS love. It's still, speaking from a strictly pragmatic standpoint, a better choice than Dragonfly when you take into account the flux that Dragonfly is currently going through. Which will be better in the long run? Only time will tell, but Dragonfly definitely presents an interesting alternative to the status quo in the BSD world.

I do take strong issue with one thing you said, though:

Parallel efforts are a waste.

I really don't believe this is true. Parallel efforts provide the community with choice and a deviance from the status quo. The status quo might be the best solution, or it might not. How would you know if it is or not if you don't challenge it? Simply because it works well enough? I don't accept that as an answer. Competing efforts are good.

Anyway, Keep using FreeBSD if you're happy with it, but I'm becoming to be annoyed with the way things are being done. To each their own, right?

What do they mean by stable?

[Anonymous Coward]

Is this 'stable' as in 'production-ready' or 'stable' as in 'package versions are fixed'?

And please don't bother answering if you think FreeBSD-STABLE means 'production-ready'...people like you seem to like to take the time to respond to these kinds of questions when your time would be better spent reading the handbook.

I want dragonfly...

[Anonymous Coward]

But I can't get it to support the Intel/DEC tulip ethernet drivers, because the existence of the old tulip driver (built with the GENERIC kernel) interferes with the newer one (not built with the kernel). Naturally my card only works with the newer one. Notably, until the 2.6 series, most linux distros also had a similar problem.

Makes it hard to do a netinstall if I don't have net. Nor am I really inclined to blow away my old system if I can't be completely sure I have net afterward.

Re:*BSD is dying

[Anonymous Coward]

I guess i should go back to windows then, oh wait I like BSD , I like feeding the troll