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In Favor of FreeBSD On the Desktop
snydeq writes "Deep End's Paul Venezia wonders why more folks aren't using FreeBSD on the desktop. 'There used to be a saying — at least I've said it many times — that my workstations run Linux, my servers run FreeBSD. Sure, it's quicker to build a Linux box, do a "yum install x y z" and toss it out into the wild as a fully functional server, but the extra time required to really get a FreeBSD box tuned will come back in spades through performance and stability metrics. You'll get more out of the hardware, be that virtual or physical, than you will on a generic Linux binary installation.'"
At least it's that way for us in HPC. Sure, FreeBSD is rock stable and all, but if you run stable, you'll be trailing behind and won't get to use the latest packages. This may be fine for ordinary HTTP server, but when you need an updated NUMA aware scheduler for your 48 core/4 socket machine or the latest drivers for your InfiniBand hardware, then you'll happily give up some alleged increase in stability in favor of real performance. Same is true for Debian stable.
Computer simulation made easy -- LibGeoDecomp
Seeing as to how you haven't RTFA, you deserve to be on-slaughtered :)
Are you really suggesting that the time I spend will "come back in spades?"
Sorry, but as a longtime FreeBSD user and having wasted days of my life getting the graphics card to work and then tuning every last parameter, I'll take Ubuntu or Fedora on my desktop, thanks.
Sorry, but it's not worth the time and whatever "spades" you're getting paid pack in are 99% emotional, not physical.
Kriston
Sir, this is /. I have NEVER read an article.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Damn - you're right. I wondered what all that text was above the comments. I assumed it was an ad, or a Terminal session or something....
I dual boot my Linux desktop, and spend a lot of time in FreeBSD (I used PC-BSD, which installs pretty easily). These days, one of its advantages is that you can still have a KDE3 or Gnome2 desktop - worth it indeed!
If this were Usenet, I'd killfile the lot of you.
And you get the benefit of one of the best GUI's in the desktop world, to boot.
The desktop looks like AOL's client software from the late 90's. Best GUI is debatable.
tl;dr - guy uses 10 years old hardware and wonders why an OS that works fine for him doesn't appeal to everyone else...
/.?
We switched our last servers from FreeBSD to Linux about 10 years ago because FreeBSD had crappy SMP support. Seriously, why does something like this get posted to
"I love my job, but I hate talking to people like you" (Freddie Mercury)
Yeah.... not quite.
There are BSD user-space tools. The kernel is a combination of the BSD kernel, Mach and various other bits.
It's BSD-flavoured, but it's not BSD. Look up Darwin for more info.
The author himself gives the reason: "Right up until last week, this FreeBSD box had an uptime of 1,057 days, or nearly three years. This streak was broken only due to a UPS failure during a brief power outage... And this box has been rock-solid stable the entire 10 years, with only a disk failure or two in the middle." Considering hardware failure will eventually bring down the machine anyway, there's little to no difference in uptime between a "rock solid" BSD install versus a "also-solid" Linux install.
When I have a list of 200+ servers and VMs that I'm responsible for, as well as the applications that run on them, who has time to tune each server? While a nice idea, it's simply not practical at the scale most large businesses run at.
We used to use FreeBSD on some servers, but they all quickly became dead ends, as OS patches and upgrades were painful and time consuming. Now we're a SLES house.
If you want your Operating System tuned and customized to your hardware can't you just use Gentoo Linux? Then you won't lose the benefits of the better support that Linux has.
all the linux fanbois i know are always raving about "OMGZ teh linux is uber stable, i only have to reboot every 6.1 years!" and looking down their noses at me as a poor, foolish windows user. youre saying theres something even more stable? those guys must be insufferable
TFA only makes a passing mention of OS X, and doesn't acknowledge its presence on servers at all. TFA is really little more than an advertisement for FreeBSD over Linux, saying "Look! It's more stable and has better features!" while completely missing the point that Linux is stable enough for use and also has ample useful features of its own.
Linux is used more than BSD because there are more available distros, meeting diverse needs without any configuration necessary. Professional support is more readily available, and in my limited experience, even hardware support is somewhat better.
Personally, I think Apple servers don't have much market share because they're so damned expensive, and there's not much in the way of specialization.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
I assume they still don't have it. Wake me up when that happens and I will use FreeBSD on the desktop.
Your assumption is wrong. A simple search on the internet would have shown you that Flash works on FreeBSD, and it works for a while now (both 32 and 64bit). I've used it with Firefox and with Opera.
See the handbook.
So, um... wake up lazy!
MacOS X is a skyscraper in the same way a house is a skyscraper. Yes, they use some of the same parts, and use similar (sometimes the same) stuff for similar functionality, but the similarities end there.
MacOS (or as I call it) Frankenstein's OS, is a hodgepodge of at least three distinct operating systems, plus Apples own work.
Unlike Frankenstein's monster, however, Frankenstein's OS, doesn't lurch around, it's actually rather good and functional, especially after the X.2 or X.3 update when they put threading into the kernel.
As for the best GUI... that is a matter of opinion, which I disagree with. The GUI is way to distracting and lacks certain pieces of functionality, customisability and accessibility that I would prefer.
Windows 2K ~= KDE > XP > XFCE > Window Maker > Gnome > Vista/7 > Any version of OSX > TWM
at least, IMO.
Yes, there's no real one trend in that list, each one is a combination of things that works for me.
Self proclaimed typo king, and inventor of the bear destroying coffee table (patent not pending).
They've had it for years, there's at least two different ways of doing it. The easiest way is just using Wine and the Windows version of Firefox. The other way is to just use the Linux version of Flash. And really, it's only necessary because of incompetent web developers anyways.
These sorts of FUD posts about a largely unimportant feature that isn't native, is really not conducive to a decent discussion.
Wait, since when does Slashdot link to articles?
I've installed BSD systems a number of times. They've always required more effort than a Linux box to get configured for what I want.
Sure BSD is a cool thing. To some people MS-DOS 6.11 was a great thing, too. You'd be surprised how many systems in the world are still running MS-DOS (a lot of point of sale systems). Just because something is cool or can be made to work doesn't mean it's the best for any particular use.
You could use a Porsche 911 as a dump truck, but why? You could make a pickup truck into a limousine, but why? Wise use of tools is a sign of maturity.
I read TFA when it was on OSNews, and it's a waste of space. I was expecting some actual points, but it seemed to boil down to 'I haven't rebooted this machine for three years! FreeBSD is therefore awesome!' When someone talks about uptime, it's a clear sign that they are an idiot: uptime is irrelevant, downtime is important. You can achieve good uptime by failing to install security updates, but it's far better to spend a minute rebooting than to spend a day cleaning up and reinstalling after a machine is compromised.
I have these reasons for using FreeBSD on the desktop:
I don't want to have to spend ages configuring stuff, or learning how to configure stuff. With FreeBSD, the stuff I learned ten years ago is still relevant. I only need to learn new things when there is new functionality. Contrast this with Linux where userspace tools change more often than Paris fashions. Just as you've learned one, it's deprecated, and then replaced by something else.
APIs are well designed and stable. A couple of years ago, I wrote some code for getting the battery status on a variety of platforms. On NetBSD, OpenBSD, and FreeBSD it was a few sysctls and worked on every architecture. On Linux, the interfaces were subtly different on every architecture, but there was a 300KB library that abstracted this for you. The code to invoke this library was more complex than the entire *BSD implementations combined.
Sound Just Works. FreeBSD has low-latency sound mixing in the kernel and has a really amazing implementation of the OSS 4 APIs. Multiple applications can just open /dev/dsp, issue a couple of ioctls() to select the sample rate and so on, and away it goes. I installed FreeBSD on a NAS / Media Center box a few weeks ago. 5.1 sound output in VLC just worked[1], and I can ssh into the machine and run another music player with the display exported to my laptop without needing to close the VLC that has the sound device open to play audio from DVDs, or configure some userspace sound daemon. The kernel just does what a kernel is supposed to do: abstract the details of the underlying system (including the fact that multiple unrelated processes are running) from userspace apps. This was what made me switch from Linux to FreeBSD in the 4.x days - multiple apps playing sound at once was easy. Apparently, three sound daemons later, it's almost easy in Linux, in a hacky kind of way, as long as PulseAudio doesn't hate you as much as it apparently hates most people...
ZFS. Seriously, if you haven't used it then you don't know how awesome it is. Creating new filesystems is as easy as creating new directories. Transparent compression, deduplication, and free snapshots are amazing. Even better is the integration with the ezjail tool, which clones a base system install and creates a jail. This is great if you want to run some untrusted code, or just set up a test environment - it takes a few seconds to create a new, isolated environment where you can test things, break things, and then destroy it when you're done. I've only used it on the most recent FreeBSD machine I've installed, and after a day I started missing it on systems where I wasn't using it. There are some places where it could be better integrated, for example apt-clone on Nexenta took a snapshot, installed a bunch of packages, and then reverted the filesystem if any of them failed - I don't know of any FreeBSD equivalent yet, but hopefully pkg-ng will introduce one.
Capsicum. The first security framework I've seen that is actually well designed. It's in -CURRENT, not sure if it will make it into 9.0, but should into 9.1 if it doesn't. Most of the standard userland tools are being modified to use it, and things like Chromium have already had Capsicum integrated - a tiny diff to do fine-grained sandboxing. An increasing number of ports are getting Capsicum support too, so expect to see your favourite desktop applications start to run with the absolute minimum required privilege soon.
[1] I spent a couple of hours looking for documentation on how to configure it. Then I decided to actually test it, found that it worked already, and felt quite silly.
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OS X is the only one you can call UNIX. The others are UNIX-like or UNIX-derived (in the BSD case). To be called UNIX (a trademark owned by The Open Group), you must be certified as implementing the whole of the Single UNIX Specification.
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With MacPorts, OSX is like FreeBSD, but frankly there's nothing like the real thing.
I often get modded down for posting this (probably partly b/c I post it too often), but . . .
Apple's hardware is tops, but OSX is a lesser-BSD and it would be the best of all possible worlds if a user could replace it (easily and completely) with a real one (FreeBSD, PC-BSD, or Desktop BSD).
The fact that Apple has largely abandoned the server market, and is the only source of hardware on which OSX is blessed to run probably doesn't help.
Yeah, you can get the "Mac Pro Server"(Oh Boy! you can by a rack shelf and then put two of them on it, for up to 4 whole sockets in 12Us! The bitchin' Radeon HD 5770(whose mini displayport and DVI outputs aren't compatible with my KVM gear) totally takes my mind off the fact that xserves would have done 24 sockets in the same space. Dual PSUs aren't an option; but does your shitbox dell server have bluetooth or S/P-DIF audio? Thought not...) or a "Mac Mini Server"(a server that supports up to 8GB of RAM, fuck yeah! Wait, you mean that "apple remote control" is the name of an attractive IR remote, not a LoM card? Shit, no wonder is seemed so cheap.)
For many people's desktop requirements, the fact that Apple refuses to make a sucky-but-wildly-inexpensive tower isn't actually a huge deal. The server market is a whole lot less forgiving of deviations from reasonable form factors and common redundancy and management features...
did Slashdot get taken over by ADD/OCD redditors? FreeBSD is not hard to install, use, and configure. It has the best documentation out of any *NIX I've seen. It can easily utilize resources, great for server daemons, clusters, DB, and can run Xorg. There's so many damn distros to choose from nowadays, people see it for 30 seconds, download a new ISO of something completely different, install it, get bored, try another, etc. Maybe if you actually put some time in to making the system just the way you want, and RTFM, then you might be happy with the results you get from FreeBSD, or any other OS for that matter. Just tired of the ADD. Pay attention!
*plays the Apogee theme song music*
These benchmarks say that Linux is usually faster than any BSD flavor.
As for stability, I can't find any definite stats on this. Personally, haven't seen a Linux crash since 1997, and that's a pretty damn long time.
What kind of nonsense are you spouting? FreeBSD has paravirtualised disk and network drivers for Xen and runs very well as DomU. Dom0 support is a bit less good, but if you want to run FreeBSD guests on a FreeBSD host there is BHyVe.
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BSD was unix before the open group ever existed. Any sane person would consider it "grandfathered in."
And by fad, you mean... in the kernel since 2003.
Yes Francis, the world has gone crazy.
I actually use mostly FreeBSD on servers because the maintainability and time-savings. I've never had a problem with updates not being accessible (cannot say the same for Solaris), and most of my installations work out-of-the-box. They do not have some fancy half-assed X wizard to tune some config file (or some xml that will later be translated to some config file), and requires that the administrator has an idea of what he's doing. The problem is, is cheaper to hire average administrators that can run a linux configuration script or a windows wizard, than one that actually knows what he's doing. And while companies probably don't need a wizard running the servers, a competent unix sysadmin will be competent and productive on freebsd, linux or solaris. The problem with modern operating systems isn't stability anymore, but how they allow the sysadmin to diagnose, troubleshoot and recover software and hardware errors. On that field, both solaris and freebsd are much more advanced than linux or windows.
No, BSD was UNIX when it contained AT&T UNIX code and AT&T owned the trademark. After the UCB vs AT&T lawsuit, BSD removed the last remaining traces of UNIX code and was not UNIX.
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"Note to all: Despite what you might read on Slashdot or other aggregators, this piece is about servers, not desktop FreeBSD use. Not sure how that got misconstrued, but I'm talking exclusively about server use. I haven't run *BSD on the desktop since 1998, hence my comment about Linux on the desktop and FreeBSD on the servers. "
I use schroot for the usecase you use ezjail for, and from your short note it looks mostly equivalent. I tend to use either a btrfs or lvm backend.
Chroot is just filesystem isolation. It was never intended for security purposes, and can be trivially breached. Jails provide real OS and memory isolation, dedicated addresses, and even dedicated network devices and stacks. It's more analogous to Solaris Containers and Linux LXC.
Having an integrated filesystem and volume manager affords certain capabilities that LVM cannot do. Without looking deeply at the implemented capabilities, BtrFS should be comparable to ZFS. The reason for multiple filesystems is to allow independent management of each. One with primarily text files could have compression enabled. One with important data could specify multiple duplicates, which makes sure those files are stored on multiple zvols in case one fails. If nothing else, it allows you to maintain independent snapshot strategies for different directories.
ZFS. Seriously, if you haven't used it then you [...]
The problem is that FreeBSD's implementation of ZFS in stable builds is extremely out of date. FreeBSD currently supports ZFS v15 (current closed-source is v33), which means you're missing a lot of the features. No triple-parity RAID, no deduplication, no encryption, no snapshot diffs, etc.
The good news is that FreeBSD 9.0 will bring this up to v28, the version used in the last release of OpenSolaris. My home file server is running OpenSolaris with a ZFS v28 storage pool, and I'm planning on trying to migrate to FreeBSD 9.0 as soon as it's out (RC2 should be out any day now, so close...)
Of course, the downside to all this is that ZFS is now effectively closed-source, and I'm not sure if we'll ever get anything newer than v28, unless it forks...
The locking of /dev/dsp is mostly ancient history at this point, even on Linux, where sound (finally) got the attention it needs
And yet I still regularly hear complaints from Linux users about sound-related problems.
I use schroot for the usecase you use ezjail for, and from your short note it looks mostly equivalent. I tend to use either a btrfs or lvm backend.
schroot uses chroot. Jail does a lot more than chroot - each jail contains an independent set of users, so things can run as root inside a jail without being able to escape.
As for creating new filesystems, I find that mostly a bother; what I want is just one filesystem to handle it all
I want my backups to be compressed and deduplicated. I want my hone directory to have some extra redundancy. I want my ports tree to be compressed but not deduplicated. I don't want setuid or execute flags to work on every part of the hierarchy.
The reason you want one filesystem is because you use a system where creating a new one that does what you want is expensive. Adding a new zfs filesystem is a single command and takes a few seconds (99% of which is the time taken to type the command, not the time for it to execute). Before using ZFS, I was in the same situation - I'd given up creating different filesystems for different parts of the tree. With the system I've set up to use ZFS, I currently have 24 ZFS filesystems mounted. There is no reason not to create more, and (since snapshots happen on a filesystem granularity) some very good reasons for creating new ones.
Snapshots are useful though (and supported by LVM and btrfs).
LVM snapshots are much more heavyweight than ZFS ones (which cost about as much as creating a hard link to create). I doubt you'd set up a cron job to take daily or hourly snapshots with LVM, but I wouldn't even think twice about doing that with the ZFS filesystem I use for storing backups.
Not sure about btrfs, but last I heard it wasn't even close to being production ready and, because it still uses the old SunOS-derived layering, doesn't fix the RAID-5 write hole or address half of the other things that ZFS does. Like many other Linux things, it's a superficial copy of something else, missing the parts that made the original interesting.
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Funny - it was the complete opposite when I started with the BSDs. I learned UNIX on FreeBSD using the handbook as my primary guide. Before discovering it, Linux was always an exercise in frustration due to slightly incorrect, or missing documentation. When you are starting from a position of having large pre-requisite knowledge gaps, slightly incorrect documentation is a killer.
FreeBSD's handbook allowed a noob like me to get by and make it while the knowledge gaps were filled in with experience.
I don't always use unix-like operating systems; but when I do, I prefer FreeBSD.
The problem is that FreeBSD's implementation of ZFS in stable builds is extremely out of date. FreeBSD currently supports ZFS v15 (current closed-source is v33), which means you're missing a lot of the features. No triple-parity RAID, no deduplication, no encryption, no snapshot diffs, etc.
As you say, FreeBSD 9 (currently in release candidate phase) supports ZFS v28. I'm using the RC now, and deduplication seems to work pretty nicely. I've got a compressed deduplicated volume that I use for Time Machine backups from a couple of Macs. Compression is saving about 25% of the space, and deduplication another 10% (I expect this to increase, because Time Machine creates a new copy of every file even if only one block changes).
Of course, the downside to all this is that ZFS is now effectively closed-source, and I'm not sure if we'll ever get anything newer than v28, unless it forks...
iXSystems sells ZFS-based storage appliances running FreeBSD. They've recently taken over development of FreeNAS and have publicly committed to continuing to develop ZFS on FreeBSD - they've already been responsible for fixing a few bugs that haven't get been fixed on Solaris. Whether the new versions will be compatible with Oracle's version depends on whether Oracle releases documentation, but either way ZFS in FreeBSD is not going to orphaned.
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Isn't the FreeBSD that Apple uses a variant that sits on top of Mach 3.0? Whereas IIRC, FreeBSD itself doesn't use Mach.
One thing I didn't get - did the article focus on just FreeBSD, or was it a generic question about BSDs? In other words, was the author wondering why people don't use any of the BSD distros out there - FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD or TrustedBSD? (And yeah, I did read the full article, but didn't get which of the above questions it was!)
The important part isn't how FreeBSD's ZFS compares with Solaris's; it's how it compares to available Linux filesystems. You're not getting triple parity or dedup support there either. The ZFS v15 is still miles ahead of any stable Linux FS for many applications. Block checksums is the feature I miss most on Linux, with good snapshot support being a close second. v15 may not have the latest snapshot diffs, but it's still better than how Linux's snapshots require LVM to work, and even then are very hackish to use.
Totally irrelevant. A typical supercomputer uses Linux as a glorified I/O controller. SMP performance in the kernel is irrelevant - jobs get given 100% control over the CPU for the time that they run. The kernel is there (often in a coprocessor) to handle I/O requests issued by the code running on the real hardware. They certainly aren't scheduling jobs on a supercomputer in the same way that they are on your desktop. If they were, it would be a pretty compelling reason to not use Linux on the desktop: supercomputers are all about throughput, and if a job has to wait a few minutes to get CPU time then that's fine as long as it gets a huge amount of CPU when it runs. Desktops are all about latency: if your code is using 20% of your CPU instead of 10%, you probably don't care, but you do care if you have to wait a user-noticeable amount of time (more than a few tens of ms) for a response to an interface action.
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FreeBSD has you editing a makefile with minimal documentation.
No, it has you editing the kernel description file with lots of documentation. Here is the GENERIC kernel config for x86-64. If you want to compile a custom kernel, copy that file and modify it. You'll find a comment on every single line explaining what it does, and a longer comment above every section. Linux's menuconfig requires more keystrokes to remove options than editing that file in a text editor.
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I'm sure I'm opening myself up for an onslaught here, but I thought all their OSX-based stuff was basically just a very elaborate FreeBSD distro.
You were mistaken. OS X's kernel is a combination of some Mach-derived code modified by Apple, some BSD-derived code modified by Apple, some Sun-written code modified by Apple, and some Apple-written code. Its libc (or libSystem) is a combination of some mostly-FreeBSD-derived code modified to varying degrees by Apple and some Apple-written code. The rest of the UN*X userland is a combination of BSD-derived code, GNU code, other upstream code, and Apple-written code. (In some places it goes with GNU code rather than BSD code, e.g. using Bash rather than the Almquist shell as its Bourne shell and GNU Make rather than BSD make as its make.)
I used "BSD-derived" deliberately; most of the BSD-derived code might have come from FreeBSD, but at least some of it came from other BSDs.
It's best thought of as its own BSD-flavored UN*X, related to but not the same as other BSD-flavored UN*Xes.
So true...For me, FreeBSD adoption went like this: Debian eventually became huge stagnant swamp. To get out of it, you had to run unstable. A big mess ensued. Enter Ubuntu, the revenge, the promise. Poor documentation. Installation breakage. 6 months later, upgrade wreckage. Fsck this, I thought.
I have installed FreeBSD once. Ports may take longer, but they are much more current then Debian ever was, and than the current Linux I use, Mandriva. You have to wait for the Package Masters...Also, with ports I have a much more fine-grained control. But let's get this out of the way: you can install packages in FreeBSD, and you do binary upgrades. There are lots of tools to handle ports. With today's speeds and RAMs, it's no big deal compiling ports. Only huge software, such as Java may take many hours (use the weekend or get the binaries and that's that..) FreeBSD takes some tweaking - because all you get is a Unix with no assumptions about what color the user favors, or which icons... -, but it's not a problem for the advanced Linux user (if you're a n00b, then there's PC-BSD, which actually should be the first approach to BSDs for the user workstation these days).
I look at today's Linux and I don't regret my choice. What's the sane choice? Fedora is an experimental platform for Red Hat. That means, from time to time, they'll make you their guinea pigs...Debian can't even be considered secure (no less than twice they had their servers hacked), and who cares about dinossaurs, anyway? Ubuntu's the new Debian. Ubuntu shoves their choices down your throat and continues the Debian tradition of delivering broken software (the new GUI, etc.) and infighting. And Ubuntu is a fantasy. The only reason it exists is because there's a money-loosing millionaire backing it up. The fantasy island one day will blow up in the fanboys' face. Mandriva I find agreeable, but they don't offer many packages, and they have too few commercial partners (so why pay?) Other distros aren't even worth mentioning.
I've used expensive proprietary mathematical software for Linux on FreeBSD, using their Linux binary layer, after the Linux upgrade destroyed library compatibility (they pride themselves in having unstable ABIs).
Linux are a mess. Each one is different, full of stupid little quirks. Libraries differ in place, version, even names. FreeBSD is just as good for the desktop. The system is sane, advances by increments, has documentation, and man pages that are actually worth reading. It's a system where decisions are not made on political bases, but technical. The noise level is much lower. One of the reasons Linux makes much more headlines (besides the PR department from Big Iron, that is) is the constant noise and turmoil. BSDs are not like that...6 months later, you learn they added a cool feature. "Thou shall not fight about bikesheds."
Linux development might get more resources. But, of course it does! Linux was part of a strategy to kill Sun Microsystems and Solaris.
Main difference between the BSD license and the GPL license: one is from California and the other is from Massachusetts
You're missing the difference between a server and a component of a datacenter.
Apple's server offerings, going all the way back, have been targeted at offering a smaller organization looking for something easy to use and familiar for their small to mid sized operation. We're talking schools here with maybe several hundred students, small to medium businesses with less than say, 100 employees, that sort of thing. These types of customers typically don't even own an equipment rack, and if they do it's populated entirely by commodity-grade D-Link switches and wifi routers. There's literally no need there for out of band management, SANs, or anything else that you seem to be thinking about. These organizations typically don't want to employ a full-time system administrator - they have an IT guy who runs the servers, fixes desktops, and offers user support, and does any and everything else the organization needs done. This guy doesn't want to fuck around with getting a "proper" environment going - he just wants to plug something in that will handle storage, mail, blogs, jabber, and a wiki. You know, the stuff that is so easy on OS X server that all you need to know how to do is slam your forehead into the space bar.
Contrary to what you may have heard, Apple isn't interested in the low margin, high support cost market that Dell and HP are fighting for. The profit per unit is just too small for them to bother with. They are going where their customers are - graphics design shops, small schools and offices, etc.
With the amount of computing ability that you get with a newer model Mac Pro, or hell even a Mac Mini, you can run one of these operations with one box tucked in a closet, sitting on top of a UPS, and it will just sit there happily plugging away doing everything they need to do without any need for somebody like yourself.
I'd like to add that some facets of FreeBSD's problem are really Unix problems (that includes Linux).
For instance, is ports building relied on some sort of modern exception-handling mechanism, then we could have a system that automagically transversed upwards the edges of the graph starting from where the build tool threw the exception, instead of a system that simply signals that it borked.
Anyway, for me I think FreeBSD, since it separates the package database from the potential tools, offers a much better future perspective for creating dependency-tracking installation software than the hard-coded ones of dpkg and rpm. These systems are nothing but another layer of complexity - if it weren't for that millionaire that created the Ubuntu team that piggybacks on Debian's legion of packagers, that approach would be long gone by now. Does anyone remember the pathetic situation Debian was in, which was the major reason Ubuntu even came into existence?...At the time, someone here on /. even produced a graph tracking number-of-packages versus time-to-deliver, and it showed clearly that Debian's assembly line was stalling in an exponential fashion, IIRC, as more software was being brought into the distro (Woody, was it?)
So, to sum it up, I remain non-plus'd. I see no real good arguments, except anecdotes (some of them betraying lacking system-administration skills. In fact, I wish people would come out and just admit the real reason they perceive the purported superiority of Linux package management systems is because of the impatient and the childish "immediatism", because, frankly adults can't wait 5 or 10 minutes for a port to install (no, do not multiply 20,000 ports x 10 minutes, that is not how FreeBSD installation and upgrading works - not *all* your ports phase of of sync with upstream at the same time, do not be a moron).
Main difference between the BSD license and the GPL license: one is from California and the other is from Massachusetts