459
That escalated quickly... (programming.dev)
submitted 10 months ago by to c/programmer_humor@programming.dev
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[–] 16 points 10 months ago (11 children)

Serious question, what is the use case for bsd? It just seems like Linux but with far worse hardware and software support

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  • [–] 13 points 10 months ago

    Security and difference of design philosophy. I run OpenBSD on one of my machines and I enjoy it. It has better software availability than I expected and it feels like a neater, more minimal system than Linuxes. Definitely falls into the "hobbyist computing" category rather than something I'd recommend for a practical use case, but it's fun.

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  • [–] 12 points 10 months ago (4 children)

    Jails, bsd is really good at jails and networking

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  • [–] 7 points 10 months ago (3 children)

    But Linux also has containers and I haven't found a networking setup I can't do with it so while this may be true it seems anecdotal

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  • [–] 8 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (2 children)

    Really good network stack. Linux is catching up surely but places like Netflix run a ton of stuff on BSD simply for that stack. AFAIK ebpf is supposedly the thing that will have Linux compete in this space- https://dev.to/dpuig/understanding-ebpf-a-game-changer-for-linux-kernel-extensions-4m7i

    For a normal person? I'd argue there's about zero benefit to running BSD over some Linux distro. Less people use jails compared to containers, networking doesn't matter like you said, and hardware support is far more awful in terms of drivers. There's a reason there's like 2-3 desktop oriented distros on BSD compared to hundreds on Linux.

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  • [–] 2 points 10 months ago* (1 child)

    Really good network stack. Linux is catching up surely but places like Netflix run a ton of stuff on BSD simply for that stack.

    Depends on the specific BSD, OpenBSD for example is only just now catching up to Linux.

    Edit: Slide 28 for a graph

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  • [–] 2 points 10 months ago

    Cluster computing. DragonflyBSD is structured entirely with a multiprocessing design philosophy, gives amazing cache coherency in Beowulf clusters thanks to the way the scheduler works.

    Bit of a niche use case, but if you're doing gpu-unfriendly parallel compute operations like bidirectional path tracing or finite element analysis it really shines.

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  • [–] 2 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

    It's fun to try new stuff.

    The documentation is really good, hell they even go over assembly programming. And overall manpages for C functions I like more.

    Also good for minimalist setups. Can have a graphical sway environment using vim with autocomplete and a browsing wikipedia while top shows 145Mb active ram.


    (Does use cache a lot more than linux tho)

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