How your data is collected and commoditised via "free" online services - <AUTHOR> http://www.troyhunt.com/2016/03/how-your-data-is-collected-and.html <comment><USER2> He's on the right track, but absolutely wrong about where the bulk of this data comes from.

It's not shady "Take a free trip!" websites.

It's your Dominoes Pizza order, it's your trip to Target, it's everything you do. (A sales person for one of the big companies listed those specific groups, but said it was basically everyone.)

The big companies in the industry (LexisNexis, Thompson Reuters' CLEAR) buy everyone's data. Anything they can get their hands on.

As far as I can tell, everyone in the country's data is being stored; everywhere you have ever lived, all of your phone numbers, voting records, debts, legal history, marriages, past names and aliases, email addresses, everything.

It's all in a handful of huge private systems. Systems that were originally marketed to law enforcement agencies, but are now being shopped to private companies as well. Insant CheckMate is just a tiny tiny fraction of what is actually captured by these data brokers.

Source: You'll have to take my word for it.

Interesting tidbit -- They have alerts setup in the system; E.g. if you search for the wrong person you'll get a call from headquarters asking why you're pulling up Kanye West's home phone number, etc.

<comment><USER3> OK, I'll take your word for it.

Everything I do is being tracked, recorded and passed around by companies big and small. Yep, got it.

Anyone care to speculate on how we actually change this situation? Or is it that there's really not much utility in privacy for most people, so we can just forget about it permanently. I realize that the paths to change are either regulatory or technical (and I find the latter more likely), but seriously: paint the picture.

Should we just accept this as the norm?

(edit: grammar)

<comment><USER4> This isn't a popular question, but is there really a problem?

I've heard the big-brother nightmare scenario type answers before, but I'm curious to see how they are more likely to negatively affect me than a car accident or slipping in the shower.

Even with government agencies (NSA/FBI) overstepping or trying to overstep their limits, isn't the root problem with policy makers keeping them in line?

<comment><USER5> I will answer you with a lengthy anecdote. A couple of years ago I wanted to buy something from a popular online shop. The shop offered various payment options. I won't bother with details, so let's make it simple: option A was no risk on their side but time consuming, while B was higher risk but fast procedure. I was time pressed, so I was happy to see B in their FAQ. After signup and checkout there was no option B for payment. I thought it was a bug in their site and sent them an email.

I then decided to have it shipped directly to my parents (I wanted to use the item over the holidays) and set up an account in their name. After checkout, option B was suddenly available. Yay, they fixed it. I made the order.

Back to my account: option B was still missing. Huh.

I then made several new accounts using various addresses over the city. The pattern that emerged was that in more affluent zip codes option B was available, in poorer parts it wasn't.

Several days later, my email was answered: they claimed not to offer B to any new accounts on principle. This clearly wasn't the case.

My sample set wasn't big, and maybe it was a bug or A/B testing plus coincidence, but it made me think.

Big brother will not kill you or bite you with big fanfare. Instead, you will be struck by inconveniences. Online shopping will be more pleasant for some and maybe even impossible for others. That flashy item you want will be available for others but you will be told that it's out of stock. All of this will be explained away as mistakes.

<comment><USER4> What? It sounds like the problem is they _didn 't have_ enough information about you.

If they had more info, they could avoid blanket policies such as avoiding riskier shipping options with all _new_ customers, and use with customers they can prove are not fraudulent.

But here's my anecdote:

I bought a metal collar extender at Macy's with my credit card. It was an impulse buy at checkout and I have never searched, emailed, liked, etc. this product in my life. I get on Amazon a week later and I have a recommendation carousel of metal collar extenders. I was so surprised I even checked my email for a receipt to see if that's how Amazon retargeted me [there was none].

But then I just stopped caring, because I realized that if anything Amazon was incurring an opportunity cost for not recommending me something more useful, and I have more important things to do with my time than to worry about how I'm being retargeted on Amazon.

<comment><USER5> > What? It sounds like the problem is they didn't have enough information > about you.

That is part of my point. It will never be perfect, but perfect enough to get a benefit for businesses. If this leaves you as part of a small percentile at the road side, that is your problem not their's. In the end, you may be regularly unfairly disadvantaged because of it nevertheless.

<comment><USER4> This is an example of a Nirvana fallacy - where you are saying it should be abolished because the "perfect solution for everything" is unattainable. If anything, your anecdote proves that should be made even better, not abolished.

Besides, the business lost a customer with you, so it's obviously not perfect enough for them either.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I have found [https://donottrack-doc.com](https://donottrack-doc.com) [made by the NFB] to be helpful in thinking about data collection. If I have time at the end of this semester I'll be taking my first-year students through the first episode.

</comment><comment><USER7> He says it in the article but it walkways bears repeating: if you aren't the customer, you're the product.

<comment><USER8> No, even if you are the customer, say at a supermarket, they're still going to take your purchase data and sell it. Supermarkets are especially sneaky, they'll charge you extra if you refuse to be tracked via a "loyalty" card, and then they market that extortion as savings!

<comment><USER9> Supermarkets will give you as many 'loyalty' cards as you want. And you can put false info on them.

I assume they can still track your purchases by credit card #.

<comment><USER10> Actually, BevMo is now being much more brazen about it. They scan your driver's license under the guise of age verification.

I'm several decades past 21. There's no way in hell that I'm an underage drinker. When pressed the last time I was there, I was told that age verification up to the age of 50 is store policy.

<comment><USER2> Along the same lines --

In bars occasionally young women will come in who will give you free packs of cigarettes in exchange for scanning your ID. I've heard, mind you, this could be completely false, the cigarette companies sell that data to insurance companies.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Just disappear. Gradually, a little at a time. Diversify identities. Take your friends with you. Make it a game. Many games. What's left public is just the boring stuff. Make it as normal and unremarkable as possible.

<comment><USER12> I've toyed with the idea of vanishing completely, but nowadays employers often want to see a web presence.... if it weren't for that, and the convenience of Facebook Messenger, I might have disappeared already.

I was just thinking about how since one usually uses the same identity for many different accounts and interests online, it would be very easy to find someone by looking for people that match those specific sets of interests. You would have to make separate identities for every sort of interest, and never mention the other from a different profile.

<comment><USER11> Well, most people on Facebook just share links. So it's not hard to look normal. Maybe a little more boring than most, but hey, you work hard and all ;)

If you're going to use multiple identities, they shouldn't have overlapping interests, or common friends, accounts, etc, etc. And they shouldn't ever refer to each other. However, it's fine to have a bunch of identities that break all of those rules, just for the fun of it. You have unassociated clouds of associated identities.

Dig into Mirimir, if you're interested. There are several more-or-less associated identities. Some of them are obvious. Some would take a little work to find. But then, Mirimir is just a relatively superficial pseudonym.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> most other countries listed have laws that completely drop the "we can sell your data" clause on the site.

If you can find a presence of the company in such countries (and for most you have to provide some sort of tax id to buy national domain sulfix) then you can enter unique data there, and call a lawyer. profit.</comment>


Technical reasons to choose FreeBSD over GNU/Linux - <AUTHOR> https://unixsheikh.com/articles/technical-reasons-to-choose-freebsd-over-linux.html <comment><USER3> What I dislike about these sorts of articles is that they try to pretend as if *BSDs weren't heavily dependent on the wider FLOSS community, which is mostly Linux-based.

They instead focus on minuscule differences, which you could maybe argue are a bit better from a design perspective, (the default file system layout for example), but in practical terms matter little.

On the other hand, they don't mention the fact that the reason OpenBSD is so "secure", is because their marketing focuses on the default install, which has almost nothing.

So the moment you install the minimum amount of packages to get your work done, the "only two remote holes" thing no longer holds.

When you point out the practically abyssal modern laptop support in FreeBSD, they just shrug because "macOS's also BSD".

Then there's the whole smugness towards Linux as if they weren't dependent on GCC for years, as if GNOME/KDE etc. wasn't a primarily Linux effort and as if ZFS was somehow their invention.

They'll sing about BSD Jails and how Docker is strictly inferior, (also ignoring LXC), while not having any even remotely equivalent frontend for BSD Jails.

They'd laugh at the systemd debates, while talking openly about maybe them doing something similar.

Now Linux also heavily depends on some parts of BSD, but you'd see hardly anybody thrashing OpenSSH, just because it's BSD.

It's just not a community I want to be a part of, that's before I get into the whole BSD vs GPL debate, but I do understand that the appeal is there for some and that's perfectly fine.

<comment><USER4> > _What I dislike about these sorts of articles is that they try to pretend as > if BSDs weren 't heavily dependent on the wider FLOSS community, which is > mostly Linux-based._

Yeah, let's talk about chickens and eggs:

* [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Berkeley_Softwa...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Berkeley_Software_Distribution)

* [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkeley_sockets](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkeley_sockets)

* [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BIND#History](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BIND#History)

* [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vi](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vi)

* [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkeley_printing_system](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkeley_printing_system)

* [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sendmail](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sendmail)

<comment><USER3> You do realize none of these originated with any of the current BSDs, right?

The lineage is there, sure, but it's not FreeBSD/OpenBSD/NetBSD nor DragonFly where any of what you linked originated.

That's not to say there's no useful software that originated from today's BSDs - there is, just not the above.

<comment><USER4> >> _What I dislike about these sorts of articles is that they try to pretend as if BSDs weren 't heavily dependent on the wider FLOSS community, which is mostly Linux-based._

> _You do realize none of these originated with any of the current BSDs, > right?_

You do realize that that there was a wider FLOSS community before Linux came around, right?

We're all "building on the shoulders of giants" as they say, and Linux is no different here than BSD.

<comment><USER3> The point was about who contributes the wast majority of the work nowdays.

Also, before GNU there indeed wasn't much of a FLOSS community in the modern sense, it was much closer to colleagues sharing program tapes with their modifications as a courtesy.

So sure, there were programmers sharing code between each other, but that was kind of informal sharing, more because nobody placed much value on software alone at the time and university labs didn't always wanted to start from scratch.

In fact the reason RMS started GNU in the first place was precisely because he felt that kind of sharing culture was being eroded.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I find some points... debatable. For example software:

> Normally when you install software on a Unix operating system you find and > download the software.

According to the title, this is about choosing FreeBSD over Linux, not over Unix. That means the normal way to install is "<package_manager> install <package_name>". For the end user this is just like ports without having to compile anything. Once you don't have the package or the port available, you end up in the same situation: download the source and compile (which is more likely to work on Linux OOTB simply due to popularity).

> Poudriere is a utility for creating and testing FreeBSD packages. It utilize > the FreeBSD jail system to set up isolated compilation environments.

In Debian-like systems you can use pbuilder in the same way. Each package is built in the same clean choot. I suspect RH has something similar?

> bhyve

They don't list anything technically better about bhyve. Why would I use this over xen or kvm?

> FreeBSD has three different firewalls built into the base system: PF, IPFW, > and IPFILTER, also known as IPF.

Ok. Linux has iptables and now nftables/bpfilter. It's also got queuing, stateless and stateful features, protocol tracking, etc. CARP can be done in userland, or via other solutions like linux-ha/stonith. What are the reasons to choose FreeBSD here? (also, mentioning 3 firewalls after being excited about well-designed system that just comes together rather than being glued together from third-party software just sounds weird)

> BSD init

They haven't listed what's actually technically better about it than in systemd. (not subjectively)

> Jails

Jails _as described in the article_ , have the same features as lxc. Lxd provides zfs-as-a-backing-store option as well.

> FreeBSD has over five hundred system variables that can be read and set > using the sysctl utility.

Ok. On my Fedora system "sysctl -a | wc -l" gives 2093.

> For example, on top of the geom_mirror module an encryption module can be > added, such as geom_eli to provide a mirrored and encrypted volume.

So how is it better than lvm with its layers dm-raid and dm-crypt?

I get that people are excited about FreeBSD and I'd love to learn what are the technically better sides of it. But this article really doesn't list that many.

<comment><USER6> > They haven't listed what's actually technically better about it than in > systemd. (not subjectively)

And even to avoid running headlong into this troll pit: Linux distros without systemd exist. It's dishonest to compare FreeBSD to Linux and then only focus on a subset of Linux distros.

<comment><USER7> > And even to avoid running headlong into this troll pit: Linux distros > without systemd exist. It's dishonest to compare FreeBSD to Linux and then > only focus on a subset of Linux distros.

Are any of them mature enough to depend on for serious work? I looked at moving back to Linux a few months ago, but all the non-systemd distributions seemed to be small projects and many of them looked to have schismed, collapsed, or both.

<comment><USER8> Void is a small project, but absolutely rock solid. It's BSD inspired and systemd free. I like it a lot.

<comment><USER9> Here's the thing. I would run: Ubuntu, Debian, Centos or Red Hat on my laptop, desktop and also on any server that I run.

I wouldn't run any small distro in AWS.

<comment><USER10> Have to agree here. I get a lot of benefits professionally from running Linux personally. I've been a full time desktop linux user over 10 years, and I'm often considered the "linux wizard" because I'm known for SSHing into servers and fixing obscure errors that others have looked at for hours with no success. My secret, is that I've run into most of the common problems (filesystem permission issues, including ACLs, selinux, low memory/OOM, conflicting dependency versions, etc) before and already mostly know how to fix them. The time I did on Arch was particularly helpful here. It was a hard first week or so but I learned more about linux during that two weeks than any other time.

Anyway the reasons I say that: These days I only run distros locally that I would run in production. I get intimately familiar with the intricacies of the distro that way and managing the servers comes natural to me because of that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Been a FreeBSD user for very long time besides Linux Slackware distributions since kernel 1.0. Started with Walnut Creek CD distributions. In early years it was much better than Linux with its fast networking stack and filesystem. Also it gives a sense of conceptual integrity as distribution is not just kernel but all the utilities, they work together in unison. But than it also hamper innovation due to design by committee vs the best tool for the job.

Now with time and various flavours of Linux from NixOS, GuixSD, Gentoo, LFS, Slackware, arch, Debian, Ubuntu, CentOS, OracleOS etc., it is in many case a better choice than FreeBSD.

In most benchmarks and hardware support it has surpassed FreeBSD. I still hope FreeBSD continue to grow and innovate, but it's not a viable choice in many areas of modern computing. Hopefully it can catch up. It still is a very viable choice in building network devices, but there also with modern hardware support Linux is giving it a tough competition.

I still use FreeBSD, but my majority production workload now is Linux with some firewall and networking related stuff in FreeBSD and openBSD.

I did try portable FreeBSD based version like dragonfly and pcbsd. But now I don't use them that often.

<comment><USER12> As a counter to this, if you're working on network software that uses a lot of bandwidth and a lot of open connections, BSD is a bit more stable than Linux, so it's generally a better choice for that at least.

<comment><USER13> This is dangerous advice. BSD networking stack may have been superior at some point but that hasn't been the case for many years now.

You are very likely to run into issues trying to do filtering and/or routing at anything >1Gbps on commodity hardware (ie. e1000 nics).

Pf is pretty but it's not worth trading stability for.

<comment><USER14> Did Juniper stop using FreeBSD recently? Also, Force10's FTOS has used NetBSD as a base certainly less than "many years now". Force10's L3 switches are at 1GB, 10GB and 40GB speeds IIRC.

<comment><USER15> The Force10 speeds are most likely not directly due to NetBSD, but from custom or specialized silicon.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> The distinction between _/ etc_ and _/ usr/local/etc_ is the headline fact here. As a sysadmin, your goal for long term stability is to separate the important bits from the volatile bits to stop them from treading on each other's toes.

Separation of the core OS from the services it is running is the key to keeping a hygienic separation between components sharing the same file system.

Debian — of which I was a long time fan — solves this by having a culture of pretty neat gardening, keeping each package separate in _/ var/spool/foo_, _/ etc/foo_, _/ usr/libexec/foo_, but not _/ usr/sbin_.

But it's all so old fashioned now that we live in the utopia of (1) machines that are spun up and then deleted automatically and (2) LXC means I have a fleet of "hosts" providing ns0.domain ns1.domain, mx.domain, www.domain, db01.int.domain all as containers on the sanctity of a relatively unchanging base host, analogous to packages installed on the sanctity of the FreeBSD base operating system, and all edited as config files that can rebuild everything except the /data and /log directories in a matter of minutes.

<comment><USER17> It only sounds like a partial solution really. You'll still end up with a load of random files in `/usr/local/etc` and unless you maintained a 100% strict policy of only installing using Ports (yeah right) you will eventually get some files of unknown origin.

The proper solution is proper separation of app files, as found on Mac (more or less), NixOS, Android and iOS.

I guess FreeBSD is still stuck in the 90s with Linux (except NixOS).

<comment><USER18> >unless you maintained a 100% strict policy of only installing using Ports (yeah right)

What do you mean "yeah right"? That's precisely how everyone I know has always managed our BSD fleets. If something isn't in ports (yeah right), you just make a port out of it. It takes 5 minutes unless the software has some crazy messed up build system.

<comment><USER3> Same on Linux, unless the software has some crazy build system, at which point you probably won't and that's exactly OP's point.

<comment><USER18> I have no idea what you are trying to convey.

<comment><USER3> It's quite simple really. On BSDs you tend to use ports to keep your filesystem tidy, but the moment you need something that's not already packaged you either a.) package it yourself b.) the build system is complex and thus you don't package it properly and make a bit of a mess on your filesystem.

So while BSDs might have slightly better FS layout as far as separation of user & system software, in the end you'd probably end up with a bunch of untracked files outside the system's software manager, no matter if you're on Linux or BSD.

<comment><USER18> Again, you're just ignoring what I said. I've managed tens of thousands of BSD systems for 25 years. I've never had anything installed that wasn't registered in the package database so all its files were uninstalled correctly. Yes, you literally do stick entirely to ports, creating a port when needed. Having a complex build system doesn't mess up your filesystem, it makes it take longer to create the port.

<comment><USER3> Good for you, but you can do exactly the same on Linux, so there's no advantage for BSDs there.

My myself have seen plenty of cases of people not having the time to create a package for a software they need now, but maybe the domain BSD is used in is less prone to needing software prone to that. Maybe it's just you being lucky.

However again, that's not a technical benefit. You can do exactly the same on Linux.

<comment><USER18> >Good for you, but you can do exactly the same on Linux,

Nobody suggested otherwise. Read what you reply to.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> This is a good list for differences between FreeBSD and Linux distros, but describing them as advantages FreeBSD has over Linux seems problematic to me. Except for firewalls and core documentation (but what about "community documentation"?) nearly every item is highly debatable whether using FreeBSD has an advantage in the first place, and many I would argue Linux has obviously better options for [1].

To me, lists like this sadly highlights that FreeBSD has extremely few unique selling points left. I accept its superiority for network infrastructure type roles, but that's about it. As a Linux user, there's nothing on this list that makes me consider switching [2].

[1]: Anything to do with package management, containers and VMs and even filesystems Linux system can either do better out of the box or can easily be augmented if you need it. I also think systemd is better than shell script based inits. But there's a reason this is a footnote, this is not the thing I want to argue here.

[2]: Besides it taking effort to switch, FreeBSD has the additional problems that it has poor hardware support for desktop usage (PLEASE get your wifi act together), and software support is also substantially worse - with FreeBSD lagging behind with stuff like Electron, Wayland, desktop virtualization and desktop containerization (Flatpak, Snaps, Appimage even). The point here isn't these details, but FreeBSD winning over Linux people is an increasing uphill struggle.

<comment><USER20> Even as an occasional Ubuntu user, it's already an effort for even some desktop developers to use GNU/Linux given that Windows and macOS are actually being sane desktops just to get work done. I just can't see any user wanting to use or switch to either Linux or BSD to sanely 'use' their computer for being productive in their daily work other than programming in vim or emacs; because they are still desktops for programmers.

The BSDs now have the same Linux desktop argument of having 'choice' which has made it a blessing for its tinkerers and a curse for commercial desktop app developers as highlighted in [2]. You have 3 ways to package an app, many desktop environment choices like GNOME, KDE, Xfce and the windowing managers like X11, Wayland to test for and you then ask why your favourite software application isn't on X Linux distro or X BSD distro. I won't be looking forward to testing or bug hunting for my GUI app on either system since their desktop stacks aren't integrated well or have a stable 'SDK' unlike with Windows and macOS. GNU/Linux and the BSDs are pretty much still fragmented ecosystems.

The BSDs in particular will always be behind, since the same developers who have always used Linux and were part of the FOSS community are the same ones that still contribute and pushed for it in their companies like Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Amazon, etc. Thus, some will only accept upstream patches for Windows, Mac and Linux. The BSDs will then be left in the sand with atrocious software support and their patches will be rejected as the maintainers will be unwilling to upstream these patches due to this.

<comment><USER21> > I just can't see any user wanting to use or switch to either Linux or BSD to > sanely 'use' their computer for being productive in their daily work other > than programming in vim or emacs; because they are still desktops for > programmers.

Do you mean for native Windows or macOs dev? Then I agree. However if you are a non tech user I don't agree. I know many people (friends and family), who use Linux on their Notebook or PCs (quite frankly most non-tech users use mobile anyway) and they have no I idea what emacs or vim is (and why should they?).

So Linux being just for dev users is just not true, at least in my experience.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I don't think the parts about ZFS being "better integrated" on FreeBSD are really true any more.

For one thing, ZFS-on-Linux is now the canonical, upstream OpenZFS implementation - [https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/solaris/ZFSOnLinuxN...](https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/solaris/ZFSOnLinuxNowOpenZFS?showcomments#comments)

For another, Ars Technica recently reviewed FreeBSD 12.1-RELEASE and found poor ZFS integration in the installer and in mount(8):

 _> Eventually, I realized that FreeBSD's mount command didn't really understand my ZFS root filesystem._ \-- [https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/04/not-actually- linux-d...](https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/04/not-actually-linux-distro- review-freebsd-12-1-release/)

Compare that with the relatively streamlined ZFS-on-root install support built into Ubuntu: [https://arstechnica.com/information- technology/2019/10/a-det...](https://arstechnica.com/information- technology/2019/10/a-detailed-look-at-ubuntus-new-experimental-zfs-installer/)

(I'm sticking with ext4 until kvdo, bcachefs, or maybe tux3 is mainlined.)

<comment><USER23> The Linux kernel devs hate ZFS and actively sabotage it even backporting changes specifically to break ZFS to LTS branches.

It's fine if you use something like Ubuntu where it's officially shipped with the distro. If not, be prepared to apply kernel patches whenever the kernel team takes a snipe at ZFS.

I'm not trying to be political here, just my day-to-day experience working with several Linux machines running large zpools. It's still worth it compared to the alternatives but if I could use FreeBSD I would.

<comment><USER3> There's absolutely no evidence for this. On the other hand, there's some evidence that Sun made ZFS licensing explicitly non-compatible with the GPL, so as to not "sabotage" Solaris.

Linux has other efforts going on in this area, including Btrfs and Bcachefs - there's also ZoL, of course.

<comment><USER23> Take a look at any of Greg Kroah-Hartman's comments on patches that screw up ZFS.

One of the biggest ones was removing exports of kernel functions that ZFS used for encrypted datasets: [https://marc.info/?l=linux- kernel&m=154689892914091](https://marc.info/?l=linux-kernel&m=154689892914091)

I'm fine with this sort of stuff in general assuming it doesn't affect LTS, but this specific patch was backported to LTS kernels even though it has nothing to do with security or bugfixes. I had several zpools I had to apply custom kernel patches on the machines for no other reason than because somebody is mad at licensing.

Bcachefs isn't even stable enough to use in production. Btrfs is okay, and I've used it before, but it's also a minefield of killing your data depending on what features you use. If you use all the features you need to make it on par with ZFS you may as well dump your data in the trash.

ZFS 'just works' and none of the features are incomplete or have asterisks attached that compromise data integrity. Yeah it has architectural problems, doesn't do stuff the Linux way, and has a license that makes devs angry. It's also never lost a byte for me in production for almost a decade of use.

I know the Linux devs don't owe me anything and I'm not really angry or anything about this. It's just a fact that it's frustrating to have to deal with political problems just to run a server.

<comment><USER3> You're just ignoring what I said above. Nobody is out to screw ZoL, but the kernel community doesn't care enough to maintain compatibility with it.

Why, as a kernel dev, would you care if there's no possibility of it ever being mainlined because of decisions Sun explicitly made to be hostile towards your project?

It's like trying to cozy up to someone who just punched me, not happening.

Bcachefs isn't yet up to parity for sure, but it is stable enough for everyday use and doesn't corrupt you data like Btrfs sometimes does. A stable foundation that gets expanded upon daily.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> While I like more FreeBSD than Linux, I say Linux is generally a better choice for servers. Better performance, better hardware support, more refined tools, easier to set up, and the list goes on. This is part due to popularity but mainly because what author hates: software written by companies willing to earn money in contrast to software written solely by passion. If it weren't for corporate money, Linux would be in a much poorer state.

Neither one is ready as a desktop operating system. Linus Torvalds said that himself about Linux. Since FreeBSD lags behind Linux, it's safe to assume that is true for FreeBSD, too.

Fast reading the author's previous articles on FreeBSD VS Linux, it's easy to see that it's dislike for Linux and praise for FreeBSD it's based solely on politics. He hates Windows 10 which he names an "horrible operating system" and now he hates Linux too. And that is just because Linux has big contributions by companies willing to gain money, in contrast to software written solely for passion, which he deems much better.

He even goes as far as state that technical merits matter much less than politics.

That I regard as pretty immature.

Now the author struggles to come up with technical reasons to pick FreeBSD over Linux. If he succeeds on that, that is for any reader to judge.

Rants like the author's previous articles on Linux VS FreeBSD seem to make even Richard Stallman an reasonable man in contrast.

Some developers, some companies are providing software for free, both as in "free beer" and as in "free speech". That means time and money. He thinks that he and other users are entitled to much more than that. He feels like he should say to others in what way should they contribute to free software.

<comment><USER25> _Neither one is ready as a desktop operating system._

This is a particular bugbear of mine. If Linux isn't ready as a desktop system, how is it that I have been using it as such for 15 years? I get that it isn't all things to all people, but it has long fulfilled my needs; I've always been able to find a good quality tool for any task I want to do. Generally speaking, I'm happier with Linux than Windows or Mac OS, though I'm sure familiarity is part of the equation.

<comment><USER26> With Linux, no matter the distribution you pick, you have to be more interested in computers than merely viewing them as an applicane for word processing, video chatting and online shopping.

\- Some software defaults to installation as sandboxed packages. Try explaining that to someone who is used to dragging and dropping files from the desktop into their programs to open them.

\- Want to watch a movie? Sure, but you won't get vsynced video without opening up a text editor as root to configure your graphics driver.

\- Ohh, your laptop has THAT particular Wifi/Bluetooth/PCI bridge/whatever chip? Sorry...

\- No, don't open "Christmas Wishlist.doc", that's from last year. The new one is called "Christmas wishlist.doc".

While Microsoft (and to a lesser extent, Apple) has gotten a lot of flak over shoddy updates lately, things are, by and large, much more prone to breaking on Linux. And when they break, even just a little, you need to know your way around a terminal to fix them.

I recently had to downgrade my kernel because of the bugs in i915. To do so, I had to first identify the problem by following the syslog and then do some heavy lifting in GRUB to lock my boot process to an older kernel version. The prerequisite knowledge to be able to perform what we might consider a simple task, has been built up during decades of me being a computer nerd.

For someone without a keen interest in computers, Linux on the desktop isn't all that great. The thing is, I like it that way. I want the freedom of choice. I want the level of control it gives me. When (or if) it becomes ready for the desktop, it's probably ready to be abandoned for something else.

<comment><USER27> > No, don't open "Christmas Wishlist.doc", that's from last year. The new one > is called "Christmas wishlist.doc"

I'm veering a bit OT here, but is anyone aware of the justification for having a case-sensitive file system? It's something that's always annoyed me about Linux and *BSD, but I wonder if there is any real benefit I've just never grasped?

<comment><USER28> Linux (and probably also the BSDs) goes beyond "case-sensitive": filenames are a sequence of bytes, giving special meaning only to the NUL byte (as the terminator) and the forward slash byte (as the path separator), and to the "", ".", and ".." filenames. From an implementation point of view, it's much simpler, and makes it easier to have high-performance code.

Case insensitivity adds a whole set of complications. The operating system has to either canonicalize all filenames, or preserve them (case preserving) but have an equivalence class of filenames. Canonicalization can be problematic (like ß -> SS, or perhaps ß -> ẞ? And let's not think of the dotless i), and to make things worse, can change with newer versions of the Unicode standard (as new characters and their case mappings are added); at least NTFS works around that by storing a case mapping table in the filesystem metadata, so a filesystem created by a newer Windows release can have a different case mapping (and you can have different case mappings for each filesystem in the same machine). It can also confuse software: even with a case preserving system, a program can open a file named FOO for writing, and not find it later when listing the directory (because it already existed as lowercase "foo"). This kind of thing has led to security issues in the past.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> FreeBSD marketing:

      - FreeBSD is like Linux but <>
      - It is more <> than Linux
      - It is less <> than Linux
      - It has more <> than Linux
      - It has less <> than Linux
      - Linux LINUX Linux LINUX LINUX

OpenBSD marketing:

Look, cute fish.

<comment><USER30> FreeBSD and Linux have pretty cute mascots too.

Puffy is exclusive to OpenBSD. Tux and Beastie are more generic.

Also:

"Early versions of OpenBSD (2.3 and 2.4) used a BSD Daemon with a halo, and briefly used a daemon police officer for version 2.5. Then, however, OpenBSD switched to Puffy, a blowfish, as a mascot." [0]

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BSD_Daemon](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BSD_Daemon)

Edit:

You're absolutely right that there seems to be some kind of power fantasy among the FreeBSD crowd about crushing Linux.

Just do an image search for "BSD Daemon" and see the g(l)orious fan-art.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> I would be totally on board with using FreeBSD as my primary server OS .. if it had a container engine. There was a port of Docker to FreeBSD, but it's ancient and unmaintained (before Docker did their big modular refactor).

In theory, you could implement a lot of the Docker Engine API for FreeBSD and on the backend use jails instead of namespaces/cgroups and ZFS if you wanted implement the same layering. Some of the security and cgroup limits may not be implementable on FreeBSD, but with the Linux binary emulation layer, you should still be able to run a lot of containers without modification (unless they need certain filecaps or privileges).

I had OpenBSD on a laptop once, but without 802.11ac support, you'll either have to downgrade the Wi-Fi card in newer laptops or use a USB adapter.

<comment><USER32> "I would be totally on board with using FreeBSD as my primary server OS .. if it had a container engine."

FreeBSD is _the original_ container engine - although, for the sake of completeness, we should count Solaris "zones" and call it a tie ...

I think there is a cultural and temporal connotation of Docker - and the use- cases that it typically enabled - that makes it seem very different than 'jail' but make no mistake: jail did all of those things and more, many years earlier.

The VPS, as we currently think of it, was built _first_ [1] on top of FreeBSD and jail.

[1] JohnCompanies announced beta availability of "server instances" on 303 and cDc mailing lists in mid 2001. Someone else coined the term "VPS" a bit later ...

<comment><USER33> Being first doesn't matter. Docker became the industry standard and jails did not.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Licensing should also be considered a technical reason.

-

Shameless plug: a few years ago, I fought the decision of my former employer's licensing counsel. He had ties with FSF Europe, and asked me to relicense my code from BSD to LGPL before publishing it (was private). I vehemently objected and asked to keep my code private instead – on the grounds of permissiveness and technicalities. They conceded. Two years passed, and I got in touch with the company and had the software released using BSD. I share a few details of my reasoning here: [https://medium.com/@henvic/opensource-and- go-what-license-f6...](https://medium.com/@henvic/opensource-and-go-what- license-f6b36c201854)

<comment><USER3> Licensing should absolutely be considered. In fact copyleft is one of the main reasons I'd go with Linux over BSD anytime.

If I am going to invest my precious free time into software development, I want to guarantee to my users that my software will always remain free, (as in freedom).

There's also a community aspect to the BSDs that I strongly don't align with, which is the sort of 'practical, above the fray' mentality that seems to disregard all political/real-world happenings around privacy, encryption, patents, censorship etc. and instead focus purely on the code. To the point of praising any piece of closed-source that has a bit of BSD in it.

While this is perfectly valid short-term, I do think that a movement that goes beyond code and has some ideological foundations is needed.

<comment><USER35> We must have differing definitions of freedom, because I regard the GPL as a severe curtailing of options and equate it with being forced to adopt a narrow, ideological worldview. If anything, this leads to fewer freedoms on use by directly creating more obligations for the user, and if my code is to be of utility for anyone, freedom of use is paramount.

What's more, and most ironically, copyleft perpetuates the fundamental atrocity of intellectual property law, by hacking it, and therefore intrinsically depending on it; in contrast, the BSD and MIT licenses are mostly a liability waiver under an assertion of attribution, ultimately creations more of necessity than ideology.

I struggle to accept the separate and somewhat animistic notion of code itself being free, having never successfully anthropomorphised a program.

<comment><USER3> We probably do have different definitions of freedom. My definition is along the lines of yours ends where mine starts, whereas yours sounds more like 'absolute freedom'.

You're right to an extent, the GPL does place certain obligations on the users, in particular to maintain (at least) the level of freedom they themselves were given, which naturally limits what one can do to an extent.

P.S. Yes, it all depends on copyright law, BSD does too, otherwise public domain would suffice.

<comment><USER36> Funny that GPL does violate your definition of freedom. Because it doesn't end where my freedom starts. It tries to impose a new license of my software linked to the GPL software. And it imposes obligations to the user beyond what the user was given.

<comment><USER3> You do not have the freedom to just take "my" code and do whatever. The moment you include my GPL'd code, you're stepping onto my ground and thus need to abide by some rules I set out for those that do.

You're still free to not use my code, but not to do as you wish if you do, because at that moment you're stepping onto my own freedom.

<comment><USER36> I haven't claimed that I am free to do what I wish to do, nor do I ask for that. The point is, that the GPL contradicts what you stated before "yours ends where mine starts". GPL tries to exactly cross that line.

<comment><USER3> The "your end where mine starts" means precisely that your ability to do whatever ends when you decide to use my code, because that is where my freedom to impose certain requirements on your usage of my code starts.

There's nothing the GPL tries to cross, that's exactly what that quote means in general society as well.

For example, you're free to wear the same shoes you do outside in your own house, but if you're coming into my own house, I have the freedom to require you not to do that.

<comment><USER36> Yes you have. Telling me to wear different shoes once I visited your house is something different. So if you think that is a reasonable request, then I have to tell you that I will refrain from visiting your house. And advise others to be very considerate about visiting your house.

<comment><USER3> What makes telling you to wear different shoes any different? I am just asking you to abide by my rules if you're going to make use of my resources.

The GPL does the same.

And yes, you're free to refrain from visiting my house if you disagree with what I am asking of you, same as you're free to not use GPL code and therefore not abide by its requirements.

The only thing you are not free to do is come to my house and ignore my rules, likewise use GPL code and ignore the GPL. That's it.

<comment><USER36> I don't mind abiding to your rules when I come to your house and while I stay in your house. I find it bizarre that you think that you can impose rules onto me after I left your house and even ask me to impose the rules onto others.

<comment><USER37> How do you feel about NDAs or official secrets?

<comment><USER36> What about them? I have no fundamental problem with them. The only reason I would sign an NDA is, when I am doing paid work.

<comment><USER37> But aren't these examples of having to follow someone else's rules after you've left their house?

<comment><USER36> So what? It is part of the deal, and as I wrote, I would sign an NDA only for a good reason, that is usually a paid job. Also, the NDA concerns only the specific task and not other things I am doing at that time or later.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> I started using FreeBSD a few months ago for a Tor relay, trying to promote OS diversity. I had read these types of articles about how FreeBSD is so much cleaner and well documented than Linux, and I wanted to try it out.

Honestly, I found it seriously lacking. It always seemed to me like most of those article writers had poor understanding of Linux, and now it seems to me like they have poor understanding of FreeBSD too.

For example, this article, like many, touts the high quality of FreeBSD documentation. I found it to be similar to Linux documentation: a few excellent pages, mostly good pages, some mediocre pages, and lots of undocumented stuff. People (including me) often complain about the quality of Linux networking documentation, which is unquestionably terrible, but I found that FreeBSD isn't really that much better overall. Better in some places, worse in others, often you have to give up and go find the source code.

Another thing often touted is the centralized development of FreeBSD making it more organized. This article betrays itself here by explaining that FreeBSD has _three_ different firewalls, one originating locally, one forked from OpenBSD, and one forked from some dude. Now, to be fair, Linux is far from clean here: between ipchains, iptables, nftables, and bpfilter, Linux has gone through a lot of change. At least with Linux though there are at most two practical options at any given time, and there is a clear forward progression. With FreeBSD, I spent several hours trying to figure out the differences between each, which wasn't helped by the documentation problems: manual pages being fragmented and incomplete and the handbook being woefully out of date on this subject.

It also seems like a lot of the hyped FreeBSD features are actually far behind Linux features. As other commenters have mentioned, Linux has device-mapper, which is similar to GEOM, and is used for LVM and modern RAID setups. Jails came before containers, but Linux namespaces are now far more powerful than jails, which aren't that much more than chroots. bhyve is nice, but lags behind QEMU/KVM. Poudriere is fine but most Linux distros have chroot builders too now.

In conclusion, I don't find FreeBSD particularly attractive for any of the reasons that I hear often touted.

<comment><USER39> Any Linux or BSD distro could achieve best-in-class documentation for new users by simply adding example usages for most commands to the top of their man pages. Man pages tend to read more encyclopedias than practical guidance, and FreeBSD was no exception last I looked.

Command xyz

Common usage: xyz -s source_ip -d dest_ip:port

<comment><USER40> The Arch Wiki is pretty damn good in my opinion. I don't see how FreeBSD's documentation is better, if "better" = more useful and up to date.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> I've been a FreeBSD user since 2.05 (1995) and a strong supporter - <USER2> still excels as an ultra-stable 'old-school' UNIX server OS (which to be honest meets a lot of use-cases more simply than a lot of modern alternatives). That being said this sort of post isn't helpful as advocacy - as others have notes it is pretty shallow and to be honest most people are probably better off running Linux if this is what they are used to.

<comment><USER42> +1! Thank you!

Been using FreeBSD for 20 years. If one's reason for using FreeBSD is that they dislike GNU/Linux, then something's very wrong from the start.

<comment><USER43> "those who hate windows use linux, those who love unix use BSD."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> What usage this article is talking about? For a server? For a desktop environment?

For servers, me and my colleagues use Linux, and not being able to use Docker is a tough call, our workflow is very Docker-centered. I know that Jails exist, but it's not just about containment, it's about packaging, building and deploying too, and having ready-made tools (and a lot of existing Dockerfiles) for that.

For desktop, I use macOS, and I'm not willing to change if it worsens the experience, which I suspect it will do.

I wonder what would be the killer use for FreeBSD today? I'd be eager to try, since I'm eager to try all kinds of stuff, but I fail to find any place I could easily stray from my current OS combination.

</comment><comment><USER45> As a longtime user of both FreeBSD and various Linux distros, I agree with a lot of points regarding the coherence and ergonomics of FreeBSD's design. However, I don't generally run FreeBSD anymore, despite enjoying using it more, simply for the reason of security. I don't feel (and maybe this is just a feeling) that security is a first class citizen on FreeBSD the way it is in Linux distros like Fedora or Ubuntu. Things can be slow to be patched and the defaults aren't always particularly secure. I really miss ZFS though. Btrfs just isn't as nice to work with.

<comment><USER46> Why not use ZFS on Linux?

<comment><USER47> Opinions and dogma about licensing is one reason as well as a sense that ZFS isn't actually better than ETX4. I'm not saying I agree with that, only that it's why ZFS and Linux don't mix from what I can tell.

<comment><USER48> ZFS and EXT4 have different use cases.

<comment><USER49> ZFS and EXT4 on LVM have a lot of overlap. A decade or so ago I made a comparison between ZFS, BtrFS, and EXT4 on LVM [0] that may be of interest.

[0] [https://rkeene.org/projects/info/wiki/BtrFS](https://rkeene.org/projects/info/wiki/BtrFS)

<comment><USER48> The checksumming/error-correction of ZFS is big difference, and the main reason I moved some of my file systems to ZFS (even with versioned backups, on EXT4, I suffered data loss due to corruption/bitrot).

On the other hand, for a simple set-up on a lower resource system, EXT4 has lots of advantages.

<comment><USER49> A good, controversial read is available at [0]. I don't agree with his conclusions entirely, but the data he presents is interesting. And also paired with [1] to give space overhead and MTBF figures for various RAID configurations (where RAID-Z ~= RAID5, RAID-Z2 ~= RAID6)

[0] [https://www.jodybruchon.com/2017/03/07/zfs-wont-save-you- fan...](https://www.jodybruchon.com/2017/03/07/zfs-wont-save-you-fancy- filesystem-fanatics-need-to-get-a-clue-about-bit-rot-and-raid-5/)

[1] [https://rkeene.org/projects/info/wiki/221](https://rkeene.org/projects/info/wiki/221)

<comment><USER48> From experience, as I said, I had bitrot on EXT4, with carefully versioned backups, but it didn't help, since the bitrot was just faithfully propagated through all the backups (I didn't have 5+ year backups - who knows when the bitrot occurred).

And I haven't experienced file corruption in the 5+ years I've used ZFS. Of course, ZFS isn't a magic bullet that solves all ills, but I've been very happy with it. I still, of course, have multiple backups of important data, but now I'm more confident about the integrity of those backups.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> I prefer BSD because I find managing kernel modules and system startup much more straightforward.

I also like that the placement of different kinds of files is much more standardized, which makes them easier to find and it also makes it a lot easier to manager a cluster of developer machines where each dev has different needs, because you can still be reasonably sure that all of their customizations will be in /usr/local.

The other thing I'll throw out here is that Netflix chose BSD for their base system on OpenConnect because they were unable to get Linux to match the networking performance of BSD when delivering large files.

</comment><comment><USER51> It's a little weird to not put some of these headliner features at the top of the list. Like ZFS (in-tree, on the default installer, without licensing issues or hostile team dynamics).

On the other hand there are things in this list which are just the FreeBSD equivalent of something Linux has in some form. The ports tree is good, and I like that you can customize options etc., and now pkg is pretty good, but are you really going to miss that if you have apt or similar?

<comment><USER52> Aren't Linux and freebsd using the same zfs fork at this point though?

<comment><USER51> I am not following closely enough to know when that makes it into a stable FreeBSD release, but yes it will be.

Except for one point: the zfs on Linux work is not in the mainline kernel, and won't be. A strict interpretation of your comment would actually be "no" \- can it really be said that "Linux is using it" in that case? You need out-of- tree kernel support which is very difficult to maintain.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> Whatevery floats your boat. I use linux, docker and kubernetes all in the cloud. I'm getting more distant from underlying OS everyday.

BSD is a fine operating system. There is nothing wrong with it. Linux is a good operating system and gets the job done. Whatever works.

I think what is more concerning is that we really haven't had a big leap in hardware, OS, and system design for sometime. When are we going to have the guts to make the next step?

<comment><USER54> I'd argue NixOS is a huge step that a lot of people still have to catch on to (to be fair: that includes more contributors to improve documentation and ergonomics, but it is already valuable and workable as it is)

<comment><USER55> Working on this!

Check out the NixOS for existing sysadmins workshop over at [https://github.com/ghuntley/workshops/tree/master/nixos- work...](https://github.com/ghuntley/workshops/tree/master/nixos-workshop)

If you want a TL;DR overview of NixOS then start here [https://github.com/ghuntley/workshops/tree/master/nixos- work...](https://github.com/ghuntley/workshops/tree/master/nixos- workshop/modules/01-introduction-to-nixos)

<comment><USER27> Something I wonder about after reading your overview - software from outwith the package manager.

It's quite often that the package manager in the Linux distro I'm using has an old version of Nginx, PHP, or whatever, and so I have to build my own, or at least use an alternative package source.

How is this kind of thing handled with NixOS config? (if it is)

<comment><USER55> Pinning and override layers

[https://github.com/digital- asset/daml/blob/master/nix/nixpkg...](https://github.com/digital- asset/daml/blob/master/nix/nixpkgs.nix#L10)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> In a perfect world I'd probably use FreeBSD in all the places I currently use Linux. I however don't live in a perfect world so I haven't used FreeBSD for anything significant in over a decade.

My number one problem with FreeBSD (and OpenBSD) has been hardware support. I got an HPE Microserver to use as a compact centralized storage. No matter what I could not get FreeBSD even booting on the machine. It's got an AMD APU and apparently FreeBSD has zero support for it. With Ubuntu I had zero installation issues and still got to use ZFS for storage.

Similarly I have a SFF AMD box to use as a router. While FreeBSD would boot on it, every few weeks it would kernel panic and need to be power cycled because FreeBSD shit the bed with the Ethernet cards in it. Ubuntu with the same exact usage patterns has given me absolutely no trouble.

I've never been able to get FreeBSD fully working on a laptop. Something is always broken (usually WiFi) and power management sucks. It's also entirely inconvenient to have to power down the laptop because it won't wake up when opening the lid.

My second major problem has been a lot of seemingly advanced features in FreeBSD are very experimental or simply difficult to use properly. While FreeBSD's Jails are very sophisticated they are a pain in the ass to manage and there's multiple management tools available with wildly different levels of functionality.

I want FreeBSD to exist and keep pushing forward but I've given up on using it. None of its technical features can make up for the fact it won't run or run well on hardware I actually own. Advanced features don't mean much to me if I can't use them effectively.

I'm not developing FreeBSD (or Linux), my interest in them extends about as far as launching other pieces of software I want to use or that I'm writing. I'm not typically pushing the limits of the systems so interesting optimizations around edge cases don't mean much to me. I don't get paid to support myself or my personal projects so I'm just going to go with the system offering the least hassle. That _hasn 't_ been FreeBSD since the 4.x days (compared to contemporary Linux distros).

<comment> non-entity >It's got an AMD APU and apparently FreeBSD has zero support for it.

When's the last time you tried. I don't remember if I've run FreeBSD on it, but I have a cheap board with an AMD APU that's run NetBSD within the last year.

> I've never been able to get FreeBSD fully working on a laptop. Something is > always broken (usually WiFi)

Yeah WiFi support is super shaky seemingly across all BSDs. I had to make a small patch to an existing kernel driver to get it to work with one of my Realtek cards in FreeBSD. To my knowledge the same card will cause panics in NetBSD when the driver is attached and I have an Intel WiFi card broken in DragobflyBSD.

<comment><USER56> > When's the last time you tried. I don't remember if I've run FreeBSD on it, > but I have a cheap board with an AMD APU that's run NetBSD within the last > year.

It's been two or three years since I last bothered. While FreeBSD's support for the board might be better there's no real upside for me to even try installing it. The router box has been happily running in a closet for years. Best case scenario is it does exactly what it does now with minimal effort on my part. It's not worth the effort.

This is my common refrain whenever I think about using FreeBSD for a project. I'll most likely end up with _some_ set of things I need to fix or debug. Each problem then saps my time, motivation, and patience. It's an order of magnitude easier to just use Linux and save my energy for interesting parts of a project.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER57> It's been said a million times- FreeBSD is an operating system, Linux is a kernel. ("GNU/Linux" is a strange beast- kernel+libc or what?). It's a tough direct comparison to make especially when you consider things like documentation (which FreeBSD is often cited as being exceptional)

<comment><USER58> > ("GNU/Linux" is a strange beast- kernel+libc or what?)

Kernel plus userspace: the standard command-line tools, compilers and some additional stuff. Such as GNOME, for instance (it's considered a part of the GNU project).

</comment></comment><comment><USER59> >The kernel and base system is completely separated from the third party applications and base system configuration goes into /etc while all third party configuration goes into /usr/local/etc. Everything you can configure and everything you can tune or setup is very well documented in the man pages.

One thing I find ironic about BSDs is that their top billing feature is being a "complete integrated (base) operating system" rather than a collection of software maintained by different projects, but at the same time, they're almost always discussed as server/poweruser operating systems rather than desktop operating systems. This seems completely backwards to me.

If I'm a sysadmin running a server, I probably know what I'm doing and feel confident replacing parts of it. I likely studied this and relative to a typical person I'm much more likely to find _the way it works_ to be interesting. By contrast if I'm a desktop user there's a very good chance I don't know what I'm doing and don't really want to. It seems like the second situation is the one where you benefit more from having a wall up that separates the system from the userlibs.

There have been fleeting attempts to make desktop-forward BSD distributions over the years, including PC-BSD and a few short-lived initiatives by the NetBSD project, but it never gets off the ground. Is this a missed opportunity?

</comment><comment><USER60> I've been a long time OpenBSD, FreeBSD and Linux user (I use Windows for mainly for work though). I've given up with the BSDs tbh. While I like that I can understand these systems. Linux is just easier to get things working on. There is just more information now out there for Linux as it is the defacto *nix out there. So it may well be that BSD has many technical merits, they tend not to be all that useful when you are trying to get stuff done.

</comment><comment><USER61> I have dabbled in BSDs (mainly OpenBSD) but can't stick with any of them because Docker doesn't work without virtualizing Linux. If I have to have a separate setup for "real work" versus hobby work, then it's a non-starter for me; I don't have enough time or brain capacity.

I like the idea of BSDs as this self-contained system (like the polish of Apple's walled garden but without the tyranny), but it is too far behind the cutting edge.

</comment><comment><USER62> Slackware lines up more with the original philosophy this article talks about. I like taking Slackware in either stable or -current and running it in this article instead of Debian ... If you wanna run Linux with a distro that hasnt changed its overall philosophy, structure, or hell even core software you should be looking at Slackware again. 15 will likely be out this year.

</comment><comment><USER63> Wow it really sounds like FreeBSD is the-right-thing to choose. Except I can't tell anyone I know to install it because it does not come with a simple installer or a working desktop. I got interested in Windows because I grew up with it, and only later I got curious of how it worked behind the scenes. When I first installed Linux I had no idea on how to use the terminal, what a package manager was, compile programs or even what a DE was. I learned it because I was able to install it on my machine in less that an hour. It doesn't matter how good your train engine is, if it ain't got no seats, people won't come aboard. [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worse_is_better](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worse_is_better)

<comment><USER64> FreeBSD used to be a Swiss watch of an OS - I used 4.8 (IIRC) to run a VPS for a few years and couldn't be happier; nowadays, looks like FreeBSD is on par or even lagging behind Linux in all respects.

</comment></comment><comment><USER65> I'm kinda confused.

The author berates Debian for patching many upstream software packages to conform to "the Debian way", and then says:

> The kernel and base system is completely separated from the third party > applications and base system configuration goes into /etc while all third > party configuration goes into /usr/local/etc.

Doesn't that mean that FreeBSD has to patch all third-party software to look for its configuration in /usr/local/etc, creating a "FreeBSD way" that is just as much at risk as breaking upstream software, making its documentation not apply etc. as the Debian software?

Or is there a real, technical difference that makes one kind of modification less intrusive than the other?

<comment><USER66> When you build a package from source with ./configure, it generally _defaults_ to /usr/local/etc. Oddly, the Linux way of putting all third party configs in /etc is actually what's weird.

<comment><USER67> Considering most unix software is written on linux for linux these days, and has been for many years, its extremely unlikely what you say is true.

<comment><USER66> Take a look here: [https://www.gnu.org/prep/standards/html_node/Directory- Varia...](https://www.gnu.org/prep/standards/html_node/Directory- Variables.html)

"The default value of prefix should be /usr/local"

On traditional Unix systems, /usr was reserved for the operating system. /usr/local is 3rd party software. This is how Solaris behaves. This is how the BSD's behave. The Linux approach is the exception, not the rule.

<comment><USER67> the fact that 99(.99?)% of modern unix systems are linux systems makes it the rule, not the exception.

<comment><USER66> What you say is true. I can see it both ways. There's also the issue that Linux is "only" the kernel, so all software is third party software. There is no differentiation between "core OS" and "third party" like you have on other platforms.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER68> Excerpt:

"With jail it is possible to create various virtual machines, each having its own set of utilities installed and its own configuration.

 _This makes it a safe way to try out software_.

For example, it is possible to run different versions or try different configurations of a web server package in different jails. And since the jail is limited to a narrow scope, the effects of a misconfiguration or mistake (even if done by the in-jail superuser) does not jeopardize the rest of the system's integrity. Since nothing has actually been modified outside of the jail, "changes" can be discarded by deleting the jail's copy of the directory tree."

</comment><comment><USER52> Wow I see no mention of no systemd in FreeBSD here.

I love how unified the freebsd maintenance and just general system utilities are. The documentation doesn't lie. I've never had a bsd box stop booting because of a wonky system change either.

<comment><USER69> > Wow I see no mention of no systemd in FreeBSD here.

The author wrote about it in the "part 1" article linked in the introduction.

</comment></comment><comment><USER70> "...there isn't such as thing as "the Arch way". The Arch Linux distribution want third party software to be as upstream has made them, so they do not change anything unless absolutely necessary"

Gosh! This is exactly how I feel about Arch. And FreeBSD seems consistent until you step outside of the base, and then, it's just a pain in the pass, because so many software nowadays is build on the assumption of running Linux/bash/gnu textutils, etc.

</comment><comment><USER71> If Linux were a railroad, FreeBSD would be a model railroad club. Nice stuff, in a way, and very similar to the real thing, but lacking a certain industrial usefulness.

<comment><USER72> Not at all. FreeBSD is without doubt on equal footing with Linux in terms of industrial usefulness, assuming the features you seek are available. Large companies use FreeBSD in production for mission critical apps but are generally less vocal about it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER73> I run Ubuntu as my daily driver primarily for its broad 3rd party application support. As such I tend to run Ubuntu on servers as well, so I'm usually in familiar territory. I have a smart friend who extols the benefits of FreeBSD, but I haven't ever given it a serious go. Is there a canonical/non-hacky way to run debian packages on FreeBSD? Like can I run Slack and Zoom? Steam?

</comment><comment><USER74> Most of these points are debated in Brendan Gregg's "Solaris to Linux Migration" blog post from 2017: [http://www.brendangregg.com/blog/2017-09-05/solaris-to- linux...](http://www.brendangregg.com/blog/2017-09-05/solaris-to- linux-2017.html)

The only point of Brendan's that I don't agree with is ZFS as it really doesn't have a strong competitor (yet). Thankfully, it also doesn't need to be on every machine - my desktops/laptops/deployed servers are treated like cattle not pets.

I love FreeBSD/OpenBSD's simplicity and principled design, but I've sadly relegated them to specific purpose servers at work and at home because I kept hitting enough speedbumps that IMO preclude them from being used in a more general sense.

</comment><comment><USER75> How do e.g. the sections about bhyve and Bastille describe _Technical reasons to choose FreeBSD over GNU /Linux_? The describe features, but they tell me nothing about why those might be better than counterparts in the Linux world.

</comment><comment><USER76> These are hardly "reasons", more like "the list of comparable freebsd analogues of some common tech solutions implemented in gnu/linux".

</comment><comment><USER77> My frustration with BSD is in the desktop arena when wanting to use a laptop. Want to use modern laptop hardware? Good luck. I get that this use isn't the core that BSD focuses on, but seriously, it's a huge potential market for people that want a secure/stable system. Right now you either need to use extremely old hardware (Thinkpad T60 era) or face many obstacles. Which is a pity.

<comment><USER78> This is a lie: no you don't need to use old hardware. I use a Thinkpad X1 Carbon (5th gen) and everything sans-fingerprint-reader works perfectly with FreeBSD 12.1, entirely built from source and ports. The trackpad even works buttery smooth, with inertial scrolling using the Synaptics X driver.

</comment></comment><comment> rooam-dev Long time "intermittent" FreeBSD user here.

I always liked the naming (e.g. NICs) and location of things in FreeBSD, felt more natural to me. It may not be a (good) technical reason, but it makes live so much easier when you know that if I install something it's in '/usr/local'. That said, not sure if it's fair to compare FreeBSD (1 distro) with Linux (many distros).

</comment><comment><USER79> Only thing that is holding me back from using FreeBSD (and other BSD) is hardware compatibility. Linux supports far more hardware devices, such as SATA controller/HBA and network cards, it seems. I've used FreeBSD (and other BSD) and it was really pleasant to see a well laid out and well thought out OS, unlike Linux which felt like a collection of after thoughts.

</comment><comment><USER80> I am running both at the moment but I must say that I am warming more to FreeBSD, reminds me of the early Linux days, before the systemd wars.

</comment><comment><USER81> In 2000, I was working on a large Solaris x86 system. It was a daily struggle to get and keep anything at all working. I needed a VNC server to hold state across laptop crashes, sleeps, wifi glitches, etc. I chose FreeBSD because I just needed one thing in my work life that actually worked. I loved it then, and I'd choose it again today.

</comment><comment><USER82> If you really like Windows and/or MacOS, you will probably be disappointed in the desktops available on Linux and FreeBSD.

But the opposite is also true. After years running Xfce and GNOME in Linux, I went back to Windows 10.

First I had to replicate my workflow, which meant using a lot of programs that could be run on any system.

Then, aside from the Microsoft updates and all the problems they cause, the total lack of package management for applications makes even more work.

I had WSL, and that is great, but running a terminal in Linux (or MacOS, even) is just easier when everything can be accessed by any program in or out of the console.

Eventually I realized I was fighting Windows with little upside. I got an M.2 SSD, installed Debian Stable (after 2 years of Windows, I REALLY didn't want a lot of updates), and everything is running great.

If you depend on Microsoft Office and/or Adobe Creative Suite apps, that's a reason to prefer Windows or MacOS. Otherwise, you can do very well — and maybe even better — with the Linux desktop of your choice.

My current laptop is three years old. GNOME 3 runs great. It's extremely responsive, and I like the way it works with the "hot corner," super key and desktop search. I use a few GNOME Shell Extensions, but not too many.

I really don't understand why developers are so enamored with Apple. Unless you are developing for Mac or iPhone, a good Linux distro, or even Windows 10, seems to be a better if not equal choice.

I managed to get my hands on an iMac, and I set it up to see how I'd like MacOS. Getting it "right" was harder than Windows, and I was really surprised at how super slow Homebrew could be. It really made me appreciate Debian's apt — and even Fedora's dnf.

Mac's Finder doesn't compare well to Windows' File Explorer (is that what they call it?) or Nautilus/Files in GNOME.

One thing Windows 10 and MacOS do well is support HD and UHD screens without fiddling. Linux desktop developers need to finally realize that HD (1920x1080) is now the baseline, and 4K-ish resolutions are common and should be completely supported out of the box.

My comfort level with Linux is high, and when I spend most of my time in the same web browsers, in addition to the file manager and text editors, it made sense for me to switch back. Windows is too much work with too little upside.

</comment><comment><USER83> Ultimately, when we are being honest, there are no technical reasons to prefer FreeBSD. Or Linux. Both work. You can probably build whatever you need to on either one (with a few exceptions, e.g. AMD) and both will work about as well. There are differences, but the importance of each difference is a matter of preference, environment, and history.

</comment><comment><USER84> I don't disagree, but are there business reasons to do it? As far as I can tell there aren't, but there are good reasons not to, such as hiring and support. Are there any people here who could make a business case as well as a technical case? I'd be fascinated to hear it.

</comment><comment><USER85> I know people who insist on using FreeBSD, or worse OpenBSD, and they often have issues with their work systems.

This is unacceptable to me. My work system must work.

So I don't care about your theoretical list because I know for a fact that Linux is better for me in practice.

<comment><USER86> I keep fixing my colleagues Linux issues. In practice, I have spent less time fixing my own BSD systems.

I usually end up stuck with Linux systems at work because of proprietary code which doesn't run on BSD.

</comment></comment><comment><USER87> And in UNIX tradition, zero reasons for anyone that cares about graphics and multimedia.

</comment><comment><USER88> Is the ports system similar to Gentoo's portage/ebuild system? I can get sources, configure the build, or get binaries (for some things) pretty easy through it.

The QA with the build farm would be nice though.

</comment><comment><USER89> technical merits, can be plenty. however how does freeBSD integrate with the rest of the I wanna get things done ecosystem of people n software. Can I easily install it on a laptop such as a thinkpad and have a plug and play experience. Can I easily update and find packages | software I need. if Open source software approached things from the usability view, we wouldn't be beholden to corporate interests. I personally, use KDE on a thinkpad

</comment><comment><USER90> It has been a couple of months since I messed with it, but I don't remember there being a way to do source based, weighted, or blackhole routes on freebsd.

</comment><comment><USER91> I'm seriously unconvinced there are any aside from personal preference and I've been using BSD since 4.1 on a vax. I still think 32v was near perfect.

</comment><comment><USER92> This seems more so like a list of differences, without any details as to what makes them different, let alone which is better...

</comment><comment><USER93> The moment I stopped caring about these arguments is the moment I got a little more happiness in my life.

</comment><comment><USER94> In the context of PF:

> Logs may be monitored using standard utilities such as tcpdump.

This sounds unusual and not entirely practical?

</comment><comment><USER95> Funny coincidence. Last night before I went to sleep I was looking up the differences between BSD and Linus.

</comment><comment><USER96> Technical reasons to choose gnu/Linux over freebsd: I can choose among one of the top distros, boot the installer on my laptop and most (if not all) the hardware will be detected and will work properly.

</comment><comment><USER97> Who care about OSes, when you have container, and VM ?

</comment><comment><USER98> Use the best tool for the job I say. If it's BSD for you or your project then so be it. If it's Linux then use that.

<comment><USER99> And use this article to figure out whether BSD is better than Linux for you or your project, right?

<comment><USER98> I was just trying to get ahead of the inevitable flame war that will ensue regarding this topic.

I didn't know about some features in BSD though so I did find the article useful.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER100> id rather see this on openbsd

<comment><USER29> Linux is a Boeing (a 737 Max, if you ask certain people), OpenBSD is a Cessna.

If you do a direct comparison, OpenBSD would lose in terms of benchmarks, hardware support, software support, features, etc.

But OpenBSD is more a philosophy, a particular way to approach computing that works for some people. OpenBSD is basically a continuation of Unix from the 80s, where the admin/user (no distinction in reality) is expected to do some work from the command line. Thus it's a great user experience. The config files tend to have the same syntax, and it's human-friendly syntax, not some XML or YAML crap designed for a tool. Things are kept simple so human brains can understand them.

But the trade-off is basically features, performance, hardware and software support. It's a bitter pill but, again, it works for some people.

I use OpenBSD full time on my router, but I tend to switch back and forth on laptop and servers (with Debian).

<comment><USER101> When Linux is a Boeing 737Max, then FreeBSD is a Airbus A380 and OpenBSD is a A-10 Warthog. xD

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER102> Practical reasons to choose linux over freebsd

1\. People use linux more than freebsd

Nothing's more important than this.

<comment><USER103> Sounds straight from a 90's Microsoft marketing department, I'm glad not everyone listened back then.

More users is definitely a feature though.

<comment><USER102> tbh microsoft was the best choice in the 90s.

the only reason linux became useful is because it became popular.

<comment><USER104> For some domains, But certainly not all, Windows was arguably a better choice, but even then it was more Windows NT vs Novell than Unix.

I don't recall Microsoft ever getting much traction in the racks of ISPs or in "big iron" installations, not until the late 90s... and even then it was tenuous.

Microsoft was a terrible choice for IP networking, for example. Changing the IP address of a server would require a reboot.

The majority of the work I did in the 90s was on HPUX and DGUX, but also a bunch of others. There was a lot more OS diversity back in the day.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


AirPooler Is Lyft For Private Planes - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2014/04/02/airpooler/

<comment><USER2> > Law prohibits private pilots from profiting from passengers so you only pay > for your share of the cost of the flight plus a 20 percent fee to AirPooler.

Can anyone shed some light on this statement? Some of the comments on the article indicate that it is illegal for AirPooler to do this.</comment>


The Hidden Secrets of Online Quizzes  - <AUTHOR> http://www.pcworld.com/article/164527-2/the_hidden_secrets_of_online_quizzes.html <comment><USER2> Previously submitted:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=606747></comment>


Ask HN: Looking for an accounting app with a descent SDK - <AUTHOR>

Hello.  I am looking for an accounting application for a startup where I work.  We bill based on usage data (stored in our own DB and we use Ruby on Rails) so we need to (1) push the usage data into the accounting app (2) auto-generate billing/invoice through the accounting app.  Any suggestions will be appreciated :)<p>- Josh <comment><USER2> <http://searchyc.com/accounting+app></comment>


Gmail Service Disruption - <AUTHOR> https://www.google.com/appsstatus#hl=en&v=issue&sid=1&iid=be4cdd50ed9bc6458ede98158a71cfd4 <comment><USER2> I built something to help get us all off Gmail, an intermediary step rather:

[https://forwardemail.net](https://forwardemail.net)

It is 100% open-source, and I built it because I wanted to begin to move away from Gmail as Google Business was no longer free to use on custom domains.

(disclosure: I am the author of this project)

<comment><USER3> I'm confused. What does this do that Gmail doesn't already do?

<comment><USER2> Read the about page

<comment><USER4> The French translation of the website is really hard to read

<comment><USER2> I'm going to feed the locale files to a human-based translation service soon. Getting up new infrastructure now.

If you'd like to translate the French one for us toss me an email at firstname.lastname@example.com - would gladly tip you or give you free service.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Windows 8 Developer days useful? - <AUTHOR>

I've got an invite to a Windows 8 Dev day in Ireland. Does anyone know if MS will give out any useful tools or s it just a simple presentation? <comment><USER2> The short answer is yes, they are. But are better to devs that aready know the platform and have an app in development. It's not that good to those that are starting from the scratch. If you have doubts about some subject or just want to polish you app you have a good moment 101 with great devs, usually, from MS.</comment>


Envy and Entrepreneurship - <AUTHOR> http://justinmares.com/entrepreneurship-and-envy/

<comment><USER2> I think not reading tech news is a good one.

I've felt a bit of envy when it comes to posts declaring how easily somebody has cashed in. But at the end of the day it's usually because the work behind the overnight success has been glossed over.

Until you read between the lines and understand the amount of work and "faking it til you make it" behind the scenes that has gone on give tech news a swerve.</comment>


Tesla Founder Elon Musk Dreams Of Electric Airplanes - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/05/05/tesla-founder-elon-musk-dreams-of-electric-airplanes/ <comment><USER2> Certainly possible. The Tesla Roadster's bodyweight is approximately 1,200 kg, the current Light-Sport Aircraft regulations (which is equivalent to most countries Ultralight regulations) put a vehicle with a max take-off weight at 600kg. Ultra-light engines are typically in the 80hp-120hp region, so it certainly looks plausible.

I'm sure, if you stripped down a Tesla to bare necessities (IE no crash protection) the weight to horsepower ratio will be even better. So I wouldn't doubt you'd be able to make a fully electric airplane that is capable of flying a fair distance. In fact, fuel efficiency in airplanes can be better than most cars. Again the fuel efficiency can also be affected by the parts used (obviously li-ion would be the minimum, lead-acid would either weigh too much or you'd plummet to your death after 5 miles) and thin-film PV cells could easily be applied to a plane's broad wingspan, however this likely wouldn't increase the flight distance much (even with 100% efficiency and optimal conditions, your average ultra-light wingspan wouldn't ever produce the total power needed for a 80HP/60KW motor).

<comment><USER3> What about beamed power? With the power of modern electric motors, freed from the burden of carrying the batteries or fuel, there would be a tremendous gain in efficiency.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'd venture to guess that current battery energy density makes this a far-off dream. Certainly that could improve, and the idea that battery components might double as structural components is interesting. Still, one has to wonder whether it will prove to be greener/faster to develop electric airplanes or to develop carbon-neutral sources of petroleum-like products (i.e. Fuel from Bacteria).</comment>


Deploying XNA Games on Zune and Xbox 360 - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.msdn.com/alfredth/archive/2009/12/15/deploying-xna-games.aspx

<comment><USER2> This would be neat for a fun side-project, but I'm 99% sure there's no business model here.

But feel free to post evidence to the contrary, I'd be glad to read it.

(EDIT: Just to clarify, I'm talking about any potential "startup" or entrepreneurial angle here. If you want to teach yourself game programming, this is probably a great cheap way to do it.)</comment>


Readmill shuts down, team joins Dropbox - <AUTHOR> https://readmill.com/epilogue

<comment><USER2> This is an incredibly, incredibly well done shutdown statement.

It explains clearly what happened; it isn't overly congratulatory to themselves; it puts a clear emphasis on how their users can export their data; it thanks those who helped them on the journey; it beautifully summarizes everything they built and stood for, from the solid typography, to the interactive timeline, to the team photos, to the simple, clean choice of a "Epilogue" as the title. And it'll be the perfect homepage come July 1st too.

Sad to see such a high-quality product shut down. I've looked to Readmill for design inspiration a lot over the past year.

<comment><USER3> Really nice to see them handling it straight-forwardly instead of pretending like it's an epic win for users when it's a really an acqui-hire. Props to these guys for being honest.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This feels like a huge loss. Readmill stood head and shoulders above other reading apps like Kindle and iBooks in terms of design. It was also one of the few services that would let you upload ePub books to your account through the website and then sync your library to your mobile device.

"Now cracks a noble heart.—Good night, sweet prince, And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest!"

I wish the team all the best at Dropbox, and I'm sure Dropbox will benefit immensely from their remarkable talent for building amazing software. At the same time, though, I wish they would have just started charging $10 a month for the service!

<comment><USER5> > It was also one of the few services that would let you upload ePub books to > your account through the website and then sync your library to your mobile > device.

Google Books does this now

<comment><USER6> Google Books is my preferred reading app for just this reason.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Well, at least they're not pitching it as a grand success for all, and won't end up on [http://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/](http://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/)

<comment><USER8> Tip to engineers new to the startup world: If the startup you work for has any success or traction, but runs out of money, you will be sold off as a team like cattle. When startups shutdown, all assets -- servers, client contracts, software, furniture, and teams -- will be sold off to recoup losses. You won't have much say in it and it kind of sucks.

In fairness to the CEO's that broker these deals, they are probably trying to make sure that their workers land on their feet. But it still sucks to realize you and your friends are considered saleable assets.

<comment><USER9> Well, if you are an employee of an acquired startup, you always have the option of leaving. The acquirer will try to make sure that between unvested equity and retention packages you have enough incentive to stay, but it's really your choice.

<comment><USER8> That's certainly one version of what can happen. Another version is that none of the equity transfers to the new company. The acquiring company will offer you a modest boost in salary and similar new stock options. If you don't take the offer because they're low balling you or you don't like the new company, your old company will terminate you at the end of the week without any severance. Or the new company will offer everyone on the team 3 months consulting contracts. Either way, better start familiarizing yourself with COBRA.

Employees in the acquired company are put under heavy pressure to take whatever deal is offered. Who wouldn't want to keep working with their friends? The CEO's/senior team will keep the employees out of the loop so that rank-and-file don't move first and take any negotiating power away from the CEO.

Not every acqui-hire is a payoff for the employees in the acquired company. It can also be a face-saving gesture when money runs out to make a shutdown look semi-successful for the founders.

<comment><USER10> And you will get tired of deleting all the job offers and "let's have coffee and talk about my startup" mails for the next few days until you find something new.

Truly, having your company fail is a horrible thing, at least in Silicon Valley right now. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'm a huge fan of Dropbox. Here is my long-term wishful thinking of their acquisitions:

        - Audiogalaxy Dec 2012: online iTunes-like audio library, synced across/streamed to all of my devices
        - Snapjoy Dec 2012: online iPhoto-like experience, synced...
        - Mailbox Mar 2013: can Dropbox be the new Gmail? If Google search needs disruption, Gmail is no different
        - Zulip Mar 2014: online chat and team collaboration with file/screenshot/text/etc sharing integrated to a whole new level. Maybe Droplr/CloudApp on steroids
        - Readmill Mar 2014: online ezine/book library... maybe doc management?!

Bottom line: to become everyone's all-in-one cloud, synced, folder. This would be the platform, a _~ /user/_ in the cloud

PS: from their Sold and Endorse acquisitions I can only speculate that they might have a(n) (e)commerce play in their mind.

<comment><USER12> It's a nice thought. But as you state, they acquired Mailbox a year ago. As far as I can tell there isn't anything to show for it in terms of an e-mail product.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Readmill was without a doubt one of my favorite apps. It did one thing, and it did it very well. Like many others, I wish it was going to be absorbed into Dropbox (like Mailbox was last year) and remain operational. Perhaps there will be some level of ebook integration in the Dropbox app in the future.

</comment><comment><USER14> Why not make Readmill part of Dropbox app ecosystem (e.g. Mailbox)? Just a read, sync and backup app without the social network features. I really hate to do all this manually with yet another service.

</comment><comment><USER15> I'm heartbroken by the loss of Readmill. Met some incredible people in the margins of books, and have had long and thoughtful conversations with fellow readers, authors, and myself.

Readmill have done an awesome job at giving us tools to rescue our data. But where to put it? How can we keep getting value out of the time we've invested into Readmill? I personally have over 600 highlights and tens of thousands words written in the margins, now locked up in a big JSON dump.

A few of us have banded together to build a tool ( [http://readshelf.co](http://readshelf.co) ) to rehome your Readmill library. It'll sync your Readmill highlights up until July 1 (and you can upload your dump as well.) When Readmill shuts down for good, we're hoping there'll be a nice replacement service that we can integrate with—giving you some continuity with your library.

Of course, all of your stuff will be exportable in a useful format; lest history repeat itself. In fact, we're really keen to hear suggestions on:

\- a sustainable business model for something like this

\- some best practices around _your_ data: access, portability, etc.

<comment><USER16> Looks like Marvin supports Readmill cloud? [http://blog.marvinapp.com/post/69175405146](http://blog.marvinapp.com/post/69175405146) (I have yet to try though, and it's an old announcement.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Damn. I'm more saddened by this than any other acquisition. Readmill is (was?) just so much better than the alternatives.

</comment><comment><USER18> Disappointed to hear this — they've made by far the best reading app for iOS, and perhaps anywhere. The FAQ tries to preempt the "but why not implement X, Y, or Z potential revenue model?" question by saying they didn't think anything would work. But that's not satisfying; I don't want to believe that there really was absolutely no solution that would've made it viable as a business, or at least saved it from impending total shutdown. Always interesting (though difficult) to read these "we're closing up shop" notices, knowing how much history and context and problem solving went on behind the scenes that we'll just never be privy to. Hope they continue to do great things with the mobile reading experience at Dropbox!

</comment><comment><USER19> Any more on the apparent $8 million "acqui-hire" by Dropbox? [http://techcrunch.com/2014/03/27/readmill-acqui- hired/](http://techcrunch.com/2014/03/27/readmill-acqui-hired/)

</comment><comment><USER20> What? Another service I start to use and shutdowns just a few days later...sad!

That's a problem with free services, and sometimes even with some paid services.

<comment><USER21> I think it's a general problem with services.

I much prefer using desktop software, even when it's discontinued, it still works.

I think the next big thing could be bringing App Stores to servers. 1 click install, zero config, etc. I recently set up my own webmail, it was a pain in the ass. It could be made a lot easier, and I think people would pay for the convenience.

<comment><USER22> > I think the next big thing could be bringing App Stores to servers.

It doesn't get much easier than "yum install" or "apt-get install".

<comment><USER21> I'm more thinking so the average person would have their own server for their family, rather than the people who have servers now.

Sure "apt-get install" installs the software, but configuring it to do anything useful is still anything but trivial. Installing Linux, creating a user accounts, setting up an SMTP, POP & IMAP server, installing a webmail app with spam filtering, making sure they all talk to each other, is hard. Installing WordPress is the easiest I've seen, and you still need to create a DB and copy the connection details.

I'm thinking of something as simple as you see a list of Apps (WordPress, PHPBB, etc). Just click 'install' and pick the directory you want it installed in. And you pay $.99 for the convince.

I think it would be good for the industry to move away from ad supported services, and to let users pay to host the services themselves.

<comment><USER22> > I think it would be good for the industry to move away from ad supported > services, and to let users pay to host the services themselves.

I somewhat agree with your perspective, but think its going to be a hard sell. People buy apps because you don't have to think about it. Configuring a service is in direct opposition of that convenience, and I don't think you'll ever have enough training wheels in the interface to fix that.

I could be wrong.

<comment><USER21> I said it 'could be' the next big thing, not it will be. I agree it's a long shot.

Web Apps have been very good to developers. Zero piracy, no installation issues, low support costs. Users like them because it's simple to get started, they aren't tied to one computer. The downsides are all long term -- and it's hard to get people to think about the future, or things like privacy.

I'm not sure where the drive would come from to make it happen. I don't see which company would put in the investment to get it started.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> They mentioned no new signups were allowed but I still managed to sign up via Facebook and created a new account. Not sure how to get a hold of them but they might want to know that.

</comment><comment><USER24> Any recommendations for a replacement?

<comment><USER25> Take a look at [http://marvinapp.com](http://marvinapp.com). It has some fancy typographic and organizing features. I found it not to my taste, but YMMV.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> jesus christ.

</comment><comment><USER27> What I felt bad about is all the bullshit they typed instead of just saying:

>> _Hey, we got acqui-hired by Dropbox and we are now shutting ReadMill down! Thanks for all the fish and hope you enjoyed ours._

That's it. That's all it would have taken.</comment>