FreeBSD problems and preliminary ways to solve

[Rick Macklem]

Pedro F. Giffuni wrote:
> First of all, thanks to Vadim for his initial post: it's
> evident he spend a lot of time preparing it.
> 
Yes, I'll second that. Being fairly new to FreeBSD, I've found
the discussion interesting.

One thing I thought I'd bring up (since I haven't seen it
mentioned yet) is Debian GNU/kFreeBSD. I haven't tried it,
so I'm talking through my hat a bunch, but...

It seems to me that FreeBSD should do what it can to support
this effort. Why? Well, I suspect a lot of why organizations
running servers might choose Linux over FreeBSD has to do with
the distros/applications and not the kernels. If they like the
style of a typical Linux distro and don't mind the GPL, this
could be a nice alternative for them.

In saying this, I don't mean to belittle the good work being
done on ports and packages and it sounds like more good things
are coming down the pipe. It's just that someone that is familiar
with a typical Linux distro may find Debian GNU/kFreeBSD less of
a transition for them. (And lets face it, everyone is biased
towards what they know vs what they don't know.)

> I just want to give my 0.02$ to this discussion:
> 
> FreeBSD 9.0 is a huge step in the right direction in many
> ways. Perhaps what I like most is getting done with the
> last GNU toolchain and ZFS updates and maintaining the well
> known stability and performance along with the new features.
> 
> Unfortunately some necessary updates didn't make it in time,
> in particular pkgng and the X.Org drivers. The new installer
> is promising but lately installing and configuring XOrg has
> become a nightmare so I find myself suggesting people to use
> PC-BSD instead.
> 
> Some rather important changes that seem critical for the future
> like ARM-EABI and a new toolchain seem to be lacking developers
> and perhaps are going on too slowly to expect them to work in
> the near future but, all in all, I should mention that FreeBSD
> is still very influential and competitive. I've seen posts not
> too long ago where linux developers praise FreeBSD for keeping
> the development pace despite having a much smaller group.
> 
> What I think is that perhaps FreeBSD shouldn´t be expecting
> to be a better linux than linux, simply because there is no
> company related to any BSD in capacity to compete with, say,
> Redhat. We still can do pretty much everything linux does
> with a little extras, but we are a actually niche market and
> it actually hasn't worked bad at all for us.
> 
One of the reasons I brought up GNU/kFreeBSD is that I think
it would be nice if folks could easily compare kernels without
having to deal with all the userland differences.

However, I have no idea how similar GNU/kFreeBSD can come to
their Linux distro and whether it will allow users to switch
between them easily?

Just my $0.00 (not worth 2 cents), rick