In this post Stephan teaches you why he moves many of his servers from Linux to freeBSD.

Here is some background History of Mine:

Because I have been using Linux ever since the pre-alpha days, I know many things about the operating system that most other users do not. There was no other way to install the operating system in the beginning, than to compile the kernel on another operating system, to hex edit a boot sector, then boot to see if your kernel would actually properly spawn on your machine. In the beginning the hex editing was done on the floppy disk you could not boot from the hard drive.

From that point, you had to go back to the foreign operating system, compile the rest that you needed for minimum functionality, then put them in a convoluted manner on the file system which was then Minix.
It was normal in that period where you first installed Linux to do not just everything yourself but to know what to do otherwise you would never get the functioning operating system.
In the end you would also compile GCC in that foreign operating system, because there was no way for you to do it in Linux with a compiler you did not have yet {chicken egg dilemma}
Only after GCC was compiled, were you able to do Native compiling in Linux on the Minix file system.

It is exactly this manner of thinking that is still bothering Linux distributions today. Somewhere there are people who still think, that there are many users who want to Tinker with the operating system, when they just want to go from one major version to the next.

This manner of thinking breaks things when you need to upgrade from minor to Major version.

One thing that has always bothered me is that a simple major update from the operating system from one person to the next can **still*" literally break things in unexpected ways because of the way that Upstream handles certain commands. For no good reasons commands like ifconfig where depreciated, the other examples also like arp. Ifconfig has been in Unix Forever. Ifconfig is in muscle memory of hundreds of thousands of system operators. Ifconfig is a specialized command which does only one thing and it does it in a perfect manner and it has been doing it ever since UNIX existed.
It's still baffles me that I need to separately install the ifcommands, before I can work on a Linux system today, and that's with any any distribution

This is just one of the examples of why it is wrong to change commands on the fly, depreciating another set of commands, without giving the people the choice, at the beginning, to include it with the installation of the distribution

The IP Command is a good one, nice modern with colour output, ifconfig is still a very good command, nice, stable decades old, leave it be!

These are the major things, that often bring system operators to seek operating systems, where stability is first, where updates from minor to minor version go smoothly, and updates from minor to Major versions usually also go smoothly and where don't disappear or are depreciated for trivial reasons.

#bash #sh #zsh #ksh #csh #tsh #freeBSD #100DaysOfCode #1000DaysOfCode #POSIX #Programming #Patch #RetroComputing #UNIX #History

https://it-notes.dragas.net/2022/01/24/why-were-migrating-many-of-our-servers-from-linux-to-freebsd/