[Info-vax] OS implementation languages

[Arne Vajhøj]

On 9/4/2023 9:37 AM, chrisq wrote:
> On 8/29/23 19:54, Arne Vajhøj wrote:
>> Linux has also squeezed FreeBSD market share.
>>
>> Primarily for non-technical reasons:
>> - Linux got backing from IBM, Oracle etc.
>> - Easier to hire Linux expertise
>> - Many companies standardize on a Linux only strategy for applications
>>    (exception for the stuff supporting PC's)
>> - Cloud vendors has pushed Linux
>> - Many companies are moving applications to Kubernetes on Linux (*)
>>
>> *) I believe that FreeBSD got jails before Linux got containers and
>>     jails should be just as good, but FreeBSD jails does not have
>>     the eco-system that Linux containers has (Kubernetes, OpenShift etc.)
> 
> What FreeBSD has managed to do is to maintain the elegance and
> simplicity of trad unix, while including advanced system
> options like ZFS in the out of the box distribution. Fully
> preemptive / real time without a compiler rebuild. Makes it a
> worthy successor to Solaris, which was noted for its robustness.
> Run a public ntp server, hundreds of hits a minute at times. It
> has a current uptime of over two years. On a ups of course. but
> seriously reliable. At least partly due to a very  conservative
> design process and a software engineering attitude. Thousands of
> packages, including most Linux packages, with those that are not,
> built from source. All the usual desktop choices, with xfce4
> being the best compromise between lightweightness and features.
> Just gets the job done with minimum of fuss.
> 
> Compare that with Linux, earlier versions still in use here, but
> becomes ever more complex and opaque. Had to give up on it after
> the systemd trainwreck. A valid windows substitute, nice decor,
> but not for serious work here. The most professional distros at
> present are arguably Suse and Debian, imho...

There is the purely technical perspective.

The biggest advantage for Linux is that they have
the resources available to code anything - if they find
out they need a million lines of code to implement something,
then it will get done.

The biggest problem for Linux is that they have
the resources available to code anything - the size
of the code base is growing quickly. The result is
complexity. And maybe not everything that at some point
was deemed a good idea is considered so 5 or 10 years
later.

*BSD has much fewer resources available. They may not
want systemd, but even if they had wanted it, then I don't
think they could have produced it as fast as Redhat did
for Linux.

But one thing is the "technical beauty contest". Something
else is the business perspective.

Linux got the support the businesses want. Linux is "good
enough". And the average Linux using company does not care
about how much code there is in the Linux kernel to maintain.

So businesses pick Linux.

Arne