# DistroWatch now runs on FreeBSD?



## drhowarddrfine (Jan 13, 2020)

I only saw this tweet


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## Cthulhux (Jan 13, 2020)

Is it important? I mean, they stopped being a "Linux rulZ lol" site quite some time ago.


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## kpedersen (Jan 13, 2020)

I would love to know their reasons. It is a fairly straight forward LAMP (now FAMP) site, they could have chosen virtually anything to use.

Perhaps they have been fatigued by distro hopping. They were the original pioneers of the sport after all XD

Oh, well. I certainly agree with their choice


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## unficyp (Jan 14, 2020)

kpedersen said:


> I would love to know their reasons. It is a fairly straight forward LAMP (now FAMP) site, they could have chosen virtually anything to use.
> 
> Perhaps they have been fatigued by distro hopping. They were the original pioneers of the sport after all XD
> 
> Oh, well. I certainly agree with their choice



There is a reddit thread:
_View: https://www.reddit.com/r/freebsd/comments/eodhit/switching_distrowatch_over_to_freebsd_ama/fec9v7m/_


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## CraigHB (Jan 14, 2020)

Always good to see professionals picking up FreeBSD.  I hope that it becomes more popular for the sake of more developers working on it, but not too popular because that can be bad too.  Too many cooks and all.

That's actually a big draw for me to FreeBSD, no wild mood swings, things move along at a slower more thought out rate.

Haha, got sucked into reading r/freebsd for an hour or two.  Still have yet to make a comment there, actually some good content, some noise too.


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## SKull (Jan 14, 2020)

kpedersen said:


> I would love to know their reasons. It is a fairly straight forward LAMP (now FAMP) site, they could have chosen virtually anything to use.
> 
> Perhaps they have been fatigued by distro hopping. They were the original pioneers of the sport after all XD
> 
> Oh, well. I certainly agree with their choice


First thing that comes to mind: jails


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## scottro (Jan 14, 2020)

Way back when, they used to use FreeBSD, 4.x days I think. They then switched to Debian--things were simpler then, and the person making the decision then just wrote that it was much quicker for them to configure Debian--however, they wrote, scripts that they used ran faster on FreeBSD. So, this is just a return for them, I guess.

I don't have the links for any of this, I just vaguely remember it, as I said, I think it was around the time of 4.x.


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## joplass (Jan 22, 2020)

systemd hihihihi


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## Deleted member 30996 (Jan 22, 2020)

I'm one of only a few people who post in the readers comments there, occasionally, that use BSD on a regular basis. The rest are mostly adamant Linux users.

The Horror... The Horror...


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## CraigHB (Jan 23, 2020)

Are you posting on reddit/r/freebsd then?  Actually there are some interesting posts, though short lived it seems.  I created an account today, might post a little here and there.  Just something else to read when I run out of stuff here.  But yeah lots of Linuxers there having a go with FreeBSD.

Clicking through some links there I got some information about the move to systemd I didn't understand before.  It does make sense in a big company profit driven way.  Not that it makes me happy, but now I understand the motivations behind it.

Anyway there is some backpedaling which I figured would happen, though I think it's here to stay with the powers behind it.  It's pretty much the fork in the path of GNU/Linux going to profit driven from passion driven.


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## Deleted member 30996 (Jan 23, 2020)

I've never posted to reddit and it's not a site I visit often.

I did see last year where they have a "trihexagonal" that posts there... Wonder where they came up with that?

But there's a ruebot speed gamer now, too. I made that word up in 2002.


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## sidetone (Jan 23, 2020)

Trihexagonal said:


> I've never posted to reddit and it's not a site I visit often.
> 
> I did see last year where they have a "trihexagonal" that posts there... Wonder where they came up with that?


That was me. I stole your name.

No, that's not me. I don't post there about FreeBSD, I just read about it.


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## drhowarddrfine (Jan 23, 2020)

CraigHB said:


> I created an account today, might post a little here and there.


You have entered the gates of hell and I pray for your soul.


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## Crivens (Jan 23, 2020)

sidetone said:


> That was me. I stole your name.
> 
> No, that's not me. I don't post there about FreeBSD, I just read about it.


That's what a name thief would say! Yes? Yes??

Sorry I could not resist.


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## sidetone (Jan 23, 2020)

Crivens said:


> That's what a name thief would say! Yes? Yes??
> 
> Sorry I could not resist.


The thief would say they didn't do it, when they weren't accused.

If I copied that name, I would change it to dexagonalhexigeismal or something.

Note to self: stop talking, these people are getting suspicious.


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## cynwulf (Jan 23, 2020)

Incidentally, Jesse Smith of distrowatch is one of the maintainers of the Linux sysvinit package:






						System V style init programs - Summary: Project Memberlist [Savannah]
					






					savannah.nongnu.org
				




And also worked on the FreeBSD port of OpenBSD's doas(1)








						Jesse Smith | creating fixes and updates for SysV init, doas, CPUlimit, and Bf | Patreon
					

Become a patron of Jesse Smith today: Get access to exclusive content and experiences on the world’s largest membership platform for artists and creators.




					www.patreon.com
				




(I hadn't looked at distrowatch for a few years, just did and noted that a distribution, which I've barely heard of, called "MX Linux", which seems to be something based on Debian is now by far the most "popular"* at the moment.  I did a quick read up and it looks like it does not use systemd either.
*"popular" in terms of distrowatch and number of hits on a page)


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## kpedersen (Jan 23, 2020)

cynwulf said:


> just did and noted that a distribution, which I've barely heard of, called "MX Linux", which seems to be something based on Debian is now by far the most "popular" at the moment



Since the great fall of Ubuntu, the distrowatch list is fairly volatile. One that is 1st today may end up 18th next month. The only one that is consistently at 3/4th place is Debian. This almost leads me to believe that it is the most popular Linux distribution in terms of total accumulated score.


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## Crivens (Jan 23, 2020)

Well, that only shows how exchangeable these distros are...


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## Deleted member 30996 (Jan 23, 2020)

sidetone said:


> That was me. I stole your name.
> 
> No, that's not me. I don't post there about FreeBSD, I just read about it.



If you were registered I'd register as .sidetone and troll you for stealing my name.


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## cynwulf (Jan 23, 2020)

If you condense all the "Debianoids" in the list of e.g. the last 6 months into one, it shows that Debian in reality is the most significant distribution project, in terms of "page hits" / exposure, which apparently dwarfs everything else.  It probably has the most exposure to the general public, aided by its "derivatives" - and a proportion of users will switch from those to the parent distribution as their familiarity increases.

CentOS is 12th and RHEL is way down the list.  It sometimes makes me wonder why Red Hat just don't dump fedora and just rebase RHEL on Debian - seeing as how Debian provides much of what they need anyway and is practically based on systemd.

I suppose it just proves that enterprise pays all the bills, but accounts for little in the way of numbers of people visiting the websites - and not much else.  My take on it has always been that it represents hobbyist and casual desktop user interest at the most and it can vary a lot due to release cycles and release dates.


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## ralphbsz (Jan 23, 2020)

Crivens said:


> Well, that only shows how exchangeable these distros are...


If counting installations of free (in the beer sense) by amateurs and enthusiasts, that's probably very true. On the other hand, the vast majority of computers in the world are servers or IoT devices (formerly known as embedded), the vast majority of these servers run Linux, and they tend to be very stable in their usage of distros. For the subset that is bought with licensed support, I think RedHat and SUSE together have the lion's share of the market. But a very large fraction of all these servers are used by the FAANGs, which tend to roll their own in-house distributions; in the case of the "N" in the FAANG, part of that is actually based on FreeBSD.


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## ralphbsz (Jan 23, 2020)

cynwulf said:


> It sometimes makes me wonder why Red Hat just don't dump fedora and just rebase RHEL on Debian ...


RedHat doesn't survive by giving away free software. It survives (or actually thrives) by selling very good support, mostly to enterprise customers, with the dominant use being servers. Those customers tend to have investments of M$ or G$ into their IT infrastructure. If RedHat were to casually change the underlying distribution technology (like switching to be based on Debian), that would require a huge retooling by its customers, and would be a gigantic transition, with very high costs. Possible, but implausible unless there are really good reasons.

One also has to remember that companies like RedHat are very large today. Last I heard, it had over 10K employees before the merger with IBM. Now not all of them are developers (in reality, a small fraction are), but even a small fraction is a large number of developers. I would not be surprised if RedHat has hundreds of engineers who do nothing but packaging, porting, and install/upgrade tools. That means they are quite independent.


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## CraigHB (Jan 23, 2020)

kpedersen said:


> The only one that is consistently at 3/4th place is Debian


I always liked Debian a lot.  It's what I used until I jumped ship to FreeBSD.



ralphbsz said:


> RedHat doesn't survive by giving away free software.


From what I understand RedHat is focusing pretty heavily on embedded devices and they've done a good amount of development in that area.  It's the reason GNU/Linux is the system choice for many of these devices.


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## decuser (Feb 9, 2021)

MX Linux is great - especially the fluxbox respins - base OS without the million and one extras: https://sourceforge.net/projects/mx-linux/files/Community_Respins/MX-Base/

When I have to use Linux, MX is my favorite after Kali and before Mint. The latest Ubuntu is nice, too, in that it has ZFS as an option during install - too bad it's Gnomy.

On topic, though, I'm glad distrowatch is running on FreeBSD.


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## drhowarddrfine (Feb 9, 2021)

Jesse, the guy who runs distrowatch, visits and contributes to a certain FreeBSD forum on a daily basis.


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## fryshke (Feb 17, 2021)

SKull said:


> First thing that comes to mind: jails


Isn't cgroups regarded as a bit more superior thing?

Anyways, so distrowatch is not running on .NET, as new runtimes somehow just skip FreeBSD.


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## kpedersen (Feb 17, 2021)

fryshke said:


> Isn't cgroups regarded as a bit more superior thing?


Basically Linux Containers (cgroups is a tiny part of this) is a similar concept to FreeBSD jails. Just not as mature.



fryshke said:


> Anyways, so distrowatch is not running on .NET, as new runtimes somehow just skip FreeBSD.


.NET can never be new. It is an ancient design steming all the way from Alef on Plan 9. FreeBSD skips much effort on it because, well we already have Java. Use that 

I barely think .NET is even still a thing. Microsoft solely directs it and yet is moving full steam into native with Rust and C++/cx


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## fryshke (Feb 19, 2021)

kpedersen said:


> Basically Linux Containers (cgroups is a tiny part of this) is a similar concept to FreeBSD jails. Just not as mature.
> 
> 
> .NET can never be new. It is an ancient design steming all the way from Alef on Plan 9. FreeBSD skips much effort on it because, well we already have Java. Use that
> ...


You barely think .NET is a thing, yet Rust is full steam? Like, have you opened any job listing website and compared .NET demand vs Rust or C++? Reality vs bubbles.


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## kpedersen (Feb 19, 2021)

fryshke said:


> You barely think .NET is a thing, yet Rust is full steam? Like, have you opened any job listing website and compared .NET demand vs Rust or C++? Reality vs bubbles.


Nah. Both .NET and Rust are very far behind C and C++. Mostly because Rust and .NET have to call into useful native C or C++ libraries to pretty much do anything interesting. So they can never overtake. However internally Microsoft are going the Rust direction (because they are unable to write correct C++ and yet they *need* native code to stay relevant). So you will see .NET based languages (VB.NET, CSharp.NET, FSharp.NET) fall even lower over the coming years as a result.

From what I can see is that C++ is the highest in terms of job advertisements. It pretty much dwarfs all other languages. Maybe because of the recent boom in "AI". I guess this is because it is one of the very few languages that can directly interface with those all important C libraries.


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