Technological advantages over Linux

[Steve O'Hara-Smith]

On Fri, 24 Jul 2020 10:28:40 +0700
Victor Sudakov <vas at sibptus.ru> wrote:

> Victor Sudakov wrote:

> 1. Debian can run several versions of PHP, PostgreSQL and some other
> software simultaneously (without manual efforts with jails, chroots

	Hmmm ...

> 3. FreeBSD lacks a native docker (what prevents from fixing

	Isn't the whole point of docker to package applications in
containers so that (among other simplifications) there was no need to
support multiple versions of services in the same environment.

	One service, one container works just as well in jails as in
docker, granted it's not as easy as writing a yaml file and watching a
poorly understood swarm of thousands of containers spring to life and
provide a load-balanced service, but it isn't hard especially with iocage
templates.

	Personally I always run services in single service jails and have
done for a lot longer than docker has existed. From what I can see docker
offers very little advantage if what you need is one-off servers and you
want complete control over what's on them and what they do. It offers huge
advantages if you want to administer large load-balanced swarms of
standardised components.

> True, some of those disadvantages are fixable, but now the impression is
> that FreeBSD is lagging behind. The only real advantage left could be
> Root-on-ZFS and BE/bectl, but ironically it does not work in AWS (and
> with UEFI boot in general) which makes it 

	I have systems which have been steadily upgraded from 8.<mumble> to
12.1 with only a single (easily corrected) upgrade glitch (the drm_kmod
issue) and not a single byte of data lost. Standard advice in Linux world
regarding major version upgrades seems to be "Don't do it and if you do
expect breakage". That is a *major* technological advantage.

	Regardless what is with the idea that one OS must be "better" than
another - a Stilson is not better than a ring spanner, they are simply
suited to different (but similar) tasks.

-- 
Steve O'Hara-Smith <steve at sohara.org>