What makes freeBSD feel old?
This is a list of all the things that make it feel old. I started this while working at a place that ran a lot of FreeBSD machines. I never got around to finishing it because we started implementing linux boxes, but I think the complaints are still valid. The real shame is that I only wrote down 6 out of about 100 different things. Mostly it’s trivial stuff, but trivial stuff should be the easiest to fix- the FreeBSD people had a real fear of painting barns (take that as you will).
- No Color during the install. none at all. even getting syntax highlighting in vim was a pain. Perhaps I’m just recalling the FreeBSD 3.1 installations they had, but it seemed a mess.
- The ASCII art in the install menu. It gives the feel of a 1988 BBS. It didn’t help that there was a keyboard driver bug in 6.0 or 6.1 that prevented me from actually selecting anything at the menu.
- Speaking of the install, I think out of the 30 or so installs I attempted, only 1 or 2 were even remotely close to trouble-free. I tried the easy, medium and advanced installs- perhaps it was just the box I was installing, or maybe bsd just hates me for calling it names.
- The partitioning tool makes cfdisk look futuristic. Does FreeBSD actually listing my 200 Gig hd by block ranges? Let me just say, that’s WAY better than giving info in a useful unit.
- network cards all have different device names- it seems a mess to have 4 Nics and have bge0, sf0, anxl0, and an0. It’s a bad example, but I guess it’s because I prefer the uniformity of eth0, eth1, eth2 in linux (which can be arranged by setting parameters in /etc/modprobe.d/options).
- rc.conf always seemed to be the most cryptic thing ever- not that it was hard to read, you just never knew what you could put in there. Whenever I asked around for any way to tell what options were available for a given package to add them into rc.conf, the answer always turned to “well download the source and check.” I’m not sure if that was [several] someone’s idea of a joke, but it really made me dislike it. compare that to emerge -v package in gentoo, which lists all of the compile option in an easy to read format.
Saturday 24 Mar 2007 | Jesse Morgan | FreeBSD, Open Source, Rant
Trivial is not the same as broken. Why fix something that isn’t broken?
Why waste resources in making the install prettier instead of adding functionality to the install?
That said, the partitioning utility sucks horribly.
The installer was broken since you couldn’t select anything at the menu.
But besides that, it’s just a matter of keeping up with the times- by not updating itself, it’s like they want it to be the next vax or something… archaic and a pain in the ass to use.
Lot of the issues people have with BSD stem from a weird form of nostalgia. When I did 386BSD’s console driver, was asked to test support for color text that many DOS programs moving to System V used. This became a target for BSDers to mock, along with anything that didn’t match the antique VAX ways of doing things.
It doesn’t surprise me that installs tend to be broken, because the way things tend to not be tested uniformly, there’s no way of checking it will work uniformly. BSD has had a history of allowing wild redefinition of application programming environments, and because they don’t keep synced to the latest development tools (due to licensing issues sometimes), there’s too much variation for many to test against.
My son (http://ben.telemuse.net) has been comparing BSD, Linux, and Windows/Vista, and has a lot to say on this.
But yes BSD feels old. Because they like it that way.