6 Jun
2022
6 Jun
'22
7:40 a.m.
On Sun, Jun 5, 2022 at 9:15 PM Larry McVoy <lm(a)mcvoy.com> wrote:
Today's FreeBSD install process is like a trip
back to 1980. It is
not pleasant. The Linux install process 15 years ago was a better
experience than Windows install process (if you've done the windows
install then get some ethernet dongle that windows recognizes so you can
connect to the internet, then do the driver search and install, install,
install all the drivers - contrast that with Linux where it just has 99%
of the drivers in the kernel).
But every distribution has its own installer, and they vary wildly.
At the start of the pandemic, we realized really quickly that our older
kid needed a dedicated computer for her use, so I put Mint on an Intel
NUC and gave it to her. It was a delightful experience; very simple,
graphical installer, all of that. It does everything she needs for school
and goofing around stuff. It's great.
The other day, I needed a Linux machine for work. I grabbed another
NUC and put Arch on it. A vastly different experience: much more akin
to installing 7th Edition than Windows or macOS. Oh! And I missed a
step, so I had to pull some shenanigans to fix that.
I'd put the FreeBSD install process somewhere between the two.
Sure, it's textual, but it's pretty straightforward. OpenBSD is probably
a tad closer to the Arch-like experience -- it's not as colorful -- but it's
not too hard[*]. So the experience varies across BSDs, but not that
much, while it's vastly different across Linux distributions.
The ABI compatibility thing breaks down, too. A colleague was trying
to get the host-side of a Salae logic analyzer working on Arch, and it
doesn't. They more or less require Ubuntu 18.something, and that's
not what he runs. As far as most end-users are concerned, your
distribution of choice is "Linux", and distributions vary in all kinds of
ways.
- Dan C.
I ran into some weird behavior in their bootstrap, though; I traced this
to something slow in the BIOS, did a fix locally, sent a bug report along
with a patch, and got told, "go use UEFI." Meh. Ok.... So I went back
and used UEFI, and the same thing was slow (unsurprising as almost
certainly the BIOS and UEFI flows share common code), wrote back,
and got silence. I pinged again the other week and still haven't heard
anything. Very discouraging. I suspect it's that kind of thing that turns
people off of at least some of the BSDs.