After about a year of work, the ArchLinux distribution now offers a variant running on the FreeBSD kernel. Says the developer, "Why would I do this? If like me, you enjoy FreeBSD and love it, but also like the philosophy behind Arch Linux, which is a fast, lightweight, optimized distro, I figured why not combine the both. Even though you could just do it on FreeBSD using the ports, not everyone wants to compile." This now puts Arch in the same category as Debian with Debian GNU/KFreeBSD, which offers a Debian userland on top of a FreeBSD kernel.
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Member since:2007-03-26
While I do agree with you, as a user of both FreeBSD and Arch, I am quite excited by this.
The real question is whether Arch's full repos (baring stuff that ties directly into the kernel - for obvious reasons) and AUR are available. But with those combined, Arch has one of the largest collections of software available for it.
The only thing that stops me from running FreeBSD on the desktop more (I have done in the past, but mainly I use FreeBSD on servers) is because Linux has more software developed for it. (and while I could always port the rare few apps that aren't available for FreeBSD, I do that every for work - so cannot be bothered to do that for 'fun' as well).
This is all just my personal views though. I'm sure plenty on here will disagree. Particularly as there seems to be a lot of rivalry between Linux and FreeBSD (which I've never really understood as it's all just open source software with the same basic ideals anyway. But such is life).
Anyhow, I'm definitely going to give "ArchBSD" a play this weekend.
Edited 2013-01-25 11:40 UTC
Member since:2005-06-30
The real question is whether Arch's full repos (baring stuff that ties directly into the kernel - for obvious reasons) and AUR are available. But with those combined, Arch has one of the largest collections of software available for it.
The only thing that stops me from running FreeBSD on the desktop more (I have done in the past, but mainly I use FreeBSD on servers) is because Linux has more software developed for it. (and while I could always port the rare few apps that aren't available for FreeBSD, I do that every for work - so cannot be bothered to do that for 'fun' as well).
This is all just my personal views though. I'm sure plenty on here will disagree. Particularly as there seems to be a lot of rivalry between Linux and FreeBSD (which I've never really understood as it's all just open source software with the same basic ideals anyway. But such is life).
Anyhow, I'm definitely going to give "ArchBSD" a play this weekend.
The selling point of Linux over other free UNIX clones is that it supports just about any hardware you throw at it. The selling point of Arch over other Linux distributions is that it is the most *BSD like of them all. Using the FreeBSD kernel removes the Linux hardware support, but doesn't add anything new that FreeBSD doesn't do. We have already have a binary package system in place, and it's not like pacman offers anything significant like delta binary updates.
As for the wide amount of software available for Linux, I fail to see how ArchBSD will rectify this. Developers code for what they know, and that is Linux. We've been complaining about the "Linux-ism" of free software since Gnome 1.x. Linux dependencies like HAL and PulseAudio or Wayland or don't get added and then deprecated overnight.
Member since:
2005-08-18
Because you can't optimize FreeBSD without using GNU
userland....
FreeBSD has binary packages....
He can do what he wants of course but I really fail to see the actual point in this.
Edited 2013-01-25 09:30 UTC