Comment by toast0
4 hours ago
> Everyone says the BSD documentation is superb, but the man pages are more of a reference than an onboarding guide.
If you try it again, the FreeBSD Handbook is the onboarding guide. [1] It's been a long while since I've set something up going from the Handbook, so I can't personally attest to its quality, but it's supposed to be good.
> One major challenge is LLMs have a hard time with BSD-related prompts. They’re trained on so much more Linux content, and there’s just enough overlap between both systems that hallucination rates are extremely high in my experience
I can't imagine they work well on Linux either, because different distributions have a different selection of tools, especially when you consider older documentation that's still out there and no longer works on mainstream distributions as tools have been replaced. The same is almost certainly true for MacOS and probably Windows as well. All of the OSes I can think of where most of the online documentation should be consistent probably don't have much online documentation. I'm not a LLM user (which is probably obvious), but I can't imagine how you'd get good information from it... at best, maybe you could get pointers to documentation you should read and understand yourself, or you could find the documentation and paste it to be summarized? People that use LLMs that I've tried to help with problems will tell me that the LLM told them X when it doesn't make sense and it actively contributes to their problem, so that doesn't give me confidence; of course, people who use LLMs and it solves their problem don't need my help, do they? :)
I "tested" the handbook recently (I think on FreeBSD 14 when it came out) and I can attest that the experience was flawless. It is even surprising that the right way to use it, is to follow a documentation and apply what it says, versus the Linux way which looks a lot more like "google your way through multiple different ways of doing the thing until you find the one that works".
Thank you. I will try again soon. BSD is too compelling from a philosophical standpoint to set aside completely.
>I can't imagine they work well on Linux either
They do, and they work better on Ubuntu/Debian than on e.g. Alpine, which in turn works better than some wonky Yocto build (ask me how I know). The mere existence of different distributions and tool selections is not the important factor here, but the amount of discourse there is in the training data. Debian and Debian-likes run the table here.