Comment by sohrob
4 days ago
Now I get what the folks using FreeBSD typically like to point to as a reason why they prefer FreeBSD over Linux because there is a clear distinction between the base system and userland.
4 days ago
Now I get what the folks using FreeBSD typically like to point to as a reason why they prefer FreeBSD over Linux because there is a clear distinction between the base system and userland.
Linux has more of a clear distinction between kernel and userspace. But the base system in *BSD includes a lot of userspace, so the API boundary is more the libc and some core libraries (TLS) instead of the kernel ABI.
FreeBSD is moving to a scheme where the base system is managed with pkg. In the release notes for last month's 15.0 release, they suggest that this will be mandatory in 16.0.
The ports tree will still be very different from base, but I feel this may erode some of the difference between FreeBSD and a typical Linux distro in terms of user experience, with respect to base vs ports. You'll update both with pkg.