Re: HOWTO articles for migrating from Linux to FreeBSD, especially for pkg?

On Thu, Jul 17, 2014 at 7:25 PM, Craig Rodrigues <rodrigc_at_freebsd.org>
wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I attend a lot of different Meetup groups in the San Francisco Bay Area /
> Silicon Valley.
>
> What I am seeing is the following usage pattern for new developers,
> especially for web apps and cloud applications.
>
> (1)   On their desktop/laptop, they will generally be using
>        a Mac running OS X.  This is their desktop Unix environment.
>        This seems to be true of almost 90% of the people that I meet.
>        The 10% of people who run a PC laptop, will mostly be running
>         Windows.  Very few seem to run Linux on their laptops, but
>        if they do, it will likely be Ubuntu Linux.
>
> (2)  For their deployed application, generally they will deploy to
>       a Linux environment on a server.  These days, the server will
>       very likely be in a cloud environment:  Amazon, Rackspace,
>       Heroku.
>
>
> For (1), encouraging people to move away from a Mac to FreeBSD for their
> desktop environment is a tough sell.  Apple is a multi-billion dollar
> company, and they make beautiful hardware, and software with
> a fantastic end-user experience.  The PC-BSD project is fighting the
> good fight in terms of making a usable FreeBSD desktop, but its
> a touch battle to fight.
>
> For (2), encouraging people to move away from Linux to FreeBSD
> on the server, may be something where we can get more wins.
> I think we can do this by having more HOWTO articles on
> the FreeBSD web page that explain the following:
>
>
>     (1)  We need a HOWTO article that explains for each command using apt
> or yum for installing packages,
>           how can I do the same thing using "pkg".
>           Even if we have a web page with a table, contrasting the
>           apt/yum commands, and pkg commands, that would be super
>           useful.
>
>           A lot of folks have moved away from FreeBSD, purely because
>           they are sick of pkg_add.  We need to explain to folks that
>           we have something better, that is quite competitive to
>           apt/yum, and it is easy to use.
>
>      (2)  We need a HOWTO article that explains how to set up
>            a FreeBSD environment with some of the major cloud providers,
>            i.e. Amazon, Rackspace, Microsoft Azure, etc.
>
>
> Do we have such articles today, or is anybody working on something
> like that?
>

I haven't such specific articles. However I did create a project which lets
people more easily install and 'try out' FreeBSD. It runs ontop of either
FreeNAS, pfSense or NAS4Free.

The idea is that because you can boot those distress off of a USB stick,
(it's like a liveCD). However you can then install the full FreeBSD generic
onto any suitably-formatted attached hard disk. (including PKGNG and ports
tree).

None of my documentation is aimed specifically at linux -> FreeBSD. However
I can say that it's utterly true (if you have Mac OS X). The desktop
experience is definately nicer (much less niggly / annoying problems).

And on Macs we have "brew install"… which is "allright". But you can't use
Macs as effectively for server stuff. It doesn't really "feel right" for
that purpose. And homebrew is like ports or gentoo (compiles everything, no
binary packages).

For me, the FreeBSD is what I decide to for server (more than linux) *not
just only* for PKGNG. We are glad that is here now. But also (very
important). If FreeBSD jails. Which isn't "as-good-as", but often superior
to such linux equivalent (if any). In terms of both security, and
efficiency.

Here you can see my FreeBSD jails HowTo:

http://dreamcat4.github.io/finch/jails-how-to/

Which is as simple as I could ever be able to make it.

Sorry I don't have any other ideas in regards to how to address the
overwhelming popularity of Linux over FreeBSD. It often isn't justified.
However in some ways linux is like windows now. For example with
overwhelming hardware support (that sometimes is not as good on FreeBSD).

And Linux is more success on embedded because it can run on many different
kinds of CPUs. Wheras FreeBSD isn't very much support for embedded CPU
(unless they happen to be X86). I get the (maybe not justified) impression
that even ARM isn't so well supported on FreeBSD.

Some things you can't change with just only a better "How-To". Even if
FreeBSD is super-great / rocks so well now.

I think if we had these two HOWTO articles today, and we could
> aggressively point people at them, this would be a huge win
> for expanding the number of people who try out FreeBSD
> for modern server applications.
>
> --
> Craig
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