> Coherency, security, stability, ZFS...

My only sort of complaint in regards to FreeBSD is actually ZFS. Not that it's not fantastic, or that it shouldn't be there. ZFS does however clearly comes from Solaris, and there have been no effort to make the ZFS command line tools feel more BSD like.

Changing the tooling around ZFS probably isn't a great idea, but coherency has clearly taken a backseat to features in this case.

> Changing the tooling around ZFS probably isn't a great idea, but coherency has clearly taken a backseat to features in this case.

Right, because ZFS is a foreign piece of software that runs on other operating systems. At that point you are better off keeping those tools coherent with other ZFS implementations. This is a good compromise.

It's coherent with the other ZFS implementations in Linux and Solaris.

Likewise, apropos storage systems that handle logical volume management, Linux's LVM tools are extremely reminiscent of those from HP-UX[0], and NetBSD's LVM guide explicitly calls out their tooling being built from Linux's lvm2tools[1].

There's a modest amount of precedent for this kind of thing.

0: lvcreate(1M) from HP-UX 11i https://nixdoc.net/man-pages/HP-UX/man1/lvcreate.1m.html

1: http://www.netbsd.org/docs/guide/en/chap-lvm.html

> ZFS

NB: Not on OpenBSD.

> Coherency

What does this refer to in this context?

Things are where you’d expect, patterns and conventions cary on throughout the system, etc… Vs the disjoint feeling linux has.

Part of the job of a Linux distribution is to provide policy, conventions, and similar consistency.

If you install everything from sources directly, or directly from upstream vendors, you may get inconsistencies, but if you install everything from your Linux distribution, you should get reasonable consistency, just as if you install everything from your BSD distribution.

even in a distro, you'll get various syntax variations for instance

Syntax of what?

cli programs, they all have different ways to handle arguments, options, help

ps: another instance, albeit not a BSD strength either, would be data format, every output is different, I, like a few people too wanted some json as pivot representation to cut the thousands of papercuts, that kind of uniformity is what I expect from "system"

Lots (just some? most? I haven't really used it much) of FreeBSD system utilities are using libxo for output, so you can use e.g.

    ps --libxo json

and get json output, or xml/html

I didn't know bsd already adopted it, only heard a few passing mentions. That's great, though, and note that I mostly meant that about linux.

I already have that with Linux.