And if you never see FreeBSD again... So what? The stuff you are building on top is probably more relevant than questions like this.
And that much should be expected, since they are both in the same Unix family tree (even if Linux was "grafted in").
Why do I see so much of this snide needling from FreeBSD proponents? Small dog syndrome?
It matters when you don't want to hire someone to learn a system, and someone who can land a job with their Linux skills does not necessarily want to learn a different system (one that's in a lot less demand). It's a valid concern even if not an insurmountable problem.
But in regards to your point... I guess what I'm saying is for most cases, the knowledge gap will be very small, and "hiring them to learn" is a huge overstatement.
Within that you will find niches where there's more of a gap. Eg. Practical knowledge of kernel development will not be super transferrable (though some of it will)
That's the needling. And I'm sure it's considered absolutely hilarious among the people engaging in it.
But what it comes down to is someone raises a valid concern and you dismiss it and question the competence of others.
You could have said something actually helpful and constructive without being bitter and dismissive, for example that you don't believe it is as big a problem as might be first thought because of the similarities between the systems, and the good FreeBSD documentation available.
Sorry but I see this attitude every time FreeBSD vs Linux topics come up. Not saying all FreeBSD proponents do it or no Linux ones do similar, mind you.
The actual point I'm making beyond that, and I think I make it reasonably well if I can say so myself, is that most of your Linux knowledge is transferrable to FreeBSD, and vice versa. It therefore makes me skeptical when people suggest that it isn't so.
> Many times you also need to think about what may not be the very best solution from a purely technical perspective but also what is the best from both a people and technical perspective.
This is huge when it comes to running the company's software imho. It's useless having the perfect solution if you can't get anyone to run it when "good enough" will have a plethora of folks ready and willing. Especially when it comes to managing the bus factor. When I asked the admin at my org about that, he explicitly said he didn't care about it (that's more an indictment of him than FreeBSD though).
Overall the human factor is something I've been trying to embrace more lately when it comes to work. For personal stuff though I'll be as esoteric as I like.
> the damn VM's are the only thing I run that does not properly report memory and CPU usage to VMware
Well that's just plain frustrating.
One of the things that annoys me to no end ( and I am not sure if this is something specific to Netscalers or FreeBSD networking appliances in general ) is that the damn VM's are the only thing I run that does not properly report memory and CPU usage to VMware. From the hypervisor perspective they are constantly running at 100% CPU (their support has told me that the system reserves the full amount of CPU given but is not actually running that high - and when you actually connect to the box it self reports the number correctly). Not a huge deal but it annoys me to have that little red "X" in the GUI next to the VM name all the time.
That being said I also have not seen any recent FreeBSD vs Linux benchmarks but I would imagine if a company as large as Netflix is already using it en masse then there would need to be not just parity but tangible benefits to swap it all out for some other linux distro. An org starting from scratch of course would be a different beast.