[Semibug] SystemD is literally the kitchen sink of Linux ; Linux starting to feel more and more alien as the years go on

Ron / BCLUG admin at bclug.ca
Wed Dec 6 20:10:32 EST 2023


Jonathan Drews wrote on 2023-12-06 16:25:

> I had the same opinion that OpenBSD was not widely used until I was
> corrected by a fellow SF-Lug member. He said OpenBSD has a large
> presence in the San Francisco area. More importantly, he said that
> OpenBSD is widely used in embedded systems.

"Widely" is rather subjective.

I can't find it listed in the top 10 of embedded OSs, but the links I 
found were all crappy or old.

Got anything recent quantifying the number of embedded OS installations?



> See:
> https://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article;sid=20040119142233

That's from... January 2004 - *twenty* years ago.

It's about a single company, http://www.signull.com.

The white paper link is a 0 page PDF. The main site is an empty HTML page.

They do not seem to exist anymore.



> also Wikipedia's OpenBSD entry lists companies that use OpenBSD as a
> firewall or other network appliance.

The "Network appliances" section?  I may be out of touch, but I've never 
heard of any of those 5 companies.

TrueNAS / FreeNAS probably has more installs than all of those put together.



Even the Wikipedia link shows OpenBSD having ~33% of *BSD* installs vs 
77% for FreeBSD, so even within BSD-land, it's not a big player.

And, I'd put my money on Linux having magnitudes more embedded 
installations than all the BSDs combined.

Of course, popularity ≠ better, yet this "unnecessary complexity":

a) doesn't drive people away
b) is the result of operating at scales that no one else does, therefore 
finding edge cases that cannot be ignored because someone on the 
internet doesn't want added complexity



Personally, I would love to add a +1 to the BSDs with my own OPNsense 
firewall though! Sounds awesome, I want it.




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