Last week I had a chat with a colleague who is highly specialized in Microsoft solutions. Young but not too young, smart, not very up to date simply because he has little time for anything else. His specialization depends entirely on where he works, not on personal interest. Lately he seemed a bit disillusioned with some choices made by "other operating systems", and he was starting to consider moving his personal projects toward Microsoft as well, since he already had the experience. Still, he said it with boredom. With the attitude of someone who is tired of wasting time.
He had heard of the BSDs but had never tried installing them. He was convinced that there were no decent hypervisors outside the Linux world and that KVM belonged to Linux alone. I had the terrible idea of showing him the BSDs, how great bhyve is, and how nvmm on NetBSD uses qemu underneath, making it almost a replacement for KVM in many setups. He lit up with the look of someone waking up from a long sleep. I also had the terrible idea of showing him illumos and its distributions. He had no clue it existed and thought old, great Solaris had been dead for years thanks to Oracle.
He called me a little while ago. He was furious. He spent the whole weekend doing tests and now he has no idea what to use among FreeBSD with bhyve, NetBSD with nvmm, and illumos with bhyve or kvm. He is slowly starting to explore jails and illumos zones. He was annoyed (in a positive way) because now he does not know what to pick since everything feels so different from what he was used to, and he found advantages in each option.
I am obviously happy about it, but I also wonder: instead of reinventing the wheel every time, would it not sometimes be better to simply broaden our horizons?
#IT #SysAdmin #OperatingSystems #FreeBSD #Linux #NetBSD #OpenBSD #DragonflyBSD #illumos #SmartOS #OmniOS #OpenIndiana #Tribblix
