Great, thanks for letting us know! I'll take a look once it's out.

My experience of chocolatey was not good. Fine to install software, but it's just a wrapper around existing installers. Try to upgrade a package... fail. Try to remove a package... fail. This depends upon the package in question; it works for some, others you have to clean up by hand, worse that having downloaded and installed using the installer by hand.

And no proper support for libraries, dependencies etc. so useless for software development. It certainly meets a need for software deployment, but it's so lacking compared with what dpkg/apt-get provide that it's a joke.

If Windows is to gain a proper package manager, I think they need to do it properly. The existing support is just broken.

I'm a programmer rather than a sysadmin so I don't personally maintain many systems, and it's not my primary interest. I'm mainly using them as a platform for software development.

At home I have a small number of systems used for Debian work: a fileserver and several development/test systems of different architectures. The fileserver is FreeBSD10/ZFS. The rest now all run FreeBSD, some also dual booting with Debian or run Debian kFreeBSD or regular FreeBSD in jails for various tasks, mainly clean build envs.

At work we've recently set up a FreeBSD10 jenkins node for CI building/testing under vmware, but this is primarily to test the llvm/clang toolchain since we test on a wide number of platforms (it's also a good proxy for MacOS clang testing since it can run the debugger over ssh which is no longer possilble on MacOS without jumping through many annoying hoops). We primarily use CentOS6/RHEL6 and Ubuntu LTS for all the other physical and virtual machines, and I don't think there will be any move to FreeBSD at present (I'm sure we won't be adopting CentOS7/RHEL7 in a hurry, though we may deploy it in a VM in the next few months for compatiblity testing, but not for anything serious).

I'm also one of the people migrating to FreeBSD, and I'm not happy that I had to do so having 15 years invested in Debian as a user and developer. Not that I'm unhappy with FreeBSD, it's really very good. I'm unhappy with the fact that a small number of arrogant and abrasive people can steamroller in a large number of very controversial changes and in doing so removed many of the reasons I was using GNU/Linux in the first place. If the system has rapidly become something you find pleasure, satisfaction and utility in using and developing it, you're not going to continue using and developing it "just because", you're going to find something to replace it. And having to make that choice was not pleasant.

My solution to this was to get a small HP N40L microserver and put all my data on it (I moved the disks over). My main machine can then boot as many systems as I want and they can all just use NFS/CIFS mounts from the server. This works around the need for a shared filesystem between all the systems. This doesn't require any particularly powerful hardware to accomplish, so shouldn't need to cost much money or space if you have a second system you can repurpose.

I can now multiboot Debian GNU/Linux, Debian GNU/kFreeBSD, FreeBSD, Gentoo and Windows without needing to worry about my data, and adding or removing additional systems isn't a problem.

Another alternative here would be to use virtualisation and use the storage from the host in each guest, but that might mean compromising on stuff like graphics in the guests.

I always considered the diversity of the Linux ecosystem its greatest asset, and the primary reason for its success--everyone had a reason to use it since you could adapt it to do whatever you wanted. That encouraged motivated and passionate people to make it what it is today. The homogenisation of Linux distributions championed by systemd is IMO one of the most foolish mistakes that could be made. Sounds good if you're a corporate drone who just deploys pre-canned applications all day long, but it's the beginning of the end for doing novel, interesting and unusal stuff with Linux, and ultimately that will affect the corporate drones as well once the people who were doing the development work move on to something else.

For the VM I have 10.0-RELEASE p9 with open-vmware-tools running (emulators/open-vm-tools-nox11 from ports). It's using the em and mpt net and disc drivers, but I think that's probably because VMware was not configured to use the paravirtualised drivers (they are available since they work with virtualbox with the paravirt devices configured). The vm-tools was definitely needed for ballooning or else you get hard lockups at some point, presumably when the host forcibly reclaims memory from the guest or something. With that, it's been solid for a couple of months as a jenkins CI node, and I'm sure with better configuration on the host side it would be even better.

Going the opposite way around, I've got FreeBSD 10.0-STABLE running as a VMware guest without any problems. The only issue I noticed was that I should probably have gone with UFS rather than ZFS due to its memory usage, but it's working fine other than that.

I'd likewise say I'm not comfortable leaving it behind, at least not yet. I would say with respect to FreeBSD I'm still at the "testing the waters" level. I'm quite encouraged by the recent work on the pkg(8) tool though, I was expecting building and installing ports to be quite a lot more primitive that it is in practice. It's still not quite as polished as dpkg/apt-get but it's getting much better with proper library dependency analysis recently added. For custom deployment of machines and VMs/jails, I plan to look at setting up a poudriere build jail and custom pkg repo, and creating ports of my Debian packages.

I've set up Debian kFreeBSD in a jail on the test server which I can independently ssh into, take ZFS snapshots of etc. which is quite nice. And the same with additional native FreeBSD userland jails for different services. I'll have to look into Bhyve when I have more time. I plan to port my schroot(1) tool to make use of ZFS snapshots and jails.

Doing a custom repo isn't too much work. The tooling is all there to make it possible (I'm one of the sbuild and sysvinit maintainers, though currently out of action due to RSI). It just depends on how entrenched systemd becomes for jessie. It was my understanding that while systemd would be the jessie default, sysvinit and upstart would continue to be supported since this would be a transitional release, which is needed for clean upgrades and would also allow continued use for the lifetime of jessie. Unfortunately it appears that certain maintainers have made efforts to entrench systemd immediately with the result that it's increasingly difficult to prevent its installation, and so the immediate future is much less certain. At the present time, I seriously doubt I'll be using Debian after the release of jessie; it's become rapidly much less usable and maintainable.

Regards,
Roger

Personally, I've been looking seriously at FreeBSD and now have a test server running ZFS to replace an LVM/ext4 Debian server. On the client I've got FreeBSD running as an alternative to Debian; 10.x with newcons does proper OpenGL and everything for radeon and intel graphics. It's a breath of fresh air after the depressing regression of the Linux desktop (GNOME3/Unity/Pulse/FreeDesktop junk), and now the whole system with systemd), which has taken place over the last five years.

It's a shame to be considering fully dumping Linux after investing 17 years of your life into it as a developer, but it's slowly become something I no longer wish to use or develop.

(Frustrated Debian developer.)

Or in the case of init, we could call it "startpar" and allow the init scripts to start in parallel based upon the LSB dependency information. We already had this parallel startup with sysvinit for years in SuSE and Debian.

I've moved most of my systems to FreeBSD. And no-so-coincidental to this post, today I set up my first Debian GNU/kFreeBSD jail system. Works perfectly. Install debootstrap from ports, create ZFS volume, debootstrap onto the volume, configure and start jail. Done. (Works fine on the bare metal, too.)

(Sad to say this since I've been a Debian developer for over a decade, but I doubt I'll be using jessie in any serious capacity except perhaps for kFreeBSD if they don't manage to screw it over as well. I despair at what's happened to the major Linux distributions over the last few years. No longer feels like home, and the years of pushy passive-aggressive behaviour and acrimony which led to it being adopted completely killed my last bit of enthusiasm. I spend all my free time working on Debian.... for this? Giving the BSDs a try for the first time in a long long time, was like a breath of fresh air.)

I've done 12 hour shifts in working an industrial production lab, going around a huge site to collect samples and then working standing in a lab testing them, worked sitting and standing at a lab bench and at various bits of expensive lab equipment all day while doing my MSc and PhD, and now I'm working full-time at a desk as a software developer, developing multi-platform open source imaging software in C++ and Java (openmicroscopy.org).

I've found working at a desk all day to be the most singularly unhealthy activity I have ever engaged in. Doing a job which requires varying degrees of physical activity is much better. You aren't stuck at a desk for the entire day in a single position. After doing this for the last two years, I've ended up with RSI, muscular problems and suffer from chronic pain in various places. "Comfort" and sitting at a desk are about as far apart as I can imagine. Physical work doesn't automatically imply physical discomfort.

You seem to be suggesting that mere consumer popularity should permit that corporations can act effectively above the law, and that they can behave as illegally as they please. There are very obvious reasons why this can not be permitted! The law is the law, and Apple were found to be a pack of liars who are continuing to bring baseless legal action against their competitors. They have been hoisted on their own petard by their legal actions here, given that all of this is self-inflicted, and they are acting like a spoiled, petulant child.

While kind of offtopic, if Apple were to be banned from trading in the UK, I think you'd find that it would hurt Apple Inc much more than it would British citizens. There are plenty of other computer and gadget manufacturers out there who would pick up the slack. Apple just manufacture shiny, but limited, gadgets. The world does not revolve around them.

I for one will happily ditch windows gaming in favour of Linux as soon as Steam has decent coverage for the games I play. I've been wanting this for years, and it really is the primary reason I even have a windows partition--everything else is done on Linux. If Steam can set up wine nicely to play the non-native ports of games I own, I really won't have any reason for keeping it around.