Phoronix reports
The inaugural release of ubuntuBSD is now available, which the developers have codenamed "Escape From SystemD". [It] pairs the Ubuntu userspace with the FreeBSD kernel.
... This first ubuntuBSD beta release is based off Ubuntu 15.10 Wily Werewolf and the FreeBSD 10.1 kernel.
This Ubuntu+FreeBSD operating system ships with the Xfce desktop, is designed for both servers and desktops, and offers complete ZFS file-system support.
The project's SourceForge page
N.B.
The ubuntuBSD Web Site link is currently a circular trip back to SourceForge.
[Additional coverage at softpedia. For the impatient/adventuresome here is a direct link to download the latest ISO (893.8 MB ubuntuBSD 15.10~BETA2-amd64.iso). -Ed.]
(Score: 2) by julian on Tuesday March 22 2016, @03:23AM
This isn't the first time this has been tried. Ubuntu's parent distro Debian used to offer Debian GNU/kFreeBSD (Debian GNU with kernel of FreeBSD). I believe it was abandoned with Debian 8 due to lack of interest (or was it because of the move to systemd?). Seems like they should target an LTS release of Ubuntu, however. The kind of people who want to get away from systemd probably don't want to update every 6 months.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 22 2016, @03:47AM
The FreeBSD userspace is actually decent. Years ago when I was using FreeBSD the man pages were better than the GNU ones. In fact back then the reason why I used Linux was more because of the Linux kernel[1] and definitely not for the GNU userspace. The GNU userspace was inferior in many aspects. Perhaps things have changed in recent years.
[1] There are a number of things the Linux kernel was and is better at than the FreeBSD kernel.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Arik on Tuesday March 22 2016, @04:59AM
GNU projects do not. Official documention for GNU userspace will be found using info, not man. Man is deprecated and included for historical reasons, but not typically maintained at all. Use info instead.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by bitstream on Tuesday March 22 2016, @05:35AM
Seems like the management style of bad neighborhoods.
(Score: 2) by jdavidb on Tuesday March 22 2016, @02:09PM
ⓋⒶ☮✝🕊 Secession is the right of all sentient beings
(Score: 2) by bitstream on Wednesday March 23 2016, @05:45AM
Perfect when all you have a text console because the network is really down.
(Score: 2) by Marand on Tuesday March 22 2016, @04:06AM
"used to offer"? Bullshit, it's still available as of the current stable release (jessie): https://wiki.debian.org/Debian_GNU/kFreeBSD/Jessie [debian.org]
It's still there and usable, it just wasn't considered an "official" part of the Jessie release because the port had issues at the time they froze* Jessie, that's all.
* the period at the end of a testing release where they stop pulling packages in from unstable and go into bugfix mode prior to making it the next stable release.
(Score: 2) by Marand on Tuesday March 22 2016, @04:17AM
I hate self-replying but this same topic just hit my RSS feed for the Register (link [theregister.co.uk]), and it quotes one of the UbuntuBSD devs, who said the project owes a lot to the same Debian BSD project I linked to above and thanked them for collaborating to make it possible.
Might have been nice if Phoronix had mentioned that instead of just declaring Debian BSD defunct, but whatever, it's Phoronix; the site's about as reliable as Kotaku most days.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 22 2016, @11:26AM
Actually, there has been much ongoing work on Debian/kFreeBSD 8.0
I have Debian/kFreeBSD 8.0 on a real box (Asus Eeebox) and on a VirtualBox virtual machine, both running fine.
Debian/kFreeBSD is approaching to a stable, but unofficial, release in the next weeks.
A screenshot could be useful... http://imgur.com/uyPs0ii [imgur.com]
Bye
gl
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 06 2016, @08:23PM
A combination.
Their excuse was lack of interest, but they dropped it like a hot potato with the transition to systemd.
Can't have something still depend on sysv after all when you try to kill it.