Another shot has been fired in the war between *nix true believers and systemd advocates, with a group of diehards welding the Ubuntu body onto the FreeBSD chassis.

Their beta, ubuntuBSD, has taken its first breaths at Sourceforge, and the counter tells us more than 2,800 daredevils have already hit the download button. It uses Ubuntu 15.10 (Wily Werewolf) on top of the FreeBSD kernel.

The FreeBSD kernel means it uses the ZFS file system, and for desktop there's the Xfce.

The Debian-based text installer lets users choose between various preconfigured installs for basic, OpenSSH, DNS, LAMP, mail, database, and other server varieties. If you want the desktop, the configs also include a Xubuntu flavour.

There's no ambiguity about what the project's developers have in mind, since the first release is code-named "Escape from systemd":

UbuntuBSD developer Jon Boden posted to the Debian-BSD list expressing his thanks for their collaboration in getting the project off the ground.

"This project owes a lot to Debian GNU/kFreeBSD and I'd like to send you a sincere offer for collaboration," he writes, promising that there will be contributions back to that project soon.

The systemd argument that forms part of the context of ubuntuBSD took off at the end of 2014, when the Debian project decided to use systemd instead of sysvinit .

The greybeards-versus-World+Dog spat led to a fork of Debian.

In 2015, Ubuntu started using systemd by default. ®