[HN Gopher] Myths about FreeBSD
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Myths about FreeBSD
Author : ecliptik
Score : 105 points
Date : 2022-01-24 17:23 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (wiki.freebsd.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (wiki.freebsd.org)
| throwaway032342 wrote:
| Myth: BSD is bad for desktops. Refutation: It has sound!
| caycep wrote:
| I feel like FreeBSD lost a lot of momentum once a lot of the
| Apple contributors moved onto other companies...in contrast to
| linux which has (or had) several corporate contributors
| continuing to fund/drive open source commits.
| pshirshov wrote:
| Could someone tell me if 5GHz .ac wifi is working in modern
| FreeBSD or not? Also I'm wondering if there is anything NixOS
| alike built on top of FreeBSD.
| na85 wrote:
| The fact that they make a point of mentioning .11n support
| should be a good hint that there is no .11ac support at all.
| rsync wrote:
| "After 4.x FreeBSD Went Downhill"
|
| This nostalgia is justified - see:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30063417
| kelp wrote:
| Also wasn't it during the 5.0 release process when DragonFly
| BSD split off?
|
| And, RE the point about "that's fixed in -current", I'm
| reminded if a talk from Netflix engineering about how they just
| run -current in production.
| Minor49er wrote:
| The article notes that FreeBSD has over 26,000 pieces of software
| with a link, but that link just goes to a page that says "The
| latest Python updated failed. I intend to repair this post-BSDCan
| 2019 -- mcl"
| anon9001 wrote:
| I wonder how FreeBSD will fare as Linux users slowly switch over
| to wayland.
|
| I found this, but it doesn't tell me much:
| https://wiki.freebsd.org/Graphics/Wayland
| fgrsnau wrote:
| I am using sway (similar to i3 but for wayland) and it is
| working flawless on an Lenovo X230 running FreeBSD 13. It seems
| biggest problem will be graphics driver for different hardware.
| anon9001 wrote:
| Awesome, maybe it's worth a look then. "amdgpu" seems
| supported, which I assume is very similar to the linux one,
| since it has the same name and is open source.
| kelp wrote:
| Other concerns I have are systemd dependencies and browser
| support.
|
| I'm not as familiar with how it works in FreeBSD, but the
| OpenBSD Chromium maintainer asked Google to upstream their
| patches and the Chromium team refused. So OpenBSD has 2.6MB of
| patches to maintain to keep Chromium going. I just checked and
| it looks like FreeBSD has 4.1MB of patches in their Chromium
| port.
|
| See: https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/g/chromium-
| dev/c/b5...
|
| Gnome decided a while back that systemd dependencies were ok,
| so the BSDs (and Gentoo) have large patch sets to maintain to
| keep basic functionality going.
|
| Those are just a couple of examples of large important projects
| that don't want to dedicate much if any effort to portability
| to BSDs or other non-Linux OSs.
|
| Seems like that puts more and more pressure on a small number
| of volunteers to keep up porting efforts of some mainstream
| programs, otherwise *BSD becomes even more niche and limited.
| NexRebular wrote:
| Linux development strategy is sure starting to look a bit
| like our old friend EEE...
| kube-system wrote:
| I haven't tried FreeBSD on a laptop, but I've always wanted
| to....
|
| > FreeBSD supports a wide range of network cards (including an
| increasing number of 802.11n chipsets)
|
| Is this out of date or should I not even try installing on a
| laptop with an ac chipset?
| samtheprogram wrote:
| Status quo ~2 years ago before FreeBSD 13 was that many
| 802.11ac cards worked but the ac features did not yet (and/or
| you'd have to install wpa_supplicant through ports to enable
| certain compilation flags), so you'd get a fraction of possible
| speeds or have to jump through hoops. Not sure what the more
| recent developments here are.
| oso2k wrote:
| Yeah....sadly WiFi driver development fell behind in *BSD
| about 8 or 10 years ago. It made firewalls like pfSense and
| SmallWall less useful if you wanted an all-in-one network
| solution. You had to start to moving WiFi to APs from various
| vendors. It's ok when you have a small foot print with few
| walls (apartment or townhouse or condo). But a larger home,
| backyard/outdoor space, or garage/network closet spaces might
| need extra APs or relocation of AP(s). I do otherwise love
| pfSense and SmallWall despite what my $DAYJOB is. 10GbE NIC
| is really great too in *BSDs.
| nix23 wrote:
| Having Freebsd on my laptop since 2 years...the only point
| of critique is wireless, thank you freebsd-foundation for
| that...you probably don't care since you all use macOS.
| kevans91 wrote:
| That's an odd and misinformed attack on the foundation.
| They're actively sponsoring WiFi work, the first half of
| which recently landed in tree. You can see what they're
| involved in on on their website:
| https://freebsdfoundation.org/our-work/projects/
| nix23 wrote:
| > They're actively sponsoring WiFi work
|
| Yes since three years without any outcome....that's why
| the critique toward the foundation and NOT the project.
|
| https://i0.wp.com/itsfoss.com/wp-
| content/uploads/2020/08/fre...
| kevans91 wrote:
| As I said in the previous post, the first half of it just
| landed within the last month. iwlwifi[0] and dozens of
| linuxkpi commits[1] over the past couple of months by
| bz@. My frame.work laptop works generally well with
| -CURRENT (and presumably with stable/13, since iwlwifi's
| been mfc'd) with some wifi stability issues that have
| been reported.
|
| [0]
| https://cgit.freebsd.org/src/log/sys/contrib/dev/iwlwifi
| [1] https://cgit.freebsd.org/src/log/sys/compat/linuxkpi
| loeg wrote:
| Last I knew, the wireless stack lacked 802.11ac support
| entirely. I think some drivers for 802.11ac hardware could
| operate in 802.11n mode, but I might be mistaken.
| dddddaviddddd wrote:
| There's currently no 802.11ac support, but this is in-progress.
| There's usually an update about WiFi support in the FreeBSD
| Foundation quarterly reports, and some major changes were
| merged into CURRENT a few weeks ago.
| mburee wrote:
| Could also always try OpenBSD, they have support for some
| 802.11ac chipsets, but check the drivers first
| kelp wrote:
| I think OpenBSD has support for some 802.11ac chipsets, but
| they don't operate at 802.11ac speeds.
|
| For example see the CAVEATS section here:
| https://man.openbsd.org/iwm.4
| systemvoltage wrote:
| It runs great on my Thinkpad X1 Gen 6. Everything works.
| mnd999 wrote:
| I'm a bit out of date on FreeBSD land but tbh probably both. It
| references FreeBSD 11 not being out yet so the article is
| several years old. FreeBSD does tend to lag behind a bit when
| it comes to WiFi support though so it wouldn't surprise me if
| 802.11ac support is patchy.
| doublerabbit wrote:
| FreeBSD has always been rock solid until I broke my XFCE4 install
| on a Ryzen 5650X, Radon 5700XT.
|
| FreeBSD is my go-to distro for any server,desktop OS. The kernel
| is strong, network is great and jails are decent and with bHyve
| happily taking everything I throw at it, I can't fault it. To me,
| it feels solid unlike Linux which has always had a flakey-cobbled
| like feeling. If I had to choose for distro it would be
| Slackware.
|
| With FreeBSD 13, you can now assign dedicated network interfaces
| to jails, grant bHyve to create virtual machines within the jail
| leading to isolated VM-Jails. Which is an amazing secure & cool
| concept as if your Virtual Machine becomes vulnable. Your worse
| case is a breaking out in to the jail rather then the host OS.
|
| This world which is becoming more limited, I'll happly stand by
| FreeBSD to help it continue to exist in the monolithic reality we
| all currently live in.
| nix23 wrote:
| How can you damage a pkg installation? That's just not
| possible.
| nimbius wrote:
| >FreeBSD Does Not Support Virtualisation
|
| this is a half-answer at best and not really relevant. the point
| of virtualization is that the OS doesnt really care or know its
| being virtualized in the first place. supporting _the
| virtualization of_ BSD is a moot point as it really doesnt
| concern the OS. bhyve (for all its worth currently) isnt
| mentioned, but it would be nice to see peoples experiences with
| it to date. props for not flogging jails as a solution however,
| as quite a few BSD purists will cheerlead this as virtualization.
|
| >The BSD License Means Companies Don't Contribute Back
|
| the real issue here is with license purists and the philosophy of
| open source. BSD gifts companies with an easier path to turning
| your work into a cloistered and proprietary part of their code,
| whereas GPL at least makes an effort to keep them honest about
| their appropriations. plenty of companies to date still do skirt
| the GPL though. ultimately whether or not a company gives back to
| an OS community is a matter of business prerogative and not
| entirely license.
| jedberg wrote:
| For a long time FreeBSD did not work on EC2 or in Virtualbox,
| which is where this comes from and why it's relevant.
| kelp wrote:
| And now I have FreeBSD 14 (13 won't boot and the issue is
| only fixed in -current) running in Parallels on my Apple
| Silicon MacBook Pro... works well.
| drewg123 wrote:
| Is the VM running arm64 or amd64?
| kelp wrote:
| arm64
|
| Otherwise it would be emulation not virtualization.
| Parallels on Apple Silicon only works with arm64 VMs.
|
| But that's pretty much everything I care about. I have
| Windows 11, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, several Linux
| distributions. They all work fine.
| kelp wrote:
| This is hardly a production use case, but I've had a bare metal
| server at OVH for several years. It's currently running FreeBSD
| 13 with bhyve. I have about 4x VMs running on it, including
| OpenBSD and several different Linux flavors.
|
| Things have just worked and I've really not had any issues with
| it in the years it's run. The VMs are stored on a mirrored zfs
| zpool with sparse volumes so they only take up space they
| actually need.
|
| All that said, I find the bhyve config language and command
| line options to be pretty painful, so I've been only using it
| with this frontend: https://github.com/churchers/vm-bhyve
| Cyberdog wrote:
| > bhyve (for all its worth currently) isnt mentioned, but it
| would be nice to see peoples experiences with it to date. props
| for not flogging jails as a solution however, as quite a few
| BSD purists will cheerlead this as virtualization.
|
| I don't think you read the article very well. It mentions bhyve
| and also promotes jails - which I think are a perfectly
| acceptable solution to many (but not all) of the reasons why
| someone might want to do virtualization - I've moved on to
| OpenBSD for my hosting and have also been experimenting with
| NetBSD, but in both of them I'm really missing something
| equivalent to FreeBSD's jails and I wish the idea had caught on
| in the broader BSD ecosystem.
| gwd wrote:
| > >The BSD License Means Companies Don't Contribute Back
|
| > the real issue here is with license purists and the
| philosophy of open source. BSD gifts companies with an easier
| path to turning your work into a cloistered and proprietary
| part of their code, whereas GPL at least makes an effort to
| keep them honest about their appropriations. plenty of
| companies to date still do skirt the GPL though. ultimately
| whether or not a company gives back to an OS community is a
| matter of business prerogative and not entirely license.
|
| But there's a difference between "giving back to the community"
| and "releasing your changes under the GPL". The only actual
| requirement is that the modified source code be 1) made
| available to the people to whom you give binaries, and 2) it be
| licensed GPL. There is no requirement even to send the code to
| the upstream project; and there's certainly no requirement to
| engage with the maintainer / review process to get the new code
| into suitable shape that the upstream project actually wants to
| take it.
|
| Without engaging with the maintainers of the upstream project,
| there is virtually no chance that anything other than trivial
| patches will be in an upstreamable state in the vendor's
| patchqueue; and so virtually no chance that someone receiving
| the GPL'd patches could actually apply them upstream without
| doing a significant amount of work to make them so. I know of
| very few cases where people have the appetite to that sort of
| work.
|
| So the result is that, _in practice_ , companies contribute
| back to GPL-licensed projects for the same reason they
| contribute back to BSD-licensed projects: because they want to
| be able to pull in new code from the upstream, and having to
| rebase a patchqueue every time they want new upstream features
| is more expensive than engaging with the maintainers to
| contribute their own code back.
|
| The main difference is in the small cases where there is enough
| community interest to actually take a company's internal
| patches and do the work of cleaning them up to get them
| upstream.
| diogenesjunior wrote:
| discussion (and probably where OP got the link from):
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30059062
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