[HN Gopher] Technical reasons to choose FreeBSD over GNU/Linux (...
___________________________________________________________________
Technical reasons to choose FreeBSD over GNU/Linux (2020)
Author : truth_seeker
Score : 235 points
Date : 2022-08-06 15:59 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (unixsheikh.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (unixsheikh.com)
| GekkePrutser wrote:
| That link has been posted here many times already.
|
| I use FreeBSD as a daily driver on my desktop. Very happy with
| it. My reasons to choose it were more that I feel like Linux has
| become a toy of big tech. If you look at the kernel
| contributions, most of them are from people working for all the
| big names. Linux has become Big Business and each company is
| trying to safeguard their interests in it. Linus is still in
| charge of the kernel officially but all the steering groups are
| dominated by big tech. Look at the Linux Foundation for instance:
| https://www.linuxfoundation.org/board-of-directors/ . These are
| not the kind of people you'd expect to lead 'free software',
| these are all boardroom types. Maybe Linux has outgrown the
| beardy hacker culture but I have not :P
|
| Of course, Linux is not much worse for it... Yet. I think this is
| for 2 reasons: Linus' benevolent dictatorship, and the fact that
| they won't be able to agree on much given that these guys are all
| competitors. But in the long term I'm sure this will take its
| toll. For example, would these guys ever have approved the GPL-3?
| Everyone in business is pretty universally against it.
|
| And in fact it's the very BSD license that makes big business
| shun FreeBSD. Which I think is a good thing. FreeBSD still feels
| like a grassroots development and as such I feel more in control.
| The excellent and consistent documentation and friendly community
| is another plus for me. And the combination of stable OS with
| rolling third-party software (but this is something that was also
| mentioned in the article). ZFS on Root is another one (though
| Ubuntu is now catching up to that).
| ahepp wrote:
| > If you look at the kernel contributions, most of them are
| from people working for all the big names
|
| Like hardware manufacturers? I thought getting commercial users
| to contribute to the kernel was desirable?
|
| > For example, would these guys ever have approved the GPL-3?
|
| Didn't Torvalds himself reject GPL-3?
|
| > And in fact it's the very BSD license that makes big business
| shun FreeBSD
|
| Now I'm really confused. Why would businesses not like the BSD
| license? And they don't like GPL-3 either? Is GPL-2 the
| goldilocks license for them?
| GekkePrutser wrote:
| > Like hardware manufacturers? I thought getting commercial
| users to contribute to the kernel was desirable?
|
| Contribute to drivers, yes. Steer development of the kernel,
| no, IMO. The more they contribute, the more influence they
| gain. And a lot of the contributions are not hardware related
| at all.
|
| > Didn't Torvalds himself reject GPL-3?
|
| I don't know, I didn't follow this as I don't follow Linux
| news that closely anymore. I thought it was mainly about the
| way that it was introduced. But I think it's a much better
| license than GPL-2.
|
| > Now I'm really confused. Why would businesses not like the
| BSD license? And they don't like GPL-3 either? Is GPL-2 the
| goldilocks license for them?
|
| Businesses hate the BSD license because any code derived does
| not have to be open at all. So that means anything they
| contribute can be taken by their competitors and used in
| closed-source software. That's totally OK. Because of this
| there's only a few companies involved in BSD. Notably
| Netflix, the former Skype (before it was acquired by MS), and
| some smaller orgs like Netapp and iX that makes
| freenas/truenas.
|
| Companies hate GPL-3 because their license gets revoked if a
| company uses its patents to attack GPLd software. It also
| stipulates some other things like that devices running GPL-3
| software must also be open (e.g. no locked bootloaders etc).
| Very good things IMO. A lot of GPL-3's stipulations were
| triggered by real-world exploitation of free software.
| Examples: By TiVo (hence the name "anti-TiVoisation clause"
| for the open hardware thing). And the anti-patent clause was
| a _direct_ result of Microsoft 's patent attacks on Linux. No
| wonder Steve Ballmer hated the GPL-3 so much.
|
| This is why Microsoft and most of the others hate it so much,
| they love giving open source lip service, but are not really
| open source companies. The GPL-2 gives them enough loopholes
| to get away with this. Many companies avoid GPL-3 licensed
| software at all costs, it was the driving force for bash not
| being updated (and replaced by zsh) on macOS for example.
|
| Personally I think it would be better if FreeBSD was GPL-3d
| but BSD is not bad for me as a use that doesn't want too much
| corporate influence. After all, if a company makes a closed-
| source fork it doesn't impact me in any way. I won't use it
| anyway.
| josephcsible wrote:
| > Didn't Torvalds himself reject GPL-3?
|
| Was the GPLv3 ever formally rejected? Isn't the problem that
| the Linux kernel was GPLv2 only before the GPLv3 existed, and
| by the time it did come out, there were too many contributors
| for there to be any hope of getting it changed?
| ahepp wrote:
| Some googling around the issue suggests Linus pretty
| clearly rejects the principles of GPLv3.
|
| https://www.linux.com/news/why-torvalds-sitting-out-
| gplv3-pr...
| josephcsible wrote:
| I know he isn't a fan of it. My point is just that his
| dislike of it isn't why Linux can't use it today.
| pleb_nz wrote:
| I really like the idea and would live to give it a go, but as
| someone who develops across web, xamarin, .netcore, docker and
| wants good first support for these tools so I'm not wasting
| time/money it looks like I would be hard pressed to swap without
| dedicating a lot money to the effort. Also, does freebsd run on
| m1/m2 hardware yet?
|
| Happy if I'm wrong and someone can point me in the right
| direction. But the few times I've looked into it it doesn't seem
| worth the expenditure.
| hkgjjgjfjfjfjf wrote:
| rubyist5eva wrote:
| I use FreeBSD on servers instead of Linux for one reason: ZFS.
| It's really that much better than anything that is currently
| available on Linux. BTRFS is not even close.
|
| Yes I know it's available on Ubuntu but everything else about
| Ubuntu is just so messy.
| stjohnswarts wrote:
| but you can use ZFS on linux?
| rubyist5eva wrote:
| Yes but it's clunky. ZFS on FreeBSD is smooth as silk. Ubuntu
| is the only distro that I would say has good integration with
| ZFS but I don't like anything else about Ubuntu.
| Asdrubalini wrote:
| I think NixOS has an even better ZFS implementation,
| compared to Ubuntu.
| cyberpunk wrote:
| what linux server distro are you using if not ubuntu lts?
| Im not a massive fan either but i run thousands of the
| bastards (k8s hosts) and cant imagine an other...
|
| just disable snap and you're good ;)
| rubyist5eva wrote:
| At $CURRENT_JOB we run our postgres database on a massive
| bare-metal dedicated server running FreeBSD, our
| container hosts are Alma Linux 8 and the base images are
| typically debian-slim, though some are alpine or even
| scratch.
| freedomben wrote:
| I don't think comparing FreeBSD to GNU/Linux is a fair
| comparison. since FreeBSD is looked at as a whole operating, it
| should probably be compared to Fedora or Ubuntu or RHEL, etc.
| Particularly the complaints about how some follow "the Debian
| way" and other don't. If you're going to say that, you invite
| criticism about things that work on FreeBSD but not on OpenBSD.
| sgarland wrote:
| Not shown: the bewildering choices made for various tools.
|
| sed
|
| * The `-i` flag - In the absence of a file extension given, I
| should not have to specify with `''` that I want the original
| file over-written. The flag is called in-place for a reason.
|
| * BSD sed doesn't support ANSI-C escape sequences, so you have to
| fall back to your shell quoting them for you.
|
| xargs
|
| * Why is there no `-d` flag for BSD?
|
| There are others I've found over the years, but those come to
| mind as annoyances.
| GekkePrutser wrote:
| They're just different. It's a different OS. I agree some
| things don't make sense but some things on Linux don't make
| sense either. It's just a long heritage of things that have
| organically grown. Consider 'dd' for example, with its 'if=xxx'
| whereas other tools would use the format '-if xxx'.
|
| But it's a different OS. Solaris tools were different from the
| GNU toolset. HP-UX' tools were very different (try compiling
| something on HP-UX CC lol). MacOS' tools are also different.
|
| If you expect things to be GNU, use GNU/Linux. Or Hurd :) Or
| install GNU coreutils.
| sgarland wrote:
| > Consider 'dd' for example
|
| This is a fair point, and I suppose something I just have
| grown used to, similar to how I can type `tar xvzf` without
| any `-` at all, and it works.
|
| > MacOS' tools are also different.
|
| Tbf when I talk of using BSD tools, I'm talking about using
| MacOS tools - I don't have any BSD installations, I just
| recognize that MacOS includes mostly (?) BSD tools by
| default.
|
| I do in fact install coreutils, and either alias them or move
| PATH priority so they get called first.
| toast0 wrote:
| > Tbf when I talk of using BSD tools, I'm talking about
| using MacOS tools - I don't have any BSD installations, I
| just recognize that MacOS includes mostly (?) BSD tools by
| default.
|
| It's not inaccurate, but somewhat unfair to use MacOS tools
| and call them BSD tools. They are ports of BSD tools, but
| Apple rarely refreshes them from the original sources, so
| it's kind of a time capsule to 2000. If you dropped 2000
| era Linux userland on someone today, there would be a lot
| of complaints and concerns. On some tools, command flags
| added in GNU coreutils do get added to FreeBSD, although I
| did not check your list of specifics.
| cpeterso wrote:
| IIRC, Apple periodically merges some kernel bits from
| FreeBSD and user space utilities from NetBSD. (Though I
| can't find a source mentioning NetBSD, atm.) I don't know
| why Apple would choose NetBSD utilities instead of
| FreeBSD if they are also using FreeBSD kernel bits.
|
| I understand why Apple doesn't bother to contribute to
| upstream FreeBSD or NetBSD, but I'm curious why they
| aren't eager to merge updates from them more frequently.
| toast0 wrote:
| > I'm curious why they aren't eager to merge updates from
| them more frequently.
|
| I suspect it's because the merge isn't easy to do; which
| is partially a self-fulfilling property of how infrequent
| it's done, but likely also has a lot to do with the
| pretty large differences in system design. A lot of the
| kernel bits are old as heck too; last I checked, at least
| the Darwin open source kernel doesn't have any protection
| against syn floods, which FreeBSD first addressed in
| kernel 4.5 (released January 29, 2002)
| trasz wrote:
| >This is a fair point, and I suppose something I just have
| grown used to, similar to how I can type `tar xvzf` without
| any `-` at all, and it works.
|
| So for a while GNU tar didn't support automatic compression
| detection, and you had to manually specify 'z' or 'j' every
| time. Quite annoying when you are used to bsdtar, which
| does this for you.
| rrix2 wrote:
| Yeah, BSD coreutils are so frustrating to use...
| 1500100900 wrote:
| > The flag is called in-place for a reason.
|
| What's the reason? Surprisingly, the file is never edited in
| place.
| sgarland wrote:
| OK, I'll give you that the underlying sycscalls are in fact
| creating a temporary file. But the abstract result to the
| user is an in-place edit.
| MontyCarloHall wrote:
| I agree that BSD coreutils are extremely feature poor (e.g. no
| PCRE in grep) and have some odd syntax choices as you point
| out, but you can always install the GNU coreutils. Of course,
| you then have to prefix everything with "g" (e.g. ggrep, gsed)
| which can get annoying.
|
| That said, this is why I've always given up on BSD every time
| I've tried it--all of the low-level technical benefits touted
| in the article never actually make a difference in my day-to-
| day usage, whereas little annoyances with the userspace really
| add up.
| sebow wrote:
| For people (semi-rightfully) complaining about the feasibility of
| FreeBSD as a desktop OS (or a workstation purposed OS), the fact
| that it isn't easy to install through the graphical interface is
| both a blessing in disguise and a legitimate point for slow
| install + config times. To that end I say to the less
| keyboard/terminal focused (which should be a paradox when it
| comes to developers but whatever) : try some of the general-
| purposed graphical "flavors" of FreeBSD: MidnightBSD, GhostBSD,
| NomadBSD. MacOS users who want to seek the same experience but on
| a less closed unix(Still FreeBSD): helloSystem(from an ex-Apple
| if I recall correctly) & ravynOS (previously 'airyx').
|
| Of course there is also netbsd + openbsd, but imo those are
| really far behind FBSD when it comes to being mainstream and
| usable as daily drivers. One of the main reasons I personally
| can't daily drive FBSD on my laptop is the lack of proper drivers
| (I know about 'running' the linux ones). Still a more than decent
| choice for any desktop unless running very obscure hardware or
| needing specific requirements (think cuda,cudnn,rt and similar
| proprietary software/libs)
| alberth wrote:
| I'm a huge fan of FreeBSD, though I have to admit - when I was
| looking at the Vulnerability Statistics chart I wondered to
| myself "are there fewer identified FreeBSD vulnerabilities
| because there are way fewer FreeBSD users (than Linux)".
| deano wrote:
| As a long time Linux and BSD user I agree with you. You still
| have to enable basic things that are not turned on by default -
| i.e. stack protection. A lot of this is enabled by default on
| OpenBSD.
|
| https://vez.mrsk.me/freebsd-defaults.html
| 1-6 wrote:
| You can find a Linux distro for everything these days though.
| werid wrote:
| can't believe that openbsd dude is still updating that page.
|
| he seems to be obsessed with an os he doesn't use.
| Gud wrote:
| As a long time FreeBSD user it makes me sad to see so many
| GNU/Linux users dismiss FreeBSD and it's way of doing things.
| Jails? Pfft. We have docker. Since everyone else is using Docker,
| surely it must be the superior technology? And so on.
| ooneeks wrote:
| Too bad BSD has such obscure hardware support, anyone running BSD
| over GNU/Linux is going to lose performance and responsiveness
| having to run everything through layers of code and emulation.
| Also, due to squalid support, it's only really usable without GUI
| - bad scaling and graphical acceleration, or the lack hereof, as
| well as poor support just means that most GUI solutions for BSD
| look worse than Windows 3.0.I've yet to see anyone make BSD look
| agreeable, the only viable solutions being KDE and XFCE, both of
| which suck. Surely that'll take away from productivity as well,
| but that's just me. The poor support is the worst offender, also
| because it seems to me that a lot of the lacking hardware support
| stems not from a lack of users, but a general apathy towards
| doing anything on your computer that isn't just using emacs or
| compiling. The lack of wifi support is most baffling and
| contributes to the fact that doing anything with BSD on a laptop
| that isn't owned by one of the developers themselves, will result
| in sluggish or subpar performance. I have the same opinion on
| desktop BSD users as I do with GNU/Hurd users. You do you. But as
| soon as you start talking about the perceived sufficiency and/or
| supremacy of your deprecated, wet 80's FOSS fever dream of an OS,
| it becomes impossible to communicate.
| johnklos wrote:
| The article hits the nail on the head about Linux' "mismatches".
| When distros need to be different gratuitously, you can no longer
| get a book on Linux that meaningfully applies across multiple
| distros. Heck, even an Ubuntu book would be irrelevant after a
| few changes (16 -> 18, 18 -> 20).
|
| The same people who respond in the community to questions about
| changes often respond to defend the changes, but rarely respond
| with answers to the technical questions about them. It's
| frustrating.
| [deleted]
| Koshkin wrote:
| > _distros need to be different gratuitously_
|
| I, on the other hand, tend to think of distributions as
| operating systems in their own right, so the difference between
| them is something I welcome - otherwise what's the point?
| baskethead wrote:
| The main reason to use Linux is because almost everyone else is.
| If you're only installing it on your own servers at home, then
| that's okay. But in a business environment, the minor differences
| or improvements with FreeBSD are simply not worth the lack of
| familiarity for most people over Linux.
|
| I used FreeBSD starting in 1999-ish and I still have the original
| Design and Implementation of the 4.4 BSD Operating System on my
| shelf. I used FreeBSD exclusively for years, but it has
| completely lost to Linux and Linux frankly is good enough.
| gabereiser wrote:
| >On FreeBSD you'll notice right away that you're dealing with a
| "complete operating system", a system that has been put together
| very well.
|
| Ugh, this argument is long in the tooth. It's not a complete
| operating system. It never will be, and neither will GNU/Linux.
| To be "complete" you need to support all the hardware. You can't.
|
| Also, a base install of FreeBSD is missing the port tree
| sources... so complete...
| efortis wrote:
| Heterogeneous infrastructure was my main motivator to learn
| FreeBSD.
|
| Without this diversity, in face of a security issue, you can only
| shut-down or take the risk.
|
| On the other hand, when there's a bug or suspicious activity on
| FreeBSD servers, you can turn off only those servers, while the
| problem is patched, and viceversa.
| trelane wrote:
| Earlier revision discussion:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22852316
| lnxg33k1 wrote:
| I think the mismatch thing doesn't really make sense, as you
| should consider freebsd as a complete OS rather than just the
| kernel, and archlinux as the same. Dragonflybsd and pcbsd for
| example have the same freebsd kernel, do they follow the freebsd
| way too?
|
| The rest is about preference with the exception of DTrace that is
| imho superior , but I am not going to pick freebsd over Linux
| only for DTrace, as Linux has better compatibility and support
| with software and hardware in general imho
|
| Edit ps: I use gentoo so I see the power of ports but I can match
| it with the wider support of Linux
| trasz wrote:
| DragonflyBSD absolutely does not use the same kernel. It
| literally split off FreeBSD over kernel architecture
| differences.
| 5e92cb50239222b wrote:
| Let me pick and choose a few points since replying to everything
| will necessitate a similar 40-page post. FreeBSD
| has great engineering and release management practices When
| someone gets an idea and develops something new, it first gets
| peer technical reviews
|
| The recent WireGuard debacle left a bad taste about this. As it
| actually turns out, sometimes there is zero technical review for
| very important patches and a few blessed developers can (and
| sometimes do) just throw their stuff directly into trunk.
| Unlike on Linux, the ZFS filesystem is a first class citizen on
| FreeBSD
|
| ZFS has first-class support on Ubuntu and is compiled into the
| kernel. FreeBSD also supports boot environments
|
| Including this one IIRC. Jails
|
| Well... linux has containers, and if all you need is isolation
| there's this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29976096
|
| systemd is not required (all the heavy lifting is done by the
| kernel using the same features employed by containers), but it's
| available almost everywhere and makes this easy.
| security
|
| I actually think it's worse in this regard because of the link
| above. Most services on my machines are heavily locked down and
| isolated from each other since systemd makes this very easy (add
| a few key-value pairs to an .ini file and it's done). On FreeBSD
| the developer must add capsicum support (which is not easy to say
| the least), or you have to setup jails for each and every
| application manually. Capsicum
|
| Excluding the usual boring stuff like seccomp-bpf, we now also
| have this: https://lwn.net/Articles/859908
|
| It's pretty much unveil for Linux. I think it kind of flew under
| the radar.
|
| I don't believe there's anything like capcisum, though.
| DTrace
|
| https://www.brendangregg.com/dtrace.html#Linux
|
| There's also real DTrace on Oracle Linux if you're ready to sell
| your soul:
|
| https://docs.oracle.com/en/operating-systems/oracle-linux/dt...
| bhyve
|
| Not sure if this counts as a particular advantage.
| Firewall
|
| I find nftables to be pretty enjoyable to work with. It has a
| similar syntax, removes duplication of rules (supporting both
| ipv4 and ipv6 at the same time), etc. I actually removed
| firewalld from many RHEL servers and went with nft directly.
| Security Event Auditing
|
| Uhm... so like auditd?
| cperciva wrote:
| _The recent WireGuard debacle left a bad taste about this. As
| it actually turns out, sometimes there is zero technical review
| for very important patches and a few blessed developers can
| (and sometimes do) just throw their stuff directly into trunk._
|
| This seems like a misunderstanding of the FreeBSD development
| model. Yes, immature code landed in HEAD, but _it was removed
| before the next release_.
|
| In general in FreeBSD there's no expectation that HEAD is
| always usable. Sometimes it won't even build! It's a place
| where code can land in the _hope_ that it will be ready by the
| time the next release rolls around, but "remove code which
| isn't ready for prime time" isn't an exceptional case.
|
| FreeBSD has a very strong history of _post_ -commit code
| review, largely because every FreeBSD committer gets email when
| commits go into the tree -- that's a lot of eyeballs. We're
| moving towards increased _pre_ -commit review thanks now that
| better tools are available for that, but that's a separate
| matter.
|
| (Yes, Netflix runs FreeBSD HEAD. I think they're nuts.)
| aaron_m04 wrote:
| > (Yes, Netflix runs FreeBSD HEAD. I think they're nuts.)
|
| Sounds like chaos engineering to me ;)
| cperciva wrote:
| Oh, they absolutely justify it on the basis that if a CDN
| node is unstable they'll just fail traffic across to
| another node. And as a FreeBSD developer I have to say that
| it's great having the OS (or at least the parts Netflix
| uses) stress tested -- you can't reproduce "1/3 of all
| internet traffic" in a test lab.
|
| The reason I think they're nuts isn't _stability_ but
| rather _security_. I guess since they 're shipping these
| boxes around the world there's nothing _really_ sensitive
| on them; but still, if I were in their shoes I would be
| worried about security bugs being introduced.
| 5e92cb50239222b wrote:
| Thanks for clarification. Although IIUC the "bad" WireGuard
| implementation was stopped from being released _just barely_
| :
|
| https://lwn.net/Articles/850098
|
| It was rushed because a particular vendor wanted to have it
| as soon as possible. If not for Jason Donenfeld's diligence
| it looks like we would have out there in the open, full of
| bugs and all.
|
| Doesn't seem like a normal occurrence though, seeing how much
| noise it made.
| cperciva wrote:
| The WG code was introduced unusually late, I agree. Usually
| experimental stuff like that lands soon after a .0 release
| so that there's a year to iron out details before the next
| release. But this is a quantitative difference -- how close
| to the next release do you push experimental code into the
| tree -- not a qualitative difference.
|
| And fundamentally the system worked! The code was deemed to
| not be ready and was yanked before the release.
| claudiojulio wrote:
| https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/03/buffer-overruns-
| lice...
| Lapsa wrote:
| > The three replaced almost all of Macy's code in a mad
| week-long sprint.
|
| damn....
|
| > Sleep to mitigate race conditions
|
| ouch...
|
| > Validation functions which simply return true
|
| da f*
|
| > strange hexadecimal output spamming the root console of
| their router
|
| :D
| pdimitar wrote:
| > _Most services on my machines are heavily locked down and
| isolated from each other since systemd makes this very easy_
|
| Do you have a guide handy? A quick Google search only showed
| generic nonsense. I'll appreciate a recipe-like pointer. Been
| curious about this for a while.
| prmoustache wrote:
| > Keep in mind that Oracle is the copyright holder of ZFS. So
| you (and Ubuntu) are violating Oracle's license terms. Would
| be realy interesting to see what happens if Oracle decides to
| sue an Ubuntu user. Would Ubuntu step in to help?
|
| There is nothing in the CDDL that prevent a user to use ZFS
| with a kernel under GPL license and no leverage for Oracle to
| sue the end user for this. The end user is not distributing
| the software. Ubuntu or possibly an hosting provider or a
| company incorporating ubuntu in its product does.
| 5e92cb50239222b wrote:
| I haven't seen any decent articles on this (doesn't mean
| there aren't any) that mention anything besides most basic
| flags.
|
| Have a gander at the comment I linked
| (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29976096).
|
| ---
|
| Probably the easiest way to start is to create your unit file
| as usual, copy the list from the comment into it, and then
| run: $ systemd-analyze security unit-name
|
| It prints a huge list of suggestions along with a short
| description of each one. Look up their names in here:
| $ man systemd.directives
|
| and look at the man linked there. Usually it's one of
| $ man systemd.exec $ man systemd.resource-control
|
| I think the starter list should get you 95% there (I use it
| for most applications with minor variations in paths and
| flags like MemoryDenyWriteExecute that breaks JIT compilers).
|
| ---
|
| If you want to keep your configuration as short as possible,
| the list with the most bang for your buck would look
| something like this: User=non-root-username
| # disable privilege escalation through SUID binaries
| NoNewPrivileges=yes CapabilityBoundingSet= #
| removes access to /home ProtectHome=yes #
| makes most paths read-only ProtectSystem=strict
| # opens read-write access only to paths your application
| needs ReadWritePaths=/var/lib/foo /var/lib/bar
|
| If your application follows FHS and writes stuff to
| /var/whatever, prefer:
| RuntimeDirectory=appname StateDirectory=appname
| CacheDirectory=appname LogsDirectory=appname
| ConfigurationDirectory=appname
|
| instead of RuntimeDirectory=/var/run/appname
| StateDirectory=/var/lib/appname
| CacheDirectory=/var/cache/appname
| LogsDirectory=/var/log/appname
| ConfigurationDirectory=/etc/appname
| pdimitar wrote:
| Thanks a bunch! I'm absolutely bookmarking your comment and
| will go back to it.
| jsiepkes wrote:
| > ZFS has first-class support on Ubuntu and is compiled into
| the kernel.
|
| And Ubuntu is also the only distribution which has ZFS. Using
| ZFS on any other distribution (for example RHEL, Rocky Linux,
| etc.) is a pain. Every update is Russian roulette in which it
| can break.
|
| And everyone except Ubutunu thinks it's a violation of the
| CDDL. Keep in mind that Oracle is the copyright holder of ZFS.
| So you (and Ubuntu) are violating Oracle's license terms. Would
| be realy interesting to see what happens if Oracle decides to
| sue an Ubuntu user. Would Ubuntu step in to help?
|
| > There's also real DTrace on Oracle Linux if you're ready to
| sell your soul:
|
| I can't run Ubuntu (for ZFS) and Oracle Linux (for DTrace) at
| the same time. Besides, like you said; Why would anyone want to
| use Oracle's Unbreakable Linux?
|
| > Well... linux has containers, and if all you need is
| isolation...
|
| No that's not all I need. I need things like virtual networking
| between my containers.
|
| > I actually think it's worse in this regard because of the
| link above.
|
| Depends. If you put them in a FreeBSD jail they are probably
| better isolated then only using systemd.
| djbusby wrote:
| It's not "only Ubuntu". I'm using ZFS (not for boot or root
| partition) on Gentoo for some time. It's a separate package
| from kernel, and has to rebuild after a kernel upgrade but it
| works as expected.
| presto8 wrote:
| To add another anecdote: I use ZFS on NixOS for all of my
| partitions, including an encrypted boot partition. It has
| been rock solid for me.
| spindle wrote:
| Not only rock solid but also very easy!
| jen20 wrote:
| > Keep in mind that Oracle is the copyright holder of ZFS. So
| you (and Ubuntu) are violating Oracle's license terms.
|
| If anything IS a problem here it is violating the terms of
| the GPL, not the CDDL.
|
| So no, no one is violating Oracles licensing terms - and if
| they were, they'd have been sued in 2016 when this shipped.
| Do you really think ORACLE of all people is just holding back
| out the goodness of their hearts?
|
| Complete FUD.
| josephcsible wrote:
| > If anything IS a problem here it is violating the terms
| of the GPL, not the CDDL.
|
| How so? Aren't the GPL and CDDL both copyleft?
|
| > So no, no one is violating Oracles licensing terms - and
| if they were, they'd have been sued in 2016 when this
| shipped. Do you really think ORACLE of all people is just
| holding back out the goodness of their hearts?
|
| No, Oracle is holding back because they want more money. If
| they sue a little guy now, then everyone else will
| immediately stop using ZFS-on-Linux. They're waiting until
| someone with really deep pockets starts to use it before
| they sue.
| trasz wrote:
| >How so? Aren't the GPL and CDDL both copyleft?
|
| They are, but GPL is (tl;dr) incompatible with anything
| that's not a subset of GPL. That's because GPL is viral,
| and CDDL isn't. And that's why in the Open Source world
| you can't get license incompatibility without throwing
| GPL in the mix.
|
| So, yeah, it's GPL that's possibly being violated; CDDL
| is fine with whatever license there is. Oracle could sue
| you if they relicensed ZFS under GPL, but can't with CDDL
| because of implicit protection CDDL contains.
| josephcsible wrote:
| Isn't the whole reason that the CDDL is a problem that it
| is viral too? Otherwise you could just distribute the
| whole bundle of ZFS+Linux as GPL and be fine.
| jsiepkes wrote:
| > If anything IS a problem here it is violating the terms
| of the GPL, not the CDDL.
|
| The CDDL terms are violated because you can't re-license
| code that is under the CDDL (in contrast to for example the
| BSD licenses). The GPLv2 is a strong copy-left license that
| puts the CDDL files under GPLv2.
|
| Even the creators of the CDDL themselves have stated that
| the CDDL is probably incompatible with the GPL [1].
|
| [1] https://lwn.net/Articles/114840/
| Eleison23 wrote:
| I'm 50 years old, now, so in college I had hands-on experience
| with a 3B2 running real live SVR3. There was also an academic VAX
| running 4.3BSD. And being closely tied to the UC system myself, I
| gradually became a BSD fanboy.
|
| I started by putting Minix on my 286 at home, but I longed to run
| 386BSD. I eventually realized my dream with some nice OpenBSD
| installs. I was a partisan, not entirely a bigot, but I'd also
| seen Linux grow from infancy and considered it a toy or
| plaything, compared to mature BSD codebases. And truly, Linux was
| a hobbyist's choice for ages, but many hobbyists grow up to be
| professionals, don't they?
|
| In 1999 (to prove I wasn't a bigot) I installed Linux on the old
| 386. It was either Slackware or Debian, and the reason I chose it
| was to support the floppy-tape controller that was unsupported by
| BSD.
|
| I continued to use OpenBSD as a daily driver, alongside Windows,
| until 2004. Then a trusted sysadmin friend listened to my pleas
| for help with audio and assorted hardware, and simply directed me
| to Ubuntu. Since then I've been BSD-free (including no Apple
| devices.)
|
| My needs over the decades have reduced from "godlike control-
| freak sysadmin" to "power user" to "does ordinary consumerist
| stuff on a Windows laptop". BSD has great technical reasons and
| use cases. If you still use BSD, more power to you! BSD's dual
| legacy for the world, even after the OS itself has evaporated,
| will be MacOS X and BSD's corporate-profit-friendly licensing
| terms.
| Keyframe wrote:
| How are things these days with graphics (well, NVIDIA and maybe
| intel, I don't care about amd) drivers, CUDA, ML? How's support
| in general for latest hardware like CPUs, mobos/wifi?
| loeg wrote:
| Basic usage with Nvidia drivers works ok. Nvidia disables CUDA
| and NVENC/NVDEC on FreeBSD. CPUs/motherboards work great, at
| least in x86 (arm64 probably works well, too, but I'm less
| familiar). Wifi is very behind the curve. If you have a
| supported card (including some 802.11AC cards), 802.11N
| probably works -- but last I heard, AC does not.
| Keyframe wrote:
| Alright as expected then, Nvidia thing a bit unexpected. So,
| people do not do ML on FreeBSD?
| loeg wrote:
| > So, people do not do ML on FreeBSD?
|
| I think that's essentially correct. Certainly, not using
| CUDA.
| mshroyer wrote:
| One application where FreeBSD especially shines is as a
| fileserver to Windows clients: Unlike on Linux, NFSv4 ACLs are
| supported natively!
|
| The NT ACLs used in Windows and SMB are much more expressive than
| Linux's POSIX draft ACLs. When a Windows client writes a file to
| a Linux Samba server, it cannot necessarily express the file's
| ACL as a POSIX ACL losslessly. To work around this, Samba's
| vfs_acl_xattr saves the "real" ACL as an extended attribute:
| https://www.samba.org/samba/docs/current/man-html/vfs_acl_xa...
|
| This means the ACLs set by clients won't be enforced for local
| users on the file server, and that you need special tools to view
| and edit those ACLs.
|
| In contrast, FreeBSD supports NFSv4 ACLs on ZFS, and those are a
| superset of NT ACLs. Samba saves the NT ACL as an NFSv4 ACL, and
| this can be viewed or edited using getfacl and setfacl as with
| any other file on the server.
| [deleted]
| amtamt wrote:
| There are virtualization options in FreeBSD, but I can't use
| FreeBSD in absence of mature OCI compatible container support,
| without going though hoops on bhyve. In present day, it matters a
| lot with a good amount of time being spent on docker/ kubernetes.
| gigatexal wrote:
| This is the same for me. ZFS native boot environments and such
| is a killer feature that I am envious of.
|
| Also proton gaming seems to be best supported on Linux from
| what I can tell.
| michaelmrose wrote:
| ZFSBootMenu provides boot environments for Linux. The now
| defunct Project Trident, formerly PC-BSD and then TrueOS, had
| a gui installer that sets you up with
|
| - ZFS on root install of essentially void Linux
|
| - rEFInd with a kernel sufficient just to boot into
|
| - ZFSBootMenu which lets you boot into a prior boot
| environment
|
| - ZFS native encryption of /home per user directory set up to
| unlock when you log in via PAM and zfscrypt
|
| - An update script that automatically creates a boot
| environment prior to updating
|
| - A mediocre choice of display manager and their own customer
| desktop environment that was neither in my opinion terrible
| nor interesting. Trivially replaceable with a different DE
| and lightdm.
|
| Trident is alas gone but all the pieces remain and work fine.
|
| https://zfsbootmenu.org/
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20211223122028/https://project-t.
| ..
| gigatexal wrote:
| this i did not know thank you for sharing!
|
| I've not got zfs on root on my fedora 36 install but if i
| did this is something i'd seriously look into
| tomc1985 wrote:
| I've gotten good enough at Linux to where I don't need to
| constantly look stuff up after long periods of use, but not
| FreeBSD.
|
| Which is why I love FreeBSD so much. It's consistent, clearly
| explained, thoroughly documented, powerful, and flexible. I have
| a home server (just upgraded to 13.1) that I go months at a time
| without logging in. And while I do tend to forget a lot of
| important details, looking them up is _incredibly easy_.
|
| I don't really care about _what_ software FreeBSD uses, just that
| it is consistent and well-documented.
|
| Plus, the whole architecture of it fits comfortably in my head.
| It is so nice to reason about.
| jester23947 wrote:
| I really like this article about FreeBSD. One really nice feature
| that is not cover though is to set the immutable flags on some
| binaries with the command chflags. It's possible to boot your
| very secure system into securemode level 1 or higher. In this
| mode, it's impossible to delete those files.
|
| rm -rf /* has very limited damage. chmod -R 0000 /* won't touch
| chmod and all kind of ooops become much less destructive.
|
| It's probably not useful in all scenarios, but definitely some
| systems deserve to never be touch live. Automation, scada, super
| important core backbone systems.
|
| FreeBSD is the power to serve. It deserves more credits.
| how2cflags wrote:
| Just wanted to say that in linux you have extended attributes
| on files, check the man page on chattr. I believe the -i option
| makes files immutable.
|
| I picked this little trick up watching a red team discuss how
| they set themselves persistence on the target system by making
| /etc/shadow immutable this way.. Fun bit is, root can't even
| remove the file until the flag is removed, and you can't see
| the immutable flag on the file unless you know what you are
| looking for via lsattr.
| matthews2 wrote:
| FreeBSD has the concept of a 'security level'. You can
| increase it at runtime, which disables more functionality,
| but you can't decrease it without a reboot.
|
| At security level 1, the immutable and append only attributes
| on files can't be removed, so even chattr -i would be
| useless.
| znpy wrote:
| Linux has SELinux, which is enabled by default in RHEL and
| derivatives.
|
| You could literally hand out root shell to people, and they
| wouldn't be able to make much mess out of it.
|
| There are SELinux policies to prevent disabling selinux
| too, of course.
|
| You probably wouldn't even need chattr.
| pxc wrote:
| SELinux is way more complex than security levels sounds
| here.
| GekkePrutser wrote:
| Securelevels are not just this. FreeBSD has its own
| SELinux equivalent called Mandatory Access Control:
|
| https://docs.freebsd.org/en/books/handbook/mac/
|
| It goes far beyond making files immutable. I haven't
| really done a deep dive to see if it's on par with
| SELinux but the description in this thread doesn't do it
| justice.
| pxc wrote:
| What I meant is that devising a sane and useful way to
| make use of security levels seems easier than achieving
| something 'equivalent' with SELinux. Sophisticated policy
| systems are nice, but something that kind of bundles sane
| defaults together and organizes them into ordered layers
| like security levels sounds great.
| kstrauser wrote:
| The whole securelevel mechanism is nice. You can only increase
| its value at runtime, never decrease it without rebooting. At
| higher levels, you can't modify firewall rules. If you
| configure the server to boot into a high securelevel, you can
| make the machine effectively read-only until you boot it with
| console access.
| avodonosov wrote:
| If it also recommended well supported laptop models...
| nulbyte wrote:
| There are details on what is working and what isn't for a slew
| of models on the FreeBSD wiki:
|
| https://wiki.freebsd.org/Laptops
| lmas wrote:
| Yeah from that page I picked a refurbished Thinkpad x270 as
| my new daily drive and set up FreeBSD on it, works perfectly!
| gnramires wrote:
| I have to plugin Void Linux, a nice little distro that tries to
| mimick some of BSD philosophy (I believe w.r.t. simplicity and
| security). It's working very well here (it's somewhat analogous
| to Arch, meant for advanced users -- that said, following the
| docs it shouldn't be too difficult to get going).
|
| https://voidlinux.org/
| bxparks wrote:
| I have tried learning FreeBSD occasionally, mostly for nostalgia
| because I learned Unix on BSD 4.3 (or 4.4?) on MicroVaxes many
| years ago. But I get stuck on some very basic things:
|
| - My wifi card doesn't work. The installer recognizes it, but the
| driver doesn't work.
|
| - The console terminal defaults to 80x25, I don't know how to
| resize it.
|
| - I can't figure out how to start X Windows.
|
| - If I run it in a VM (e.g. VirtualBox), the network bridging
| doesn't work so my FreeBSD instance has no internet access.
|
| It's probably my fault, I'm sure it's in the docs somewhere. But
| it probably means that I'm not the target audience for FreeBSD,
| since I don't have the time and patience to figure out the most
| basic things.
| Dracophoenix wrote:
| > - My wifi card doesn't work. The installer recognizes it, but
| the driver doesn't work.
|
| It really depends on your Wi-fi card. If you're installing
| FreeBSD on bare metal with an Intel card, iwx now supports Wifi
| 6 and 6E cards. Although, since I haven't tested it myself, I
| can't say it will work as expected if it works at all.
|
| > - The console terminal defaults to 80x25, I don't know how to
| resize it.
|
| Select console terminal at the boot screen and type the
| following: gop list gop set {mode number}
|
| and then reboot the VM
|
| > - I can't figure out how to start X Windows.
|
| Assuming you've installed the appropriate graphics driver from
| the pkg or ports repo: pkg install xorg
| startx
|
| If you don't have the appropriate graphics driver, proceed to
| step 8 in the webpage below.
|
| > - If I run it in a VM (e.g. VirtualBox), the network bridging
| doesn't work so my FreeBSD instance has no internet access.
|
| https://freebsdfoundation.org/freebsd-project/resources/inst...
|
| Step 8 might help.
| xoa wrote:
| If you're interested in trying out BSD on the desktop vs in a
| server or through some other BSD-based appliance distro
| (projects like OPNsense or TrueNAS Core which build on BSD but
| are mostly intended to be used from a Web GUI) you could take a
| look at GhostBSD [0]. It's a vastly more polished and desktop
| focused project that takes off many of the sharp edges of a
| plain vanilla FreeBSD install. Of course, "more polished" for
| BSD is still going to be a ways behind Linux these days. There
| just isn't the same level of hardware support, eyeballs and
| companies working on it. But it's not 00s era either, it's a
| pleasant functional experience. If one wants to test the waters
| a bit in an easier way it's an option worth considering. Ars
| did a decent little initial experience run through [1] a few
| years back (though since it is under active development a lot
| has changed since then) you could check out if interested. As
| demoed there it's very viable in a light VM so one doesn't even
| need to dedicate any hardware for a first try. That review also
| lists some of the other more GUI focused BSD distributions left
| out there.
|
| Anyway, there are some options to ease into it more. I find
| some of the ancient FreeBSD-isms a bit grating on occasion but
| overall I'm glad it's part of the mix.
|
| ----
|
| 0: https://ghostbsd.org/
|
| 1: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/04/not-actually-
| linux-d...
| gabereiser wrote:
| Yet... "On FreeBSD you'll notice right away that you're dealing
| with a "complete operating system", a system that has been put
| together very well." It's a complete operating system. /s
|
| This is why FreeBSD loses in my view. The arrogance of claiming
| to be a complete system when basic stuff like wifi doesn't
| work.
| teakettle42 wrote:
| > basic stuff like wifi
|
| Wi-fi is not basic.
|
| Having written a wifi driver, that's something I'm
| comfortable stating unequivocally.
|
| The hardware is almost always proprietary and undocumented,
| and in many cases (looking at you, Broadcom), a poorly-
| designed shitshow of complex errata, proprietary magic
| numbers required for initialization, and in general, an
| absolute dogshit technology stack.
|
| The only reason Linux has working Wi-Fi at all tends to be
| because it was used to power a lot of cheap consumer access
| points, and Wi-Fi chipset manufacturers released binary and
| open-source Linux drivers -- generally of horrific quality,
| but drivers nonetheless.
| Klonoar wrote:
| _> - My wifi card doesn't work. The installer recognizes it,
| but the driver doesn't work._
|
| (Even if you get it to work, it's not going to be full speed)
| jester23947 wrote:
| read the handbook... it's the second chapter in this webpage.
| RamRodification wrote:
| ...or pick an operating system where you don't need to read
| the handbook to get working WiFi.
| djbusby wrote:
| I'm on Linux and have to get a rtw8852 driver from some
| random-ish gitHub repo to get WiFi in a recent Lenovo.
|
| Does this mean WiFI is only for Win/Mac?
| gtirloni wrote:
| Does it mean rtw8852 is supported on *BSD?
| alexklarjr wrote:
| mostly, I can't make both my usb wifi5 dongles work on
| ubuntu 22 as well as random Qualcomm wifi4 pcie. These
| chips must be decade old.
| trelane wrote:
| RTW8852 based wifi, sure. You can get Linux preinstalled,
| and with full support from some places. I highly
| recommend doing that if you're going to run Linux.
| They'll not have that chip though. They'll have one that
| works.
| unethical_ban wrote:
| That's odd. My 2018 Lenovo Thinkpad had working Wifi out
| of the box from day 1.
|
| The last time I had wifi driver issues on Linux was 2008.
| gabereiser wrote:
| New chip for Wifi6 hasn't made it upstream to the kernel
| yet and relies on patches.
| shaw00000 wrote:
| FreeBSD, OpenBSD and NetBSD are for servers, appliance servers
| and embedded devices mostly. You can use them as a desktop, but
| that's not where their strengths are. If you want to learn or
| use FreeBSD in this case I strongly suggest setting up a home
| server and learn as much as possible.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| I've used OpenBSD as my desktop OS for the last 10 years or
| so. I agree it's probably not the ideal desktop OS for
| everyone, but I think your dismissal may be a bit too strong.
|
| You do need to be sure your desktop machine is well-suited
| for OpenBSD. This means supported Intel or AMD graphics
| (Nvidia won't work well if at all, and not all AMD will
| either) and network/wifi card.
| beezle wrote:
| If the user has run of the mill hardware, that only is true
| in the sense that FreeBSD does not offer to install a desktop
| environment at time of initial install/setup. Nothing
| precludes you from installing Gnome, KDE, or any of the many
| others. IE pkg install gnome.
|
| The only place FreeBSD (or any of the other BSDs) is less
| robust is driver support, though most common stuff is
| available. In any event, those needing support for the latest
| greatest of hardware are probably better of with Windows.
| a-dub wrote:
| how does the kernel compare these days? pre-cfq i remember the
| scheduler was far better than linux, but what about raw
| performance for single and multithread/process workloads with
| lots of i/o going through the kernel?
|
| raw cve counts seem meaningless without a denominator to me.
| those numbers should be normalized by estimated install base if
| they're going to be compared.
| jeffbee wrote:
| Yeah, the number of BSD CVEs just boils down to the fact that
| nobody cares about BSD. Since nobody cares about it, its
| performance is also very 20-years-ago and doesn't stand up to
| modern linux performance. You could expect database performance
| (e.g. postgresql) to be 2-4x higher on linux under a highly
| concurrent load. There are thousands of full-time professionals
| around the world focused on linux performance and the
| applications are co-evolving to work best on linux so you can't
| expect cutting-edge speed from freebsd.
|
| There's probably a niche for freebsd but unless you know
| exactly what it is and how to exploit that niche, you're not
| going to find it by accident.
| [deleted]
| naikrovek wrote:
| > the fact that nobody cares about BSD
|
| I am quite certain that you would be shocked if you learned
| how many people use it. I've worked at two companies where
| more than 95% of servers ran FreeBSD, and these are
| absolutely companies that you have heard of. 10s of thousands
| of servers at each when I worked at them, and likely 5x that
| amount, now.
|
| lots of people care about FreeBSD. they just aren't known for
| crapping on Linux, like Linux users are known for crapping on
| everything that is not Linux.
| jen20 wrote:
| So who are these companies? I hear references to them
| constantly, but pretty much the only ones willing to stick
| their head above the parapet are Netflix (in a single use
| case) and a few storage/network vendors using proprietary
| forks.
| ooneeks wrote:
| I would scream if I ever saw a dude in a suit give some
| 70's looking NEET permission to base their company's
| entire IT platform on FreeBSD specifically. It'd be like
| switching all your office workstations from MacOS to
| Ubuntu or Linux Mint.
| ooneeks wrote:
| Well to be fair, most people using FreeBSD are also Linux
| users, save people indirectly using/'benefiting' from BSD,
| i.e in a work environment as you mentioned. Of course
| discounting Mac users (I honestly think that's a hilarious
| joke). It also strikes me that many companies use BSD
| simply to save money in an area where time =/= money, as
| BSD is very secure and very stable, there are some
| licensing issues with many big Linux distros, etc. I very
| much doubt that anyone in the year 2022 are using BSD
| servers or workstations to improve their performance yield
| unless you're working retail or construction or something
| and are looking to implement a RTOS platform based on BSD
| because your boss severely capped your department's budget
| lol
| a-dub wrote:
| there was a time when freebsd's networking stack was
| pretty trendy for use in high performance networking
| settings.
|
| it was frequently used to implement things like software
| load balancers. quite possibly because of its (pre-linux-
| cfq) superior resource scheduling.
|
| there was also a time before it was trendy to complain
| about the GIL in python where SMP in freebsd suffered
| from the BKL. only one processor could be in the kernel
| at a time.
| naikrovek wrote:
| despite all the Linux users defending their operating system
| (they should, Linux is great) based on past experiences, I still
| prefer FreeBSD when possible. it just feels ... like a complete
| thing, rather than an assembly of different things. it makes
| sense to me.
|
| the article mentions this, and when I started typing I thought I
| could do a better job of explaining, but as I typed I realize
| that I could not.
|
| it just feels better to me. it may not feel better, or even good,
| to any of you, and that's (of course) fine with me. I just like
| FreeBSD.
|
| I think FreeBSD deserves _far_ more attention than it gets, and I
| am therefore quite happy to see this article on HN, even if
| others can 't see why it's a valid option for anything they need.
| stiray wrote:
| I am using freebsd since version 8 for all my server needs (was
| using linux, but got repelled by its chaos which I dont care
| about on my laptop, but it pisses me off on server).
|
| Some more points:
|
| - bhyve, developed by netapp, they ditched all old technologies
| support and it works faster on my i5 server than kvm on my i7
| laptop. Snapshoting using ZFS is not a feature to discard either.
|
| - FIBs, absolute miracle routing tables that you can apply to
| whatever software, define the routes as fib 1 (lets say it is
| openvpn) and then use them as simply as `setfib 1 bash` to use
| them in all child processes
|
| - backward compatibility, this is where linux is really horrible,
| there was an article about compiling binary on freebsd 2 and
| running it on freebsd 10. Try this on linux, binaries are not
| compatible even on minor versions.
|
| - jails... docker? Really? Jails are 15+ years old
| implementation, kernel supported, that stood test of time,
| actually being a security feature. It runs circles around the
| docker in everything except how much it was adapted by community.
| I never understood why people rather used an inferior solution
| like docker.
|
| - not to mention all the chaos in linux ecosystem, in next sub-
| version, the commands can have completely different switches,...
|
| I will never understand on what technical merits people are using
| linux for servers except the support-ability of hardware. Due to
| the whole show that linux is getting we would prosper as a
| humanity by ditching the linux. Unfortunately, marketing is worth
| more than anything.
|
| (I do understand that people will not agree due to their
| preference, but try to use it. I doubt you will prefer linux ever
| again.)
| nightfly wrote:
| I've run into fun issues like FreeBSDs slab allocator not
| playing nicely with the ZFS/NFS workload on one specific server
| and having to drop down to having ZFS allocate memory in a
| different way that used about twices as much CPU to avoid
| random multi-second pauses on the whole system. Also had issues
| where kerberized NFS would get confused and something would
| crash so had to have random cron jobs to restart dying
| components, since FreeBSDs init system is so simple. Also
| arbitrary and short name length limits, I think in both bhyve
| in the past (couldn't use fqdns for VM names since that would
| have exceeded the limit) and something about zfs mountpoints
| ages ago (I think we ended up changing our naming and nested
| conventions to work around)
| stjohnswarts wrote:
| I use Linux all day long and none of this is an issue for me,
| so I guess that's the counterpoint. I'm just a desktop/server
| user/developer though and not a guru by any stretch.
| atmosx wrote:
| Comparing Linux to FreeBSD is like comparing a Mercedes to a
| custom-made trackday car.
|
| Docker, kubernetes et all was the nail in the coffin.
|
| BSDs are amazing for universities, OS classes and some
| outliers in the industry here and there.
|
| The one thing FreeBSD had was network stack performance.
| Linux supports higher throughput for a while now.. so even
| that ship sailed.
| stormbrew wrote:
| Some of this may be true, though I have some disagreements
| about the accuracy of some (and also the issue that "Linux" is
| a broad target and some of these apply more or less to
| different distributions or os'), but freebsd definitely had its
| share if chaos in its history. The fbsd4-6 era was a difficult
| one to navigate and it's basically where I feel off the freebsd
| bandwagon.
| GekkePrutser wrote:
| Me too, at FreeBSD 6. ZFS was also pretty new and unstable in
| those days. I upgraded and could no longer read my pools.
|
| But I came back to it in the last few years and it's matured
| a lot.
| jeffbee wrote:
| > backward compatibility, this is where linux is really
| horrible, there was an article about compiling binary on
| freebsd 2 and running it on freebsd 10. Try this on linux,
| binaries are not compatible even on minor versions.
|
| What a completely bizarre claim. I have commercial linux/x86
| binaries from the 90s that work perfectly well on my current PC
| running Linux 5.15.
| asveikau wrote:
| I had trouble trying to run libc5 era software a few years
| ago. This wasn't the kernel but the distro did not make it
| easy. I wouldn't expect them to keep maintaining libc5
| packages 20+ years later either.
|
| I think if you do anything GUI-ish over the last 20 years
| there's been many shared library breaking changes. But that'd
| be true of FreeBSD too since those dependencies are just the
| same when they live in ports.
| trws wrote:
| I'm guessing the OP meant "where glibc is really horrible",
| since bsd libc is rather more abi stable, largely because
| that's where FreeBSD provides compatibility instead of the
| syscall layer. This is not to say you can't use an old libc
| and fix up the loader paths or use a container and make it
| work, but it's a different set of challenges.
| bonzini wrote:
| > it works faster on my i5 server than kvm on my i7 laptop.
|
| What benchmark and what processors exactly?
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| > jails... docker? Really? Jails are 15+ years old
| implementation, kernel supported, that stood test of time,
| actually being a security feature. It runs circles around the
| docker in everything except how much it was adapted by
| community. I never understood why people rather used an
| inferior solution like docker.
|
| Docker has Dockerfiles, layers, and trivial push/pull of
| images. Compared to those workflow improvements, nobody cares
| if the guts suck.
| ahepp wrote:
| I've had a decent time writing little "jailfiles" and a
| create/destroy script. It's certainly nowhere near as
| ergonomic as docker though.
|
| But it seems like a very solvable problem.
| jzb wrote:
| But, someone has to care enough to do so, and it has to
| catch on.
|
| FreeBSD lacks the network effect.
| GekkePrutser wrote:
| > Compared to those workflow improvements, nobody cares if
| the guts suck.
|
| Some people care, this is why FreeBSD is still around :)
|
| And it's not really relevant if you build your own images
| anyway. And in fact within the scope of FreeBSD jails offer
| very similar features, one of the things that's very common
| to do is make a base image with ZFS and then base all your
| jails off it. This means you just have to update your base
| and all your jails are updated. It's similar to pulling the
| latest alpine with docker. If you embrace the full ecosystem
| with Bastille you will have very similar capabilities.
|
| The big missing point is that you can't use images from
| docker hub. This is a big negative but if you already don't
| plan on using those it's not really a bad thing. And there is
| increasing resistance to pulling things made by unknown
| people into production (I'm sure many vulnerabilities will
| happen in the future as attackers start to take advantage of
| this).
|
| But anyway it doesn't have to be for everyone. It doesn't
| have to be the biggest thing around.
| heinrichhartman wrote:
| I would like to be on the jails train, but the
| build/deployment story always felt inferior.
|
| I have never seen anyone build jail-images from CI and
| deploying them to fleets of FreeBSD hosts. This may be
| technically feasible with zfs send/recieve but in practice
| people I know distributed packages (not images) to 10s of
| FreeBSD jails/hosts.
|
| I want to deploy container images to a cluster - not
| install a package in a zone/jail. Is anyone doing this with
| FreeBSD/Solaris? (Outside of Joyent)
| kaba0 wrote:
| Docker is not a security sandbox technolgy, but a bundle all
| the dependency sandbox one.
| old-gregg wrote:
| Remember, you're comparing Linux and FreeBSD in 2022 but BSD
| lost to Linux much earlier, many years ago. Back when I was
| looking into them (long time ago, excuse me for not remembering
| the details), BSD felt more pleasant and coherent. But at the
| same time it had limitations on scalability, performance and
| compatibility with hardware and also with userland software. In
| every benchmark, especially on multi-core, multi-socket
| systems, Linux was ahead.
|
| My theory at the time was this: GNOME won on developers'
| desktops, so most software was developed on Linux natively,
| with BSD compatibility (and performance) as an afterthought.
| IIRC Linus made a similar point on the mailing list that
| developers love servers that resemble their programming
| environments. TDLR: BSDs got stuck in CLI-only mode for too
| long.
|
| The more common explanation was that Linux got a head start by
| a few years by being a clean-sheet implementation, while the
| BSD had to spend its early years purging itself off the AT&T
| copyrighted code, so it was untouchable from a commercial use
| perspective.
| cesarb wrote:
| > The more common explanation was that Linux got a head start
| by a few years by being a clean-sheet implementation
|
| My favorite theory for why Linux got a head start is in this
| (long) comment I found some time ago here:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21420338
|
| Some excerpts:
|
| "With Linux, I just booted from a Linux boot floppy with my
| Linux install CD in the CD-ROM drive, and ran the
| installation. With BSD...it could not find the drive because
| I had an IDE CD-ROM and it only supported SCSI."
|
| "It insisted on being given a disk upon which it could
| completely repartition. [...] Linux, on the other hand, was
| happy to come second after my existing DOS/Windows."
|
| "By the time the BSD people realized they really should be
| supporting IDE CD-ROM and get along with prior DOS/Windows on
| the same disk, Linux was way ahead."
| nine_k wrote:
| I remember why I chose linux in 1998 for my desktop, and
| would choose for my server.
|
| Hardware compatibility. I could install Linux on my shabby
| work desktop, and it just worked. Actually it worked more
| stably than NT 4.
|
| Binary distros. I could apt-get install stuff onto my box in
| minutes. I rarely had to build things from source.
|
| Speed of change. Linux was acquiring features at a breakneck
| speed. Large companies started contributing. SMP, interesting
| networking stuff, better disk I/O, new filesystems, stuff
| like that. Hell, Windows emulation good enough to run
| StarCraft! It felt alive and cared for. It was apparent that
| many serious businesses want to bet big on Linux. Some say
| marketing; I say GPL and project guidance.
|
| I also had a lovely server box with FreeBSD. It had select
| compatible hardware. It had really nice documentation. It ran
| Apache and Squid pretty well. I had to build the latter from
| source IIRC. I had to build a lot from source (slow in 1998).
| If that was not available as a buildable package, I often had
| to tweak header files to make it build. For many amenities
| which I took for granted on my linux box, I decided that it's
| too much hassle to make them built on BSD.
|
| Features like SMP or journaling file systems were a bit late
| in FreeBSD. Maybe they were more solid, and achieved
| performance parity with Linux with time. Sadly, the industry
| largely made the choice.
|
| I also find modern Linux a mess, and run a minimalist distro
| (Void) on my laptop. I could consider running BSD on a
| server, but most servers now have to run VMs and containers
| within them, most tooling just assumes Linux.
| cesarb wrote:
| > it works faster on my i5 server than kvm on my i7 laptop
|
| Laptop processors are usually slower, due to lower thermal and
| power limits, so that's not surprising at all.
| ooneeks wrote:
| Having used BSD many years ago on desktop, I completely
| disagree. What are you using your computer for using BSD? I
| really don't spend 99% of my time just compiling lol The chaos
| thing is something I hear from BSD users quite a lot. I'm still
| not sure what it is means, maybe that's some sort of personal
| issue..? I suppose you don't like forking and variation, which
| is understandable coming from a user of an OS with a
| fantastically small userbase that somehow still manages to be
| proportionally more fragmented than any other community I can
| think of, but the "chaos" of Linux is grossly overstated. Most
| everything that is relevant today runs Debian, unless you're a
| poweruser running Arch or even Gentoo, but even then, who's out
| there being a distro purist? I'm willing to bet that most
| people running Arch or Gentoo are still using quite a bit of
| 'Debian resources'/assets. Sure, there's RedHat too and all the
| others that fill some corporate niche, but there really isn't
| this whole divide within the Linux community like people
| sometimes imply. I think a lot of people are stuck in a mindset
| that hasn't been relevant for somewhere between 10 and 20
| years.
| ajross wrote:
| > It runs circles around the docker in everything except how
| much it was adapted by community.
|
| ...except?
|
| Meh. People who want to engage in this argument are generally
| trying to argue about jails vs. the collection of linux
| container technologies. That's not Docker. Docker won because
| of Dockerfiles. Docker isn't, at its core, an interesting
| container technology. Docker is a simple metaphor and
| programming environment to _leverage_ container technology to
| solve practical[1] problems.
|
| And as it happened, it was done on Linux and not jails, owing
| in large part to the more configurable/toolkit-style/policy-
| free tools available there. Jails were indeed more mature, but
| they were solving the wrong problem.
|
| [1] Also thorny, boring problems like configuration management
| of large apps developed piecewise from components and by large
| teams. The kind of thing that is historically not well served
| by the operating system, BSD included.
| truth_seeker wrote:
| More detailed comparison of Docker Vs Jails :
|
| https://www.diva-
| portal.org/smash/get/diva2:1453017/FULLTEXT...
| intothemild wrote:
| I love FreeBSD and i love Jails, but you're right. Docker won
| because of simplicity.
|
| Dockerfiles make it super simple. There is similar stuff for
| jails but you need a jails frontend that use it.
|
| A few years ago i wanted to build the Jailfile equivalent,
| call it Warden, and have Warden manage the jails.
|
| But honestly i doubt it would get traction outside a small
| community.
| throwaway7980 wrote:
| CBSDfiles, reggae and bastillebsd can all build jails from
| a file based method
| SoftTalker wrote:
| "Simple" is subjective.
|
| Have you ever looked at what Docker puts in your iptables?
| I challenge you to understand what's happening with your
| networking after that.
|
| If you want containers, lxc command line and a bit of
| configuration for a bridge interface is all you really
| need.
| ajross wrote:
| > If you want containers, [...] is all you really need.
|
| And that is the attitude embraced by jails (to be clear:
| rather more cleanly and attractively than the expression
| of the same ideas in linux), and precisely why it lost.
|
| No one wants "containers". They want _docker_. They want
| to be handed something that looks no more threatening
| than a mid-80 's build script and have it magically be
| it's own little world with all its own software and
| versions and stuff, but still talk to the rest of the
| world on the same networks from the same piece of
| hardware (yes, via some weird voodoo to glue all that
| together).
|
| It's like arguing that no one needs word processing
| because nroff or LaTeX is all you need. It's not wrong.
| It's just a failure in the market.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| The voodoo is what bothers me. As the person responsible
| for the server, when things go wrong I will get blamed.
| In that situation, I at least want it to be my fault.
| Sunspark wrote:
| Build it and they will come..
| GekkePrutser wrote:
| > Dockerfiles make it super simple. There is similar stuff
| for jails but you need a jails frontend that use it.
|
| But docker is just a frontend for linux containers :)
| You're not comparing the right things here: Linux
| containers with a popular frontend and all the trimmings,
| to barebones FreeBSD jails.
| loop0 wrote:
| Honest question here about jails. I like docker because the
| tooling makes it super easy to get anything running in no time.
| How is jails tooling? Let's say I need to get an app running, a
| database and a redis for the app. Is that as easy as docker
| compose?
| notabee wrote:
| As someone who has just been tearing my hair out over v1 and v2
| cgroups and containers for testing systemd services, I think I
| need to spend some time in FreeBSD land.
| stingraycharles wrote:
| From a technological perspective, everything you say is true,
| and FreeBSD is better in so many regards. But, compatibility
| and community support is just a deal breaker.
|
| The jails vs docker argument is a good example: while
| technically better, Docker (or rather, cgroups and image
| distribution) have been standardised and have tremendous
| community adoption. FreeBSD cannot tap into any of this at all.
| Yes, jails might be better, but because they lack widespread
| adoption, they're far less useful.
|
| It's a sad state of affairs, I wish things went otherwise, but
| I feel Linux is sometimes a good example of the "worse is
| better" approach at work.
| mtlmtlmtlmtl wrote:
| I think one of the biggest mistakes the FreeBSD team made(in
| terms of more widestream adoption) was abandoning the Linux
| syscall table layer. It's still there, but it's stuck on
| 2.6.x last time I looked. It's a lot to maintain, yes, but it
| would help secure a lot more users like me, who are highly
| technical, potential contributors, who like a lot of the
| features(jails, better ZFS integration, easy to set up dtrace
| support etc), but also like to play around with bleeding edge
| software that tends to support Linux/OS X first, and maybe
| BSDs by accident, if you're lucky.
|
| I think keeping this layer in development, maybe having a
| similar setup to SmartOS, letting you set up "Linux jails" or
| something like that, would significantly help adoption in the
| desktop/workstation space. This would of course lead to
| recruiting more developers, and so on.
|
| Drivers are trickier, but I actually never had driver issues
| the last time I used FreeBSD as a daily driver(for about 6
| months a few years ago, until I ran back to Linux with my
| tail between my legs).
|
| It would be nice if at some point many decades ago, the Unix
| world had agreed on a standardised kernel API for modular
| drivers, so that drivers could more easily be ported between
| kernels, but it's way too late for that at this point I
| guess.
|
| And maybe not even technically feasible, but I'm not
| qualified to comment on that.
| nullify88 wrote:
| Perhaps VHS vs Betamax is a suitable equivalent to FreeBSD vs
| Linux.
| philistine wrote:
| Your comment implies the old trop that Beta was much better
| quality than VHS, but Betamax's reputation for better
| quality was marketing spin and conflation with Betacam,
| Sony's pro version.
|
| In reality, Betamax was nearly indistinguishable from VHS.
| usefulcat wrote:
| Obviously it's been quite a long time, but as someone
| whose first VCR was beta, this rings true. If nothing
| else, I definitely don't remember a noticeable quality
| difference when we later switched to VHS.
| nmz wrote:
| Nobody ever adopts it because nobody wants to support it,
| ergo nobody ever adopts it and nothing ever improves. Gotta
| love this little cycle of mediocrity the software world has
| going on.
| aleclm wrote:
| This post is not very robust in its arguments:
|
| 1. vulnerability list is not very relevant as a measure if you
| don't relate to SLOC, features available or _something_ ;
|
| 2. having a lot of configuration options for security is far from
| being good, security should be easy and by default; if the
| tradeoffs are unclear you enter FUD and avoid enabling them; is
| randomizing PIDs good? what are the downsides? :shrug:
|
| 3. I stopped reading given that the most prominent arguments
| seemed heavily biased;
| efortis wrote:
| About point 1, and not exactly SLOC, but the comparison is
| between the Linux Kernel and FreeBSD (a full OS).
|
| Now, it's possible that the number of vulnerabilities are much
| higher in the Linux Kernel because there is more research
| interest due to its larger usage.
| locutous wrote:
| Tried freebsd for a router because if into like this. Hardware
| support was lacking for my setup. It ended up being unstable and
| horrible. Replaced with Linux and it's been running smoothly
| since.
| gray_-_wolf wrote:
| I've considered migrating my NAS to openbsd few times, but one
| thing I was not sure about is with that to replace the filesystem
| with. I'm currently running btrfs and I like it. Few things I
| would like to have in a replacement:
|
| 1. copy-on-write and snapshots
|
| 2. checksums that are automatically verified on reads
|
| 3. btrfs' version of RAID1 (meaning I don't have to buy identical
| HDDs only)
|
| What would be my options?
| ahepp wrote:
| I believe zfs fulfills all those requirements.
|
| I'm running freebsd on my NAS and it's been great.
| LanternLight83 wrote:
| Not #3, but it's still the best option
| gtirloni wrote:
| Hmm I think you can mirror different sizes just fine but
| it'll predictably use the smaller size, no? Is btrfs
| different in that regard? I have only used it when it was
| released many years ago so my memory is rusty.
| ahepp wrote:
| as far as I know, you can put disks of different sizes in a
| mirror vdev, you'll just obviously be limited to the size
| of the smaller disk.
|
| Is that not what OC is asking for?
| jiripospisil wrote:
| I have a server running FreeBSD 13.1-RELEASE and the experience
| is kind of mixed. Things from the top of my head in no particular
| order:
|
| - I like the idea of "kern_securelevel", but I can only use it on
| the low setting (1 out of 3) because the machine (VM) is
| sometimes powered off and its time gets de-synced. The server is
| running ntpd but on this security level you're not allowed to
| change time by more than a second.
|
| - ntpd doesn't support running with ASLR enabled. Fortunately,
| you can disable ASLR for a particular process with "proccontrol".
|
| - ASLR is not enabled by default. Not that it cannot be defeated
| but it's a basic security measure, isn't it?
|
| - User installed packages put their configuration into
| "/usr/local/etc/". Or more generally user level stuff goes to
| "/usr/local". I like that, keeps things more tidy.
|
| - Upgrading between major versions requires several reboots. You
| also have to reinstall / recompile all of your installed packages
| / ports because ABI can change between versions.
|
| - IPv6 didn't work out of the box because the standard DHCP
| client doesn't support DHCPv6. Getting it to work took me a while
| but works now with the use of rtsold.
|
| - pf is nice. Enabling pflog and then inspecting the logged
| traffic via standard tools such as tcpdump is handy.
|
| - In line with UNIX philosophy, each utility does one thing and
| one thing only. I find it quite annoying though when dealing with
| long running services. There doesn't seem to be a standardized
| way of monitoring once a particular service is started via rc.
| Some packages use daemontools, some use something else (I forget
| the name), and some don't do any monitoring at all. Similarly
| with logging. I very much prefer systemd in this regard.
|
| - Jails are cool but annoying sometimes. Jails are created from a
| particular version of FreeBSD and you have to keep them up to
| date with "freebsd-update" like a regular host (including the
| reboot dance). There's a way to share most of the files between
| jails using mount_nullfs but I haven't tried that.
|
| - I miss "journalctl --since=-5hours" every time I ssh into the
| machine. Not sure how I could do it with just plain log files
| without parsing their specific format.
| jagged-chisel wrote:
| How well does FreeBSD support a "modern" web backend? Does Java
| run here? Mono (C#)? Node.js? PostgreSQL? Any noSQL databases?
| sophacles wrote:
| For the most part: yes. The one I'm not sure of is Mono.
|
| That being said, some tooling assumes linux sometimes, but the
| popular stuff is generally gtg, especially if you get it via
| the ports tree.
| carlavilla wrote:
| You can run Spring with Java 17 in FreeBSD without problems.
| Same with Node.js, Postgres and MongoDB for example. About
| Mono, I don't have experience with this environment. But I'm
| using the other technologies at my work without problems.
| whalesalad wrote:
| In the server sense, FreeBSD will do essentially everything
| that Linux does as far as running software. For your examples,
| yes.
| pid_0 wrote:
| pjmlp wrote:
| I guess calling POSIX modern is a point of view, unless a
| language runtime is bound to Linux specific syscalls, any UNIX
| like OS will run "modern" web backends.
|
| From that point of view, you can even do "modern" web backends
| on IBM and Unisys mainframes, using their POSIX environments.
|
| And yes, they do actually support everything on that list, by
| the way, mainframes invented noSQL databases before SQL was a
| thing, have a look on ISAM.
| trasz wrote:
| Very, very few things depend on Linux-specific syscalls.
| There are two reasons for this: first, they are unportable,
| so you need another code path for everything !Linux anyway,
| and even when you only care about Linux you can't assume
| those syscalls are available, because you first need to get
| them into the kernel, then into glibc, which is a separate
| project, and then you need to ship them in the distro, which
| in some cases (RHEL) means either waiting half a decade or
| porting it to a kernel half a decade old.
|
| And no, there aren't many things you can run on z/OS POSIX
| environment, because it fails to support absolutely basic
| things, like fork(2).
|
| >mainframes invented noSQL databases before SQL was a thing
|
| I'm not sure about this; structured storage was popular
| before Unix made flat files common, but there was a
| fundamental flaw in how it was implemented: it was all in the
| kernel, not on top of it.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Who said anything about z/OS? There are other mainframes to
| chose from.
|
| In any case, in what concerns "modern" Web development,
| z/OS has you covered,
|
| https://www.ibm.com/products/open-enterprise-sdk-go-zos
|
| https://www.ibm.com/support/pages/java-sdk-products-zos
|
| https://www.ibm.com/products/sdk-nodejs-compiler-zos
| trasz wrote:
| What mainframes are still alive, apart from
| z/Architecture?
|
| As for "modern Web development" - not really; it's a bit
| like running Apache and MySQL on Windows 98 - yes, you
| technically could, but you probably don't want to. Have
| you heard of anyone wilfully choosing to use mainframes
| instead of some Unix over the past two decades?
| tomc1985 wrote:
| Haven't tried Mono, Node, or anything NoSQL, but Java, Ruby,
| and Postgres all run pretty well. It is runtime-compatibile
| with Linux executables and you can even install a linux distro
| in a jail
|
| https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/setting-up-a-debian-linux...
| tester756 wrote:
| here people mess with FreeBSD afaik:
|
| Building the .NET Core SDK on FreeBSD
|
| https://github.com/dotnet/source-build/issues/1139
| ArrayBoundCheck wrote:
| AFAIK I and most people can't run it due to freebsd not
| supporting our hardware. Does it support intel wifi and GPUs?
| (I'm using an amd GPU). Can I run netflix or prime and get 1080
| resolution? (note on linux I need to use a addon to achieve this)
| trasz wrote:
| Yes, it does support Intel WiFi and GPUs, and in some cases
| (all GPUs, more and more WiFi) it uses code borrowed from
| Linux. For Netflix you'll need to run Linux Chromium or Firefox
| using linux(4)
| (https://docs.freebsd.org/en/books/handbook/linuxemu/), because
| of widevine.
| rvz wrote:
| It is not early days anymore and we have given it a quarter of a
| century for these _' alternatives'_ OSes to do something on the
| desktop and it is still plagued with issues for just simple
| desktop usage.
|
| This list of reasons here makes it easy for me and others to
| choose _neither_ and tell users to just stick with either Windows
| or macOS (which macOS is a BSD Unix, but the users don 't care
| and they should not).
|
| Both FreeBSD and the trillions of GNU/Linux distros are _still_
| not ready for a simple desktop usage.
|
| This is even before mentioning the in-fighting on swapping out
| system components like desktop environments, windowing systems,
| init systems, service, etc.
| claudiojulio wrote:
| https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/03/buffer-overruns-lice...
| itvision wrote:
| > Technical reasons to choose FreeBSD over GNU/Linux
|
| On the server/router maybe. For IT pros maybe.
|
| The desktop is a whole different matter.
| oleleo wrote:
| sgt wrote:
| On the desktop, Linux is going to be challenging anyway. Many
| people love that challenge and make it work, and that's cool.
| But my point is that if you can make it work on desktop Linux
| you will make it work on FreeBSD as well, given some decent
| skill.
| loeg wrote:
| > But my point is that if you can make it work on desktop
| Linux you will make it work on FreeBSD as well, given some
| decent skill.
|
| As someone who has run Linux and FreeBSD desktops for years
| -- no, Linux on the desktop is actually quite a bit better
| and easier to use than FreeBSD.
| gtirloni wrote:
| _> Linux on the desktop is actually quite a bit better and
| easier to use than FreeBSD._
|
| As someone who actually started learning *NIX on BSDs and
| later switched to Linux, I think "quite a bit better and
| easier" is an understatement. I tried the latest FreeBSD
| last year on a not so recent Lenovo laptop and it was a
| horrible experience.
| caslon wrote:
| Desktop Linux is pretty comfortable and intuitive, actually.
| There's no challenge involved.
| sgt wrote:
| A guy I know (relatively skilled) spent a whole week
| setting up Linux on his laptop the other day. So I don't
| think it's always as predictable as to say there's never a
| challenge involved in 2022.
| prmoustache wrote:
| Not sure what do you want to prove with that anecdotal
| point. I've seen coworkers spend a month or 2 with both
| their new and old mac or windows laptops because they
| weren't seeing the end of migrating their stuff from one
| computer to another and setting up their dev environment.
|
| Some people are just bad at this.
| trelane wrote:
| He should try putting OSX on the hardware. Wouldn't even
| _start_ to work.
|
| Clearly OSX is not ready for the desktop yet.
| ooneeks wrote:
| Just install Ubuntu if you quite literally cannot grasp
| GNU/Linux. No, your "guy" is not "relatively skilled",
| that's an absurd claim when it took an entire week
| setting up Linux on a laptop. It has never, ever taken me
| more than an hour or two with mainstream distros, or more
| than 3 days max. for more complicated distros such as
| Gentoo or Arch - but the system would be minimally
| operational within a day, always. You would literally
| have to one-finger press your keyboard whilst also
| learning how to read for the first time simultaneously,
| to make the install of Linux on a LAPTOP last a week.
| caslon wrote:
| "Relatively" seems like it's doing a lot of work there.
| unethical_ban wrote:
| I just installed Fedora 36 on my Thinkpad. It went pretty
| smoothly. Single monitor, AMD CPU/iGPU.
|
| There are a few gripes about the discoverability of the
| keyboard shortcuts. Unity was good with this, holding
| down the Win/Meta key showed all the DE shortcuts.
|
| Also, there is not an easy way to change certain settings
| (like system font!) without installing an obscure package
| "Tweaks" that should be built into the system settings.
| sgt wrote:
| Can you quickly try and connect to my 4K 60Hz monitor
| without the whole room breaking into laughter?
| ooneeks wrote:
| Have you not ever used a Linux distro? I haven't had an
| issue with monitors since before Ubuntu 8. Seems
| ridiculous you're going to claim that Linux, which
| dominates the phone/handheld industry, would have issues
| in regards to using high resolution/high DPI monitors
| along with lower spec ones concurrently. I think of all
| OS's, my bet would probably be that this is a way bigger
| issue on Windows than on Linux or Mac.
| caslon wrote:
| Anecdotally, as a user of a different distribution and
| desktop environment, yes. Just Works.
| sgt wrote:
| If that's true then there's been substantial improvements
| on that front recently (which is good). As I recall, that
| was a tricky problem since your laptop screen likely runs
| another resolution, different DPI, etc so connecting to
| an additional screen makes things go haywire.
| caslon wrote:
| That's only with Wayland. If you don't use Wayland, the
| situation has been fine for a decade.
| iasay wrote:
| macOS is a fine Unix desktop to drive your FreeBSD servers
| from...
| awuji wrote:
| I have been daily driving FreeBSD as a desktop since the last
| time this article was posted and I love it. It is super
| consistent and reliable, and after I got it set up, I don't
| have to worry about anything breaking. I can easily use it
| daily for coding and web browsing, and it feels as smooth and
| fast as a Linux setup on the same hardware.
|
| That said, I still have a Linux system for things like gaming,
| Cuda, and containers. Though, as I never have time to game
| anyways, I could just use the Linux system as a server.
|
| But, I've used Linux for 10+ years and it only started annoying
| me recently so I may also get frustrated with freeBSD
| eventually.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2022-08-06 23:00 UTC)