[HN Gopher] A Journey from Linux to FreeBSD
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A Journey from Linux to FreeBSD
Author : BSDobelix
Score : 70 points
Date : 2024-10-12 13:21 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (freebsdfoundation.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (freebsdfoundation.org)
| jmclnx wrote:
| Love seeing all this FreeBSD press!
|
| Maybe people will give it a try and hopefully Linux developers
| will once again start believing portability is a good thing :)
| KnowtheRopes wrote:
| FreeBSD is a cool OS, especially as a work machine. Once, I
| almost joined a company where my first assignment was to install
| FreeBSD on my work computer. It worked really well, and I
| actually liked using xfce. What a time! I was young, the grass
| was green, and the skies were blue.
| cruffle_duffle wrote:
| Typing "man $something" and getting actual good documentation
| rather than "use infodoc you uncultured swine" was always a
| bonus too.
|
| Back when such things were my deal, the FreeBSD docs were a
| breath of fresh air. It was like the whole platform was
| designed intentionally rather than the pile of cobbled together
| components that most Linux distros felt like.
| jmclnx wrote:
| >"use infodoc you uncultured swine"
|
| Quote of the year. I see you hate info almost as much as I
| do.
| IshKebab wrote:
| Ha yes let me just agree with you both that info is trash.
| It's the GNU way to make things unnecessarily difficult. If
| it was easy then any commoner could do it. By making things
| difficult they ensure that only the most dedicated acolytes
| can succeed, and everyone else is unworthy and pitiable.
| musicale wrote:
| man should just handle info transparently.
| ramon156 wrote:
| As a fedora user, why would I consider FreeBSD? I don't know
| enough about the differences. All I know is that FreeBSD is
| currently behind on features and tool versions
| binkHN wrote:
| I find the BSDs, in general, take a more holistic approach to
| the operating design and everything feels very cohesive. In
| contrast, Linux feels more like an assembly of parts to form a
| unit and everything feels far more disjointed. That said, I run
| Linux on my production workstation because it supports more
| modern stuff. However, OpenBSD is one of my favorite operating
| systems to put on the back end because of its very simple and
| consistent design, and, well, strong focus on security.
| linguae wrote:
| Exactly. The reason why I'm a fan of the BSDs in general is
| because of the cohesion of the base system, not to mention
| the high quality of its documentation and source code. I tend
| to prefer cleaner, cohesive systems that seem "designed"
| (System 7 Unix, the BSDs, Plan 9, C, NeXT and early Mac OS X,
| Smalltalk, many functional programming languages like Scheme
| and Standard ML) to large, complex systems that seem
| "evolved" (Windows, Linux, C++, JavaScript, the Web in
| general). I also like the conservative, deliberate approach
| that the BSDs take when it comes to the inclusion of new
| features. I remember reading a FreeBSD guide about 20 years
| ago that said something to the effect of "BSD is what you get
| when Unix hackers make a Unix for a PC, while Linux is what
| you get when PC hackers make a Unix for a PC." The spirit of
| that quote is that the BSDs tend to adhere to the Unix
| philosophy and thus their feature additions are in line with
| the philosophy of the overall system. The consequence of
| this, though, is that the BSDs are slower to adopt new
| technologies compared to Linux, though there is, in my
| opinion, a tendency in the Linux ecosystem for new
| technologies to be pushed before they are 100% ready, and the
| Linux ecosystem, as you said, feels more like an assembly of
| parts, each with their own design philosophies, rather than a
| cohesive system. Linux is certainly good, but I personally
| find FreeBSD more pleasant.
|
| With that said, I use FreeBSD for my home server and also
| inside VMs, but I find myself using Linux more. There are
| many situations where I often need to use Linux instead of
| FreeBSD due to either software compatibility reasons or lack
| of drivers.
| ghostpepper wrote:
| I hear this claim about security repeated a lot but not
| everyone agrees[0]. Always interested in hearing perspectives
| from actual users though. What do you like about their focus
| on security?
|
| [0] https://isopenbsdsecu.re/about/
| binkHN wrote:
| There's a lot of defense in depth approaches in OpenBSD,
| and as someone who's been on the mailing list for quite
| some time, I get to see them in real time.
| https://isopenbsdsecu.re/mitigations/ does break them down
| fairly well, perhaps a bit pessimistically, but, if you
| take time to read through this, you can still see a lot of
| innovation coming from OpenBSD, and often before others.
| TacticalCoder wrote:
| > As a fedora user, why would I consider FreeBSD?
|
| The vid talks about how big Linux vendor, like Red Hat,
| betrayed the Linux community (their words, not mine).
|
| If you're fine with the "microsoftization" of Linux, then
| you're all good and set with Fedora or Ubuntu.
|
| For many users Linux is just "Windows but sucking a bit less
| than Windows".
|
| But others do feel the betrayal they talk about in the vid. For
| me for example systemd and systemd's author now officially
| being on Microsoft' payroll is a very hard pill to swallow.
| Same for many non-portable things now targeting only the
| bastardized Linux ecosystem, instead of targeting all the
| Unixes still out there (including FreeBSD and OpenBSD).
|
| Thankfully due to the unfathomably big number of Linux
| containers / virtual machines being spun on and off and the
| need for utmost speed of these, systemd ain't much of a thing
| in the Linux container world. And Linux is still the kernel and
| it's still possible to have both systemd-less containers _and_
| systemd-less distros. I 'm not sure how long that'll last
| though seen how systemd is spreading its tentacles everywhere.
|
| For people who love Microsoft INI files and who love the rube-
| goldberg monstrosity that Windows is, systemd Linux distros
| with snap and whatnots are just fine. To them Linux is just
| basically a Windows a tiny bit more secure and crashing a tiny
| bit less. And don't worry: Microsoft employees are hard at work
| making sure Linux gets shittier by the day, emulating the
| mistakes of the biggest turd of an OS ever made (that'd be
| Windows).
|
| For others, thankfully the BSDs do still exists.
| myaccountonhn wrote:
| There's also Void, Alpine and Guix if you don't want to use
| systemd.
|
| What I personally really like about the BSDs are that they
| are very hackable with great documentation. The code base is
| much smaller and building your own kernel is very
| straightforward. I was able to even fix some of my own
| drivers and learnt a ton in the process.
| bch wrote:
| > There's also Void [...]
|
| Started[0] by NetBSDs (and Hacker News') own _jmmv_ [1]. So
| if you're getting BSD vibes, now you know why.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Void_Linux?#History
|
| [1] https://jmmv.dev/software/netbsd.html
| jmmv wrote:
| Heh, not quite! Void Linux was started by the _other_
| NetBSD developer from Spain: xtraeme.
| bch wrote:
| D'oh!
| homebrewer wrote:
| You're unlikely to convert anyone with that kind of attitude
| and these massive exaggerations, which are obvious to anyone
| who knows their linuxen. Some BSD advocates are like
| sandpaper, unfortunately, which is not helping the OSes,
| which often get defined in terms of what they're _not_.
| Rotundo wrote:
| Unlikely to convert anyone, but they are not wrong either.
|
| I don't use BSD, but as a long time user of Linux (started
| with Yggdrasil) I can't help but think Linux is slowly but
| surely getting sabotaged. Systemd, Wayland, Pulseaudio, it
| is all needlessly complicated and introduces dependencies
| in other software that shouldn't be there.
|
| Maybe I _should_ take a good look at the BSD's after all.
| loeg wrote:
| No real reason to as an end user. Maybe better ZFS integration
| out of the box is appealing for a NAS or something like that.
| But the desktop user experience on FreeBSD is not great. Lots
| of regressions in things you might care about (wifi, kde/gnome,
| chrome web browser) relative to Linux.
| IWeldMelons wrote:
| Did you actually use it for desktop? Yes it has some
| regressions and rough edges, but it has very nice release
| cycle for packages - quarterly (much like ubuntu but twice as
| fast), and separate schedule for the base system; the makes
| borking OS more difficult. Packages are fresh, security
| updates frequents, what not to like?
|
| Hardware support is abysmal though.
| loeg wrote:
| > Did you actually use it for desktop?
|
| Yes.
| IWeldMelons wrote:
| I personally use it frequently in a VM, and I find it
| nicer than Ubuntu as I get fresh packages, without risk
| of borking os itself, ass base and packages separate.
| Other than that, chrome/kde works about same.
| hnlmorg wrote:
| What sort of regressions are there in KDE and Chrome?
| loeg wrote:
| A variety of things don't work or break frequently. Google
| does not support Chrome on BSD at all and refuses to
| upstream any BSD support patches in chromium, so ports
| maintainers struggle to re-port new chromium releases to
| BSD (there is a giant stack of patches that keeps growing
| bigger). Updates lag upstream, often by a long time.
| Chrome's core security sandboxing features are broken on
| BSD (it just runs un-sandboxed!), which is kind of a major
| issue that no one talks about.
| skydhash wrote:
| Is chrome a web requirement these days? I'd say use
| Firefox and be done with it.
| loeg wrote:
| Lots of people seem to prefer Chrome to Firefox, possibly
| some for good reasons:
| https://www.oberlo.com/statistics/browser-market-share
|
| Firefox may work better on FreeBSD, or not -- I don't
| have as much personal experience with it. (It's not like
| there are a huge number of BSD Firefox developers,
| either.)
| timeon wrote:
| > possibly some for good reasons
|
| Can you help me? I didn't find any in that article. Maybe
| I missed in the flood of term 'market share'.
| pxc wrote:
| Seeing this kind of attitude in the Linux community saddens
| me. We should remember that Linux too has been small, and
| incomplete, and difficult-- and it still is at least some of
| those things within the wider desktop world. So are a great
| many Linux distros, including fabulous ones that should not
| be overlooked.
|
| I hope that the Linux community will long retain at least
| some echo of that exploratory spirit, and extend that to
| projects like FreeBSD.
| timeon wrote:
| > you might care about (wifi, kde/gnome, chrome web browser)
|
| It is 2024. I do not care about the browser functionality for
| ~15 years.
| carapace wrote:
| As a fedora user you probably shouldn't consider FreeBSD, it's
| more for servers than desktop systems. E.g. I run it on my
| laptop even though I can't adjust the brightness of the
| monitor.
|
| For me being "behind on features and tool versions" actually
| means that there's much less going on so I'm more confident
| that everything works and works well together. From my POV
| Linux has developed a case of Winchester Mystery House
| syndrome.
| craftkiller wrote:
| Have you tried the backlight[0] utility they added to the
| base system? None of the sysctls I've found have worked at
| adjusting my laptop's backlight but the backlight utility
| itself succeeds for me (on an AMD framework laptop).
|
| [0] https://man.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?backlight
| carapace wrote:
| I haven't, thanks for the tip! :D
| craftkiller wrote:
| > behind [..] tool versions
|
| I run both Arch Linux and FreeBSD. It is not uncommon that
| FreeBSD's packages update faster than Arch Linux. Make sure you
| update your pkg config to use the latest packages instead of
| the quarterly packages it uses by default.
|
| Also, I'd like to point out that FreeBSD has thousands of more
| packages than Fedora:
| https://repology.org/repositories/statistics/newest
|
| > why would I consider FreeBSD
|
| ZFS: Since FreeBSD isn't encumbered by the GPL, it has fully
| integrated ZFS which is a far better experience than on Linux.
| On FreeBSD ZFS always works, whereas on Linux ZFS is an out-of-
| tree module and your dkms builds breaks frequently when the
| kernel updates. Also, a lot of software on FreeBSD takes
| advantage of the features of ZFS, whereas on Linux most
| software doesn't use the features of either btrfs or ZFS.
|
| PF: This firewall has a great config format. After using PF,
| Linux's iptables makes me want to walk into the ocean.
|
| poudriere: A great and easy-to-use package builder. I use this
| to build both my OS and all my software with CPU optimizations
| for my specific processor (but FreeBSD has official package
| repositories, so you don't need to build your own if you don't
| want to.)
|
| kqueue: FreeBSD uses the kqeueue syscall. Later Linux created
| their own syscall: epoll. But epoll is fundamentally broken:
| https://idea.popcount.org/2017-02-20-epoll-is-fundamentally-...
|
| jails: more secure than Linux containers despite being invented
| 7 years earlier.
|
| sysctl instead of /proc: On FreeBSD, when you're listing the
| running processes (for example, top, htop, or ps), it uses
| sysctl which gets an atomic snapshot of the running processes.
| On Linux, you have to crawl through the /proc filesystem which
| is MANY more syscalls and the contents of /proc are changing
| out from under you while you're crawling through it.
|
| -----
|
| That being said, Linux has some wins over FreeBSD:
|
| systemd: As controversial as it is, I think systemd is nicer
| than FreeBSD's init system. systemd supports user services
| whereas the built-in FreeBSD service manager does not (3rd
| party ones do though). Systemd automatically captures
| stdout/stderr to a log whereas FreeBSD relies on each service
| invoking the daemon tool to redirect their stdout/stderr.
| FreeBSD still uses pidfiles for everything which is flawed.
|
| documentation: FreeBSD has much better man pages than Linux,
| but the Arch Linux wiki is the champion, no contest.
|
| wifi: FreeBSD's wifi support is definitely not great. There are
| efforts under way to make a shim that will allow FreeBSD to use
| the Linux wifi drivers (similar to what they did for graphics
| drivers) but where it stands today, the wifi support is not
| great. That being said, there is a package called "wifibox"
| that spins up a tiny Linux VM and has Linux drive your wifi
| card, bridging the connection back to FreeBSD.
|
| ------
|
| Finally, this is a popular blog post on why someone would
| choose FreeBSD over Linux: <go see Vermaden's post at
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41820161 >
|
| Edit: Vermaden himself has posted the link to his blog post at
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41820161 so I am removing
| the link.
| homebrewer wrote:
| These days, iptables is often just a wrapper around nftables.
| Familiarize yourself with it if/when you have the time, you
| might actually like it. It uses a declarative approach
| similar to pf et al., and uses the same set of rules for ipv4
| and ipv6.
|
| https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Nftables
| vermaden wrote:
| Some reasons here:
|
| - https://vermaden.wordpress.com/2020/09/07/quare-freebsd/
| BSDobelix wrote:
| >All I know is that FreeBSD is currently behind on features and
| tool versions
|
| Well, I don't want to be that guy, but you're wrong about that
| too ;)
| ofalkaed wrote:
| The main benefit for me is that it provides a very stable user
| experience since it is not under the influence of the war
| between linux distros; you learn the system once and you might
| spend 5 minutes after a major update learning what is new and
| configuring. But much of that software in ports is developed
| for linux with no consideration for BSD so it can cause
| headaches since the maintainers of those ports can not possibly
| test every possible use case and generally port it for their
| own case. A big rub for me is the sound situation, I love OSS
| but not all programs support it so I still get stuck using
| Jack.
|
| I almost made the switch to FreeBSD a few times but Slackware
| still offers fewer compromises for me with the same
| ridiculously stable user experience and I don't have to worry
| as much about drivers when computer shopping. I assume I will
| end up switching to FreeBSD when Patrick dies since Slackware
| will probably die with him so I keep an eye on it and play with
| it once every year or two.
| hedora wrote:
| For my use cases (a stable environment for writing and running
| systems code locally, browsing the internet, reading pdfs,
| etc), desktop Linux peaked about ten years ago.
|
| That was back before systemd/wayland, and back when deleting
| pulseaudio just made everything work better.
|
| Also, minimal window managers like evilwm were more tenable,
| since the only useful thing that really used the notification
| area/dbus was wifi.
|
| Anyway, being behind on the spiral of instability I've seen
| with recent Linux desktop environments seems like a feature,
| not a bug.
| nils-m-holm wrote:
| I have used FreeBSD for work and play since version 1.1.5. Never
| had any trouble with it. Since more than 10 years I am also
| running it on notebook computers.
|
| Back in the days a friend visited and we talked about fork bombs.
| I fetched a spare FreeBSD box and ran the infamous shell script
| on it. System performance went down to a crawl, but I was still
| able to log in on a different virtual console and shut the
| machine down. Many systems back then would not have recovered
| from that.
| thowawatp302 wrote:
| What won me over is how it treats an NFS share going away.
| Linux gets so weird you need to reboot but FreeBSD is usable to
| the point I can fix the issue.
|
| Honestly it's the same with out of memory issues too.
|
| I just can think about my FreeBSD boxes less.
| BSDobelix wrote:
| Yep, you can test this right now, do a "stress -c 320" (that's
| 10 times the number of cores I have), a linuxbox starts to
| stutter massively (sometimes even audio), with FreeBSD no
| stuttering at all, just a bit less responsive.
| ghostpepper wrote:
| This is fascinating. I always assumed the susceptibility to
| fork bombs was an inevitable consequence of the Unix process
| model optimizing for speed of fork.
|
| Do you know why/how BSD handles it better?
| chungy wrote:
| I can't really speak to what FreeBSD is (or was?) doing
| special, but even on Linux these days with proper ulimits,
| fork bombs are pretty far from the disaster they once were.
| CodeCompost wrote:
| Ok but when I run it on my notebook, WiFi is slow, the laptop
| crashes when I connect it to a docking station, audio doesn't
| work and suspend and resume is broken. And this on a Linux
| certified machine.
| serf wrote:
| 'notebook computer' is so ambiguous as to be useless.
|
| go find one of those 'notebook computer's that the dev team
| uses (probably a few-generations-old thinkpad or dell) and go
| see what the experience is like if you're unwilling or unable
| to put the work into getting your machine to run as you wish.
|
| furthermore this isn't a solved issue for ANY OS on the
| fringe of the computer market. Go install the newest version
| of Windows on a Chuwi machine and see how many drivers are
| MIA and functionalities lost. Install Linux on an obscure
| VAIO or Toughbook and see what happens.
|
| Regardless of the promises and hoped-for-wishes, EVERY os is
| hardware-centric, and they all have different orbits.
|
| The BSDs just tend to make choices that give them one of the
| widest arrangement of choices in the 'will-it-run-on-this'
| category.
| musicale wrote:
| > EVERY os is hardware-centric, and they all have different
| orbits
|
| Kind of why I like macOS (works fine on any Mac, with about
| 7 years of support - though I wish it were 10, and x86
| support may stop sooner) and Windows (runs on any x86 PC,
| games work without issue, years of updates and backward
| compatibility.)
|
| But on a mainstream x86 laptop like a ThinkPad, I'd expect
| Ubuntu/Debian/etc. and FreeBSD to work well, for 10 years
| or more of updates. (And I'd expect most games to work on
| Linux with Proton.)
| 0xcde4c3db wrote:
| Are the (non-Nvidia) GPU drivers still years behind mainline
| Linux? I might be misinterpreting the release scheme, but it
| seems like FreeBSD 14's drivers correspond to Linux 5.15 and
| FreeBSD 15's will correspond to at least Linux 6.1. Is that
| right? 5.15 should be new enough to have decent support for my
| GPU (which "worked" out of the box on Linux but didn't really
| stabilize until 5.12 or so).
| BSDobelix wrote:
| You can install drm-6.1:
|
| https://www.freshports.org/graphics/drm-61-kmod/
|
| It even in the quarterly repo.
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