[HN Gopher] Why I love FreeBSD
___________________________________________________________________
Why I love FreeBSD
Author : enz
Score : 309 points
Date : 2026-03-16 11:23 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (it-notes.dragas.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (it-notes.dragas.net)
| Hendrikto wrote:
| A week ago, I decided to set up my home server with FreeBSD,
| after the HDD failed, just to try it out. The setup was quick and
| easy and everything works fine so far.
|
| I am just not sure it is worth leaving the Linux ecosystem. What
| if I want to run a Docker container? Do I have to trust random
| people for ports of software that runs natively on Linux, or port
| it myself?
|
| FreeBSD seems good so far, but community and ecosystem are
| important.
| vermaden wrote:
| No one prevents You from installing Linux in a Bhyve VM and
| running Docker there.
|
| Overhead of FreeBSD Bhyve Hypervisor is about 0.5% (measured in
| benchmarks) so You loose nothing.
|
| Here You have easy and complete jumpstart into Bhyve in
| FreeBSD:
|
| - https://vermaden.wordpress.com/2023/08/18/freebsd-bhyve-
| virt...
|
| Regards, vermaden
| ComputerGuru wrote:
| Isn't that no longer necessary? Doesn't linuxulator + podman
| suffice?
| sidkshatriya wrote:
| > Doesn't linuxulator + podman suffice?
|
| No it is not reliable enough. Some syscalls not
| implemented, there are edge case issues with procfs etc.
| Best to execute in a Linux VM.
| c-c-c-c-c wrote:
| it's exceedingly rare that programs dont work with
| linuxulator, i use vivado daily and you can play games
| through linux steam and proton that way.
| elcritch wrote:
| Unfortunately podman on freebsd is pretty early stage. I
| was only able to get very simple containers to run.
| shevy-java wrote:
| I can not answer the other questions; for me Linux worked and
| works better. But that statement here:
|
| > Do I have to trust random people for ports of software that
| runs natively on Linux, or port it myself?
|
| This is a bit problematic in my opinion because ultimately we
| have to trust all who write open source code. This works well
| for the most part but there are malicious actors too. See the
| xz backdoor as example. Or various state actors who want to
| sniff after people. Age verification is the current attempt to
| sniff for people data, trying to push legislation by claiming
| "this is only to protect children" (while it has some
| interesting side effects, e. g. becoming a stepping stone for
| anyone wanting to sniff user data and relay this).
|
| > FreeBSD seems good so far, but community and ecosystem are
| important.
|
| Well, there are many more Linux users. Whether that is better
| or worse ... but it is a fact too.
| fridder wrote:
| You can run oci containers via podman.
| mghackerlady wrote:
| it isn't anywhere close to the convenience of docker, but if
| you just need containerised OS-level virtualization FreeBSD has
| Jails which are really cool
| 0x457 wrote:
| > I am just not sure it is worth leaving the Linux ecosystem.
| What if I want to run a Docker container? Do I have to trust
| random people for ports of software that runs natively on
| Linux, or port it myself?
|
| You already trust random people in linux, you have to trust
| even more random and more people when you run docker.
|
| Ports are quite large collection already. If you port yourself
| it's either up to 20 minutes plus compilation time or major
| nightmare. More and more software today assumes you run on
| linux only.
|
| I think FreeBSD is great for setup and forget. If you have to
| interact with it regularly it's not worth it. Definitely not
| worth it for desktop.
| Gud wrote:
| You should avoid Docker, is the obvious answer, and grow to
| love FreeBSD jails.
| cess11 wrote:
| If you just want to run a Docker container casually, perhaps do
| it on your personal computer instead of the home server. If
| there is some service you really can't manage to get running
| with jails or right on the BSD, bhyve and guest Linux should be
| easy enough.
| shevy-java wrote:
| > had trained me to hunt for documentation in fragments: often
| incomplete, often outdated, sometimes already stale after barely
| a year.
|
| This is indeed a problem now that google search is next to
| useless. And AI further degrading the quality.
|
| I work around it to some extent by keeping my local knowledge
| base up to date, as much as that is possible; and using a ton of
| scripts that help me do things. That works. I am also efficient.
| But some projects are simply underdocumented. A random example
| is, in the ruby ecosystem, rack. Have a look here:
|
| https://github.com/rack/rack
|
| Now find the documentation ... try it.
|
| You may find it:
|
| https://rack.github.io/rack/
|
| Linked from the github page.
|
| Well, have a look at it.
|
| Remain patient.
|
| Now as you have looked at it ... tell me if someone is troll-
| roflcopter-joking you.
|
| https://rack.github.io/rack/main/index.html
|
| Yes, you can jump to the individual documentation of the classes,
| but does that really explain anything? It next to tells you
| nothing at all about anything about rack.
|
| If you are new to ruby, would you waste any time with such a
| project? Yes, rack is useful; yes, many people don't use it
| directly but may use sinatra, rails and so forth, I get it. But
| this is not the point. The point is whether the documentation is
| good or bad. And that is not the only example. See ruby-
| webassembly. Ruby-opal. Numerous more projects (I won't even
| mention the abandoned gems, but this is of course a problem every
| language faces, some code will become outdated as maintainers
| disappear.)
|
| So this is really nothing unique to Linux. I bet on BSD you will
| also find ... a lack of documentation. Probably even more as so
| few blog about BSD. OpenBSD claims it has great documentation.
| Well, if I look at what they have, and look at Arch or Gentoo
| wiki, then sorry but the BSDs don't understand the problem
| domain.
|
| It really is a general problem. Documentation is simply too crap
| in general, with a few exceptions.
|
| > if the team behind this OS puts this much care into its
| documentation, imagine how solid the system itself must be.
|
| Meh. FreeBSD documentation can barely called the stand-out role
| model here either. Not sure what the BSD folks think about that.
|
| > I realized almost immediately that GNU/Linux and FreeBSD were
| so similar they were completely different.
|
| Not really.
|
| There are some differences but I found they are very similar in
| their respective niche.
|
| Unfortunately my finding convinced me that Linux is the better
| choice for my use cases. This ranges from e. g. LFS/BLFS to 500
| out of top 500 supercomputers running Linux. Sure, I am not in
| that use case of having a supercomputer, but the point is about
| quality. Linux is like chaotic quality. Messy. But it works. New
| Jersey model versus [insert any high quality here].
| https://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is-better.html
|
| > Not only that: Linux would overheat and produce unpredictable
| results - errors, sudden shutdowns, fans screaming even after
| compilation finished.
|
| Well, hardware plays a big factor, I get it. I have issues with
| some nvidia cards, but other cards worked fine on the same
| computer. But this apocalypse scenario he writes about ... that's
| rubbish nonsense. Linux works. For the most part - depending on
| the hardware. But mostly it really works.
|
| > I could read my email in mutt while compiling, something that
| was practically impossible on Linux
|
| Ok sorry, I stopped reading there. My current computer was fairly
| cheap; I deliberately put in 64GB RAM (before the insane AI-
| driven cost increases) and that computer works super-fast. I
| compile almost everything from source. I have no real issue with
| anything being too slow; admittedly a few things take quite a bit
| of compile-power, e. g. LLVM, or qt - compiling that from source
| takes a while, yes, even on a fast computer. But nah, the attempt
| to claim how FreeBSD is so much faster than Linux is, that's
| simply not factual. It is rubbish nonsense. Note that OpenBSD and
| NetBSD folks never write such strangeness. What's wrong with the
| FreeBSD guys?
| 4fterd4rk wrote:
| AKSHUALLY...
| anthk wrote:
| The Arch Wiki it's a joke as it gets obsolete with every major
| upgrade. OpenBSD has the FAQ and all of the base it's throughly
| documented. GNU/Linux manpages? Info pages? Often either
| incomplete or missing. Don't let me start on compatibility. On
| your beloved overengineerd turd, you need to resort to either
| containers or hacks to run 10 yo software. FreeBSD will just
| run it through compatNx libraries, where N is the version
| number, and there's a -32 (bit) suffix for obvious needs. Now,
| how can you run legacy software under current Arch Linux? Yeah,
| there's Flatpak, but I've found broken software on it.
|
| Altough on compatibility, under 9front everything it's
| statically compiled, period. Compile, store, copy back, run.
|
| Docs? man pages, and /sys/doc. Easier to be understood and set.
|
| Current Unixes are too bloated. Yes, FreeBSD too. NetBSD and
| OpenBSD, a bit less. GNU/Linux it's such a monster that over
| time I'd guess Guix will just keep Coreutils as a toolbox and
| everything will be jitted Guile/Scheme, and for the rest of the
| distros, it will just be Wayland+Gnome+Flatpak OS. Now try
| hacking _that_. Try creating a working 32 bit OS with it.
| Documentation beyond GUIX ' info files? Good luck, man will be
| a legacy tool called from Info from Guix.
|
| SystemD? Over time, Gnome won't be under non SystemD OSes.
| Forget it under BSD's and shims, KDE will be the only option
| (and under Guix too). The irony, GNU Networked Object Model
| Environment outside of the GNU os.
|
| Meanwhile, by default GNU/Linux has more propietary bits in the
| kernel than GNU bits. Untar it, Radeon depends on nonfree
| firmware. So does tons of SOCS, audio devices, wireless cards.
| Linux Libre + Guix? Not with Gnome, maybe with a Guile
| JIT/AOT'ed desktop environment, a la Cosmic but with AOT'ted
| Guile instead of Rust. Forget cohesiveness, your Redhatware OS
| will be as native to the rest as Waydroid inside Fedora
| Silverblue. Seamless, but not native. And with similar issues
| on running some software in Waydroid without hacks faking up
| the existence of some blobs.
|
| And as tons of infra depends on SystemD and blobs, guess what
| will happen to Arch and the rest of the distros. It will jut be
| second class, Pacman packaged Fedoras.
| guenthert wrote:
| >> I could read my email in mutt while compiling, something
| that was practically impossible on Linux
|
| > Ok sorry, I stopped reading there.
|
| Why? That's a treasured feature. https://xkcd.com/303/
| SanjayMehta wrote:
| I used to but driver support for wireless devices was so
| inconsistent I had to move to Linux.
| crdrost wrote:
| That's unintentionally hilarious -- some of us remember 15-20
| years ago when flaky support for wireless devices was the
| biggest reason people would decide Linux wasn't ready for
| desktop yet and avoid switching from Windows to Linux. (Well,
| Windows to dual-boot -- Windows users were never fully willing
| to let go of the video games angle at the time.)
| Gud wrote:
| Linux had better WiFi 20 years ago than FreeBSD has today.
|
| I still prefer FreeBSD.
| amadeuspagel wrote:
| > Over the years, FreeBSD has served me well. At a certain point
| it stepped down as my primary desktop - partly because I switched
| to Mac, partly because of unsupported hardware - but it never
| stopped being one of my first choices for servers and any serious
| workload.
|
| Not my idea of love. Maybe that hardware was supported on Linux.
| Switch from Linux to FreeBSD so that you can later switch to Mac
| when you get frustrated with unsupported hardware is not a good
| pitch.
| nullpoint420 wrote:
| 100%. It reminds me of how a ton of FreeBSD devs moved to Mac
| during the Darwin days. Then they were abandoned by Apple once
| they stopped contributing to upstream.
| frumplestlatz wrote:
| We weren't abandoned by Apple -- Apple _never_ contributed to
| upstream. Darwin and OpenDarwin were APSL projects and never
| fed code back into FreeBSD.
|
| Using macOS meant we got laptop hardware that worked
| reliably, including Wi-Fi, running a more or less BSD-derived
| userspace.
|
| The lack of graphics and Wi-Fi driver support on the *BSDs is
| not Apple's fault. It has always been a resource issue.
|
| Thanks to the AT&T lawsuit, Linux secured momentum at a
| critical juncture -- and here we are. Path dependence and the
| complexities of real life mean that "winning" is never just a
| question of technical merit.
| pjmlp wrote:
| A consequence of the license, which allows Apple and Sony
| to do exactly that.
| frumplestlatz wrote:
| I and other FreeBSD developers are okay with that -- if
| we weren't, we'd be using a different license.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Looking to some complaints doesn't feel like everyone is.
| hideout_berlin wrote:
| do you remember opendarwin? i was also at puredarwin but
| the project seams death
| frumplestlatz wrote:
| Yes, and Apple did kill it, unfortunately -- but it was
| never an effort to push code upstream into the BSDs.
| freeopinion wrote:
| FreeBSD supports a much larger range of hardware than MacOS.
| It's a bit strange to bemoan hardware support, then switch OS
| and buy very specific hardware for that OS.
|
| Imagine quitting MacOS because it doesn't support Realtek
| RTL8188CUS.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Something that a Mac user or developer, those that have been
| on the ecosystem for decades would never bother to do anyway.
| bitwize wrote:
| Well it just so happens that the best hardware in the world
| for desktop use--literally years ahead of any competition--is
| made by the makers of macOS and is totally supported by
| macOS.
| adrian_b wrote:
| What you say is true only when you define "desktop use" in
| a certain way, which corresponds to what an Apple PC is
| good for.
|
| I define "desktop use" in another way, and for my
| definition any Apple PC is completely non-competitive, by
| having a much lower performance and a much higher price
| than a desktop PC using an AMD Ryzen CPU.
|
| Apple PCs have exceptional single-thread performance, but
| that is irrelevant for me. I care about multi-threaded
| performance and especially about floating-point FP64 and
| big integer computational throughput, for which the Apple
| CPUs are weak, one could say years behind their
| competition, except that Apple does not make any attempt to
| compete in this domain.
|
| An Apple PC may be the optimum PC for your needs and that
| is fine, but you should not believe that any computer user
| has the same needs as you.
| imagetic wrote:
| me too
| krylon wrote:
| My home server has been running FreeBSD for ten years now, and it
| has never let me down. Except for one time I got fresh with
| /dev/speaker and triggered a spontaneous reboot (I don't know if
| it's FreeBSD's fault or the hardware, though).
|
| I delayed upgrading to 15.0 after it was released, but last
| weekend I finally did it, and it left me wondering why I hadn't
| done it sooner, because it went quickly and smoothly.
|
| Is there anything FreeBSD can do that, say, Debian cannot?
| Probably not (at least I cannot think of anything). When I set up
| the server, ZFS was a huge selling point, but I heard that it
| works quite well on Linux, these days. But I appreciate the
| reliability, the good documentation, the community (when I need
| help).
| whizzter wrote:
| My current home server passed 10 years in the autnum, but I've
| been running FreeBSD on servers since around 2000.
|
| The main gripe is probably Docker and/or software depending on
| Linux-isms that can't be run natively without resorting to
| bhyve or smth alike that.
| BirAdam wrote:
| You could just use podman.
| whizzter wrote:
| Theoretically yes, however still limited by how well the
| FreeBSD Linux layer handles syscalls. A year or so back I
| tried running .NET (just binaries, not via a container)
| since the port wasn't as far along as today and it crashed
| due to what I suspect was slight differences in signal
| handling defaults.
|
| And this is part of the situation that's going to get
| worse, io_uring will become more popular in language
| runtimes and iirc it's not trivial to emulate via existing
| FreeBSD mechanisms (kqueue).
|
| Iirc Mac docker uses xhyve (bhyve port/inspired) to run
| containers via Linux emulation, MS went for pv-Linux for
| WSL2, while FreeBSD has been "good enough" so far.
|
| But I think that for containers it's either time to shape
| up Linux emulation well (It's ironic that WSL1 ironed out
| their worst quirks just as WSL2 was introduced, although
| that was without io_uring) or just add an option for Podman
| to have a minimal pv-Linux kernel via bhyve to get better
| compatibility.
| frumplestlatz wrote:
| Indeed, ideally we could get docker on FreeBSD using the
| same approach as is used on macOS -- automatically run
| (one or more) Linux VMs under bhyve.
|
| I wonder if FreeBSD ought to consider a WSL2-style
| approach to Linux binary compatibility, too.
|
| Keeping the Linux syscall compatibility layer up-to-date
| has always been a resource problem, especially when
| syscalls depend on large, complex Linux kernel subsystems
| that just don't map cleanly to FreeBSD kernel facilities.
| jbverschoor wrote:
| Exactly the reason why I switched from FreeBSD to Debian, 25
| years ago
| toast0 wrote:
| > Is there anything FreeBSD can do that, say, Debian cannot?
| Probably not (at least I cannot think of anything).
|
| Stability of user interface and documentation.
| throwaway27448 wrote:
| What documentation does a distro even publish? I only ask
| because freebsd has the most solid documentation I've used of
| any OS I've ever encountered. I seriously doubt Debian has
| documented the linux kernel that well (which, tbf, would be
| an insane project to even attempt)
| toast0 wrote:
| Debian has an installation guide[1]. I'd imagine all the
| major distributions do.
|
| But it probably has to change a lot for every major
| release, because so many things change. FreeBSD major
| releases have changes too, but a lot of the user interfaces
| are very stable and so the documentation can be too. Stable
| documentation allows time for it to be edited and revised
| to become better documentation, as well as developing
| quality translations.
|
| [1] https://www.debian.org/releases/stable/amd64/
| adiabatichottub wrote:
| I've been surprised at times by what's missing. There are
| are some strange omissions, from most recent memory around
| the Bourne shell builtin commands and make(1). I've had to
| go hunting in other BSD distribution manuals at times to
| find what I need. I'd say the GNU core utilities sometimes
| have better docs for their equivalent commands.
|
| That said, for non-core utilities on Linux it's pretty hit-
| or-miss. The BSDs are generally pretty consistent in what
| they do offer, and that's what I love about them. Of course
| it's a different development model and it shows.
| MisterTea wrote:
| ZFS on FreeBSD is first class. I had an old FreeNAS raid z5
| array on 5x 500GB disks that I wanted to check 4 years after
| decommissioning the system. I put together a temporary machine
| with all the disks plugged in and without doing anything the
| live FreeBSD image found and configured the array. I was
| instantly able to look through the file system and even dump it
| to my current FreeBSD server with almost 0 effort. I was sold
| after that. These days I prefer to run small systems and basic
| services. I don't want webguis or docker images anymore.
| adiabatichottub wrote:
| Right. On my development workstation I use Arch and I'm
| always worried a kernel upgrade is going to break the ZFS
| module. For those that aren't familiar, ZFS isn't part of
| mainline Linux because of licensing incompatibility (and
| general distrust of Oracle).
|
| On FreeBSD I know its always going to work.
| znpy wrote:
| Just so you know: the zfs in freebsd and in linux are the
| same codebase. Literally. It's OpenZFS.
|
| Also, a few years ago the FreeBSD people decided to throw
| away their own ZFS implementation and import the linux one
| (OpenZFS) because they couldn't keep up with the development
| pace.
|
| Nowadays ZFS development is collaborative but in each major
| freebsd release it's clearly marked which OpenZFS releases
| they imported in the FreeBSD codebase.
| evanjrowley wrote:
| >Is there anything FreeBSD can do that, say, Debian cannot?
|
| ZFS boot environments.
|
| One could install Debian's root on ZFS by following the OpenZFS
| documentation guide, combine it with ZFSBootMenu (or similar),
| but there won't be any upstream support from the Debian project
| itself.
|
| The Nitrux Linux distribution is based on Debian and provides
| an _immutable_ feature similar to boot environments, but you
| can 't treat your immutable boot images the same way you can
| treat your mutable data like how you can with ZFS datasets on
| FreeBSD.
| sidkshatriya wrote:
| you can use snapper + btrfs and the end result is like
| `bectl`. However it not as simple/integrated as ZFS Boot
| environments on FreeBSD
| shrubble wrote:
| The btrfs code quality seems less than ZFS, based on the
| reports I have read.
| sidkshatriya wrote:
| btrfs is suffering from a lot of old bad publicity and
| some poor design decisions around RAID.
|
| But by now it is a great file system if you don't go near
| RAID5/6. btrfs has its flaws (ZFS has its own flaws!).
| However:
|
| - It's used a lot, especially by facebook and Redhat (on
| fedora)
|
| - Gets a lot of testing
|
| - Sees a lot of bug fixes
|
| - Has a lot of features
|
| I haven't read btrfs code but given that it is a popular
| file system and Linux code quality tends to be good in
| popular subsystems I would hesitate to say its code
| quality is worse than ZFS in any way.
| HackerThemAll wrote:
| btrfs is pathetic when it comes to performance. So no,
| thanks.
|
| https://www.phoronix.com/review/linux-70-filesystems
| GuestFAUniverse wrote:
| In real world scenarios, where file based backups fail,
| one needs to add at least lvm.
|
| And only than those benchmarks would be more interesting
| to me.
| krylon wrote:
| Last I heard (~8 years ago), the RAID-like functionality
| in btrfs was very unstable and crash-prone. The
| impression I got was that there was not a lot of interest
| in fixing this. Then bcachefs came and ... appears to
| have gone nowhere AFAICT.
|
| The non-RAID part of btrfs appears to be stable. It's the
| default filesystem on openSUSE and SLES. But I don't
| think it's ever going to reach feature parity with ZFS.
| krylon wrote:
| On openSUSE Tumbleweed, it is. Each Upgrade creates two
| snapshots, one before, one after, and if anything goes
| wrong, I can boot into a snapshot where the world was still
| in order.
|
| I have a higher opinion of ZFS than I do of btrfs, but FWIW
| snapper+btrfs has worked well for me on openSUSE Tumbleweed
| for ten years now, too.
| zenoprax wrote:
| > Is there anything FreeBSD can do that, say, Debian cannot?
|
| If you asked the opposite (what can Debian do that FreeBSD
| cannot) I would have more to say and it would mostly be
| preceded by "I know FreeBSD is not Linux but ...". Whenever I
| need to do any sort of maintenance or inspection I have to look
| up the equivalent commands for things like `lsblk` and
| something nested in `/usr/etc/...` when I'm used to finding it
| in `/etc/` over every other system.
|
| This is a consequence of both FreeBSD's reliability in needing
| very infrequent attention and my limited use-cases to use it.
| As a NAS it is great but I can't touch it without full-text
| search of all my notes on the side! Either way, no regrets
| about learning and relying on it after ~18 months so far.
| atmosx wrote:
| Lack of docker support? Docker is available on macOS through
| emulation yes but bhyve is a thing... so why not? :-)
| HackerThemAll wrote:
| Docker is a concept resembling FreeBSD's jails that were
| introduced in year 2000, having much better isolation, much
| better security than Docker has had for a long time
| (perhaps even now jails are still superior to Docker).
| overfeed wrote:
| Better isolation, better security, but far fewer gists
| and shared config-files shared ok the Internet for common
| tasks. Docker comprehensively wkn thr popularity contest,
| and is often the more convenient solution because of it,
| in a _worse is better_ way.
| assimpleaspossi wrote:
| That's why I don't use Linux. It lacks Jail support.
| joshstrange wrote:
| Lack of good NFS support? When we benchmarked it last it was
| 10x+ slower than running on linux (ubuntu).
|
| Also lack of collective mindshare. I use FreeBSD at work
| every since day and while I don't hate it, I do wish we just
| used Linux. There are more guides, tools, etc for Linux than
| for FreeBSD. Yes, as a comment in this sub-thread stated,
| jails exist but everyone knows docker, not jails. So even
| with jails apparently being better than containers, it
| doesn't really matter, there isn't the ecosystem there.
|
| FreeBSD might be as good as this blog author makes it out to
| be, and maybe I'm "holding it wrong" (always a strong
| possibility) but I can't help but feel it causes more
| friction than I'd like, it's just "slightly" harder to do
| anything. In the age of LLMs I have to tell it (or put it in
| my system prompt) "I'm using FreeBSD" or it will be give me
| Linux advice. It just feels like death by a thousand
| papercuts.
| assimpleaspossi wrote:
| >>maybe I'm "holding it wrong" (always a strong
| possibility)
|
| Yes. You are holding it wrong. And it's obvious from your
| comment.
| irishcoffee wrote:
| A tool that is non-obvious in how to use it is a tool
| problem, not a user problem.
| jmmv wrote:
| > I delayed upgrading to 15.0 after it was released, but last
| weekend I finally did it, and it left me wondering why I hadn't
| done it sooner, because it went quickly and smoothly.
|
| I haven't done that yet because I think I'd want to switch to
| pkgbase but that makes me nervous. Did you go with that option
| or continued to use the sets?
| sidkshatriya wrote:
| Why not create a boot environment and try out FreeBSD 15 with
| pkgbase ? If the experiment is successful just make the boot
| environment the default otherwise throw it away...
|
| With such powerful tools I find it fascinating that FreeBSD
| users are not more willing to experiment !
| jmmv wrote:
| To be honest I've never tried boot environments. I know
| they are a thing, and I have my whole setup on ZFS, so
| maybe that's the perfect use case.
| krylon wrote:
| I haven't switched to pkgbase. Yet. I don't intend to for the
| time being. I set up a VM to test it, but I haven't gotten
| around to actually testing it.
| atmosx wrote:
| > Is there anything FreeBSD can do that, say, Debian cannot?
|
| Yes. Emulate traffic latency using IPFW and dummynet[^1]. There
| is no Linux (or OpenBSD, NetBSD) counterpart.
|
| The ZFS implementation is less buggy.
|
| [^1]: https://man.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?dummynet
| c0balt wrote:
| That is not really accurate? Linux traffic control (tc, [0])
| exists since Kernel 2.2. It can introduce traffic latency and
| a few other network conditions, like packet loss.
|
| [0]: https://www.man7.org/linux/man-pages/man8/tc.8.html
| atmosx wrote:
| Hmm kind of... I was referring to the fact that dummynet
| models pipes with a fixed bandwidth and centralized
| scheduler. Packets are released according to very high
| precision transmission timing. This means that
| serialization delay, queue buildup, and link behavior are
| simulated in a way that resembles real network conditions.
| Dummynet can provide a highly deterministic timing and
| queue behavior, which made it popular in networking
| research and WAN emulation experiments. TC cannot do that
| with the same accuracy.
|
| I think much like other tools, think SELinux vs OpenBSD
| (unveil, etc) TC is more flexible (does more things) but
| there are _some things_ that can't do, and even for things
| both can do *BSD solutions are much simpler.
| allreduce wrote:
| You can emulate latency, packet errors, etc using netem tc
| [0] on Linux.
|
| [0]: https://man.archlinux.org/man/tc-netem.8.en
| favorited wrote:
| > The ZFS implementation is less buggy.
|
| FreeBSD and Linux have been using the same implementation of
| ZFS for years.
| atmosx wrote:
| AFAIK the most common is ARC but there are other areas as
| well.
|
| On Linux, ARC memory is reclaimed using the kernel shrinker
| API which has historically been a problem. There has been
| several bugs leading to OOMs or system freeze due to high
| memory usage on systems that use ARC heavily.
|
| On FreeBSD ARC is integrated directly with the VM
| subsystem. The stack is simpler, less bug-prone.
|
| Now this is not a ZFS algo/whatever problem. It's an
| implementation/subsystem issue but it's still something to
| keep an eye on for the ZFS admin.
|
| ps. I'm using ZFS on Linux for 15 years on a self-hosted,
| home backup server and only once I've had mem issues
| leading to crashes when I misconfigured the ARC. So it's
| fairly _stable_ but still not FreeBSD-level stable.
| gsich wrote:
| What I really want is the Windows tool for that. Can't call
| it equivalent, because clunsy is way superior.
|
| https://jagt.github.io/clumsy/index.html
| adrian_b wrote:
| There are various niche applications where Debian or any Linux
| are worse than FreeBSD.
|
| For example the support for magnetic tapes and for a few other
| SCSI peripherals is better in FreeBSD. The Linux utility for
| controlling a LTO tape drive lacks some important options that
| the corresponding FreeBSD utility has.
|
| I have a tape drive, and to be able to use it like I want I had
| to move it to a FreeBSD server.
|
| Some years ago I was using a surveillance camera that was much
| easier to use in FreeBSD than in Linux, if you wanted to record
| good quality video and audio. I have not tried more recently to
| use such cameras in Linux, to see if now the recording quality
| is better.
|
| So while there are more hardware devices that have better
| support in Linux than in FreeBSD, there are also devices with
| better support in FreeBSD than in Linux.
|
| However the main reason why I use FreeBSD on many of my servers
| is that I need much less time for their administration than for
| Linux servers. In my experience, Linux servers need much less
| time for administration than Windows servers, and FreeBSD
| compares to Linux like Linux to Windows.
|
| I have FreeBSD servers that I have not touched for years, and
| they have worked 24/7 with no downtime and no rebooting, and
| this includes servers connected directly to the Internet, which
| implement firewalls, routers and various services, like NTP,
| DNS servers and proxies, e-mail servers, web servers and
| proxies etc.
| irishcoffee wrote:
| > Some years ago I was using a surveillance camera that was
| much easier to use in FreeBSD than in Linux, if you wanted to
| record good quality video and audio. I have not tried more
| recently to use such cameras in Linux, to see if now the
| recording quality is better.
|
| This example seems very hand-wavy. What camera?
| adrian_b wrote:
| A Logitech FullHD camera on USB, but I doubt that the
| problem was camera-specific. I believe that I would have
| seen the same behavior on any high-resolution USB camera.
|
| In FreeBSD, the command required for recording was very
| simple and it worked flawlessly. In Linux, it was more
| complex and there were various stuttering problems at
| maximum resolution. I am still using those cameras, but I
| have not tried them again in Linux. In Linux they worked
| worse than in FreeBSD around 5 years ago, perhaps nowadays
| there is no longer any problem in Linux.
|
| This was intended to be an example that you cannot know a
| priori whether a given device will work better on FreeBSD
| or on Linux. In general, there is a greater probability for
| Linux to have good support than for FreeBSD, but there are
| also counterexamples, so you cannot be certain which is
| better until you try both.
| irishcoffee wrote:
| I am sorry, I have a hard time accepting this level of
| detail, acknowledging it was half a decade ago.
|
| In a nutshell, you content that FreeBSD running on the
| same hardware as "a linux" performed better with camera
| operations. However, you did not specify even a specific
| camera model, or the interface(s) used to interact with
| the camera.
|
| I have zero issue accepting that a BSD is better than a
| linux at things, pretending otherwise is foolish.
| However, this specific example isn't tracking.
| adiabatichottub wrote:
| > I have FreeBSD servers that I have not touched for years,
| and they have worked 24/7 with no downtime and no rebooting,
| and this includes servers connected directly to the Internet,
| which implement firewalls, routers and various services, like
| NTP, DNS servers and proxies, e-mail servers, web servers and
| proxies etc.
|
| Same. We've got qmail config files with 2006 as the mtime
| MarkusWandel wrote:
| Cameras? I suppose the world still has some weird cameras
| that need proprietary/weird drivers, but for all intents and
| purposes: USB cameras are UVC and work with a generic driver,
| and IP cameras are OnVIF and work with ffmpeg. I can't
| imagine the latter having any OS dependencies as far as
| Linux/BSD/Mac/Windows is concerned. Quality is fine - I have
| a bunch recording 24/7 with high quality audio and video.
| righthand wrote:
| FreeBsd is Systemd free.
| liendolucas wrote:
| FreeBSD is an amazing beast. I'm currently using it as my
| workstation, and because I need to use Linux, bhyve came to the
| rescue and is easy to use it through the `vm` wrapper tool. It
| works like a charm and it is built in.
|
| Being that said, on FreeBSD 15, I believe I've found a serious
| bug: when I disconnect a USB optical mouse on the "Lenovo 16 G7
| ARP" the system completes freezes and reboots, I guess it
| reaches a kernel panic. It took me a few disconnections of the
| power, ethernet and finally the mouse to detect this condition.
|
| Surprinsingly this does not happen if the device is wireless (I
| tried to remove the receiver of a Trackball and the system
| keeps working just fine). I find this really weird and don't
| know if actually report it in the FreeBSD forums, maybe is just
| a glitch on this particular laptop or it has something to do
| with the touchpad, just guessing here.
|
| Putting this particular issue aside, I'm extremely happy that
| almost everything works with little or no effort on a
| recent/modern laptop.
|
| BSDs in general are fantastic OSes.
| CodeCompost wrote:
| I'd love to move my home server to FreeBSD but I would like to
| run Immich on it.
|
| Immich assumes you're running Docker and I can't seem to get
| Linux running in a bhyve VM with Intel Quick Sync acceleration.
| messe wrote:
| Could be worth checking out: https://github.com/immich-
| app/immich/discussions/24931
| jaypatelani wrote:
| I prefer syncting
| smm11 wrote:
| I could never get sleep to work, and got tired of rebooting 17
| times a day.
| ogogmad wrote:
| OpenBSD might have "better" support for sleep and hibernate,
| but I didn't succeed in installing it on this laptop: I think
| it required me to connect an Ethernet cable, which I wasn't
| going to do.
|
| Veering even more off-topic: I've just installed OpenSUSE Kalpa
| on this laptop. That's not regular OpenSUSE, by the way.
| Previously, each of the like, 5 problems I've encountered doing
| it, would've caused me to give up - but ChatGPT helped me fix
| all of them! I think this is going to become my daily driver
| for a while now.
| evanjrowley wrote:
| One of my favorite FreeBSD features is first-class support for
| ZFS boot environments. These have been working in FreeBSD/Solaris
| since 2008[0]. Having each boot environment available as a ZFS
| snapshot capable of being managed the same way as any other
| dataset, capable of being sent and received, is such a powerful
| feature. I dilligently watch the _immutable_ / _atomic_ Linux
| space to see when something implements this in the same fashion.
|
| Ubuntu could have been the one, but they reversed course after
| dropping support for Zsys in 2022[1].
|
| If there are others, then please let me know, but as far as I can
| tell, the closest approximations in Linux are:
|
| - Btrfs with Snapper in OpenSuse Tumbleweed/MicroOS
|
| - Snapshot Manager/Boom in RHEL
|
| - OStree in Fedora Atomic, CarbonOS, EndlessOS
|
| - Bootable container implementations in Fedora CoreOS, RHEL10,
| CarbonOS, Bazzite, BlendOS, etc.
|
| - Snaps in Ubuntu Core
|
| - Generations in NixOS and Guix
|
| - A/B update mechanism in ChromeOS, IncusOS
|
| - OverlayFS in Nitrux Linux
|
| - Ad-hoc implementations with Arch, Alpine, etc.
|
| Excluding the ad-hoc implementations, only OpenSuse and Red Hat
| approaches allow you to treat your system image and system data
| the same way. They're great, but fundamentally incompatible, and
| neither has caught on with other distributions. Capabilities of
| both approaches are limited compared to ZFS.
|
| The strangest part of the Linux situation IMHO is, every time ZFS
| on Linux is discussed, someone will invariably bring up XFS. For
| the past decade, XFS on Linux contains support for Copy-on-Write
| (CoW) and snapshots via relinking. If this is the preferred path
| on Linux (for users who don't want checksumming of
| ZFS/Btrfs/Bcachefs), then how come no major distros besides Red
| Hat have embraced it[2] to provide an update rollback
| functionality?
|
| I concede that most of the other approaches do provide a higher
| level level of determinism for what your root system looks like
| after an upgrade. It's powerful when you can test that system as
| an OCI container (or as a VM with Nix/Guix). FWIW, FreeBSD can
| approximate this with the ability to use it's boot environments
| as a jail[3].
|
| [0] https://daemonforums.org/showthread.php?t=7099
|
| [1]
| https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/ubiquity/+bug/1968...
|
| [2]
| https://docs.redhat.com/en/documentation/red_hat_enterprise_...
|
| [3]
| https://man.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=bectl&sektion=8&ma...
| aforwardslash wrote:
| I don't want to be _that_ guy, but zfs on freebsd was kind-of-
| experimental until around 2012;AFAIK in 2012 (Freebsd 9) root
| on zfs was a manual process, and not that easy to upgrade. Root
| on zfs is somewhat "recent"- it took years to get to the
| installer. My company at the time was basically a bsd shop
| (openbsd and freebsd), and the opensolaris(12?) version was
| still quite ahead. Still have my opensolaris tshirt of "first
| 5000" :)
| seethishat wrote:
| I love OpenBSD for similar reasons, except, I still run it as my
| primary desktop and on an old Chromebook. It just works. No drama
| with updates. Upgrade every six months. I'd be lost without it.
| hideout_berlin wrote:
| i plan to run netbsd on my chromebook do you have a good
| manual? or how to?
| stego-tech wrote:
| I think I finally know what to do with my second NUC: FreeBSD.
|
| I'm in the process of converting and consolidating all my home
| infra into a mono-compose, for the simple reason _I don 't want
| to fiddle with shit, I just want to set-and-forget_. The joy of
| technology was in communications and experiences, not having to
| dive through abstraction layers to figure out why something was
| being _fiddly_. Containers promised to remove the fiddliness (as
| every virtualization advancement inevitably promises), and now I
| 'm forced to either fiddle with Docker and its root security
| issues, fiddle with Podman and reconfiguring the OS for lower
| security so containers don't stop (or worse, converting compose
| to systemd files to make them services), or fiddle with
| Kubernetes to make things work with a myriad of ancillary
| services and CRDs for enterprises, not homelabs.
|
| For two years now, there's been a pretty consistent campaign of
| love-letters for the BSDs that keep tugging at what I love about
| technology: that the whole point was to enable you to _spend more
| time living_ , rather than wrangling what a computer does and how
| it does it. The concept of jails where I can just run _software_
| again, no abstractions needed, and trust it to not misbehave?
| _Amazing_ , I want to learn more.
|
| So yeah, in lieu of setting up the second NUC as a Debian HA node
| for Docker/QEMU failover, I think I'm going to slap FreeBSD on it
| and try porting my workloads to it via Jails. Worst case
| scenario, I learn something new; best case scenario, I finally
| get what I want and can finally catch up on my books, movies,
| shows, and music instead of constantly fiddling with why Plex or
| Jellyfin or my RSS Aggregator stopped functioning, _again_.
| MarkusWandel wrote:
| Early in my Unix-ish at home journey (26-ish years ago) I tried
| FreeBSD. It was so _Unix_ because, well, it is. An operating
| system, not a collection of parts. I found _at the time_ in Linux
| land Debian felt similar.
|
| But there is always pressure for more features, more bloat. In
| Linux, on the plus side, I can plug in some random gadget and in
| most cases it just works. And any laptop that's a few years old,
| you can just install Fedora from its bootable live image, and it
| will work. Secure boot, suspend, Wifi, the special buttons on the
| keyboard, and so on. But the downside is enormous bloat and yes,
| often the kind of tinkering you really don't want to do any more,
| such as the Brother laser printer drivers still being shipped as
| 32-bit binaries and the installer silently failing because one
| particular 32-bit dependency wasn't autoinstalled. Or having to
| get an Ubuntu-dedicated installer (Displaylink!) to run on
| Fedora.
|
| But here you have the "mainstream" Unix-ish OS absorbing all the
| bleeding edge stuff, all the bloat. Allowing FreeBSD free reign
| to be pure, with a higher average quality of _user_ , which sets
| the tone of the whole scene. An echo of the old days, like Usenet
| before "Eternal September" and before Canter & Siegel - for those
| old enough to remember how it all felt back then.
| sidkshatriya wrote:
| > But the downside is enormous bloat
|
| If you think Linux can have "enormous bloat" then Windows bloat
| by the same standards is terrifyingly humongous (and slow!).
| Asooka wrote:
| It is.
| philistine wrote:
| FreeBSD is the macOS to Linux's Windows. Or better yet, the iOS
| to Linux's Android.
| steve1977 wrote:
| I mean, parts of FreeBSD literally are in macOS and iOS...
| gosukiwi wrote:
| When I tried FreeBSD, I was also blown away by the manual, so
| simple, such high-quality documentation. I think what I liked the
| most is that it felt coherent, unlike modern OS like Linux and
| Windows. I think macOS might be the most cohesive of the popular
| OS's.
| hedora wrote:
| I recently spent 20 minutes reading forum posts and vague
| documentation because MacOS couldn't confirm a .md file wasn't
| free of malware.
|
| I could say some nice things about MacOS, but it certainly is
| not "cohesive" any more.
| sgt wrote:
| Well written and clearly not AI generated. So refreshing these
| days.
| commandersaki wrote:
| Ran a FreeBSD colocated server for about a decade that went
| through generations of hardware. I really want to like the OS,
| except it's most touted feature, the network stack, was
| consistently unreliable for me using Intel NICs on Supermicro
| servers. They would go offline usually after some load due to
| mbuf resource exhaustion. I never got to the bottom of it even
| though I posted to the bugs database and would diligently follow
| up and perform experiments. This also happened on different
| incarnations of server hardware, so it wasn't the same physical
| NIC having the issue, but different varieties.
|
| Anyways had enough of the random downtime, I just switched to
| Linux which didn't have these issues.
|
| I'd say the best part of FreeBSD though is freebsd-update which
| was a game changer from the previous make world shenanigans.
| dewarrn1 wrote:
| Hail u/cperciva.
| commandersaki wrote:
| Or rather all hail u/cperciva for freebsd-update.
| doublerabbit wrote:
| I colocate all my servers that all run FreeBSD.
|
| Myself has been through generational hardware, and had had zero
| issues with any apart from when the raid card failed.
|
| Network has been solid. ZFS has just worked. Not sure what your
| issues were however colocating since FreeBSD 8, and now
| colocating 16-CURRENT on my the server. FreeBSD has been rock
| stable in my books.
|
| 2x Dell R630 and 1x Cisco U220 M5
| doublerabbit@cookie:~ $ uname -a && uptime FreeBSD
| cookie.server 12.2-BETA1 FreeBSD 12.2-BETA1 r365618 GENERIC
| amd64 10:39PM up 1752 days, 1:31, 1 user, load
| averages: 0.64, 1.30, 1.31
| kev009 wrote:
| Intel has had a somewhat awkward relationship with FreeBSD
| forever. While they are forced to support it (for $reasons)
| they never have properly covered it.
|
| I would say as of FreeBSD 12-13 most major issues are addressed
| from 1gig up to current 100g. There is an odd bug in 2.5g igc
| where some users have interface stalls whilst others like
| Netgate are shipping large numbers without issue, waiting to
| hear if this is firmware or not.
|
| Source: I maintain several of the Intel drivers on a volunteer
| basis and used to send several Tbit/s to the Internet over them
| professionally.
| adrian_b wrote:
| I do not believe that your problems are typical for FreeBSD
| servers.
|
| I have been using FreeBSD servers for around 30 years. Most of
| them had Intel NICs and I have used at least 5 or 6 different
| kinds of Supermicro motherboards, both with Xeon and with Epyc.
|
| Most servers have worked 24/7, without being rebooted for years
| and without having any minute of downtime except when I did
| some hardware upgrade or kernel upgrade.
|
| I do not doubt that you had the problems described, but there
| must be some very unusual circumstances that have caused this.
| I would not be surprised if there was some problem with the
| version of Supermicro BIOS of your motherboards, and not with
| FreeBSD, because I have seen many bugs in Supermicro firmware.
| Or perhaps you had some buggy version of Intel NICs.
|
| There is one advantage of Linux over FreeBSD, which is not
| widely known. Linux has a huge database of known bugs in
| various peripheral devices, including Ethernet NICs, and when
| one of those is recognized it applies workarounds for the bugs.
|
| Like any other operating system, FreeBSD also implements
| workarounds for peripheral interfaces with known bugs, but
| because it has a much smaller user base also its database of
| bugs includes much fewer bugs, typically only those that had
| been reported by FreeBSD users. Because of this, I have seen
| cases when some hardware devices did not work well in FreeBSD,
| while they worked well in Linux, and the reason was always
| because Linux knew that they must not be used in the standard
| way, but it applied the corresponding workaround for their
| bugs.
|
| Only Windows is shielded from the problems caused by bugs,
| because the hardware vendors write themselves the Windows
| device drivers and include in them any required workarounds for
| their bugs.
| sidkshatriya wrote:
| > There is one advantage of Linux over FreeBSD, which is not
| widely known. Linux has a huge database of known bugs in
| various peripheral devices, including Ethernet NICs, and when
| one of those is recognized it applies workarounds for the
| bugs.
|
| Almost universal hardware support and workarounds for quirks
| is precisely the reason why everyone uses Linux even if they
| might want to use FreeBSD or something else. In other words,
| this advantage is known and is the reason why Linux is
| dominant in the server space today.
| adrian_b wrote:
| It is widely known that Linux has "better" hardware support
| for many peripheral devices, but few know what "better"
| means, i.e. that a lot of devices that you can buy have
| various bugs and in most cases their vendors do not
| document the bugs in any way, because they provide Windows
| drivers that contain workarounds for the bugs, and they do
| not care about other operating systems.
|
| The users of other operating systems must discover the bugs
| and how to handle them by reverse engineering, and here
| Linux has the advantage of a much greater user base than
| any alternative, so in most cases the bugs will be
| identified by some Linux user, and then either the user or
| the maintainers of the corresponding Linux subsystem will
| implement a workaround for the bug.
| commandersaki wrote:
| This looks to be a theme in FreeBSD, specifically tweaking
| mbuf numbers because of exhaustion [1], [2], [3], [4] (and
| not to mention any posted on the freebsd bug tracker). The
| fact that you have options to tweak mbufs and limits in the
| first place just doesn't seem like a well thought out design
| -- in Linux you never have to specify skbuff (Linux's mbuf
| equivalent) numbers for any reason. I don't even know if my
| issue was hardware specific or just a FreeBSD-ism to do with
| mbufs, but it is a class of issue that just doesn't exist in
| Linux.
|
| [1] https://serverfault.com/questions/335461/pfsense-mbuf-
| full-w...
|
| [2] https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/394876/how-to-
| fix-m...
|
| [3] https://redmine.pfsense.org/issues/5553
|
| [4] https://docs.netgate.com/pfsense/en/latest/hardware/tune.
| htm...
| w4rh4wk5 wrote:
| For someone who has multiple years of experience using Linux for
| desktop and servers, what's the best way to get into FreeBSD? Any
| specific recommendations for desktop, like is Wayland ready on
| FreeBSD?
| xenophonf wrote:
| I love FreeBSD for its documentation. To answer your question
| about Wayland specifically:
|
| https://docs.freebsd.org/en/books/handbook/wayland/
|
| If you want something with a graphical environment ready to
| run, check out GhostBSD, which is based on FreeBSD and features
| MATE:
|
| https://www.ghostbsd.org/
| adiabatichottub wrote:
| I've been using both Linux and BSD since 2000. Honestly, I
| prefer Linux on the desktop. My dev workstation runs Arch, and
| I keep a FreeBSD VM running to do OS and ports builds.
|
| As a server OS I find FreeBSD really consistent and easy to
| administrate. I never have trouble finding things: packages
| always go in /usr/local. The old-school init system works great
| at what it's designed to do, and all the startup scripts are
| easy to understand. The whole thing just feels kind of cozy and
| familiar. If you like working in a shell then FreeBSD just kind
| of feels like /home.
|
| Coming from modern Linux though, some of the constructs can
| feel a bit outdated. Usually this gives me a warm fuzzy
| feeling, but sometimes it's a real pain (looking at you,
| make(1)). It's like hacking Perl, once you understand the idiom
| and what it's good at then you can be good friends.
|
| If you want to run a mail server for 20 years and go through
| multiple hardware and OS upgrades with minimal pain and maximal
| uptime then you can't beat it.
| myylogic wrote:
| beacuse u are lucky
| aap_ wrote:
| I was using FreeBSD (after NetBSD) as my primary system for a
| while in school (no, i can't watch this youtube video, flash
| doesn't run on FreeBSD). i still use it for my home server, it's
| just cozy.
| c-c-c-c-c wrote:
| that makes no sense, youtube hasn't used flash in ages. If you
| use any modern browser on freebsd you'd be able to play the
| video.
| brcmthrowaway wrote:
| Does FreeBSD support latest PCIe generations and Thunderbolt?
| aborsy wrote:
| Can we say FreeBSD is more secure than Linux, because it's
| smaller and less of a target?
|
| Not clear!
| aforwardslash wrote:
| Rule of thumb, its not. Common stuff like address randomization
| is a recent default, afaik still doesnt have random process
| ids, and the base permissions arent stellar. However I would
| prefer jails any day of the week vs the clusterf** that are
| namespaces and cgroups.
| dwrodri wrote:
| Serious FreeBSD question: I like a lot of what FreeBSD promises,
| but have been hesitant to make the leap for my home server as I
| enjoy hosting game servers via steamcmd. I know FreeBSD has Linux
| binary compatibility, but I am unsure how this would play out for
| all of my hosting needs. Also, I have some old Nvidia GPUs in
| this machine, which I might get rid of as they are no longer
| supported by the latest releases of ML packages, but I also might
| keep them around for self-teaching CUDA.
|
| How do FreeBSD users get around the inconveniences associated
| with the "the rest of the world" running on Linux?
| hedora wrote:
| Hey; Linux refugee here.
|
| I want to have a bunch (5-10) of freebsd cattle-style servers to
| run a service on.
|
| What's the preferred infrastructure as code style approach to
| setting them up?
|
| Some will be bare metal with kvm console access. Some will be
| VMs. They will be heterogeneous and not in one DC.
|
| I probably don't need zfs for this application (raw iops matter
| more than snapshots, etc).
|
| I have previous experience with kubernetes, and am not interested
| in using it again.
|
| Monitoring, logging, deterministic "zero to working" install and
| updates are probably the main requirements.
| ijustlovemath wrote:
| how about ansible?
| hedora wrote:
| I don't have any experience with it, but it sounds plausible.
| What about FreeBSD / Unix native things, like syslog or
| jails?
| ochoseis wrote:
| Nomad?
| QuantumNoodle wrote:
| I ran a TrueNAS server that was based on BSD, loved jails. Then
| TrueNAS started using debian so more application can run on it.
| Selfishly I like getting more utility from my server so this was
| a welcomed change. What industry is BSD used in now a days?
| h4kunamata wrote:
| I am a long time Debian Netinst (terminal) user, and Mint
| Cinnamon for Desktop. OPNSense run on FreeBSD and it just works.
|
| My personal issue is that I do not believe FreeBSD will give me a
| smooth experience to get my GPU and what not running. On Mint
| Cinnamon, I only had to install the latest supported kernel to
| get my RTX and WiFi6 card recognised.
|
| Debian, the reason why I run Debian as a server everywhere, even
| in my 3D printer is because it just work, and not just that.
|
| I only run Debian Netinst version, that means to only install
| standard system and SSH, text mode is the way.
|
| We are talking about 300MB of memory being used by Pihole +
| Unbound Recursive DNS of 512MB running on a Debian 13.
|
| Disk space?? 1GB or so I guess.
|
| These are my blockers to even try raw FreeBSD, lack of proper
| hardware support and as a server even if I remove everything I
| can, I do not imagine FreeBSD running with 300MB/1G of resources.
|
| Not to mention if you work in IT in any way, the last thing you
| wanna is fighting the system you use to solve another problem,
| that is why I left Ubuntu after 13years or so, it is a Windows
| within the Linux world now.
|
| A distro Linux must just run, no dramas, no issues, major system
| release goes like nothing happened. That matters!!!
| pfp wrote:
| Ok, where are the companies using FreeBSD?
|
| How do you get hired if you do happen to have proper FreeBSD
| skills? It's notably absent from all the job listings.
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