17 ms·

You should try FreeBSD (2014)

174 points by eatonphil 11y ago

jsnell 11y ago
> Many major companies like Google or Netflix use FreeBSD in production. Citation needed on that Google part. It seems unlikely to be true on any meaningful scale. (That is, when writing a FreeBSD advocacy article, maybe you should not be using the largest Linux user in the world as the FreeBSD example).
myxlptlk 11y ago
As far as I know, FreeBSD is more secure than most of the out of the box Linux versions(not considering jails). Does anyone know an article that illustrates this?
- unluckier 11y ago
  I've heard the opposite. Although it's comparing to OpenBSD in this case, here's a good graphic that shows the exploit mitigations that FreeBSD provides by default: http://networkfilter.blogspot.com/2014/12/security-openbsd-vs-freebsd.html#out_of_the_box http://networkfilter.blogspot.com/2014/12/security-openbsd-v...
- corv 11y ago
  There is HardenedBSD http://hardenedbsd.org/ http://hardenedbsd.org/, which is working on filling gaps between OpenBSD and FreeBSD security. OpenBSD is definitely more secure out of the box than Linux.
asuffield 11y ago
(Tedious disclaimer: not speaking for anybody else, my opinion only, etc. I'm an SRE at Google.) > Many major companies like Google or Netflix use FreeBSD in production. Erm. Well, the company's so huge that I'm sure there's something with some freebsd in it somewhere, but... not really. I've worked with freebsd extensively in a past job, where it was used for licensing reasons. I don't agree with this article.
- cannam 11y ago
  Yahoo used to run largely on FreeBSD, at least up to the mid 2000s. Wonder whether they still use it.
  - krenoten 11y ago
    They have mostly moved away from it.
  - ashishrvce 11y ago
    New machines are using RedHat. Some of the older machines still run FreeBSD.
  - JdeBP 11y ago
    Enjoy reading https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10558288 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10558288 .
- unethical_ban 11y ago
  Netflix uses FreeBSD as a major component of its CDN (IIRC, it's the OS on all their CDN nodes).
  - Freaky 11y ago
    Yup: https://openconnect.netflix.com/software/ https://openconnect.netflix.com/software/ They're actively giving back a lot of their work too: http://v4.freshbsd.org/search?q=netflix http://v4.freshbsd.org/search?q=netflix
  - Thaxll 11y ago
    Most of the CDN isn't served by open connect but by real CDN like Akamai.
    - emaste 11y ago
      That used to be the case, but Netflix started building out their own CDN a few years ago and they've migrated away from their legacy providers. Netflix is now serving about a third of US peak time internet traffic from FreeBSD.
unluckier 11y ago
How's FreeBSD doing in the exploit mitigation department? Last I checked, they didn't even have ASLR. http://networkfilter.blogspot.com/2014/12/security-openbsd-vs-freebsd.html#out_of_the_box http://networkfilter.blogspot.com/2014/12/security-openbsd-v...
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- corv 11y ago
  HardenedBSD http://hardenedbsd.org/ http://hardenedbsd.org/ has completed a fork of FreeBSD with ASLR.
- floatboth 11y ago
  HardenedBSD has ASLR, they're working on upstreaming it to FreeBSD.
- mhandley 11y ago
  I'm not sure I'd place much faith in ASLR these days. Bittau's Blind Return Oriented Programming (BROP) http://www.scs.stanford.edu/brop/ http://www.scs.stanford.edu/brop/ makes that only a speedbump, not a real obstacle, for any server that suffers from a stack overflow vulnerability and respawns after a crash. Basically, you can read the return address off the stack a byte at a time by detecting the difference between a crash (you got the overflowed byte wrong) and no-crash (you got the overflowed byte correct). Doesn't take long to recover the return address, and hence find the text location. Their paper is a really fun read!
  - unluckier 11y ago
    We all know that exploit mitigations aren't perfect. But to not even bother using them... that's just ridiculous. There are plenty of scenarios where ASLR helps prevent exploitation. And the fact that FreeBSD doesn't even have it is pretty damning.
    - mhandley 11y ago
gamesbrainiac 11y ago
I definitely think people should give FreeBSD a try. I also think they should give different flavors or linux a try (e.g. Arch Linux). What I don't agree with is using FreeBSD or a non-mainstream OS in production unless you really know what you're doing. There are many reasons for this, but the most important one is what the article alluded to; there is a plethora of resources for troubleshooting an issue. If you can't install a package like `gfortran` on something like ubuntu, then you can head over to askubuntu and will likely get the solution to your problem. What I think FreeBSD (or any less widely used OS for that matter) should do is create the right kind of easily searchable support structure that people coming from Ubuntu and CentOS take for granted. If you read the article closely, it does not point to a canonical support structure. This does not mean there isn't one or for that matter, many. But, what I can decipher is that there isn't a de-facto site that you can get help from.
- corv 11y ago
  There is canonical support such as the excellent handbook: https://www.freebsd.org/doc/en/books/handbook/ https://www.freebsd.org/doc/en/books/handbook/ The forums and mailing lists are also full of very knowledgeable users and developers. Besides, FreeBSD's Jails eat Docker for lunch as long as you don't need a point and click App store for your containers.
- eatonphil 11y ago
  I'm sure many people will tell you that the FreeBSD man pages [0] are an incredible resource and some of the best written man pages out there. From experience, the official handbook [1] was incredibly helpful as well. That said, the forums are not the most helpful place because there are /so/ many configurations out there and so many "right" ways to do things that it makes finding a working solution incredibly difficult. [0] https://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi https://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi [1] https://www.freebsd.org/doc/handbook/ https://www.freebsd.org/doc/handbook/
axx 11y ago
If you're interested in a video tutorial on how to set up FreeBSD, these are good videos to start: https://vimeo.com/channels/freebsdguides https://vimeo.com/channels/freebsdguides
pge 11y ago
I used FreeBSD for a couple of years but now use Arch (after a fling with Ubuntu in between). Reasons I switched (some of which may have been addressed since): * building everything from source got old * lack of support for hardware (Linux has gotten really good at having drivers for hardware) * ports of desktop applications were not always available, and the POSIX shim to use Linux applications didnt always work without some hacking * On the server side, Linux pretty much caught up on performance * As the Linux community has grown, the resources available to Linux users are amazing. FreeBSD feels like Linux used to - always having to hack around and try to research how to make it work and nothing quite working smoothly (on the desktop - less of an issue for servers, where FreeBSD has always shined). Linux has reached a point where I use Linux as my primary desktop OS, and it works great. FreeBSD for the desktop feels like a step backwards.
- deaddodo 11y ago
  > * building everything from source got old You....don't have to. You haven't had to for years. Just use pkg instead of ports. > * lack of support for hardware (Linux has gotten really good at having drivers for hardware) Other than wireless, FreeBSD's driver support is pretty solid. I have a cutting edge machine (haswell-e, nvidia, ddr4, etc) and not one device is unsupported. In fact, FreeBSD has much less hassle with the audio driver than any Linux distro I've tried. > * ports of desktop applications were not always available, and the POSIX shim to use Linux applications didnt always work without some hacking Well yeah, it's still a different OS. If you need some specific commercial software (source unavailable), you'll probably have to jump through some hoops to get it working. > * On the server side, Linux pretty much caught up on performance Sure. But when performance is on par, it's not really a factor anymore. At that point, it's just what is easiest/most enjoyable to manage. > * As the Linux community has grown, the resources available to Linux users are amazing. FreeBSD feels like Linux used to - always having to hack around and try to research how to make it work and nothing quite working smoothly I've never run into this issue. As long as you aren't just trying to run commands from stackoverflow, you should be able to adapt things for the few nuances pretty easily. It's really just about knowing your OS. Again, not necessarily true for commercial software...but the case for most FOSS.
- anon6_ 11y ago
eatonphil 11y ago
I recently switched my dev machine (laptop) from Ubuntu to FreeBSD because I wanted the experience. I wrote a post about it[0]. Basically, wifi and graphics were a PITA and I brute forced my way into getting them working. After getting past those two though, everything else just worked. The simplicity of the system compared to Debian/Ubuntu is just astounding. I haven't yet gotten into jails or bhyve, but those are the next two things I'm very excited to work toward. [0] http://blog.eatonphil.com/2015-11-18/two-weeks-of-freebsd---current-impressions http://blog.eatonphil.com/2015-11-18/two-weeks-of-freebsd---...
- corv 11y ago
  I've found that OpenBSD has incredibly complete support for many laptops, going so far as to support Thinkpads with touchscreens and digitizer pens out of the box. Overall I find FreeBSD's desktop to be more usable, even though OpenBSD has more streamlined configuration in some parts of the system.
  - eatonphil 11y ago
    I agree! For instance, my wifi card (Centrino 2230) is not supported on FreeBSD 10.2-STABLE but it has been available on OpenBSD for a little while. It is now supported in HEAD but won't be in STABLE until 11.0 next year. I decided to go with FreeBSD because, from what I read, it seemed like it and 3rd-part packages are kept more up-to-date. As a server-side and front-end developer, this is somewhat more immediately important than "complete security". Edit: Additionally, jails and bhyve are a big motivator to pick FreeBSD over OpenBSD, personally.
    - floatboth 11y ago
      Don't be afraid to run -CURRENT on a laptop! Or even the graphics team's testing branch, which already has Haswell accelerated graphics support: https://github.com/freebsd/freebsd-base-graphics/tree/drm-i915-update-38 https://github.com/freebsd/freebsd-base-graphics/tree/drm-i9... About 3rd party packages: FreeBSD ports are always current, binary packages are available as quarterly and current. With OpenBSD, it's all frozen on release, and you basically have to run -CURRENT to get recent packages. The OpenBSD team is working on a hypervisor too: http://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article&sid=20151101223132 http://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article&sid=20151101223132 ZFS + jails + DTrace though… :-)
decasteve 11y ago
These posts should never be allowed on Fridays. I should be out drinking (or doing what normal people do) on Friday nights, not at home installing another OS.
- squiguy7 11y ago
  Just go spin an instance up in the cloud then ;).
natch 11y ago
I like FreeBSD a lot but I found OpenBSD to be even nicer. Mostly because the of the practice they have of including real examples of command usage in UNIX man pages. Sounds like a small reason, but it was quite a boon. Caveat: This was a while ago. I don't know if FreeBSD has adopted the same practice.
alimbada 11y ago
> A really big difference is that FreeBSD is the kernel and userland together. Can someone explain the significance of this as the author seems to keep glossing over it. What's does he mean by saying they are "together" and what is the advantage of it?
- wsterling 11y ago
  The userland and kernel are developed together by the same group of people/project. So the design is consistent across the system. In Linux the kernel comes from Linus and the kernel development team. The userland usually comes from the GNU core utils team, the distro creator and several other places. This can cause disconnects between how various things in the system work, kernel patches to get a random features to work, etc.
- protomyth 11y ago
  The significance is that you have one group building the kernel and userland which allows for implementation and testing of features that cross that boundary. A non-FreeBSD example is the recent work on pledge in OpenBSD. Kernel changes were made in conjunction with changes to a significant part of the userland. That is a minor example, but gives the feel of how having the same set of eyes look to the whole system can be a benefit.
- jamiesonbecker 11y ago
  I think what the OP is referring to is that Linux is just the kernel, whereas a full "GNU/Linux" distribution is the GNU userspace utilities (the command line utilities), compilers, etc and other things (not necesarily part of GNU). The author might be saying that the FreeBSD OS is essentially treated as a single distribution that is both developed, maintained, and packaged cohesively by a single team, as opposed to Linux, where the kernel team (led by Linus) develops the kernel (and maintains/integrates associated parts such as device drivers and filesystems), other devs develop other utilities, and distribution teams pull together everything else (usually either a company such as Canonical or Red Hat, or often a team of volunteers such as with Debian.) For the latter, it really comes down to a difference in philosophy: because FreeBSD is a single, cohesive unit, there's less room for differing opinions and variety in the mix, which can deliver solid results but with reduced "moving fast and breaking things" that sometimes result in faster innovative leaps that you might see on Linux. (But how much do you enjoy seeing your core infrastructure broken? e.g., this is also why Debian has three tracks - stable, testing, and unstable, to accomodate different levels of risk.) (Your choice of operating systems may have nothing at all to do with your choice of governance -- but the solid, stable approach could be characterized as conservative and the move fast and break things could be progressive ;) personally, I like both at different times)
dijit 11y ago
I did. I like it. It feels very clean and well engineered, I always manage to break it via updates though (freebsd-upgrade vs ports vs pkg) Apparently pkg-ng and ports are linked via a central database though now, so that should not be the case any longer. As for why? I disliked systemd and was told to "evolve or gtfo" so I gtfo since I didn't like the way it was being forced on me and the few gripes I had with it fell onto people who seemed to be acting very defensively. But I digress. I'm a systems administrator, in my next employment I will be attempting to get into a company that is making use of freebsd ( hopefully by then I'll be breaking it much less often of course :) )
- obsurveyor 11y ago
  Always read /usr/ports/UPDATING after upgrading your ports tree, before upgrading any ports. This usually has what's going to break and instructions about how to manage. It does seem like it's not updated as often these days though.
  - mavhc 11y ago
    Is there an equivalent to Debian's Stable packages?
    - corv 11y ago
      There are several tiers. Nowadays installing a release version of FreeBSD, packages will get updates quarterly with security updates in between as required. In effect the system is suited for production and very stable by default. Other tiers include the stable and current branches which track development more closely.
      - takeda 11y ago
        After introduction of pkg (FreeBSD 10.0+), the packages are build weekly.
- corv 11y ago
  freebsd-upgrade has been absolutely fool-proof for me. Mixing ports and pkg is not advisable even though they use the same database since versions are often not in sync. Boot environments on ZFS with beadm provide a brilliant way to protect against catastrophic updates. I don't know of any other popular OS that offers something comparable.
vox_mollis 11y ago
#1 selling point missing from the article( though they hinted at it with a nod to /etc/rc.conf ): It's not infected with systemd. Edit: Downvotes? This is a selling point, with all major linux distros leaving very little choice for those who dislike systemd.
- Symbiote 11y ago
  Three replies, and two of them gripe about Systemd. I'd be more interested in hearing about everything else.
  - easytiger 11y ago
    If they were serious they would be griping about laptop compatability, making me think they arent using it all
J_Darnley 11y ago
I can't even stick with using Linux. No way will I manage a BSD.
- wooger 11y ago
  There's a very great difference between using BSD on the desktop vs. using it on a server. FreeBSD is years behind Linux in desktop support in terms of GPU drivers (still no haswell graphics support), desktop environment slickness and audio latency etc. It will fall further behind still in the near future, as desktop Linux embraces Wayland. On a server though, it's just fine.
ddavidn 11y ago
FreeBSD was my first and longest-standing OS love.
jamescun 11y ago
I recently switched my personal box to FreeBSD. I honestly find it significantly easier to manage than Linux, and have greater trust in its reliability merely from its simplicity. The single biggest thing which stood out for me was PF (from OpenBSD). Anybody who has ever had the grace of managing IPTables on Linux, give PF a go with /etc/pf.conf (docs: https://www.freebsd.org/doc/handbook/firewalls-pf.html https://www.freebsd.org/doc/handbook/firewalls-pf.html, my config: https://github.com/jamescun/infrastructure/blob/master/roles/common/files/pf.conf https://github.com/jamescun/infrastructure/blob/master/roles...).
- liotier 11y ago
  > Anybody who has ever had the grace of managing IPTables on Linux Nowadays few people manage IPTables directly. Long ago I used to maintain my own convoluted scripts (ipfwadm, ipchains, iptables...) but once I discovered Shorewall I never looked back - multi-interface multi-VLAN rounting setups can now be sanely managed from the comfort of very readable configuration files.
- aktau 11y ago
  On that note, I'm currently on Debian Stretch which has a Linux 4.2 kernel and consequently great support for nftables (iptables replacement). I never truly grokked iptables but configuring nftables reminded me of putting up a pf firewall on OSX. In fact, I'd say it was even easier. The docs could be a tad bit better, but the actual format itself is intuitive and easy to understand. I'd highly recommend it over iptables if one has the chance.
- atmosx 11y ago
  Here's PF from a VPS running FreeBSD (slightly changed): https://gist.github.com/atmosx/1d4bf8ad42d0447cb415 https://gist.github.com/atmosx/1d4bf8ad42d0447cb415
- jms703 11y ago
  That PF code is from OpenBSD 4.5, released in May 2009. I wonder what fixes and improvements are missing.
olavgg 11y ago
Actually, FreeBSD is a great platform to learn about Linux. The more you learn about FreeBSD, the more will you understand Linux. The only time I will advice not spending time on FreeBSD, is when you have to deal with Java.
- corv 11y ago
  Absolutely agree. A single year of FreeBSD has taught me more than 10 years of Linux about UNIX and by extension made me more proficient with both systems.
- eatonphil 11y ago
  What issues do you have with Java on FreeBSD? I only just got FreeBSD running on my dev machine, but I've been able to work on (build/run) my Scala projects easily enough.
- tobik 11y ago
  What problems did you have with Java on FreeBSD? I've done Java, Scala, and Clojure development on FreeBSD and had no problems whatsoever.
  - takeda 11y ago
    The issue was that in the past JDK (offered by Sun and Oracle) had no binaries available for FreeBSD (I believe the source was available but was not the same that Sun JDK was built from). If you wanted to run it, you would have to download the Linux version and run it in compatibility mode. Later FreeBSD get some kind of deal with Sun to provide native Sun JDK for FreeBSD and made them available through http://www.freebsd.org http://www.freebsd.org (you can check web archive to see older versions). Nowadays starting since JDK 7, OpenJDK supposed to be fully compatible with OracleJDK, so it should no longer be a problem anymore.
- gnoway 11y ago
  Have you tried lately? Java used to be a big issue on FreeBSD, but that hasn't been the case in several years. Now it works as well as any other platform.
crb 11y ago
Does anyone have a source that FreeBSD are used at Google and Netflix today?
- teamhappy 11y ago
  https://openconnect.netflix.com/software/ https://openconnect.netflix.com/software/
- corv 11y ago
  Also WhatsApp
  - bluedino 11y ago
    And NetApp
  - ashishrvce 11y ago
    Yahoo! was using FreeBSD machines in production for many years. They were very stable. Since WhatsApp team came out of Yahoo!, they kept using FreeBSD machines.
- olavgg 11y ago
  Netflix has the OpenConnect server/service that is used to bring content closer to the users by caching content at the ISP. It's a FreeBSD box with NginX and Bird BGP
- protomyth 11y ago
  video from AsiaBSDCon 2014 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4sZZN8Szh14 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4sZZN8Szh14 interview with Scott Long of Netflix on BSD Now http://www.bsdnow.tv/episodes/2013_12_25-the_gift_of_giving http://www.bsdnow.tv/episodes/2013_12_25-the_gift_of_giving
- drewg123 11y ago
  I work on the OCA team at Netflix. I can confirm we run FreeBSD on our CDN servers. I was at Google for several years before Netflix, and I believe that any claims of FreeBSD being used by Google are either outdated or misguided. AFAIK, Google was linux from day 1.
therealmarv 11y ago
I really wanted to try FreeBSD because of ZFS. Then I've seen benchmarks of ZFS between FreeBSD and ZFS on Linux on Ubuntu. Ubuntu was nearly double the speed in the benchmarks. I was sold to Ubuntu. Simple.
- corv 11y ago
  There is a lot that can go wrong benchmarking filesystems, especially one like ZFS that relies heavily on its caches being filled. I find the claim hard to believe and would like to see the benchmark if you can dig it out.
- bsg75 11y ago
  "There are lies, damned lies, and benchmarks" Did you compare performance on your own workloads? We test ZoL with each major release, and while stability has improved significantly, it becomes apparent that ZFS can have wide performance differences depending on configuration and use case. This is true with all ZFS implementations, but with ZFS on Linux not being native there are even more variables.
cwyers 11y ago
> If your understanding of the server OS does only allow you to copy/paste random strings from Stackoverflow, you might not really enjoy FreeBSD (or anything besides Ubuntu) — but then, why are you operating a server in the first place? To serve stuff. (To expand on this -- most people don't use software, they use software to GET STUFF DONE. Very few people want to operate a server. They operate a server because it allows them to do something they want to. If your FreeBSD pitch is "you should want to operate a server," you're already not reaching most of your possible audience.)
- nullspace 11y ago
  What you said can be applied to anything: "most people don't use programming languages, they use programming languages to GET STUFF DONE". If everyone strictly followed this we wouldn't be using any programming languages other than Java or Python. Using FreeBSD does not preclude you from getting stuff done, but you do need to have an inclination to try out new (for you) things in your machines right now. It takes some critical mass of enthusiastic adopters (not sure what this number is, but it's there) for your statement to start applying to a wider audience. And from this articles perspective, this critical mass needs to know servers well enough.
- lgunsch 11y ago
  That type of viewpoint is hurting our industry. Just blindly doing things is not productive at all. You should learn and understand what it is you are doing before you do it. Just getting shit tonnes of stuff done is not productive at all if you don't understand how or why you are doing it. Truck drivers actually know how to drive, Crane operators know how to run a crane, and people operating production servers costing businesses time and resources should also act in the best interest of the business.
  - JupiterMoon 11y ago
    As a counterpoint. Truck drivers don't need to know how to build a truck nor to crane operators need technical understanding of the materials in the crane's structure.
zeroxfe 11y ago
Not sure what the author's sources are, but Google does not use FreeBSD in production.
- azinman2 11y ago
  They used to long ago
protomyth 11y ago
Those interested in FreeBSD for their desktop might want to take a look at PC-BSD http://www.pcbsd.org http://www.pcbsd.org which is a FreeBSD variant geared towards desktop users. Also, BSD Now http://www.bsdnow.tv http://www.bsdnow.tv and BSDTalk http://bsdtalk.blogspot.com http://bsdtalk.blogspot.com are excellent podcasts for BSD.
- corv 11y ago
  Also, worth mentioning is the excellent FreeNAS http://www.freenas.org/ http://www.freenas.org/ storage appliance based on FreeBSD & its ZFS capabilities.
- byuu 11y ago
  Just a word of warning, Jordan Hubbard and Kip Macy work for iXsystems and are pushing for both PC-BSD and FreeNAS to move to NextBSD, which is basically bringing half of OS X into FreeBSD. (Probably inspired by Jordan's days of working at Apple.) Which many people, including myself, feel is a disastrously bad idea (ex http://blog.darknedgy.net/technology/2015/08/26/0/ http://blog.darknedgy.net/technology/2015/08/26/0/). It has a lot of similarities to Linux and systemd. As such, I've switched to recommending people just go with FreeBSD lately. It's a bit of work, but with some helpful guides, you can help people avoid most of the pitfalls (ex http://files.byuu.org/temp/os/freebsd-10.html http://files.byuu.org/temp/os/freebsd-10.html). And once you learn the basics, you'll be in a great position to administer your system going forward.
  - vezzy-fnord 11y ago
    Thanks for the shout-out. Thankfully, the FreeBSD Foundation itself doesn't seem particularly receptive to the NextBSD effort (judging from their most recent quarterly status), so there's no danger of it being merged soon.
    - JdeBP 11y ago
      On that subject, see http://marc.info/?t=144763538600004&r=1&w=2 http://marc.info/?t=144763538600004&r=1&w=2 .
jcadam 11y ago
I'm a programmer, not a professional sysadmin, but for my side projects I have to manage my own servers (well, small VMs, but you know what I mean) and for this I definitely prefer BSD. In fact, I prefer BSD in general over Linux, and while I tried to run it on my main dev laptop, a never ending trickle of minor frustrations with hardware support (suspend/hibernate never worked right, weird issues with docking/undocking (I have a Dell latitude), audio, etc.) eventually forced me back to Ubuntu. So, for the time being I think I'll stick with Linux for my workstations and BSD for my servers :)
- corv 11y ago
  Fortunately AWS and Digital Ocean have great support for FreeBSD!
  - jcadam 11y ago
    Indeed, I'm running a couple of FreeBSD droplets on DigitalOcean right now. I just wish they'd get their backup service working for BSD.
myztic 11y ago
I wonder why this got so many votes to be honest, it's from May 2014 and as far as why one would want to try FreeBSD it is not very detailed. That being said: I use FreeBSD and (obviously) prefer it, but: 1) ZFSonLinux has made huge steps forward and actually (at least in my opinion) is production ready and rock solid (of course it's not as good as ZFS on FreeBSD though, for example it's lacking some features and of course it's not as proven as of now) 2) Usable containers finally have come to Linux in the form of Docker and everybody is absolutely hyped about it (I would argue though that Jails has more features, is more stable and mature) The most obvious reason for me to use FreeBSD though is just the difference in philosophy. Don't rapidly make big changes, think everything through, don't surprise users, don't make upgrades that call for massive user intervention, and it's democratically governed and yes, it's a complete OS. Code quality is also better (have you actually looked at what code makes it into the Linux Kernel?), and I would argue therefore security and stability is way better. Just my 2 cents, nothing wrong with Linux, have used it for years, now I would not want to go back though. And a small Side Note: No systemd, not to start a flame war, but it is taking over the linux-sphere and I find it's design just horrific
- dorfsmay 11y ago
  Are there significant differences in usability between BSD jails and LXC?
  - krenoten 11y ago
    http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/127001/linux-lxc-vs-freebsd-jail http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/127001/linux-lxc-vs-...
  - lobster_johnson 11y ago
    There's little technical difference. Both BSD and Linux provide set of kernel-level mechanisms that allow you to run "containers", ie. process trees that are completely isolated from each other and from the host OS. They are roughly comparable, I believe, with mostly minor technical differences. The huge practical difference right now is that on Linux, Docker and LXC (as in linuxcontainers.org) provide a high-level, fairly opinioned framework and set of infrastructure pieces to build, run and manage containers — and there are no fully equivalent tools on BSD, at least none that are as featureful or mature. If you want to do containerized deploys on BSD, you'll be writing scripts that set up jails, call rctl, set kernel parameters with sysctl, and so on. There's ezjail [1], but it's nowhere near Docker in terms of scope. I actually wish there was something on Linux that was less monolithic and better designed than Docker. Its image management is badly designed and annoying to use, and after all this time it still suffers from design flaws such as needing to be the parent of all containers (completely unnecessary given that we have cgroups). [1] https://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/jails-ezjail.html https://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/j...
linuxlizard 11y ago
Small reason to use Linux--Linux has taken over the embedded market. Hardware vendors (e.g., Broadcom, Intel) offer BSP (board support packages) for Linux but not any of the BSDs. The BSP in embedded does sort-of what the PC BIOS does. The BSP is the code to bring the microcontroller from cold start to booting something. Booting Linux is supported by large vendors. Embedded hardware vendors also offer Linux drivers. Not so much anything else.
- ausjke 11y ago
  This is indeed true, systemd was the one thing triggered me to check with BSD again after quite a few years. Netbsd used to be the embedded BSD flavor, but comparing to linux it's nearly nothing these days. linux thrived in the embedded OS space and pushed aside QNX, OS9, Vxworks, WinCE and NetBSD.
thinkingkong 11y ago
Not sure which operating systems are still pushing the enveloppe but I get the impression that these system designs are congealing. BSD and Solaris were different enough to create real competition, if only friendly. Now it seems that momentum of linux has turned it into the only real option for doing "serious" things, unless you need the license freedom of BSD for an embedded device.
- feld 11y ago
  That's an impression a lot of people have been getting and it's very unfortunate. It doesn't help that OS isn't really taught anymore. But if you're interested, check out http://teachbsd.org http://teachbsd.org
tmbsundar 11y ago
I have freebsd in one of my VMs and like it very much. One reason I am reluctant to move it as my primary OS is the lack of CUDA support (this might be an nvidia thing and not the fault of freebsd devs). But still it's seems to be a blocker. Is there a way to make CUDA work in freebsd? Would be glad to know.
- floatboth 11y ago
  No. NVIDIA hasn't ported CUDA to FreeBSD. There is OpenCL though https://wiki.freebsd.org/Graphics/OpenCL https://wiki.freebsd.org/Graphics/OpenCL for Intel and Radeon.
blinkingled 11y ago
If you're not comfortable putting FreeBSD on your desktop - check out pfSense. Find that old PC, slap another NIC in it and make it your router. You get ZFS for free along with other cool networking and FreeBSD stuff.
davidgerard 11y ago
I like FreeBSD a lot more than Linux at the administration level. I ran it as my desktop for a few years. The big problem: all the software I wanted to run assumed the whole world was GNU/Linux. So I ended up running lots of Linux binaries under emulation. (yes, I could have compiled everything from ports. But the time I spent 3 days compiling OpenOffice to discover the port was known-broken put me off that a bit ...) Then I discovered Ubuntu and in particular synaptic and the Debian repos and had a "holy shit, this gets it right" moment. Haven't looked back.
- gregory-nisbet 11y ago
  I've read about the FreeBSD Linux emulation layer, but don't know that much about it. What exactly does it provide besides emulation of Linux system calls? How reliable is it in practice?
  - davidgerard 11y ago
    This was ten years ago, I have no idea what it's like in 2015. It's a syscall emulator and a pile of libs from Red Hat. It was reasonably reliable. X font rendering was awful. But then, Linux at the time wasn't much better; Ubuntu had only just started on the process of making the Linux desktop less annoying.
    - floatboth 11y ago
      It is maintained. epoll support is coming to the linuxulator in FreeBSD 11. But you don't need it really. All the usual desktop software is available natively. Firefox, Thunderbird, Chromium, LibreOffice, Transmission, VLC, GIMP, darktable, ioquake3 :-) You don't need to compile anything (if you don't want to, say, use LibreSSL everywhere), pkgng is excellent.
      - david-given 11y ago
        > But you don't need it really. ...games. Is the syscall emulation layer good enough to run the Steam client and, to pick one at random, Kerbal Space Program?
zekevermillion 11y ago
I prefer the "Comparing BSD and Linux" article by Greg Lehey. He clearly prefers BSD and thinks that the BSDs are more elegant OSs than GNU/Linux. Nevertheless, he admits that some users may prefer GNU/Linux for various reasons, and we are left to make our own decisions as to the aesthetics of the various unixes. https://www.freebsd.org/doc/en/articles/explaining-bsd/comparing-bsd-and-linux.html https://www.freebsd.org/doc/en/articles/explaining-bsd/compa...
KirinDave 11y ago
I sort of hope people are waking up from the rut the industry has been. OSX for dev, Linux for backend services... Even AWS. If I were to start another company today, I'd almost surely be using none of these options to max my productivity. Right now, OSX has become increasingly hostile to dev and Linux is great at modularizing other features FreeBSD built years ago. Lately I've been trying to ship software from the newly open sourced and open-er licensed .NET CoreCLR and Mono (via C# & F# respectively) and FreeBSD. The results are surprisingly good, especially with the new native executable compilation target stuff. And the docker pass-through to FreeBSD jails is hot like the sun. It's like a Docker container with similar constraints but without such severe security issues. That and the new network stack makes containers on FreeBSD pretty compelling, even compared to the 1.9 security work. And there is that thing where linux is locked in a death roll with itself regarding its initalization system? Freebsd don't have that. And that thing where Apple makes you boot into safe mode and flip an NVRAM bit to actually have root on your box? Of course, I'm not personally shipping code on iOS, so this discussion is a lot more flexible for me than it might be for many.
- kris-s 11y ago
  What would you develop on then?
  - KirinDave 11y ago
    Backend services, maybe micro maybe not. The CLR has really great support for a hybrid async/threadpool model and C# has direct language support. There's a framework called "ServiceStack" which tastes a lot like Jetty that you can use to avoid the ASP.NET-influenced technologies and approach things in a lightweight way. There is also a developer preview of actual native compilation, which means your deploy story in a container is competitive with Go and startup times for a statically linked binary are great. This means it's actually outperforming Java for containerized deploys (in this specific facet). Azure and GCE are both really, really good compared to EC2. Hell, GCE is shipping actual Kubernetes support and I want to migrate our entire tech stack to that. Already we've migrated our growing website to it, and as soon as they fix some network performance issues (already fixed in master, but we don't use beta orchestration software in production), we'll flip the switch on that as it elegantly solves some really shitty problems you hit in AWS VPCs. I like F# a lot, by the way. I can't wait to use it more. It's like OCaml but with a lot of the amenities you expect from the JVM ecosystem (like, for example, the ever-required but poorly supported datetime libraries) and LINQ support, which is pervasive, user-extensible object comprehensions with compiler support. C# doesn't excite me so much, but it has a REPL and it's certainly a more advanced language than Java.
JeremyMorgan 11y ago
I've been using FreeBSD since 1999 or so, and I love it, but not really for a desktop. On a server you can spend a lot of time dialing it in, building from source, etc. and have a rock solid performant server, and in most cases it's worth it. On the desktop you can get a system that's basically the same as Linux but you will spend more time on updates and building stuff, and it will be harder to configure your hardware. If the philosophical differences between FreeBSD and Linux are important to you, it's worth it. Otherwise I'm not sure there are many advantages that make it worth the hassle. I have tried PC-BSD but haven't spent enough time with it to make a really solid conclusion about it.
- samstave 11y ago
  So... what then do you prefer for your desktop?
  - JeremyMorgan 11y ago
    Depends on the task, and I'm not exactly a typical case. For graphics and video editing I prefer OSX. For .Net specific development, Windows 10 (Which I'm starting to hate). For all other development and casual browsing I use Arch Linux. I spent a full day building it and dialing it in a couple years ago and it works like clockwork today.
fisk 11y ago
I tried 10.0, and I had a few really irritating problems. My connection didn't stay up well with freebsd, and freebsd-update was not behaving robustly in the face of that. And pkg was frequently having problems with upgrades to itself where you had to follow the lists to know when to do something carefully by hand rather than letting the tool do its thing.
jeffdavis 11y ago
Linux has a lot of the pathology that comes with monopoly. Low innovation, features almost entirely copied from other OSes (often poorly and very late). Also my brief experience with a kernel patch for Linux felt very abrasive, defensive, and I didn't make any progress (though part of the issue was fixed in a roundabout way a few months later). If you use freebsd/openbsd/dragonflybsd you are supporting a more innovative group of people, and will have a much more pleasant experience if you need something fixed in the kernel (I had an issue with the freebsd kernel as well, and they acknowledged and fixed it).
Spiritus 11y ago
This got me curious, and I installed one of the official Vagrant images[1]. However they don't seem to come with ZFS as default file system...? [1] https://vagrantcloud.com/freebsd https://vagrantcloud.com/freebsd
- jdboyd 11y ago
  I expect that for general development use, FreeBSD in a VM performs better with UFS than it does with ZFS, especially in low memory VMs. That is probably why the vagrant images don't use it by default. You might need to just create a FreeBSD VM from the normal FreeBSD installer if you wish to experiment with ZFS on FreeBSD.
drcube 11y ago
I expect almost any laptop I buy will work (with minimal tinkering) with any flavor of Linux I use, but something tells me that is not the case with BSD. Are they all running it on a virtual machine? Or is there a lot more people writing drivers for BSD than I imagined? The BSDs seem like they have a lot of what I love about Slackware, only more so. I'd really like to try installing one, and might do so on an old laptop this weekend.

174 points by eatonphil 11y ago

> Many major companies like Google or Netflix use FreeBSD in production. Citation needed on that Google part. It seems unlikely to be true on any meaningful scale. (That is, when writing a FreeBSD advocacy article, maybe you should not be using the largest Linux user in the world as the FreeBSD example).

myxlptlk 11y ago

As far as I know, FreeBSD is more secure than most of the out of the box Linux versions(not considering jails). Does anyone know an article that illustrates this?

unluckier 11y ago
I've heard the opposite. Although it's comparing to OpenBSD in this case, here's a good graphic that shows the exploit mitigations that FreeBSD provides by default: http://networkfilter.blogspot.com/2014/12/security-openbsd-vs-freebsd.html#out_of_the_box http://networkfilter.blogspot.com/2014/12/security-openbsd-v...
corv 11y ago
There is HardenedBSD http://hardenedbsd.org/ http://hardenedbsd.org/, which is working on filling gaps between OpenBSD and FreeBSD security. OpenBSD is definitely more secure out of the box than Linux.

asuffield 11y ago

(Tedious disclaimer: not speaking for anybody else, my opinion only, etc. I'm an SRE at Google.) > Many major companies like Google or Netflix use FreeBSD in production. Erm. Well, the company's so huge that I'm sure there's something with some freebsd in it somewhere, but... not really. I've worked with freebsd extensively in a past job, where it was used for licensing reasons. I don't agree with this article.

cannam 11y ago
Yahoo used to run largely on FreeBSD, at least up to the mid 2000s. Wonder whether they still use it.
- krenoten 11y ago
  They have mostly moved away from it.
- ashishrvce 11y ago
  New machines are using RedHat. Some of the older machines still run FreeBSD.
- JdeBP 11y ago
  Enjoy reading https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10558288 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10558288 .
unethical_ban 11y ago
Netflix uses FreeBSD as a major component of its CDN (IIRC, it's the OS on all their CDN nodes).
- Freaky 11y ago
  Yup: https://openconnect.netflix.com/software/ https://openconnect.netflix.com/software/ They're actively giving back a lot of their work too: http://v4.freshbsd.org/search?q=netflix http://v4.freshbsd.org/search?q=netflix
- Thaxll 11y ago
  Most of the CDN isn't served by open connect but by real CDN like Akamai.
  - emaste 11y ago
    That used to be the case, but Netflix started building out their own CDN a few years ago and they've migrated away from their legacy providers. Netflix is now serving about a third of US peak time internet traffic from FreeBSD.

unluckier 11y ago

How's FreeBSD doing in the exploit mitigation department? Last I checked, they didn't even have ASLR. http://networkfilter.blogspot.com/2014/12/security-openbsd-vs-freebsd.html#out_of_the_box http://networkfilter.blogspot.com/2014/12/security-openbsd-v...

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
corv 11y ago
HardenedBSD http://hardenedbsd.org/ http://hardenedbsd.org/ has completed a fork of FreeBSD with ASLR.
floatboth 11y ago
HardenedBSD has ASLR, they're working on upstreaming it to FreeBSD.
mhandley 11y ago
I'm not sure I'd place much faith in ASLR these days. Bittau's Blind Return Oriented Programming (BROP) http://www.scs.stanford.edu/brop/ http://www.scs.stanford.edu/brop/ makes that only a speedbump, not a real obstacle, for any server that suffers from a stack overflow vulnerability and respawns after a crash. Basically, you can read the return address off the stack a byte at a time by detecting the difference between a crash (you got the overflowed byte wrong) and no-crash (you got the overflowed byte correct). Doesn't take long to recover the return address, and hence find the text location. Their paper is a really fun read!
- unluckier 11y ago
  We all know that exploit mitigations aren't perfect. But to not even bother using them... that's just ridiculous. There are plenty of scenarios where ASLR helps prevent exploitation. And the fact that FreeBSD doesn't even have it is pretty damning.
  - mhandley 11y ago

gamesbrainiac 11y ago

I definitely think people should give FreeBSD a try. I also think they should give different flavors or linux a try (e.g. Arch Linux). What I don't agree with is using FreeBSD or a non-mainstream OS in production unless you really know what you're doing. There are many reasons for this, but the most important one is what the article alluded to; there is a plethora of resources for troubleshooting an issue. If you can't install a package like `gfortran` on something like ubuntu, then you can head over to askubuntu and will likely get the solution to your problem. What I think FreeBSD (or any less widely used OS for that matter) should do is create the right kind of easily searchable support structure that people coming from Ubuntu and CentOS take for granted. If you read the article closely, it does not point to a canonical support structure. This does not mean there isn't one or for that matter, many. But, what I can decipher is that there isn't a de-facto site that you can get help from.

corv 11y ago
There is canonical support such as the excellent handbook: https://www.freebsd.org/doc/en/books/handbook/ https://www.freebsd.org/doc/en/books/handbook/ The forums and mailing lists are also full of very knowledgeable users and developers. Besides, FreeBSD's Jails eat Docker for lunch as long as you don't need a point and click App store for your containers.
eatonphil 11y ago
I'm sure many people will tell you that the FreeBSD man pages [0] are an incredible resource and some of the best written man pages out there. From experience, the official handbook [1] was incredibly helpful as well. That said, the forums are not the most helpful place because there are /so/ many configurations out there and so many "right" ways to do things that it makes finding a working solution incredibly difficult. [0] https://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi https://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi [1] https://www.freebsd.org/doc/handbook/ https://www.freebsd.org/doc/handbook/

axx 11y ago

If you're interested in a video tutorial on how to set up FreeBSD, these are good videos to start: https://vimeo.com/channels/freebsdguides https://vimeo.com/channels/freebsdguides

pge 11y ago

I used FreeBSD for a couple of years but now use Arch (after a fling with Ubuntu in between). Reasons I switched (some of which may have been addressed since): * building everything from source got old * lack of support for hardware (Linux has gotten really good at having drivers for hardware) * ports of desktop applications were not always available, and the POSIX shim to use Linux applications didnt always work without some hacking * On the server side, Linux pretty much caught up on performance * As the Linux community has grown, the resources available to Linux users are amazing. FreeBSD feels like Linux used to - always having to hack around and try to research how to make it work and nothing quite working smoothly (on the desktop - less of an issue for servers, where FreeBSD has always shined). Linux has reached a point where I use Linux as my primary desktop OS, and it works great. FreeBSD for the desktop feels like a step backwards.

deaddodo 11y ago
> * building everything from source got old You....don't have to. You haven't had to for years. Just use pkg instead of ports. > * lack of support for hardware (Linux has gotten really good at having drivers for hardware) Other than wireless, FreeBSD's driver support is pretty solid. I have a cutting edge machine (haswell-e, nvidia, ddr4, etc) and not one device is unsupported. In fact, FreeBSD has much less hassle with the audio driver than any Linux distro I've tried. > * ports of desktop applications were not always available, and the POSIX shim to use Linux applications didnt always work without some hacking Well yeah, it's still a different OS. If you need some specific commercial software (source unavailable), you'll probably have to jump through some hoops to get it working. > * On the server side, Linux pretty much caught up on performance Sure. But when performance is on par, it's not really a factor anymore. At that point, it's just what is easiest/most enjoyable to manage. > * As the Linux community has grown, the resources available to Linux users are amazing. FreeBSD feels like Linux used to - always having to hack around and try to research how to make it work and nothing quite working smoothly I've never run into this issue. As long as you aren't just trying to run commands from stackoverflow, you should be able to adapt things for the few nuances pretty easily. It's really just about knowing your OS. Again, not necessarily true for commercial software...but the case for most FOSS.
anon6_ 11y ago

eatonphil 11y ago

I recently switched my dev machine (laptop) from Ubuntu to FreeBSD because I wanted the experience. I wrote a post about it[0]. Basically, wifi and graphics were a PITA and I brute forced my way into getting them working. After getting past those two though, everything else just worked. The simplicity of the system compared to Debian/Ubuntu is just astounding. I haven't yet gotten into jails or bhyve, but those are the next two things I'm very excited to work toward. [0] http://blog.eatonphil.com/2015-11-18/two-weeks-of-freebsd---current-impressions http://blog.eatonphil.com/2015-11-18/two-weeks-of-freebsd---...

corv 11y ago
I've found that OpenBSD has incredibly complete support for many laptops, going so far as to support Thinkpads with touchscreens and digitizer pens out of the box. Overall I find FreeBSD's desktop to be more usable, even though OpenBSD has more streamlined configuration in some parts of the system.
- eatonphil 11y ago
  I agree! For instance, my wifi card (Centrino 2230) is not supported on FreeBSD 10.2-STABLE but it has been available on OpenBSD for a little while. It is now supported in HEAD but won't be in STABLE until 11.0 next year. I decided to go with FreeBSD because, from what I read, it seemed like it and 3rd-part packages are kept more up-to-date. As a server-side and front-end developer, this is somewhat more immediately important than "complete security". Edit: Additionally, jails and bhyve are a big motivator to pick FreeBSD over OpenBSD, personally.
  - floatboth 11y ago
    Don't be afraid to run -CURRENT on a laptop! Or even the graphics team's testing branch, which already has Haswell accelerated graphics support: https://github.com/freebsd/freebsd-base-graphics/tree/drm-i915-update-38 https://github.com/freebsd/freebsd-base-graphics/tree/drm-i9... About 3rd party packages: FreeBSD ports are always current, binary packages are available as quarterly and current. With OpenBSD, it's all frozen on release, and you basically have to run -CURRENT to get recent packages. The OpenBSD team is working on a hypervisor too: http://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article&sid=20151101223132 http://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article&sid=20151101223132 ZFS + jails + DTrace though… :-)

decasteve 11y ago

These posts should never be allowed on Fridays. I should be out drinking (or doing what normal people do) on Friday nights, not at home installing another OS.

squiguy7 11y ago
Just go spin an instance up in the cloud then ;).

natch 11y ago

I like FreeBSD a lot but I found OpenBSD to be even nicer. Mostly because the of the practice they have of including real examples of command usage in UNIX man pages. Sounds like a small reason, but it was quite a boon. Caveat: This was a while ago. I don't know if FreeBSD has adopted the same practice.

alimbada 11y ago

> A really big difference is that FreeBSD is the kernel and userland together. Can someone explain the significance of this as the author seems to keep glossing over it. What's does he mean by saying they are "together" and what is the advantage of it?

wsterling 11y ago
The userland and kernel are developed together by the same group of people/project. So the design is consistent across the system. In Linux the kernel comes from Linus and the kernel development team. The userland usually comes from the GNU core utils team, the distro creator and several other places. This can cause disconnects between how various things in the system work, kernel patches to get a random features to work, etc.
protomyth 11y ago
The significance is that you have one group building the kernel and userland which allows for implementation and testing of features that cross that boundary. A non-FreeBSD example is the recent work on pledge in OpenBSD. Kernel changes were made in conjunction with changes to a significant part of the userland. That is a minor example, but gives the feel of how having the same set of eyes look to the whole system can be a benefit.
jamiesonbecker 11y ago
I think what the OP is referring to is that Linux is just the kernel, whereas a full "GNU/Linux" distribution is the GNU userspace utilities (the command line utilities), compilers, etc and other things (not necesarily part of GNU). The author might be saying that the FreeBSD OS is essentially treated as a single distribution that is both developed, maintained, and packaged cohesively by a single team, as opposed to Linux, where the kernel team (led by Linus) develops the kernel (and maintains/integrates associated parts such as device drivers and filesystems), other devs develop other utilities, and distribution teams pull together everything else (usually either a company such as Canonical or Red Hat, or often a team of volunteers such as with Debian.) For the latter, it really comes down to a difference in philosophy: because FreeBSD is a single, cohesive unit, there's less room for differing opinions and variety in the mix, which can deliver solid results but with reduced "moving fast and breaking things" that sometimes result in faster innovative leaps that you might see on Linux. (But how much do you enjoy seeing your core infrastructure broken? e.g., this is also why Debian has three tracks - stable, testing, and unstable, to accomodate different levels of risk.) (Your choice of operating systems may have nothing at all to do with your choice of governance -- but the solid, stable approach could be characterized as conservative and the move fast and break things could be progressive ;) personally, I like both at different times)

dijit 11y ago

I did. I like it. It feels very clean and well engineered, I always manage to break it via updates though (freebsd-upgrade vs ports vs pkg) Apparently pkg-ng and ports are linked via a central database though now, so that should not be the case any longer. As for why? I disliked systemd and was told to "evolve or gtfo" so I gtfo since I didn't like the way it was being forced on me and the few gripes I had with it fell onto people who seemed to be acting very defensively. But I digress. I'm a systems administrator, in my next employment I will be attempting to get into a company that is making use of freebsd ( hopefully by then I'll be breaking it much less often of course :) )

obsurveyor 11y ago
Always read /usr/ports/UPDATING after upgrading your ports tree, before upgrading any ports. This usually has what's going to break and instructions about how to manage. It does seem like it's not updated as often these days though.
- mavhc 11y ago
  Is there an equivalent to Debian's Stable packages?
  - corv 11y ago
    There are several tiers. Nowadays installing a release version of FreeBSD, packages will get updates quarterly with security updates in between as required. In effect the system is suited for production and very stable by default. Other tiers include the stable and current branches which track development more closely.
    - takeda 11y ago
      After introduction of pkg (FreeBSD 10.0+), the packages are build weekly.
corv 11y ago
freebsd-upgrade has been absolutely fool-proof for me. Mixing ports and pkg is not advisable even though they use the same database since versions are often not in sync. Boot environments on ZFS with beadm provide a brilliant way to protect against catastrophic updates. I don't know of any other popular OS that offers something comparable.

vox_mollis 11y ago

#1 selling point missing from the article( though they hinted at it with a nod to /etc/rc.conf ): It's not infected with systemd. Edit: Downvotes? This is a selling point, with all major linux distros leaving very little choice for those who dislike systemd.

Symbiote 11y ago
Three replies, and two of them gripe about Systemd. I'd be more interested in hearing about everything else.
- easytiger 11y ago
  If they were serious they would be griping about laptop compatability, making me think they arent using it all

J_Darnley 11y ago

I can't even stick with using Linux. No way will I manage a BSD.

wooger 11y ago
There's a very great difference between using BSD on the desktop vs. using it on a server. FreeBSD is years behind Linux in desktop support in terms of GPU drivers (still no haswell graphics support), desktop environment slickness and audio latency etc. It will fall further behind still in the near future, as desktop Linux embraces Wayland. On a server though, it's just fine.

ddavidn 11y ago

FreeBSD was my first and longest-standing OS love.

jamescun 11y ago

I recently switched my personal box to FreeBSD. I honestly find it significantly easier to manage than Linux, and have greater trust in its reliability merely from its simplicity. The single biggest thing which stood out for me was PF (from OpenBSD). Anybody who has ever had the grace of managing IPTables on Linux, give PF a go with /etc/pf.conf (docs: https://www.freebsd.org/doc/handbook/firewalls-pf.html https://www.freebsd.org/doc/handbook/firewalls-pf.html, my config: https://github.com/jamescun/infrastructure/blob/master/roles/common/files/pf.conf https://github.com/jamescun/infrastructure/blob/master/roles...).

liotier 11y ago
> Anybody who has ever had the grace of managing IPTables on Linux Nowadays few people manage IPTables directly. Long ago I used to maintain my own convoluted scripts (ipfwadm, ipchains, iptables...) but once I discovered Shorewall I never looked back - multi-interface multi-VLAN rounting setups can now be sanely managed from the comfort of very readable configuration files.
aktau 11y ago
On that note, I'm currently on Debian Stretch which has a Linux 4.2 kernel and consequently great support for nftables (iptables replacement). I never truly grokked iptables but configuring nftables reminded me of putting up a pf firewall on OSX. In fact, I'd say it was even easier. The docs could be a tad bit better, but the actual format itself is intuitive and easy to understand. I'd highly recommend it over iptables if one has the chance.
atmosx 11y ago
Here's PF from a VPS running FreeBSD (slightly changed): https://gist.github.com/atmosx/1d4bf8ad42d0447cb415 https://gist.github.com/atmosx/1d4bf8ad42d0447cb415
jms703 11y ago
That PF code is from OpenBSD 4.5, released in May 2009. I wonder what fixes and improvements are missing.

olavgg 11y ago

Actually, FreeBSD is a great platform to learn about Linux. The more you learn about FreeBSD, the more will you understand Linux. The only time I will advice not spending time on FreeBSD, is when you have to deal with Java.

corv 11y ago
Absolutely agree. A single year of FreeBSD has taught me more than 10 years of Linux about UNIX and by extension made me more proficient with both systems.
eatonphil 11y ago
What issues do you have with Java on FreeBSD? I only just got FreeBSD running on my dev machine, but I've been able to work on (build/run) my Scala projects easily enough.
tobik 11y ago
What problems did you have with Java on FreeBSD? I've done Java, Scala, and Clojure development on FreeBSD and had no problems whatsoever.
- takeda 11y ago
  The issue was that in the past JDK (offered by Sun and Oracle) had no binaries available for FreeBSD (I believe the source was available but was not the same that Sun JDK was built from). If you wanted to run it, you would have to download the Linux version and run it in compatibility mode. Later FreeBSD get some kind of deal with Sun to provide native Sun JDK for FreeBSD and made them available through http://www.freebsd.org http://www.freebsd.org (you can check web archive to see older versions). Nowadays starting since JDK 7, OpenJDK supposed to be fully compatible with OracleJDK, so it should no longer be a problem anymore.
gnoway 11y ago
Have you tried lately? Java used to be a big issue on FreeBSD, but that hasn't been the case in several years. Now it works as well as any other platform.

crb 11y ago

Does anyone have a source that FreeBSD are used at Google and Netflix today?

teamhappy 11y ago
https://openconnect.netflix.com/software/ https://openconnect.netflix.com/software/
corv 11y ago
Also WhatsApp
- bluedino 11y ago
  And NetApp
- ashishrvce 11y ago
  Yahoo! was using FreeBSD machines in production for many years. They were very stable. Since WhatsApp team came out of Yahoo!, they kept using FreeBSD machines.
olavgg 11y ago
Netflix has the OpenConnect server/service that is used to bring content closer to the users by caching content at the ISP. It's a FreeBSD box with NginX and Bird BGP
protomyth 11y ago
video from AsiaBSDCon 2014 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4sZZN8Szh14 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4sZZN8Szh14 interview with Scott Long of Netflix on BSD Now http://www.bsdnow.tv/episodes/2013_12_25-the_gift_of_giving http://www.bsdnow.tv/episodes/2013_12_25-the_gift_of_giving
drewg123 11y ago
I work on the OCA team at Netflix. I can confirm we run FreeBSD on our CDN servers. I was at Google for several years before Netflix, and I believe that any claims of FreeBSD being used by Google are either outdated or misguided. AFAIK, Google was linux from day 1.

therealmarv 11y ago

I really wanted to try FreeBSD because of ZFS. Then I've seen benchmarks of ZFS between FreeBSD and ZFS on Linux on Ubuntu. Ubuntu was nearly double the speed in the benchmarks. I was sold to Ubuntu. Simple.

corv 11y ago
There is a lot that can go wrong benchmarking filesystems, especially one like ZFS that relies heavily on its caches being filled. I find the claim hard to believe and would like to see the benchmark if you can dig it out.
bsg75 11y ago
"There are lies, damned lies, and benchmarks" Did you compare performance on your own workloads? We test ZoL with each major release, and while stability has improved significantly, it becomes apparent that ZFS can have wide performance differences depending on configuration and use case. This is true with all ZFS implementations, but with ZFS on Linux not being native there are even more variables.

cwyers 11y ago

> If your understanding of the server OS does only allow you to copy/paste random strings from Stackoverflow, you might not really enjoy FreeBSD (or anything besides Ubuntu) — but then, why are you operating a server in the first place? To serve stuff. (To expand on this -- most people don't use software, they use software to GET STUFF DONE. Very few people want to operate a server. They operate a server because it allows them to do something they want to. If your FreeBSD pitch is "you should want to operate a server," you're already not reaching most of your possible audience.)

nullspace 11y ago
What you said can be applied to anything: "most people don't use programming languages, they use programming languages to GET STUFF DONE". If everyone strictly followed this we wouldn't be using any programming languages other than Java or Python. Using FreeBSD does not preclude you from getting stuff done, but you do need to have an inclination to try out new (for you) things in your machines right now. It takes some critical mass of enthusiastic adopters (not sure what this number is, but it's there) for your statement to start applying to a wider audience. And from this articles perspective, this critical mass needs to know servers well enough.
lgunsch 11y ago
That type of viewpoint is hurting our industry. Just blindly doing things is not productive at all. You should learn and understand what it is you are doing before you do it. Just getting shit tonnes of stuff done is not productive at all if you don't understand how or why you are doing it. Truck drivers actually know how to drive, Crane operators know how to run a crane, and people operating production servers costing businesses time and resources should also act in the best interest of the business.
- JupiterMoon 11y ago
  As a counterpoint. Truck drivers don't need to know how to build a truck nor to crane operators need technical understanding of the materials in the crane's structure.

zeroxfe 11y ago

Not sure what the author's sources are, but Google does not use FreeBSD in production.

azinman2 11y ago
They used to long ago

protomyth 11y ago

Those interested in FreeBSD for their desktop might want to take a look at PC-BSD http://www.pcbsd.org http://www.pcbsd.org which is a FreeBSD variant geared towards desktop users. Also, BSD Now http://www.bsdnow.tv http://www.bsdnow.tv and BSDTalk http://bsdtalk.blogspot.com http://bsdtalk.blogspot.com are excellent podcasts for BSD.

corv 11y ago
Also, worth mentioning is the excellent FreeNAS http://www.freenas.org/ http://www.freenas.org/ storage appliance based on FreeBSD & its ZFS capabilities.
byuu 11y ago
Just a word of warning, Jordan Hubbard and Kip Macy work for iXsystems and are pushing for both PC-BSD and FreeNAS to move to NextBSD, which is basically bringing half of OS X into FreeBSD. (Probably inspired by Jordan's days of working at Apple.) Which many people, including myself, feel is a disastrously bad idea (ex http://blog.darknedgy.net/technology/2015/08/26/0/ http://blog.darknedgy.net/technology/2015/08/26/0/). It has a lot of similarities to Linux and systemd. As such, I've switched to recommending people just go with FreeBSD lately. It's a bit of work, but with some helpful guides, you can help people avoid most of the pitfalls (ex http://files.byuu.org/temp/os/freebsd-10.html http://files.byuu.org/temp/os/freebsd-10.html). And once you learn the basics, you'll be in a great position to administer your system going forward.
- vezzy-fnord 11y ago
  Thanks for the shout-out. Thankfully, the FreeBSD Foundation itself doesn't seem particularly receptive to the NextBSD effort (judging from their most recent quarterly status), so there's no danger of it being merged soon.
  - JdeBP 11y ago
    On that subject, see http://marc.info/?t=144763538600004&r=1&w=2 http://marc.info/?t=144763538600004&r=1&w=2 .

jcadam 11y ago

I'm a programmer, not a professional sysadmin, but for my side projects I have to manage my own servers (well, small VMs, but you know what I mean) and for this I definitely prefer BSD. In fact, I prefer BSD in general over Linux, and while I tried to run it on my main dev laptop, a never ending trickle of minor frustrations with hardware support (suspend/hibernate never worked right, weird issues with docking/undocking (I have a Dell latitude), audio, etc.) eventually forced me back to Ubuntu. So, for the time being I think I'll stick with Linux for my workstations and BSD for my servers :)

corv 11y ago
Fortunately AWS and Digital Ocean have great support for FreeBSD!
- jcadam 11y ago
  Indeed, I'm running a couple of FreeBSD droplets on DigitalOcean right now. I just wish they'd get their backup service working for BSD.

myztic 11y ago

I wonder why this got so many votes to be honest, it's from May 2014 and as far as why one would want to try FreeBSD it is not very detailed. That being said: I use FreeBSD and (obviously) prefer it, but: 1) ZFSonLinux has made huge steps forward and actually (at least in my opinion) is production ready and rock solid (of course it's not as good as ZFS on FreeBSD though, for example it's lacking some features and of course it's not as proven as of now) 2) Usable containers finally have come to Linux in the form of Docker and everybody is absolutely hyped about it (I would argue though that Jails has more features, is more stable and mature) The most obvious reason for me to use FreeBSD though is just the difference in philosophy. Don't rapidly make big changes, think everything through, don't surprise users, don't make upgrades that call for massive user intervention, and it's democratically governed and yes, it's a complete OS. Code quality is also better (have you actually looked at what code makes it into the Linux Kernel?), and I would argue therefore security and stability is way better. Just my 2 cents, nothing wrong with Linux, have used it for years, now I would not want to go back though. And a small Side Note: No systemd, not to start a flame war, but it is taking over the linux-sphere and I find it's design just horrific

dorfsmay 11y ago
Are there significant differences in usability between BSD jails and LXC?
- krenoten 11y ago
  http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/127001/linux-lxc-vs-freebsd-jail http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/127001/linux-lxc-vs-...
- lobster_johnson 11y ago
  There's little technical difference. Both BSD and Linux provide set of kernel-level mechanisms that allow you to run "containers", ie. process trees that are completely isolated from each other and from the host OS. They are roughly comparable, I believe, with mostly minor technical differences. The huge practical difference right now is that on Linux, Docker and LXC (as in linuxcontainers.org) provide a high-level, fairly opinioned framework and set of infrastructure pieces to build, run and manage containers — and there are no fully equivalent tools on BSD, at least none that are as featureful or mature. If you want to do containerized deploys on BSD, you'll be writing scripts that set up jails, call rctl, set kernel parameters with sysctl, and so on. There's ezjail [1], but it's nowhere near Docker in terms of scope. I actually wish there was something on Linux that was less monolithic and better designed than Docker. Its image management is badly designed and annoying to use, and after all this time it still suffers from design flaws such as needing to be the parent of all containers (completely unnecessary given that we have cgroups). [1] https://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/jails-ezjail.html https://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/j...

linuxlizard 11y ago

Small reason to use Linux--Linux has taken over the embedded market. Hardware vendors (e.g., Broadcom, Intel) offer BSP (board support packages) for Linux but not any of the BSDs. The BSP in embedded does sort-of what the PC BIOS does. The BSP is the code to bring the microcontroller from cold start to booting something. Booting Linux is supported by large vendors. Embedded hardware vendors also offer Linux drivers. Not so much anything else.

ausjke 11y ago
This is indeed true, systemd was the one thing triggered me to check with BSD again after quite a few years. Netbsd used to be the embedded BSD flavor, but comparing to linux it's nearly nothing these days. linux thrived in the embedded OS space and pushed aside QNX, OS9, Vxworks, WinCE and NetBSD.

thinkingkong 11y ago

Not sure which operating systems are still pushing the enveloppe but I get the impression that these system designs are congealing. BSD and Solaris were different enough to create real competition, if only friendly. Now it seems that momentum of linux has turned it into the only real option for doing "serious" things, unless you need the license freedom of BSD for an embedded device.

feld 11y ago
That's an impression a lot of people have been getting and it's very unfortunate. It doesn't help that OS isn't really taught anymore. But if you're interested, check out http://teachbsd.org http://teachbsd.org

tmbsundar 11y ago

I have freebsd in one of my VMs and like it very much. One reason I am reluctant to move it as my primary OS is the lack of CUDA support (this might be an nvidia thing and not the fault of freebsd devs). But still it's seems to be a blocker. Is there a way to make CUDA work in freebsd? Would be glad to know.

floatboth 11y ago
No. NVIDIA hasn't ported CUDA to FreeBSD. There is OpenCL though https://wiki.freebsd.org/Graphics/OpenCL https://wiki.freebsd.org/Graphics/OpenCL for Intel and Radeon.

blinkingled 11y ago

If you're not comfortable putting FreeBSD on your desktop - check out pfSense. Find that old PC, slap another NIC in it and make it your router. You get ZFS for free along with other cool networking and FreeBSD stuff.

davidgerard 11y ago

I like FreeBSD a lot more than Linux at the administration level. I ran it as my desktop for a few years. The big problem: all the software I wanted to run assumed the whole world was GNU/Linux. So I ended up running lots of Linux binaries under emulation. (yes, I could have compiled everything from ports. But the time I spent 3 days compiling OpenOffice to discover the port was known-broken put me off that a bit ...) Then I discovered Ubuntu and in particular synaptic and the Debian repos and had a "holy shit, this gets it right" moment. Haven't looked back.

gregory-nisbet 11y ago
I've read about the FreeBSD Linux emulation layer, but don't know that much about it. What exactly does it provide besides emulation of Linux system calls? How reliable is it in practice?
- davidgerard 11y ago
  This was ten years ago, I have no idea what it's like in 2015. It's a syscall emulator and a pile of libs from Red Hat. It was reasonably reliable. X font rendering was awful. But then, Linux at the time wasn't much better; Ubuntu had only just started on the process of making the Linux desktop less annoying.
  - floatboth 11y ago
    It is maintained. epoll support is coming to the linuxulator in FreeBSD 11. But you don't need it really. All the usual desktop software is available natively. Firefox, Thunderbird, Chromium, LibreOffice, Transmission, VLC, GIMP, darktable, ioquake3 :-) You don't need to compile anything (if you don't want to, say, use LibreSSL everywhere), pkgng is excellent.
    - david-given 11y ago
      > But you don't need it really. ...games. Is the syscall emulation layer good enough to run the Steam client and, to pick one at random, Kerbal Space Program?

zekevermillion 11y ago

I prefer the "Comparing BSD and Linux" article by Greg Lehey. He clearly prefers BSD and thinks that the BSDs are more elegant OSs than GNU/Linux. Nevertheless, he admits that some users may prefer GNU/Linux for various reasons, and we are left to make our own decisions as to the aesthetics of the various unixes. https://www.freebsd.org/doc/en/articles/explaining-bsd/comparing-bsd-and-linux.html https://www.freebsd.org/doc/en/articles/explaining-bsd/compa...

KirinDave 11y ago

I sort of hope people are waking up from the rut the industry has been. OSX for dev, Linux for backend services... Even AWS. If I were to start another company today, I'd almost surely be using none of these options to max my productivity. Right now, OSX has become increasingly hostile to dev and Linux is great at modularizing other features FreeBSD built years ago. Lately I've been trying to ship software from the newly open sourced and open-er licensed .NET CoreCLR and Mono (via C# & F# respectively) and FreeBSD. The results are surprisingly good, especially with the new native executable compilation target stuff. And the docker pass-through to FreeBSD jails is hot like the sun. It's like a Docker container with similar constraints but without such severe security issues. That and the new network stack makes containers on FreeBSD pretty compelling, even compared to the 1.9 security work. And there is that thing where linux is locked in a death roll with itself regarding its initalization system? Freebsd don't have that. And that thing where Apple makes you boot into safe mode and flip an NVRAM bit to actually have root on your box? Of course, I'm not personally shipping code on iOS, so this discussion is a lot more flexible for me than it might be for many.

kris-s 11y ago
What would you develop on then?
- KirinDave 11y ago
  Backend services, maybe micro maybe not. The CLR has really great support for a hybrid async/threadpool model and C# has direct language support. There's a framework called "ServiceStack" which tastes a lot like Jetty that you can use to avoid the ASP.NET-influenced technologies and approach things in a lightweight way. There is also a developer preview of actual native compilation, which means your deploy story in a container is competitive with Go and startup times for a statically linked binary are great. This means it's actually outperforming Java for containerized deploys (in this specific facet). Azure and GCE are both really, really good compared to EC2. Hell, GCE is shipping actual Kubernetes support and I want to migrate our entire tech stack to that. Already we've migrated our growing website to it, and as soon as they fix some network performance issues (already fixed in master, but we don't use beta orchestration software in production), we'll flip the switch on that as it elegantly solves some really shitty problems you hit in AWS VPCs. I like F# a lot, by the way. I can't wait to use it more. It's like OCaml but with a lot of the amenities you expect from the JVM ecosystem (like, for example, the ever-required but poorly supported datetime libraries) and LINQ support, which is pervasive, user-extensible object comprehensions with compiler support. C# doesn't excite me so much, but it has a REPL and it's certainly a more advanced language than Java.

JeremyMorgan 11y ago

I've been using FreeBSD since 1999 or so, and I love it, but not really for a desktop. On a server you can spend a lot of time dialing it in, building from source, etc. and have a rock solid performant server, and in most cases it's worth it. On the desktop you can get a system that's basically the same as Linux but you will spend more time on updates and building stuff, and it will be harder to configure your hardware. If the philosophical differences between FreeBSD and Linux are important to you, it's worth it. Otherwise I'm not sure there are many advantages that make it worth the hassle. I have tried PC-BSD but haven't spent enough time with it to make a really solid conclusion about it.

samstave 11y ago
So... what then do you prefer for your desktop?
- JeremyMorgan 11y ago
  Depends on the task, and I'm not exactly a typical case. For graphics and video editing I prefer OSX. For .Net specific development, Windows 10 (Which I'm starting to hate). For all other development and casual browsing I use Arch Linux. I spent a full day building it and dialing it in a couple years ago and it works like clockwork today.

fisk 11y ago

I tried 10.0, and I had a few really irritating problems. My connection didn't stay up well with freebsd, and freebsd-update was not behaving robustly in the face of that. And pkg was frequently having problems with upgrades to itself where you had to follow the lists to know when to do something carefully by hand rather than letting the tool do its thing.

jeffdavis 11y ago

Linux has a lot of the pathology that comes with monopoly. Low innovation, features almost entirely copied from other OSes (often poorly and very late). Also my brief experience with a kernel patch for Linux felt very abrasive, defensive, and I didn't make any progress (though part of the issue was fixed in a roundabout way a few months later). If you use freebsd/openbsd/dragonflybsd you are supporting a more innovative group of people, and will have a much more pleasant experience if you need something fixed in the kernel (I had an issue with the freebsd kernel as well, and they acknowledged and fixed it).

Spiritus 11y ago

This got me curious, and I installed one of the official Vagrant images[1]. However they don't seem to come with ZFS as default file system...? [1] https://vagrantcloud.com/freebsd https://vagrantcloud.com/freebsd

jdboyd 11y ago
I expect that for general development use, FreeBSD in a VM performs better with UFS than it does with ZFS, especially in low memory VMs. That is probably why the vagrant images don't use it by default. You might need to just create a FreeBSD VM from the normal FreeBSD installer if you wish to experiment with ZFS on FreeBSD.

drcube 11y ago

I expect almost any laptop I buy will work (with minimal tinkering) with any flavor of Linux I use, but something tells me that is not the case with BSD. Are they all running it on a virtual machine? Or is there a lot more people writing drivers for BSD than I imagined? The BSDs seem like they have a lot of what I love about Slackware, only more so. I'd really like to try installing one, and might do so on an old laptop this weekend.