4 ms·

I left Linux for BSD on my home computers. FreeBSD has the right mix of OS aesthetics and great practical tools. Between the new binary pkg tool, ezjail, and gr

by jitl 10y ago

I left Linux for BSD on my home computers. FreeBSD has the right mix of OS aesthetics and great practical tools. Between the new binary pkg tool, ezjail, and great native ZFS support, I am very happy with it.

autoreleasepool 10y ago
As a newcomer, FreeBSD's new pkg tool is what sold me to the platform. I am too new school to to deal with Ports. I don't get much of a rush out of compiling my own binaries.
- clarry 10y ago
  Does it offer something beyond OpenBSD's pkg tools?
  - Sanddancer 10y ago
    A database backend which makes searching through packages, and occasionally being naughty and altering manifests, easi. It's fast as hell, like faster than apt, it lets you lock packages to a specific version, etc, so you can do things like have 2 or 3 packages built with special flags and still use the package management tools. It's fantastically clean too and well documented, as BSD software tends to be.
themartorana 10y ago
Did the same to our entire server stack (20+ servers). We were using Ubuntu and Upstart, and when Debian announced systemd, Ubuntu announced the end of Upstart. Having to move all our init scripts sucked, and while trying to select the best approach, the systemd war was just getting started. A friend who was hearing me weigh the merits of different approaches suggested FreeBSD, and I'm not sure why I hadn't considered it prior. We moved to it (a couple years back) and it's been a breath of fresh air. Even better, I can watch the systemd takeover from afar.
- ultramancool 10y ago
  I made the same move, except I added an extra piece. Instead of moving everything to a new platform-specific init system like freebsd's rc system, I instead moved everything to runit. Runit can run ontop of an existing init system, so now I can have this code running ontop of bsd, upstart and systemd based systems without having to change a thing. It's really be a savior for me. I don't touch anything, I write scripts that are about the simplest thing I've ever seen and it just runs anywhere I toss it. I used to avoid writing init scripts like this like the plague but runit has made it quite enjoyable. I've even moved a lot of dev stuff where I had everything running in tmux to runit based control.

by jitl 10y ago

autoreleasepool 10y ago

As a newcomer, FreeBSD's new pkg tool is what sold me to the platform. I am too new school to to deal with Ports. I don't get much of a rush out of compiling my own binaries.

clarry 10y ago
Does it offer something beyond OpenBSD's pkg tools?
- Sanddancer 10y ago
  A database backend which makes searching through packages, and occasionally being naughty and altering manifests, easi. It's fast as hell, like faster than apt, it lets you lock packages to a specific version, etc, so you can do things like have 2 or 3 packages built with special flags and still use the package management tools. It's fantastically clean too and well documented, as BSD software tends to be.

themartorana 10y ago

Did the same to our entire server stack (20+ servers). We were using Ubuntu and Upstart, and when Debian announced systemd, Ubuntu announced the end of Upstart. Having to move all our init scripts sucked, and while trying to select the best approach, the systemd war was just getting started. A friend who was hearing me weigh the merits of different approaches suggested FreeBSD, and I'm not sure why I hadn't considered it prior. We moved to it (a couple years back) and it's been a breath of fresh air. Even better, I can watch the systemd takeover from afar.

ultramancool 10y ago
I made the same move, except I added an extra piece. Instead of moving everything to a new platform-specific init system like freebsd's rc system, I instead moved everything to runit. Runit can run ontop of an existing init system, so now I can have this code running ontop of bsd, upstart and systemd based systems without having to change a thing. It's really be a savior for me. I don't touch anything, I write scripts that are about the simplest thing I've ever seen and it just runs anywhere I toss it. I used to avoid writing init scripts like this like the plague but runit has made it quite enjoyable. I've even moved a lot of dev stuff where I had everything running in tmux to runit based control.