8 ms·

I know Linux (Debian) quite well and would like an excuse to try learning FreeBSD, but I just can't find any serious use-cases where FreeBSD would be of any adv

by nixos 10y ago

I know Linux (Debian) quite well and would like an excuse to try learning FreeBSD, but I just can't find any serious use-cases where FreeBSD would be of any advantage. I run a small site on a VPS, so: 1. I don't have GBs of free memory for ZFS 2. I don't have GB of RAM, CPU and HD space to build everything from ports, and most importantly, no need. Except for an Application Firewall for nginx, what does ports have over deb packages? All in all, how much MB of free RAM or free HD space will I win by compiling everything myself (taking time to do so, and pushing off security updates because I don't have the time to sit and watch the compilation, hoping nothing breaks (which _did_ happen once) 3. License - I don't care. GPL is free enough for me. 4. Base vs. Ports - Why should I care? Debian (testing!) is stable enough for me. Except for dist-upgrades, I never ran into issues, and then it may be faster to nuke the server from orbit. Now had BSD "appified" the /usr/local directory (rather than keeping the nginx binary in /usr/local/bin and conf in /usr/local/conf it would have kept everything related to nginx in a /usr/local/nginx) it would have been interesting, but now? If anything, I like how Debian maintains both base and ports, so I can get almost any software I need from apt-get, and don't have to worry about conflicts. 5. systemd? The reason Debian went with systemd was (IIRC) because they didn't have the manpower to undo all of RedHat's work in forcing all applications to integrate into systemd (such as GNOME). I don't know how FreeBSD is doing in that regard. I don't mind learning new systems. (see my username :) ). I actually understand what nixos or coreos, for example, bring to the table. But FreeBSD?

cperciva 10y ago
I'm inclined to agree that there probably aren't any great reasons why you would benefit from FreeBSD rather than Debian, but just to correct one misconception: I don't have GBs of free memory for ZFS In the early days of ZFS it required many GB of memory -- it was developed for Solaris, and designed for servers with lots of memory. But it has improved dramatically since it first came to FreeBSD, and people run it with far less memory these days.
- nixos 10y ago
  How much RAM is required these days?
  - cperciva 10y ago
    There are definitely people running ZFS on systems with less than 1GB of RAM. I'm not sure if anyone is running ZFS on a system with less than 512 MB of RAM. (FWIW, at one point the amount of address space was far more important than the amount of RAM -- amd64 systems with 1 GB of RAM would run better than i386 systems with 2 GB. I'm not sure if this is still the case.)
    - radiowave 10y ago
      Back in the days of OpenSolaris, I was absolutely running it on 512MB, including a Gnome 2 desktop. I won't claim it won any records for speed, but it absolutely worked, and the data survived a rather nasty intermittent disk controller failure. No first-hand experience with ZFS on BSD, but I believe in the early days of the ZFS port there were issues where if the system came under sudden memory pressure, ZFS might not hand its RAM back to the kernel fast enough, leading to (I guess) a panic. So this is a fit-and-finish issue with a specific port, not an inherent ZFS issue, but it seems to have fed into the whole notion of "ZFS needs bucketloads of RAM".
  - lucaspiller 10y ago
    A big user of RAM in ZFS is dedup and compression - which can both be disabled.
    - alblue 10y ago
      Compression does not use a significant amount of memory - it's the deduplication which uses a lot of memory. In fact compression can make it run faster as there is less I/O data.
    - snuxoll 10y ago
      Compression in ZFS doesn't use RAM, dedup tables, the arc and l2arc mapping tables are all that matters with regards to memory usage with ZFS. l2arc is where a lot of newbies end up shooting themselves in the foot, they go toss in a mirrored pair of 512GB SSD's for their l2arc on a system with 32GB of RAM and wonder why performance got worse or it crashed, or they enabled dedup on 24TB of data with 64GB of ram and wonder why it crashed and their zpool is beyond recovery. If you are using ZFS without an l2arc or dedup enabled even a measly 1GB of RAM is "sufficient", you just won't get the best performance since it's going to have to constantly fetch from disk depending on your active data set (which is literally no different a problem than OS-level file caching in any other operating system).
aaron-lebo 10y ago
1. zfs runs well on a lot of systems. You might have to change a setting or two but it's not as you say. 2. pkg install and the related pkg utilities have existed for awhile. 5. systemd isn't and shouldn't be a requirement for applications going forward. Any application that requires it is limiting its portability for unknown reasons. The joy of trying a new system is the little things you learn that you weren't even aware of before.
- erlehmann_ 10y ago
  Regarding your point 5: Application developers embrace systemd (and thereby reject portability to some extent) because it makes it easier for them to not do infrastructure work. A description of that phenomenon in KDE can be read here: http://blog.davidedmundson.co.uk/blog/systemd-and-plasma http://blog.davidedmundson.co.uk/blog/systemd-and-plasma
  - malka 10y ago
    So it's a feature. I cut myself from shitty software by using FreeBSD.
- nixos 10y ago
  > pkg install and the related pkg utilities have existed for awhile. So have apt and apt-get. So that takes away one of the advantages of FreeBSD > systemd isn't and shouldn't be a requirement for applications going forward. Any application that requires it is limiting its portability for unknown reasons. True, tell RedHat that :(
  - danieldk 10y ago
    So have apt and apt-get. So that takes away one of the advantages of FreeBSD Not completely. In Debian and others it's mostly a choice between a stable base and stale software or a moving base and up to date software (though backports improve things quite a bit for Debian Stable). Since in FreeBSD packages are separated from the base system, it's possible to run a stable base system, while using quarterly updates or rolling release (latest) of packages. (Note: I didn't have many problems running Debian Unstable, but it may depend on your requirements.)
merlincorey 10y ago
> 1. I don't have GBs of free memory for ZFS ZFS does not require large amounts of RAM any more, unless you want to benefit from its impressive caching features and have large amounts of disk space. > 2. I don't have GB of RAM, CPU and HD space to build everything from ports, and most importantly, no need. Since FreeBSD 10, pkg-ng has been the standard. It unifies binary packages installable similar to apt and other linux package managers with your custom ports built packages as needed. Now you can mix and match seamlessly and there is no need to have an entire ports tree unless you have special needs. > 3. License - I don't care. GPL is free enough for me. Each to their own, but MIT and BSD are, to me, free-er and more friendly to business applications. > 4. Base vs. Ports - Why should I care? Debian (testing!) is stable enough for me. Except for dist-upgrades, I never ran into issues, and then it may be faster to nuke the server from orbit. Now had BSD "appified" the /usr/local directory (rather than keeping the nginx binary in /usr/local/bin and conf in /usr/local/conf it would have kept everything related to nginx in a /usr/local/nginx) it would have been interesting, but now? The layout you're discussing is basically what happens by default when things are `make install`ed most times without any customizations. The layout that you're lamenting makes sense enough and has merits, with no need to be "appified" -- that is what packages are for. Again, I implore you to check out pkg-ng, it is a core feature of the OS now. > 5. systemd? The reason Debian went with systemd was (IIRC) because they didn't have the manpower to undo all of RedHat's work in forcing all applications to integrate into systemd (such as GNOME). I don't know how FreeBSD is doing in that regard People are experimenting with alternative init systems in the BSD world, though we will likely never directly have SystemD, there are some efforts to support systemd unit files as well as some new directions taking into account Apple's work as well as lessons learned from systemd to build a BSD licensed alternative to all of the above. > But FreeBSD? FreeBSD brings to the table a free, cohesive, highly engineered and integrated operating system that is coming into its prime. There are a multitude of advanced features in terms of filesystems, networking, and more. FreeBSD has first class support in AWS and some other major cloud environments. However, FreeBSD has been and continues to be a server focused operating system. Even so, FreeBSD on the desktop is coming along, but it's certainly nowhere near linux in that regard. In the end, each to their own, if you find a reason to like and use it, then great, but at the least you should look into it and learn what you can from it, like any system.
anexprogrammer 10y ago
ZFS only needs GBs if you need deduplication. 99% don't, almost everyone is better off with compression. 1GB is the min for ZFS though it can run in a little less.
- nixos 10y ago
  Too much. I've got a 700-800 MB system. It's unfortunate, as I'd love to have a versioned FS
  - anexprogrammer 10y ago
    Well, if you're willing to tune settings there's an example on the FreeBSD wiki of someone with a laptop "running nicely" with 768M and their settings. https://wiki.freebsd.org/ZFSTuningGuide https://wiki.freebsd.org/ZFSTuningGuide I've no idea what compromises that'll bring you, or how it would react to you pointing it at a multi TB space.
  - PeCaN 10y ago
    VMS could run a versioned FS in <128MB of RAM, so there's really nothing conceptually in the way. I bet with dedup off and some tweaking you can get ZFS to run in very little memory.
    - rbanffy 10y ago
      That's not really an apples to apples comparison. VMS versioning is a completely different thing than ZFS snapshots and copy on write.
  - ktRolster 10y ago
    Wow, with RAM costing something like $5 a gigabyte these days....do you want us to take up a collection to help you out? I'm not above a little charity, I'll send you a fiver to help you get a real computer!
    - nixos 10y ago
corv 10y ago
Linux is fine for ordinary computing and many specialized tasks but some areas are better served by BSDs. If you require the integrity guarantees offered by ZFS and still want the efficient resource allocation of containers you will not get around FreeBSD or a Solaris based distribution. If you need a system that is secure by default you will not get around OpenBSD. If you need the portability of Linux coupled with a license that lets you freely redistribute in order to sell an appliance you will be hard pressed to get around NetBSD. By the way, ZFS will run fine on small VPS since the RAM cache can be turned off. You still get instant snapshots and rollbacks, efficient replication and integrity guarantees.
- icebraining 10y ago
  If you need the portability of Linux coupled with a license that lets you freely redistribute in order to sell an appliance you will be hard pressed to get around NetBSD. It's perfectly legal to sell an appliance with Linux, people do it all the time.
  - teacup50 10y ago
    You can't "freely redistribute" it though. You have to comply with the viral decidedly non-freeing provisions.
    - mjg59 10y ago
      You can redistribute it as much as you want, providing you permit recipients to do the same thing. Entire industries have found this to be completely reasonable.
    - rbanffy 10y ago
      The only freedom you give up by using the GPL is the freedom to screw your users over by denying them access to the source code. All you are demanded is to let others enjoy the freedom you enjoy. That, surely, isn't too much to ask.
      - 10y ago
badsock 10y ago
One big thing for me is that I trust the FreeBSD devs to not completely reinvent things unless they're sure it's an improvement. I got sick of the churn in Linux, having to relearn things all the time and then find out when I'm done that it's not any better, just different. Things I learned how to do in FreeBSD a decade ago still work. For example, to get a NIC configured I can either put one or two lines of text in rc.conf, (which I have pretty much memorized at this point), or stop and learn what RedHat thinks is the coolest way to do network config this year.
- ktRolster 10y ago
  Watching iptables get replaced was a really depressing example of that, after the developers swore that "this time we got it right" when replacing ipchains......
  - gvurrdon 10y ago
    Thanks - clearly I wasn't paying attention as I had not noticed NFtables. Another exciting task to look forward too, then.
  - dspillett 10y ago
    In fairness IPTables has been around and considered stable for, what, more than a decade and a half now? I'm sure there are great many things that I consider "right" now that will be wrong in 15 years time either due to changes in the environment in which they work or me otherwise learning new information or developing new techniques over time.
  - jlgaddis 10y ago
    ... and ipchains (in 2.2) replaced ipfwadm.
  - kbenson 10y ago
    I haven't had reason to use nftables yet (beyond the default config in a distro), but if it's in any way closer to PF, then it's vastly superior to iptables in my eyes. I spent a while configuring OpenBSD firewall/VPN gateway boxes about a decade ago, and the all around superiority of PF was astounding.
josteink 10y ago
> I don't have GBs of free memory for ZFS Only ZFS dedup uses goobles of RAM, and use of that is discouraged anyway. > I don't have GB of RAM, CPU and HD space to build everything from ports, and most importantly, no need. Last I checked, Debian now supports ZFS in form of a source DKMS package. No need to maintain your own setup. If you go with Ubuntu instead, which provides binary ZFS packages, you can also use it as a rootfs to get full advantage of its capabilities[1]. That said, I've decided to just stick with btrfs, because it's in the mainline Linux kernel, and works well enough for my needs with absolutely zero hassle. FreeBSD is nice though. No harm in trying it out to widen your horizon :) [1] https://github.com/zfsonlinux/zfs/wiki/Ubuntu-16.04-Root-on-ZFS https://github.com/zfsonlinux/zfs/wiki/Ubuntu-16.04-Root-on-...
woodman 10y ago
> 1. I don't have GBs of free memory for ZFS Others have already addressed the memory hog myth, so I'll just say that you aren't required to run ZFS - UFS still works just fine. I just sshed into my freebsd AWS instance (UFS) to see 116d uptime with 130MB ram in use and the remaining 110MB being free. I've made no effort to optimize resource usage on the instance, but if I wanted to I could pretty easily cut that by a third without a noticeable impact on performance. > 2. I don't have GB of RAM, CPU and HD space to build everything from ports, and most importantly, no need. You might be surprised to learn how many build options there are for the software you use daily. I jumped in with both feet and setup a jailed build server after wanting some uncommon build options for vim, ncurses and sqlite3. > 5. systemd? ... didn't have the manpower ... I don't know how FreeBSD is doing in that regard. It has made no attempt, which I'm pretty happy about. The only annoying thing from linux that keeps popping up on my freebsd desktop is dbus.
- nickpsecurity 10y ago
  Which FreeBSD desktop do you use? I'm collecting recommendations before I try using one.
  - 2trill2spill 10y ago
    Try Lumina It's simple and light on resources. https://lumina-desktop.org/ https://lumina-desktop.org/
    - nickpsecurity 10y ago
      I was about to ask about it's robustness and security. Then, the website gave me 404 errors on features, news, and other sections on the website. Hmm. I'll still put it on the list, though, for non-critical use.
  - woodman 10y ago
    I don't use a DE, but I've used the tiling WM i3 for years: https://i3wm.org https://i3wm.org
  - 10y ago
zeveb 10y ago
> I just can't find any serious use-cases where FreeBSD would be of any advantage. Ditto. I definitely like the idea of FreeBSD (and, even more, OpenBSD), but neither really seems worth the pain. The fact that I can't just rely on third-party software working means that I can't use either for my personal desktop (I like to play proprietary games) or even for servers (without extensive testing ahead of time, anyway). As for the license, I prefer the GPL over the BSDL. I don't see why third parties should be permitted to forbid their users from enjoying the same rights they themselves received. Nuts to that. And, honestly, as much as BSDs are a nicely-integrated software suite, they are an old nicely-integrated software suite. As much as the GNU userland is … weird & inconsistent, it's also really powerful. I like having an ls which has added options since 1986. I'd love to love the BSDs, but … I don't.

by nixos 10y ago

cperciva 10y ago

I'm inclined to agree that there probably aren't any great reasons why you would benefit from FreeBSD rather than Debian, but just to correct one misconception: I don't have GBs of free memory for ZFS In the early days of ZFS it required many GB of memory -- it was developed for Solaris, and designed for servers with lots of memory. But it has improved dramatically since it first came to FreeBSD, and people run it with far less memory these days.

nixos 10y ago
How much RAM is required these days?
- cperciva 10y ago
  There are definitely people running ZFS on systems with less than 1GB of RAM. I'm not sure if anyone is running ZFS on a system with less than 512 MB of RAM. (FWIW, at one point the amount of address space was far more important than the amount of RAM -- amd64 systems with 1 GB of RAM would run better than i386 systems with 2 GB. I'm not sure if this is still the case.)
  - radiowave 10y ago
    Back in the days of OpenSolaris, I was absolutely running it on 512MB, including a Gnome 2 desktop. I won't claim it won any records for speed, but it absolutely worked, and the data survived a rather nasty intermittent disk controller failure. No first-hand experience with ZFS on BSD, but I believe in the early days of the ZFS port there were issues where if the system came under sudden memory pressure, ZFS might not hand its RAM back to the kernel fast enough, leading to (I guess) a panic. So this is a fit-and-finish issue with a specific port, not an inherent ZFS issue, but it seems to have fed into the whole notion of "ZFS needs bucketloads of RAM".
- lucaspiller 10y ago
  A big user of RAM in ZFS is dedup and compression - which can both be disabled.
  - alblue 10y ago
    Compression does not use a significant amount of memory - it's the deduplication which uses a lot of memory. In fact compression can make it run faster as there is less I/O data.
  - snuxoll 10y ago
    Compression in ZFS doesn't use RAM, dedup tables, the arc and l2arc mapping tables are all that matters with regards to memory usage with ZFS. l2arc is where a lot of newbies end up shooting themselves in the foot, they go toss in a mirrored pair of 512GB SSD's for their l2arc on a system with 32GB of RAM and wonder why performance got worse or it crashed, or they enabled dedup on 24TB of data with 64GB of ram and wonder why it crashed and their zpool is beyond recovery. If you are using ZFS without an l2arc or dedup enabled even a measly 1GB of RAM is "sufficient", you just won't get the best performance since it's going to have to constantly fetch from disk depending on your active data set (which is literally no different a problem than OS-level file caching in any other operating system).

aaron-lebo 10y ago

1. zfs runs well on a lot of systems. You might have to change a setting or two but it's not as you say. 2. pkg install and the related pkg utilities have existed for awhile. 5. systemd isn't and shouldn't be a requirement for applications going forward. Any application that requires it is limiting its portability for unknown reasons. The joy of trying a new system is the little things you learn that you weren't even aware of before.

erlehmann_ 10y ago
Regarding your point 5: Application developers embrace systemd (and thereby reject portability to some extent) because it makes it easier for them to not do infrastructure work. A description of that phenomenon in KDE can be read here: http://blog.davidedmundson.co.uk/blog/systemd-and-plasma http://blog.davidedmundson.co.uk/blog/systemd-and-plasma
- malka 10y ago
  So it's a feature. I cut myself from shitty software by using FreeBSD.
nixos 10y ago
> pkg install and the related pkg utilities have existed for awhile. So have apt and apt-get. So that takes away one of the advantages of FreeBSD > systemd isn't and shouldn't be a requirement for applications going forward. Any application that requires it is limiting its portability for unknown reasons. True, tell RedHat that :(
- danieldk 10y ago
  So have apt and apt-get. So that takes away one of the advantages of FreeBSD Not completely. In Debian and others it's mostly a choice between a stable base and stale software or a moving base and up to date software (though backports improve things quite a bit for Debian Stable). Since in FreeBSD packages are separated from the base system, it's possible to run a stable base system, while using quarterly updates or rolling release (latest) of packages. (Note: I didn't have many problems running Debian Unstable, but it may depend on your requirements.)

merlincorey 10y ago

> 1. I don't have GBs of free memory for ZFS ZFS does not require large amounts of RAM any more, unless you want to benefit from its impressive caching features and have large amounts of disk space. > 2. I don't have GB of RAM, CPU and HD space to build everything from ports, and most importantly, no need. Since FreeBSD 10, pkg-ng has been the standard. It unifies binary packages installable similar to apt and other linux package managers with your custom ports built packages as needed. Now you can mix and match seamlessly and there is no need to have an entire ports tree unless you have special needs. > 3. License - I don't care. GPL is free enough for me. Each to their own, but MIT and BSD are, to me, free-er and more friendly to business applications. > 4. Base vs. Ports - Why should I care? Debian (testing!) is stable enough for me. Except for dist-upgrades, I never ran into issues, and then it may be faster to nuke the server from orbit. Now had BSD "appified" the /usr/local directory (rather than keeping the nginx binary in /usr/local/bin and conf in /usr/local/conf it would have kept everything related to nginx in a /usr/local/nginx) it would have been interesting, but now? The layout you're discussing is basically what happens by default when things are `make install`ed most times without any customizations. The layout that you're lamenting makes sense enough and has merits, with no need to be "appified" -- that is what packages are for. Again, I implore you to check out pkg-ng, it is a core feature of the OS now. > 5. systemd? The reason Debian went with systemd was (IIRC) because they didn't have the manpower to undo all of RedHat's work in forcing all applications to integrate into systemd (such as GNOME). I don't know how FreeBSD is doing in that regard People are experimenting with alternative init systems in the BSD world, though we will likely never directly have SystemD, there are some efforts to support systemd unit files as well as some new directions taking into account Apple's work as well as lessons learned from systemd to build a BSD licensed alternative to all of the above. > But FreeBSD? FreeBSD brings to the table a free, cohesive, highly engineered and integrated operating system that is coming into its prime. There are a multitude of advanced features in terms of filesystems, networking, and more. FreeBSD has first class support in AWS and some other major cloud environments. However, FreeBSD has been and continues to be a server focused operating system. Even so, FreeBSD on the desktop is coming along, but it's certainly nowhere near linux in that regard. In the end, each to their own, if you find a reason to like and use it, then great, but at the least you should look into it and learn what you can from it, like any system.

anexprogrammer 10y ago

ZFS only needs GBs if you need deduplication. 99% don't, almost everyone is better off with compression. 1GB is the min for ZFS though it can run in a little less.

nixos 10y ago
Too much. I've got a 700-800 MB system. It's unfortunate, as I'd love to have a versioned FS
- anexprogrammer 10y ago
  Well, if you're willing to tune settings there's an example on the FreeBSD wiki of someone with a laptop "running nicely" with 768M and their settings. https://wiki.freebsd.org/ZFSTuningGuide https://wiki.freebsd.org/ZFSTuningGuide I've no idea what compromises that'll bring you, or how it would react to you pointing it at a multi TB space.
- PeCaN 10y ago
  VMS could run a versioned FS in <128MB of RAM, so there's really nothing conceptually in the way. I bet with dedup off and some tweaking you can get ZFS to run in very little memory.
  - rbanffy 10y ago
    That's not really an apples to apples comparison. VMS versioning is a completely different thing than ZFS snapshots and copy on write.
- ktRolster 10y ago
  Wow, with RAM costing something like $5 a gigabyte these days....do you want us to take up a collection to help you out? I'm not above a little charity, I'll send you a fiver to help you get a real computer!
  - nixos 10y ago

corv 10y ago

Linux is fine for ordinary computing and many specialized tasks but some areas are better served by BSDs. If you require the integrity guarantees offered by ZFS and still want the efficient resource allocation of containers you will not get around FreeBSD or a Solaris based distribution. If you need a system that is secure by default you will not get around OpenBSD. If you need the portability of Linux coupled with a license that lets you freely redistribute in order to sell an appliance you will be hard pressed to get around NetBSD. By the way, ZFS will run fine on small VPS since the RAM cache can be turned off. You still get instant snapshots and rollbacks, efficient replication and integrity guarantees.

icebraining 10y ago
If you need the portability of Linux coupled with a license that lets you freely redistribute in order to sell an appliance you will be hard pressed to get around NetBSD. It's perfectly legal to sell an appliance with Linux, people do it all the time.
- teacup50 10y ago
  You can't "freely redistribute" it though. You have to comply with the viral decidedly non-freeing provisions.
  - mjg59 10y ago
    You can redistribute it as much as you want, providing you permit recipients to do the same thing. Entire industries have found this to be completely reasonable.
  - rbanffy 10y ago
    The only freedom you give up by using the GPL is the freedom to screw your users over by denying them access to the source code. All you are demanded is to let others enjoy the freedom you enjoy. That, surely, isn't too much to ask.
    - 10y ago

badsock 10y ago

One big thing for me is that I trust the FreeBSD devs to not completely reinvent things unless they're sure it's an improvement. I got sick of the churn in Linux, having to relearn things all the time and then find out when I'm done that it's not any better, just different. Things I learned how to do in FreeBSD a decade ago still work. For example, to get a NIC configured I can either put one or two lines of text in rc.conf, (which I have pretty much memorized at this point), or stop and learn what RedHat thinks is the coolest way to do network config this year.

ktRolster 10y ago
Watching iptables get replaced was a really depressing example of that, after the developers swore that "this time we got it right" when replacing ipchains......
- gvurrdon 10y ago
  Thanks - clearly I wasn't paying attention as I had not noticed NFtables. Another exciting task to look forward too, then.
- dspillett 10y ago
  In fairness IPTables has been around and considered stable for, what, more than a decade and a half now? I'm sure there are great many things that I consider "right" now that will be wrong in 15 years time either due to changes in the environment in which they work or me otherwise learning new information or developing new techniques over time.
- jlgaddis 10y ago
  ... and ipchains (in 2.2) replaced ipfwadm.
- kbenson 10y ago
  I haven't had reason to use nftables yet (beyond the default config in a distro), but if it's in any way closer to PF, then it's vastly superior to iptables in my eyes. I spent a while configuring OpenBSD firewall/VPN gateway boxes about a decade ago, and the all around superiority of PF was astounding.

josteink 10y ago

> I don't have GBs of free memory for ZFS Only ZFS dedup uses goobles of RAM, and use of that is discouraged anyway. > I don't have GB of RAM, CPU and HD space to build everything from ports, and most importantly, no need. Last I checked, Debian now supports ZFS in form of a source DKMS package. No need to maintain your own setup. If you go with Ubuntu instead, which provides binary ZFS packages, you can also use it as a rootfs to get full advantage of its capabilities[1]. That said, I've decided to just stick with btrfs, because it's in the mainline Linux kernel, and works well enough for my needs with absolutely zero hassle. FreeBSD is nice though. No harm in trying it out to widen your horizon :) [1] https://github.com/zfsonlinux/zfs/wiki/Ubuntu-16.04-Root-on-ZFS https://github.com/zfsonlinux/zfs/wiki/Ubuntu-16.04-Root-on-...

woodman 10y ago

> 1. I don't have GBs of free memory for ZFS Others have already addressed the memory hog myth, so I'll just say that you aren't required to run ZFS - UFS still works just fine. I just sshed into my freebsd AWS instance (UFS) to see 116d uptime with 130MB ram in use and the remaining 110MB being free. I've made no effort to optimize resource usage on the instance, but if I wanted to I could pretty easily cut that by a third without a noticeable impact on performance. > 2. I don't have GB of RAM, CPU and HD space to build everything from ports, and most importantly, no need. You might be surprised to learn how many build options there are for the software you use daily. I jumped in with both feet and setup a jailed build server after wanting some uncommon build options for vim, ncurses and sqlite3. > 5. systemd? ... didn't have the manpower ... I don't know how FreeBSD is doing in that regard. It has made no attempt, which I'm pretty happy about. The only annoying thing from linux that keeps popping up on my freebsd desktop is dbus.

nickpsecurity 10y ago
Which FreeBSD desktop do you use? I'm collecting recommendations before I try using one.
- 2trill2spill 10y ago
  Try Lumina It's simple and light on resources. https://lumina-desktop.org/ https://lumina-desktop.org/
  - nickpsecurity 10y ago
    I was about to ask about it's robustness and security. Then, the website gave me 404 errors on features, news, and other sections on the website. Hmm. I'll still put it on the list, though, for non-critical use.
- woodman 10y ago
  I don't use a DE, but I've used the tiling WM i3 for years: https://i3wm.org https://i3wm.org
- 10y ago

zeveb 10y ago

> I just can't find any serious use-cases where FreeBSD would be of any advantage. Ditto. I definitely like the idea of FreeBSD (and, even more, OpenBSD), but neither really seems worth the pain. The fact that I can't just rely on third-party software working means that I can't use either for my personal desktop (I like to play proprietary games) or even for servers (without extensive testing ahead of time, anyway). As for the license, I prefer the GPL over the BSDL. I don't see why third parties should be permitted to forbid their users from enjoying the same rights they themselves received. Nuts to that. And, honestly, as much as BSDs are a nicely-integrated software suite, they are an old nicely-integrated software suite. As much as the GNU userland is … weird & inconsistent, it's also really powerful. I like having an ls which has added options since 1986. I'd love to love the BSDs, but … I don't.