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FreeBSD Myths

152 points by type0 10y ago

mavhc 10y ago
From 2013
- wongarsu 10y ago
  More accurately: from 2012, with minor updates from 2013 and 2016 [1]. 1: https://wiki.freebsd.org/action/info/Myths?action=info https://wiki.freebsd.org/action/info/Myths?action=info
  - drewg123 10y ago
    Indeed. There is 100G support now, for example.
    - nickysielicki 10y ago
      Bhyve not being mentioned under their virtualization section is a pretty big hole, too.
      - Sanddancer 10y ago
        Bhyve's in the second paragraph of the virtualization section. It talks about virtualbox, then bhyve.
        nickysielicki 10y ago
        D'oh, don't know how I missed that.
alacombe 10y ago
> FreeBSD Has a Closed Development Model Given that it took me 3 month to have Jack Vogel (then maintainer of the driver) acknowledge there was an uninitialized variable bug in the e1000(4) driver, leading to countless user frustration, despite detailed technical analysis and patch. Let me openly challenge this assertion... The issue ended up being fixed (or actually, buried in a huge patch) without attribution [ed. of course!]. My kind regards, but from experience, Linux folks is more open than BSD folks. YMMV. > The BSD License Means Companies Don't Contribute Back They don't ! I've worked for 5 years in a [small] company using FreeBSD as the main development platform, heavily hacking the TCP and network stack. We leached plenty, and didn't contribute a single line back !
- drewg123 10y ago
  Let's just say that the Intel drivers have a pretty checkered history and your experience was not unique. There are new people at Intel working on their drivers, and they are more responsive. Also, iflib is coming, and it will move a lot of the stack-facing driver code from the Intel (and other) drivers to a common location. It is much higher performance and far less buggy than the vendor code it replaces. The beauty of the BSD license is that you don't have to contribute back if you don't want to. Some companies contribute at lot. For example, the Netflix contribution of async sendfile, CAM support for NVME, etc.
  - alacombe 10y ago
    My experience is not limited to the e1000(4) driver. The device tree driver subsystem is based on hardware model from the early 90s, the mbuf API is plagued with code duplication. Nobody want to touch this because the old guard is pretty much locking these interface. Everybody praise the Lord PHK, but his actual code in the tree is really sub-standard... The way to change things is to do what Adrian Chadd has been doing, sneaking in, and changing stuff behind's people back. The way to contribute to BSD is easy, you have to be big to have enough influence (including monetary wise) to get stuff in. When you are a small nobody, you end up being treated as such. Comparatively, I've had Linus look up at some issue I used to have with Linux USB stack (which were likely local interconnect issue). A world of difference. edit: while I think about it, most large changes in FreeBSD are discussed in private. Public discussion on patch and technical discussion is frowned upon. At the end of the day, the dev submit at 10kloc patch that is unrewiewable, and it gets in with rather poor amount of discussion. The only public discussion held is pretty much bikeshedding. There is way more interesting technical conversation happening in a day on the LKML than will happen in a year on FreeBSD ml.
    - drewg123 10y ago
      The problem with mbufs is that they have been around and been extended since the 80s. And Rototilling the interface will break a LOT of hardware. One of the nice things about iflib is that abstracts mbufs away from drivers. Of course that doesn't help much with crusty old drivers, but it does help some. Having worked on both systems, there are some things I like better about mbufs as compared to skbs. But BSD badly needs the skb frags (eg, attached pages) concept to avoid excessive pointer chasing. We've been using an internal (not shared) patch that puts attached pages into an iovec, but it needs a lot of cleanup before upstreaming. Oddly, I've had just the opposite experience as you. I've always found contributing to FreeBSD much easier. I was the author of network drivers for an IHV (not Intel) at a previous job. FreeBSD was a million times easier to deal with than Linux. I had a commit bit, and just developed my driver in head. Whereas with Linux, submitting even minor patches was a major ordeal thanks to davem and the netdev cabal. The Linux driver was often lacking features as compared to FreeBSD just because getting patches in was so time consuming. There is actually quite a bit of public discussion of patches in Phabricator these days.
SwellJoe 10y ago
I think the best thing about FreeBSD is the incredibly high quality of its users; I don't know how that would fit into a "myths" page, but it's worth knowing. Maybe in a section covering how much less popular FreeBSD is than Linux and other operating systems. It could point at that while there are (many) fewer users, they are, on average, extremely well-educated about their system. I'm nearly always impressed by the quality of bug reports we get from FreeBSD users. They're more likely to include a patch, more likely to include specific details about how to reproduce the problem and reasonable theories about why the problem is happening. I don't know if this is correlation or causation (or which direction the cause/effect goes; i.e. are FreeBSD users better educated and that's why they choose FreeBSD, or are they better educated because they have to be in order to survive on a more challenging platform...thus it could be survival bias, rather than any real cause/effect) and I don't know if it is self-reinforcing (i.e. smart users breed more smart users because they're better able to guide new users in smart directions). All that said, lest I begin to sound too positive about FreeBSD, I still use Linux exclusively for my production servers and desktop/laptop. It's a great system with great users, but the sheer inertia of the Linux ecosystem is overwhelming. The Linux kernel alone has more contributors in each release than the entirety of the 400 commit bit havers on the whole of FreeBSD. Luckily, of course, FreeBSD gets to leverage lots of things that are mostly driven by the Linux ecosystem (Gnome, KDE, etc. all sorts of things that are predominantly funded by Red Hat, Canonical, SuSE, IBM, etc. for their Linux products).
- smsm42 10y ago
  > I think the best thing about FreeBSD is the incredibly high quality of its users; I suspect survivor bias in action here. At least I would consider a possibility that these users are so well-educated about their system because they have no choice. And that's not always what one wants. I don't really want to be extremely well-educated about the details of my car. I just want to operate a couple of buttons, levers and other gadgets and get quickly and safely from point A to point B. I couldn't care less how the car does it, for all I care it could have magical pixies inside. Now, I'm not saying BSD users doing it wrong. On the contrary, if it works for them that's great, and becoming the master of your tools is both personally rewarding and enriching. But - if you're preaching to outside audience, one has to mention that "BSD users are very knowledgeable about the details of their system" might also mean "you can't use this system unless you become an expert in it, if you're just interested in being a casual consumer you're in trouble".
smsm42 10y ago
The problem with these lists is that they are technically correct but misleading. E.g. yes, you can run Linux software with some plugins and Windows software with WINE. Except not every software would run, you'd have to jump through hoops that very well may be too high for your level of technical expertise and worst of all, you have no idea upfront if it'll work or not. Choosing OS is a big step, but it's also a foundational step which by itself does nothing for you - you then need apps. And when you read this list, say "OK, cool, all my software is Windows but I'm sure Wine will handle that" and then discover you can't really do any work - that's be bad for you. Same with drivers - sure, BSD supports "wide range" of hardware. However, unless you are very skilled in hardware specs, there's no way for you to know whether your card that you just bought in the store/on amazon is in this range. This is the problem that bothers people - that their card would not be supported, not the global number of supported cards. Same for binary packages - it's nice that it has binary packaging tools, but how I know the software I want will be available in package form? E.g. on Linux I can look into Redhat or Debian package repos and see what they ship, or see download page of any major software vendor and look for "Download for Linux" button - but while I see a lot of DEB/RPM/APT/YUM distribution instructions, I rarely see any BSD instructions.
- jlgaddis 10y ago
  Packages currently available for FreeBSD 10: http://pkg.freebsd.org/freebsd:10:x86:64/latest/All/ http://pkg.freebsd.org/freebsd:10:x86:64/latest/All/ See also Freshports: http://www.freshports.org http://www.freshports.org
  - vacri 10y ago
    Is there a cli tool to browse that, or do you have to go to the web?
    - jlgaddis 10y ago
      If you have the ports tree [0] installed, you can browse through /usr/ports. There's a subdirectory in there for each port, named "category/port". You can search the ports tree using (replace foo with your search term): $ make -C /usr/ports search key=foo You can install the ports tree by running: # portsnap fetch extract [0]: http://www.freshports.org http://www.freshports.org
adamnemecek 10y ago
If you haven't read the book "Design and implementation of the FreeBSD operating system" (https://www.amazon.com/Design-Implementation-FreeBSD-Operating-System/dp/0321968972/ https://www.amazon.com/Design-Implementation-FreeBSD-Operati...) you should. It's possibly the best "applied" OS book. It also contains some interesting code samples in the book which is surprisingly uncommon in comparable books. FreeBSD has for years had some features that are only now reaching 'mainstream' popularity (e.g. jails, which containers are based on). This books explains all that in quite a bit of detail and manages to stay high level enough not to get boring with the details but gives you enough detail to have a pretty detailed understanding. It's also one of the few books that talks about networking in very practical terms (and not like OSI layers and whatnot) which makes me say that it's also possibly one of the best books on networking (you learn quite a bit about networks from how OS's work with them). It also has the hands down best file system around (the book also talks about that). And unlike large parts of linux, the kernel source is actually pretty legible.
- skrebbel 10y ago
  As a lifelong Windows user, I've always been surprised about the obsession Unix users seem to have with filesystems. I mean, as an end user (developer, but I assume that doesn't matter), what I expect from a filesystem is: * let me save a file in a directory * let me open it again I also appreciate how many tools can use stats (eg filemtime) for good effect, and how fine grained permissions help keep my computer secure. All filesystems I've ever used let me do these things, and have for a long time. This probably makes me a Blub programmer in file system terms. What am I missing? Why should I be dissatisfied with NTFS? I mean, in all honesty I don't even know which filesystems my various hard drives and sd cards have - I just save and open files.
  - akvadrako 10y ago
    NTFS is a quite decent filesystem – even more so when it was introduced – and there is a lot to be said for having a one standard. But would you really want to work with FAT or even exFAT as your main OS? It's about 20% slower and doesn't support ACLs or journaling, so you can lose data in a crash. So filesystems matter and Linux still doesn't have a standard choice that's as good as other OSes had 5 years ago.
walrus01 10y ago
Noteworthy that they say it can run as a xen domU, but not whether as PV or HVM. HVM is a huge performance hut.
- Sanddancer 10y ago
  It supports both PV and HVM installations.
- tachion 10y ago
  Not only it supports both PV and HVM (with PVHVM in works) but also it can run as a dom0.
  - Freaky 10y ago
    Last time I checked PV was only supported on i386.
gosukiwi 10y ago
I tried using FreeBSD for my web dev environment once. It was nice, I just hated the fact that I didn't have Dropbox and some node packages (like node-webkit) didn't quite work as expected.
gallerytungsten 10y ago
re: FreeBSD is Just OS X Without the Good Bits The "good bits" are things like Photoshop, Illustrator, and Quark. Sure, I'm aware there are alternatives like Gimp and [whatever]. But the alternatives are kludges for edge case experts; and not for people who need to Get Stuff Done. PS. I operate a FreeBSD server. It's great for that.
- toomanythings4 10y ago
  What if you don't use Photoshop, Illustrator or Quark? I don't and I've used it for my workstation for 12 years.
- jomamaxx 10y ago
  The 'good bits' of OSX is that there is no such a thing as 'drivers' from the users perspective. If you have to use the word 'driver' - it's not user friendly. If you have to 'build' anything - it's not user friendly. 99% of people want to use their apps - even most devs just want a clean, stable, bug-free, well documented and consistent platform to develop on. I have nothing against any of the unix flavours - all the power to them, but I'm not sure that these kinds of articles are hitting the mark when it comes to anything remotely resembling mass adoption. Free BSD is not a 'product' really, I would argue that it's 'technology'.
  - danieldk 10y ago
    The 'good bits' of OSX is that there is no such a thing as 'drivers' from the users perspective. Well, unless you buy some hardware that is not from Apple. Buy a 802.11ac USB stick (because your Mac has 802.11n and you cannot upgrade the hardware) with Mac drivers. The vendor decides to release a (buggy) driver update for El Capitan half a year after it's released. Pretending that the driver problem does not exist on macOS does not make it go away. (Mac user since 2007.)
    - jomamaxx 10y ago
      "Pretending that the driver problem does not exist on macOS does not make it go away." I never said there was not a driver problem. I alluded to the user perception of drivers. Users in this day and age should have absolutely no need to be aware of the concept of 'drivers'. Do you have any drivers for your Android? iPhone? The very concept may very well be dated and perhaps there is a a better solution in 2016.
mp3geek 10y ago
Does FreeBSD have anything to compete with V4L/DVB ?
- tobik 10y ago
  Yes, it has V4L/DVB support via the multimedia/webcamd port/package, which is essentially a user space port of Linux' V4L/DVB drivers. https://www.freshports.org/multimedia/webcamd https://www.freshports.org/multimedia/webcamd
parennoob 10y ago
From the "FreeBSD is good for servers, not for Desktops" > If even this is too much effort, PC-BSD is a full-featured desktop system built on top of FreeBSD, with an easy-to-use installer and the option of commercial support. Seriously, it is this sort of "the user is so stupid if they can't compile their own software easily" attitude that turns me off about projects like FreeBSD. How hard is it to simply not say this stuff, and gain a lot more users into the bargain? Just say something friendly, like "If you would prefer an OS that works out of the box, PC-BSD is also available".
- LeoPanthera 10y ago
  I don't see that attitude in what you are reading. Any OS which the user has to install themselves has to assume a certain amount of knowledge in the user. It's completely fair to say "And there's an even easier way if you prefer" as well.
  - dwc 10y ago
    Your version, "and there's an even easier way...", does sound nicer than, "If even this is too much effort, ..." There's a difference in tone there.
    - LeoPanthera 10y ago
      Well, perhaps, but it feels incredibly minor to me. Even if true, I don't think the tone represents the intention.
- Yuioup 10y ago
  Last time I tried to use PC-BSD, updates were painfully slow. It lead me to believe that there were not enough mirrors to serve packages. This was about 5-6 years ago. How is PC-BSD doing nowadays? Is it really worth installing and using?
  - dingaling 10y ago
    > How is PC-BSD doing nowadays? Is it really worth installing and using? Anecdotally, I installed it on a spare laptop last month and the first main hurdle was that the disk partitioner kept failing until I first manually fdisked the disk to a single partition. The second hurdle was that when it booted to the desktop there was no system tray icon to enable wireless networking and select an SSID, despite the 4965 chipset being fully supported. Presumably it requires some messing-around with wpa_supplicant. I haven't had time to go back to it but both would be deal-breakers for the 'common person'.
Scarbutt 10y ago
FreeBSD is a second class citizen when it comes to the JVM. Myth?
- grkvlt 10y ago
  No, very true, sadly. I wonder if the C-school hackers on BSD just look down on Java as far too 'Enterprisey' for them? Or has this changed?
frik 10y ago
Can someone debunk the myth I read about the FreeBSD package management system? In Debian/Ubuntu/Mint style Linux it's enough to use apt-get update apt-get upgrade and only the changed packages including all interdepencies are downloaded and installed in the correct binary form (x86/x64/arm...). How does FreeBSD really handles package management and is it ahead or behind the current state-of-art in this respect? And what is on the roadmap to improve the status-quo (in case there is a need)?
- Sanddancer 10y ago
  pkg-ng was added a few years ago, and makes updating super easy. pkg update pulls a new package list, pkg upgrade installs. For installs, pkg add, for deinstalls, pkg delete. It also uses sqlite as its database format, so it's a lot easier to build tools around for querying and maintaining systems.
- ivoras 10y ago
  That particular case - upgrading everything - is actually supported pretty well. Of course, there's the distinction between the base system and app packages - the base still needs to be upgraded another way (freebsd-update). It's the much more useful case of upgrading complete subgraphs of package dependencies that still wasn't implemented when I last looked at it a year ago. If you have application packages A1 and A2 installed, and a library package L on which both of them depend on, then if you upgrade A2 to a newer version which requires (and is linked against) a newer version of package L, pkgng will simply not upgrade both L and A1. The pkgng devs simply declared this to be out of scope. For a time, pkgng (now just "pkg" as it's the only one) looked like it could be the best thing since sliced bread, only for the devs to arrogantly dismiss the most common dependency-related operation used in practice. It's the single biggest issue which turned me away from FreeBSD, since I don't want to write package manager code, don't want to maintain my own package repos, and don't want to track "snapshots" (i.e. 6-months old "freezed" package repos, without security updates) which are the three "workarounds" proposed to me at the time. This is important because FreeBSD's ports and packages are on a "rolling release" model, i.e. often (daily/weekly, depends on the maintainer) updated to the latest upstream version, so the lack of complete subgraph package upgrades regularly leaves you with broken apps.
tete 10y ago
I use FreeBSD, but if you think FreeBSD 4.x was great (related to the "everything after was bad" myth) and also if performance is your thing you should take a look at DragonFly BSD. Matthew Dillon who is largely responsible for FreeBSD works on this now. But don't fear. People of both projects share a lot, just try different approaches. :) https://www.dragonflybsd.org/ https://www.dragonflybsd.org/ (also, if you think the website isn't the nicest I agree)
aswanson 10y ago
I just want a single download freebsd distro for the desktop to play around with. Doesn't seem to exist.
- monorailz 10y ago
  Maybe DesktopBSD? http://www.desktopbsd.net/ http://www.desktopbsd.net/ I dunno, I haven't used it but others have said that it's a simple install. I bought a Lenovo Thinkpad to run a FreeBSD laptop and don't feel that the amount of work I had to do to get it to a useful state was all that different from the amount of work with Fedora on my desktop computer but I've been using both FreeBSD and various Linux distros for several years and don't know your amount of previous experience with either FreeBSD or Linux so YMMV.

FreeBSD Myths

152 points by type0 10y ago

mavhc 10y ago

From 2013

wongarsu 10y ago
More accurately: from 2012, with minor updates from 2013 and 2016 [1]. 1: https://wiki.freebsd.org/action/info/Myths?action=info https://wiki.freebsd.org/action/info/Myths?action=info
- drewg123 10y ago
  Indeed. There is 100G support now, for example.
  - nickysielicki 10y ago
    Bhyve not being mentioned under their virtualization section is a pretty big hole, too.
    - Sanddancer 10y ago
      Bhyve's in the second paragraph of the virtualization section. It talks about virtualbox, then bhyve.
      - nickysielicki 10y ago
        D'oh, don't know how I missed that.

alacombe 10y ago

> FreeBSD Has a Closed Development Model Given that it took me 3 month to have Jack Vogel (then maintainer of the driver) acknowledge there was an uninitialized variable bug in the e1000(4) driver, leading to countless user frustration, despite detailed technical analysis and patch. Let me openly challenge this assertion... The issue ended up being fixed (or actually, buried in a huge patch) without attribution [ed. of course!]. My kind regards, but from experience, Linux folks is more open than BSD folks. YMMV. > The BSD License Means Companies Don't Contribute Back They don't ! I've worked for 5 years in a [small] company using FreeBSD as the main development platform, heavily hacking the TCP and network stack. We leached plenty, and didn't contribute a single line back !

drewg123 10y ago
Let's just say that the Intel drivers have a pretty checkered history and your experience was not unique. There are new people at Intel working on their drivers, and they are more responsive. Also, iflib is coming, and it will move a lot of the stack-facing driver code from the Intel (and other) drivers to a common location. It is much higher performance and far less buggy than the vendor code it replaces. The beauty of the BSD license is that you don't have to contribute back if you don't want to. Some companies contribute at lot. For example, the Netflix contribution of async sendfile, CAM support for NVME, etc.
- alacombe 10y ago
  My experience is not limited to the e1000(4) driver. The device tree driver subsystem is based on hardware model from the early 90s, the mbuf API is plagued with code duplication. Nobody want to touch this because the old guard is pretty much locking these interface. Everybody praise the Lord PHK, but his actual code in the tree is really sub-standard... The way to change things is to do what Adrian Chadd has been doing, sneaking in, and changing stuff behind's people back. The way to contribute to BSD is easy, you have to be big to have enough influence (including monetary wise) to get stuff in. When you are a small nobody, you end up being treated as such. Comparatively, I've had Linus look up at some issue I used to have with Linux USB stack (which were likely local interconnect issue). A world of difference. edit: while I think about it, most large changes in FreeBSD are discussed in private. Public discussion on patch and technical discussion is frowned upon. At the end of the day, the dev submit at 10kloc patch that is unrewiewable, and it gets in with rather poor amount of discussion. The only public discussion held is pretty much bikeshedding. There is way more interesting technical conversation happening in a day on the LKML than will happen in a year on FreeBSD ml.
  - drewg123 10y ago
    The problem with mbufs is that they have been around and been extended since the 80s. And Rototilling the interface will break a LOT of hardware. One of the nice things about iflib is that abstracts mbufs away from drivers. Of course that doesn't help much with crusty old drivers, but it does help some. Having worked on both systems, there are some things I like better about mbufs as compared to skbs. But BSD badly needs the skb frags (eg, attached pages) concept to avoid excessive pointer chasing. We've been using an internal (not shared) patch that puts attached pages into an iovec, but it needs a lot of cleanup before upstreaming. Oddly, I've had just the opposite experience as you. I've always found contributing to FreeBSD much easier. I was the author of network drivers for an IHV (not Intel) at a previous job. FreeBSD was a million times easier to deal with than Linux. I had a commit bit, and just developed my driver in head. Whereas with Linux, submitting even minor patches was a major ordeal thanks to davem and the netdev cabal. The Linux driver was often lacking features as compared to FreeBSD just because getting patches in was so time consuming. There is actually quite a bit of public discussion of patches in Phabricator these days.

SwellJoe 10y ago

I think the best thing about FreeBSD is the incredibly high quality of its users; I don't know how that would fit into a "myths" page, but it's worth knowing. Maybe in a section covering how much less popular FreeBSD is than Linux and other operating systems. It could point at that while there are (many) fewer users, they are, on average, extremely well-educated about their system. I'm nearly always impressed by the quality of bug reports we get from FreeBSD users. They're more likely to include a patch, more likely to include specific details about how to reproduce the problem and reasonable theories about why the problem is happening. I don't know if this is correlation or causation (or which direction the cause/effect goes; i.e. are FreeBSD users better educated and that's why they choose FreeBSD, or are they better educated because they have to be in order to survive on a more challenging platform...thus it could be survival bias, rather than any real cause/effect) and I don't know if it is self-reinforcing (i.e. smart users breed more smart users because they're better able to guide new users in smart directions). All that said, lest I begin to sound too positive about FreeBSD, I still use Linux exclusively for my production servers and desktop/laptop. It's a great system with great users, but the sheer inertia of the Linux ecosystem is overwhelming. The Linux kernel alone has more contributors in each release than the entirety of the 400 commit bit havers on the whole of FreeBSD. Luckily, of course, FreeBSD gets to leverage lots of things that are mostly driven by the Linux ecosystem (Gnome, KDE, etc. all sorts of things that are predominantly funded by Red Hat, Canonical, SuSE, IBM, etc. for their Linux products).

smsm42 10y ago
> I think the best thing about FreeBSD is the incredibly high quality of its users; I suspect survivor bias in action here. At least I would consider a possibility that these users are so well-educated about their system because they have no choice. And that's not always what one wants. I don't really want to be extremely well-educated about the details of my car. I just want to operate a couple of buttons, levers and other gadgets and get quickly and safely from point A to point B. I couldn't care less how the car does it, for all I care it could have magical pixies inside. Now, I'm not saying BSD users doing it wrong. On the contrary, if it works for them that's great, and becoming the master of your tools is both personally rewarding and enriching. But - if you're preaching to outside audience, one has to mention that "BSD users are very knowledgeable about the details of their system" might also mean "you can't use this system unless you become an expert in it, if you're just interested in being a casual consumer you're in trouble".

smsm42 10y ago

The problem with these lists is that they are technically correct but misleading. E.g. yes, you can run Linux software with some plugins and Windows software with WINE. Except not every software would run, you'd have to jump through hoops that very well may be too high for your level of technical expertise and worst of all, you have no idea upfront if it'll work or not. Choosing OS is a big step, but it's also a foundational step which by itself does nothing for you - you then need apps. And when you read this list, say "OK, cool, all my software is Windows but I'm sure Wine will handle that" and then discover you can't really do any work - that's be bad for you. Same with drivers - sure, BSD supports "wide range" of hardware. However, unless you are very skilled in hardware specs, there's no way for you to know whether your card that you just bought in the store/on amazon is in this range. This is the problem that bothers people - that their card would not be supported, not the global number of supported cards. Same for binary packages - it's nice that it has binary packaging tools, but how I know the software I want will be available in package form? E.g. on Linux I can look into Redhat or Debian package repos and see what they ship, or see download page of any major software vendor and look for "Download for Linux" button - but while I see a lot of DEB/RPM/APT/YUM distribution instructions, I rarely see any BSD instructions.

jlgaddis 10y ago
Packages currently available for FreeBSD 10: http://pkg.freebsd.org/freebsd:10:x86:64/latest/All/ http://pkg.freebsd.org/freebsd:10:x86:64/latest/All/ See also Freshports: http://www.freshports.org http://www.freshports.org
- vacri 10y ago
  Is there a cli tool to browse that, or do you have to go to the web?
  - jlgaddis 10y ago
    If you have the ports tree [0] installed, you can browse through /usr/ports. There's a subdirectory in there for each port, named "category/port". You can search the ports tree using (replace foo with your search term): $ make -C /usr/ports search key=foo You can install the ports tree by running: # portsnap fetch extract [0]: http://www.freshports.org http://www.freshports.org

adamnemecek 10y ago

If you haven't read the book "Design and implementation of the FreeBSD operating system" (https://www.amazon.com/Design-Implementation-FreeBSD-Operating-System/dp/0321968972/ https://www.amazon.com/Design-Implementation-FreeBSD-Operati...) you should. It's possibly the best "applied" OS book. It also contains some interesting code samples in the book which is surprisingly uncommon in comparable books. FreeBSD has for years had some features that are only now reaching 'mainstream' popularity (e.g. jails, which containers are based on). This books explains all that in quite a bit of detail and manages to stay high level enough not to get boring with the details but gives you enough detail to have a pretty detailed understanding. It's also one of the few books that talks about networking in very practical terms (and not like OSI layers and whatnot) which makes me say that it's also possibly one of the best books on networking (you learn quite a bit about networks from how OS's work with them). It also has the hands down best file system around (the book also talks about that). And unlike large parts of linux, the kernel source is actually pretty legible.

skrebbel 10y ago
As a lifelong Windows user, I've always been surprised about the obsession Unix users seem to have with filesystems. I mean, as an end user (developer, but I assume that doesn't matter), what I expect from a filesystem is: * let me save a file in a directory * let me open it again I also appreciate how many tools can use stats (eg filemtime) for good effect, and how fine grained permissions help keep my computer secure. All filesystems I've ever used let me do these things, and have for a long time. This probably makes me a Blub programmer in file system terms. What am I missing? Why should I be dissatisfied with NTFS? I mean, in all honesty I don't even know which filesystems my various hard drives and sd cards have - I just save and open files.
- akvadrako 10y ago
  NTFS is a quite decent filesystem – even more so when it was introduced – and there is a lot to be said for having a one standard. But would you really want to work with FAT or even exFAT as your main OS? It's about 20% slower and doesn't support ACLs or journaling, so you can lose data in a crash. So filesystems matter and Linux still doesn't have a standard choice that's as good as other OSes had 5 years ago.

walrus01 10y ago

Noteworthy that they say it can run as a xen domU, but not whether as PV or HVM. HVM is a huge performance hut.

Sanddancer 10y ago
It supports both PV and HVM installations.
tachion 10y ago
Not only it supports both PV and HVM (with PVHVM in works) but also it can run as a dom0.
- Freaky 10y ago
  Last time I checked PV was only supported on i386.

gosukiwi 10y ago

I tried using FreeBSD for my web dev environment once. It was nice, I just hated the fact that I didn't have Dropbox and some node packages (like node-webkit) didn't quite work as expected.

gallerytungsten 10y ago

re: FreeBSD is Just OS X Without the Good Bits The "good bits" are things like Photoshop, Illustrator, and Quark. Sure, I'm aware there are alternatives like Gimp and [whatever]. But the alternatives are kludges for edge case experts; and not for people who need to Get Stuff Done. PS. I operate a FreeBSD server. It's great for that.

toomanythings4 10y ago
What if you don't use Photoshop, Illustrator or Quark? I don't and I've used it for my workstation for 12 years.
jomamaxx 10y ago
The 'good bits' of OSX is that there is no such a thing as 'drivers' from the users perspective. If you have to use the word 'driver' - it's not user friendly. If you have to 'build' anything - it's not user friendly. 99% of people want to use their apps - even most devs just want a clean, stable, bug-free, well documented and consistent platform to develop on. I have nothing against any of the unix flavours - all the power to them, but I'm not sure that these kinds of articles are hitting the mark when it comes to anything remotely resembling mass adoption. Free BSD is not a 'product' really, I would argue that it's 'technology'.
- danieldk 10y ago
  The 'good bits' of OSX is that there is no such a thing as 'drivers' from the users perspective. Well, unless you buy some hardware that is not from Apple. Buy a 802.11ac USB stick (because your Mac has 802.11n and you cannot upgrade the hardware) with Mac drivers. The vendor decides to release a (buggy) driver update for El Capitan half a year after it's released. Pretending that the driver problem does not exist on macOS does not make it go away. (Mac user since 2007.)
  - jomamaxx 10y ago
    "Pretending that the driver problem does not exist on macOS does not make it go away." I never said there was not a driver problem. I alluded to the user perception of drivers. Users in this day and age should have absolutely no need to be aware of the concept of 'drivers'. Do you have any drivers for your Android? iPhone? The very concept may very well be dated and perhaps there is a a better solution in 2016.

mp3geek 10y ago

Does FreeBSD have anything to compete with V4L/DVB ?

tobik 10y ago
Yes, it has V4L/DVB support via the multimedia/webcamd port/package, which is essentially a user space port of Linux' V4L/DVB drivers. https://www.freshports.org/multimedia/webcamd https://www.freshports.org/multimedia/webcamd

parennoob 10y ago

From the "FreeBSD is good for servers, not for Desktops" > If even this is too much effort, PC-BSD is a full-featured desktop system built on top of FreeBSD, with an easy-to-use installer and the option of commercial support. Seriously, it is this sort of "the user is so stupid if they can't compile their own software easily" attitude that turns me off about projects like FreeBSD. How hard is it to simply not say this stuff, and gain a lot more users into the bargain? Just say something friendly, like "If you would prefer an OS that works out of the box, PC-BSD is also available".

LeoPanthera 10y ago
I don't see that attitude in what you are reading. Any OS which the user has to install themselves has to assume a certain amount of knowledge in the user. It's completely fair to say "And there's an even easier way if you prefer" as well.
- dwc 10y ago
  Your version, "and there's an even easier way...", does sound nicer than, "If even this is too much effort, ..." There's a difference in tone there.
  - LeoPanthera 10y ago
    Well, perhaps, but it feels incredibly minor to me. Even if true, I don't think the tone represents the intention.
Yuioup 10y ago
Last time I tried to use PC-BSD, updates were painfully slow. It lead me to believe that there were not enough mirrors to serve packages. This was about 5-6 years ago. How is PC-BSD doing nowadays? Is it really worth installing and using?
- dingaling 10y ago
  > How is PC-BSD doing nowadays? Is it really worth installing and using? Anecdotally, I installed it on a spare laptop last month and the first main hurdle was that the disk partitioner kept failing until I first manually fdisked the disk to a single partition. The second hurdle was that when it booted to the desktop there was no system tray icon to enable wireless networking and select an SSID, despite the 4965 chipset being fully supported. Presumably it requires some messing-around with wpa_supplicant. I haven't had time to go back to it but both would be deal-breakers for the 'common person'.

Scarbutt 10y ago

FreeBSD is a second class citizen when it comes to the JVM. Myth?

grkvlt 10y ago
No, very true, sadly. I wonder if the C-school hackers on BSD just look down on Java as far too 'Enterprisey' for them? Or has this changed?

frik 10y ago

Can someone debunk the myth I read about the FreeBSD package management system? In Debian/Ubuntu/Mint style Linux it's enough to use apt-get update apt-get upgrade and only the changed packages including all interdepencies are downloaded and installed in the correct binary form (x86/x64/arm...). How does FreeBSD really handles package management and is it ahead or behind the current state-of-art in this respect? And what is on the roadmap to improve the status-quo (in case there is a need)?

Sanddancer 10y ago
pkg-ng was added a few years ago, and makes updating super easy. pkg update pulls a new package list, pkg upgrade installs. For installs, pkg add, for deinstalls, pkg delete. It also uses sqlite as its database format, so it's a lot easier to build tools around for querying and maintaining systems.
ivoras 10y ago
That particular case - upgrading everything - is actually supported pretty well. Of course, there's the distinction between the base system and app packages - the base still needs to be upgraded another way (freebsd-update). It's the much more useful case of upgrading complete subgraphs of package dependencies that still wasn't implemented when I last looked at it a year ago. If you have application packages A1 and A2 installed, and a library package L on which both of them depend on, then if you upgrade A2 to a newer version which requires (and is linked against) a newer version of package L, pkgng will simply not upgrade both L and A1. The pkgng devs simply declared this to be out of scope. For a time, pkgng (now just "pkg" as it's the only one) looked like it could be the best thing since sliced bread, only for the devs to arrogantly dismiss the most common dependency-related operation used in practice. It's the single biggest issue which turned me away from FreeBSD, since I don't want to write package manager code, don't want to maintain my own package repos, and don't want to track "snapshots" (i.e. 6-months old "freezed" package repos, without security updates) which are the three "workarounds" proposed to me at the time. This is important because FreeBSD's ports and packages are on a "rolling release" model, i.e. often (daily/weekly, depends on the maintainer) updated to the latest upstream version, so the lack of complete subgraph package upgrades regularly leaves you with broken apps.

tete 10y ago

I use FreeBSD, but if you think FreeBSD 4.x was great (related to the "everything after was bad" myth) and also if performance is your thing you should take a look at DragonFly BSD. Matthew Dillon who is largely responsible for FreeBSD works on this now. But don't fear. People of both projects share a lot, just try different approaches. :) https://www.dragonflybsd.org/ https://www.dragonflybsd.org/ (also, if you think the website isn't the nicest I agree)

aswanson 10y ago

I just want a single download freebsd distro for the desktop to play around with. Doesn't seem to exist.

monorailz 10y ago
Maybe DesktopBSD? http://www.desktopbsd.net/ http://www.desktopbsd.net/ I dunno, I haven't used it but others have said that it's a simple install. I bought a Lenovo Thinkpad to run a FreeBSD laptop and don't feel that the amount of work I had to do to get it to a useful state was all that different from the amount of work with Fedora on my desktop computer but I've been using both FreeBSD and various Linux distros for several years and don't know your amount of previous experience with either FreeBSD or Linux so YMMV.