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I was a long time FreeBSD user before I switched to Arch. FreeBSD is a pure and beautiful system, but Linux provides much better performance and ease of use in
by terminalcommand 9y ago
I was a long time FreeBSD user before I switched to Arch.
FreeBSD is a pure and beautiful system, but Linux provides much better performance and ease of use in desktop related tasks. The network stack on FreeBSD is of magnitudes faster than Linux (based on my experience with both OSes), however this does not compensate for power management issues and general slugishness while using linux software.
If you're using FreeBSD on your main computer, you need some kind of a Desktop Environment, if you don't want to stick with KDE4, you install GNOME. However, GNOME is ported from Linux and although most of the time it works without problems, there is a speed compromise (again only based on my experience).
Upsides of FreeBSD:
• The Package Repository is great, most apps such as firefox, emacs, IDE's are maintained at their latest versions.
• The system works solid, no crashes
• FreeBSD feels more like Unix, and if you're interested in the low level stuff you can learn more quickly. The source code is clean, the implementations are not complicated.
• Drivers are scarcer than Linux, but if there is a driver, it works flawlessly.
The points I'm neutral about:
• Behyve and ZFS are all great technologies, however they were a bit complex for my test. I couldn't manage to setup a Linux server with X11 forwarding. As for ZFS, I used FreeBSD on my laptop with a 256G SSD drive, so I did not see much benefit of ZFS. However, I was aware that if I had used VMs, ZFS would offer much better IO performance.
As for sleep and power management issues:
• Power management on FreeBSD is good, not great like Linux and you don't have powertop and tlp available. But it's good. You can expect upto 70-80% of the battery life you get in Linux. (You don't even have to tinker with C-States and all, just powerd or powerdxx works great out of the box.)
As for sleep issues, mostly on FreeBSD the closing the lid or pressing the power button won't be recognized as a sleep trigger. But on most laptops 'acpiconf -s3' puts your laptop to sleep.
- weavie 9y agoKDE and Gnome are not the only desktop environments available. I use XFCE and am very happy with it, no speed problems at all.
- michaelmrose 9y agoOn a similar sized ssd I'm saving a good bit of space with compression, have benefited from snapshots and rollback, and zfs send beats rsync by a mile for backups. You might want to look into these and other benefits I think it's worth it even on single disk setups.
- michaelmrose 9y agoOn a similar sized ssd I'm saving a good bit of space with compression, have benefited from snapshots and rollback, and zfs send beats rsync by a mile for backups. You might want to look into these and other benefits I think it's worth it even on single disk setups.
- floatboth 9y agoKDE 5 is in progress, you can already try it http://euroquis.nl/bobulate/?p=1609 http://euroquis.nl/bobulate/?p=1609 Closing the lid is a non-issue, see sysctl hw.acpi.lid_switch_state. A more serious problem is that some Thinkpads just don't wake up https://github.com/FreeBSDDesktop/freebsd-base-graphics/issues/145 https://github.com/FreeBSDDesktop/freebsd-base-graphics/issu... :( This was already mentioned here but what's up with people thinking that ZFS is only for large storage arrays? You don't need anything more than a small SSD to get the benefits of snapshots, compression, and general ZFS reliability (copy on write — no data corruption ever, except for like hardware bugs). Boot Environments is an especially great snapshot-based feature. Also how is bhyve complex? It's the simplest hypervisor ever.
- terminalcommand 9y agoThank you for the hw.acpi.lid_switch_state heads up. Bhyve seemed complex to me, because I was accustomed to Virtualbox and VMware. I tried to boot up ubuntu server with behyve and finding the kernel images, loading them, typing the boot commands were a hassle. Maybe if I had some prior experience with hypervisors, I could better understand behyve. As for ZFS, I always had extra space in my SSD, so compression was of little use to me. My FreeBSD system only used 30-40 GB of space (including downloads). I had 8 Gigabytes of RAM, but FreeBSD only needed 1.4 GB, even whilst browsing. I haven't used the snapshot feature, although I imagine it's powerful. I also haven't made use of FreeBSD jails, which are, according to what I read, far better than chroot.
- floatboth 9y agojails are like chroot but they also isolate PIDs, users, networking… so "containers" :) the bhyve command shipping with FreeBSD is a bit lower level, sure. There are more user-friendly front-ends like https://github.com/pr1ntf/iohyve https://github.com/pr1ntf/iohyve and http://chyves.org http://chyves.org
- fnj 9y ago> Also how is bhyve complex? It's the simplest hypervisor ever. Some might say "most primitive ever".