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Debian developer revisits FreeBSD after 20 years (2015)
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- TimWolla 9y ago(2015)
- sctb 9y agoThank you! We've updated the headline.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- ianai 9y agoHis negatives are largely overblown or not bound to only FreeBSD. Also, if you want security updates with a shorter time lag then maybe you should contribute them. It’s a much smaller community so it’s going to move slower. Also (2015)
- HugoDaniel 9y ago"btrfs isn’t there yet, but will be awesome when it is." So awesome that Red Hat Linux even deprecated it. "Its laptop support leaves something to be desired. I installed it on a few-years-old Thinkpad — basically the best possible platform for working suspend in a Free OS. It has worked perfectly out of the box in Debian for years." Perfect as in "everything except certain common features and expected annoyances" like suspend/resume et al. But this year is the year you know... Does anyone even fall for these Linux rants ?
- calpaterson 9y agoI use Debian on desktop and laptop all day every day and have not had a problem with suspend and resume in at least the last 5 years. At this point, it seems to work at least as well as Windows and Mac (perhaps better - I've seen a few Windows users having suspend problems).
- pksadiq 9y agoI recommend every person who buy a hardware for GNU/Linux to buy one that runs well out of the box with Debian main. It is a hard requirement I suggest to my friends. May be they run Ubuntu/Fedora, but if it runs well with Debian or linux-libre, rest assured, it should work with any Distribution. I haven't yet seen much Laptops of notebooks to recommend though. https://h-node.org/ https://h-node.org/ seems to be the only good reference.
- HugoDaniel 9y agoWifi comes up ? VPN reconnects ? USB's and Card readers stay mounted ? Audio mixer volume stays the same ? Youtube videos and music player resumes ? uptime shows the correct information ? All of this out of the box in 2015 ? That must have been the year of linux on the desktop.
- calpaterson 9y agoYes all of it. I'm on a thinkpad T450, running Debian oldstable (jessie) which was frozen for release in late 2014.
- jmiserez 9y agoSuspend-to-disk too?
- calpaterson 9y agoI don't really do that much so I don't know. It only really happens in laptops when battery is running low while suspended and then something seems to wake the laptop and then hibernate it. Cool trick. No idea how it works though.
- trisimix 9y agoThis is a bsd rant not linux
- HugoDaniel 9y agoIs it ? "There is nothing like Dropbox for FreeBSD. Apparently this is because FreeBSD has nothing like Linux’s inotify. " Kind of gave it away for me.
- pbalau 9y agoFacebook's watchman uses inotify and I made it build and run on FreeBSD 11 2 days ago. Still need to fix some scripts and I will try to submit it to the ports tree
- vetinari 9y agoOf course Redhat deprecated btrfs support, they are betting on XFS and Stratis. No need to throw resources on competing project, the others in Linux community will carry on. > Perfect as in "everything except certain common features and expected annoyances" like suspend/resume et al. I don't think you read that part carefully with proper understanding. The author said, that these annoyances were when running FreeBSD, and that in Debian it doesn't have them.
- cyphar 9y ago> So awesome that Red Hat Linux even deprecated it. They never "supported" it in the strict meaning of the word, it was only a technical preview and they dropped it from technical preview. That's different from "deprecated" (let alone that Red Hat doesn't have the power to deprecate things in upstream Linux). Not to mention that most/all of Red Hat's btrfs engineers moved to other companies (like Facebook) so nobody was there to maintain it. The more forward-thinking reason for dropping it is that Red Hat is putting all their eggs into devicemapper+XFS (in the form of "Stratis"[1]), so why would they expend engineering resources on more projects than necessary -- especially when they'll probably want customers to switch to Stratis rather than keep them on a never-actually-supported-by-them filesystem. [1]: https://github.com/stratis-storage https://github.com/stratis-storage
- qwerty456127 9y agoThe main problem of BSD OSes (including FreeBSD and macOS) is that they include different (not 100% compatible) versions of the basic command line tools and the GNU versions usually are better.
- jgowdy 9y agoAnd the main solution for that is just install the GNU tools you prefer from ports or packages. Super simple.
- HugoDaniel 9y agoOr read the man pages. Which are better in the BSDs as their target audience tends to prefer proper documentation to google searches.
- fiddlerwoaroof 9y agoThe gnu utilities are fairly well documented in info pages
- mikepurvis 9y agoSure, but that undermines the part of the premise of a BSD-style OS, where you have an "omakase" base system, maintained as a monolith with known and clearly stated assumptions around compatibility and interoperability between the components of the base system.
- HugoDaniel 9y agoExpecting the same tool operation between very different OS's (even if they are all a fork from a common old ancestor) also undermines that premise.
- jgowdy 9y agoYou don’t need to honor the “premise” of the OS, nor do I think the developers of the OS care which software I prefer to run. Run whatever you’re comfortable with. If it was such an issue for them, I’m sure they’d remove the GNU packages they pre-build and host for you. The premise of BSD is you don’t have to use the GNU tools. But they give you the choice.
- yaseer 9y agoWho here uses FreeBSD in production, and what use-cases do they find it better than Linux for?
- titanix2 9y agoThe PlayStation use an OS based on FreeBSD. The licensing is the big differenciating factor I guess.
- vetinari 9y agoPanasonic uses FreeBSD in their TVs. Others don't, Samsung or LG for example use Linux. They don't seem to have a problem with licensing.
- HugoDaniel 9y agoI use it. My use case is: 1. After properly setting it up, do sporadic updates when necessary without worrying that the whole thing falls appart. Much better than Linux ;)
- acdha 9y agoWhat Linux distribution were you using – something like Gentoo?
- HugoDaniel 9y agoI used a few in my past life as a bad sysadmin. Mostly Ubuntu Server's. Some Fedora's, some CentOS's, some Arch Linux. I never did try Gentoo in production servers though. And through the years I learned to dislike their hive-mind approach to problems with half-baked crippled solutions that get approved and merged to production because some untouchable dev/guru/mastermind decided that he alone was a significant sample of all linux users: - Forget about extending and improving ifconfig. Lets change everything and create a new command, afterall ifconfig is not that important,. - Forget about your system dir layout. Lets change it and mix everything up into / - Oops that kernel update completly screwed iptables... - Oops that kernel update somehow introduced packet loops in the network - Today I learned that I/O DoS is. - wtf systemd ? Now i have to read up on this new sh*t that they are pushing down my throat. Oh wait there is no documentation. - Don't get me started on filesystems... Anyhow, I find Unix systems very hard to manage and maintain, i mean we do have all these devops tools to automatically manage configs and programatically setup machines in a coherent way. Linux just likes to show more than others that it exists, and does it in very inappropriate ways.
- gigatexal 9y agoI like FreeBSD’s sane layouts, awesome documentation, and simple administration. But seriously the handbook is documentation gold.
- krylon 9y ago> But seriously the handbook is documentation gold. Amen to that!
- rfraile 9y agoGold if you compared it with what? I think that Arch wiki is superb and have a lot of more information for the experience user than the FreeBSD manual which is excellent only for the first approach.
- earenndil 9y agoArch wiki is different, imo, than the manual in that it focuses more on individual applications that run on the system whereas the handbook focuses on the system itself. I have used both on freebsd, FWIW.
- krylon 9y agoGold compared to what Microsoft and many commercial ISVs dump on their customers as "documentation". The Arch Wiki is superb, indeed. Let's call it platinum. ;-) My issue is that if volunteer driven projects like FreeBSD, Arch Linux or OpenBSD can provide very high quality documentation, I expect commercial ISVs to provide documentation that is at the very least that good. Instead, documentation is often either missing entirely or very bad. Or they have the audacity to charge you extra for a manual.
- thomastjeffery 9y agoThere only better wiki I have seen is the Gentoo wiki.
- trisimix 9y agoMight be something i install to a vm as a project. Not seeing any compelling reasons to switch from arch except zfs
- rwmj 9y agoAnd ironically the latest FreeBSD doesn't boot in QEMU if you're using AMD hardware, as of about a month ago. The bug has been open since 2016: https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=213333 https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=213333
- GalacticDomin8r 9y agoSo filing a QEMU bug on FreeBSD's tracker is supposed to help how?
- rwmj 9y agoWhile we can argue about precisely where the blame lies, I'm leaning towards a FreeBSD bug here since it cannot handle the topology that QEMU supplies (yet Windows, Linux, older FreeBSD can). In any case maybe the FreeBSD community could interact with the QEMU community, since virtualization is probably the way most new FreeBSD users come on board.
- slacka 9y agoI couldn't find this issue on the QEMU bug tracker. https://bugs.launchpad.net/qemu/ https://bugs.launchpad.net/qemu/ Since you encountered it and I don't yet have AMD hardware to test, would you mind reporting it?
- rwmj 9y agoNo, because (as discussed above): (1) I do not think it's a QEMU bug. Windows, Linux and older versions of FreeBSD work fine. (2) I'm one of those people who thought, let's try to compile some software on FreeBSD .. meh can't get it to work. It's really for FreeBSD to fix this, if they want to on-board new users (and maybe they don't, that's totally fine too).
- foxhop 9y agoI started as a user of FreeBSD, I run Linux at work and on my personal computers, As for my personal servers, I'm all in with SmartOS hypervisor. SmartOS is so simple to use.
- Timothycquinn 9y agoIf I was going to build a private home server, I would choose SmartOS as well. It has all the parts needed and most importantly, virtual networking OOTB via CrossBow. I have not found any feature complete virtual networking in Linux or *BSD. Have to use XEN or VMWare. With that said, I use Linux for my desktop as it gives the best user experience on a laptop. IMO, FreeBSD and variants still don't cut it at this time for dekstop.
- krylon 9y ago> IMO, FreeBSD and variants still don't cut it at this time for desktop. Sadly, I agree. My experience running FreeBSD on a laptop has been terrible. I do have one ancient laptop running OpenBSD that works perfectly. But due to the smaller number of developers and less enthusiastic support by hardware companies, hardware support is far behind Linux. On the server, this is less of an issue, because there is less hardware to support, and virtualization, it becomes even easier.
- krylon 9y agoToo late to EDIT: What I meant to say was: and WITH Virtualization
- elcritch 9y agoHave you tried SmartOS as a desktop by chance? I’d love to use SmartOS for my workstation but am currently using Ubuntu with ZoL because I doubted the level of GPU support on SmartOS.
- foxhop 9y agoSmartOS isn't really for workstations, unless your workstation doesn't need a GUI (mine does). That said, I'm about to create a blog post and youtube video on how to run SmartOS at home for real cheap (as in cheap hardware and electricity)
- ComputerGuru 9y agoSite appears down for the moment, but I thought the title sounded familiar. No qualms with the repost, but for anyone interested there was a very healthy discussion about this article three years or so ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9025437 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9025437
- GalacticDomin8r 9y agoAn even less accurate representation now than it was back then.
- halayli 9y agoAfter using FreeBSD for many years and having to move to linux for various reasons, I still miss kqueue and FreeBSD's superior networking stack.
- oldcynic 9y agoEven allowing for the age of the piece this seems pretty partisan. Only one I'll pick out - RAID5. Who cares about RAID5 with current disk sizes? Should be using ZFS, probably under RAIDZ2 or 3, if you actually care about your data. Home servers have been running FreeBSD since the days of 2.x. I'll not be giving up ZFS, jails, and what seems to be the best net stack anywhere, any time soon.
- VLM 9y agoCould summarize to Linux is more commercial marketing checkbox oriented now, whereas FreeBSD is the good old days of itch scratching. For example, RAID5 hasn't been interesting to me as sysadmin for decade or more now for a variety of reasons. I did use it back in the days of single digit gig hard drives to create something useful sized, but its not the "right" way to do almost everything now except for the weirdest corner cases, that can be worked around in much better ways. Its something marketing can checkbox so commercialized Linux will NEVER remove it. I remember the good old days of having qty six two gig hard drives and software RAID5 on top of them. Those days aren't coming back, but they were good old days. On the opposite side, the handbook is useful on a regular basis, so people often use it, and maintain the heck out of it, making it even more more useful, repeat.
- ggm 9y ago"doesn't have raid5 in geom but has raidz1 in zfs" got me. Geom is useful as a layer abstraction without raid5 and zfs has raid5 equivalent (and better) so.. why does it matter?
- digi_owl 9y ago"The bad: ABI stability I’m used to being able to run binaries I compiled years ago on a modern system. This is generally possible in Linux, assuming you have the correct shared libraries available." May be true for terminal stuff that rely mostly on kernel syscalls to get stuff done. But deity help you if you try to get a GUI binary you want to get going. You may well have to clone a distro from back then in terms of libs. And things may even balk at Xorg if something happens to talk some xlib stuff that didn't come along in the xcb transition...
- Mister_Snuggles 9y agoAs a FreeBSD user, I agree with this article. Virtualization, which is one of my main use cases, works but is far from perfect. FreeBSD 11 improved things - in particular, UEFI graphics exposed over VNC makes installing Windows less painful (however, I couldn’t get networking working in the guest so it wasn’t terribly useful). One huge miss is that UEFI variables aren’t persisted across guest reboots, so it’s entirely possible to install a system and not be able to boot it without issuing UEFI commands. I really like the clean split between base system and 3rd-party software. However, I whole heartedly agree that managing 3rd-party software is a mess. Plus, thanks to the ABI issues, doing major version upgrades is kind of scary. I’ve never had an issue with a major version upgrade, but doing it scares me every time. Finally, there’s one huge issue that FreeBSD finally fixed in 11.1. The kernel was not compiled with IPSEC in 10.x, and in 11.0 they compiled it with IPSEC but not IPSEC_NAT_T. It took until 11.1 for IPSec VPNs to finally be usable out of the box.
- mastax 9y ago>Finally, there’s one huge issue that FreeBSD finally fixed in 11.1. The kernel was not compiled with IPSEC in 10.x, and in 11.0 they compiled it with IPSEC but not IPSEC_NAT_T. It took until 11.1 for IPSec VPNs to finally be usable out of the box. Thank you! I wouldn't have known about this without your comment. I need to revisit my VPN configuration, getting it to work on FreeNAS 10.1 was a huge hack.
- rsync 9y ago"Virtualization, which is one of my main use cases, works but is far from perfect." There was a brief period of time when the current, linux release of vmware workstation (v3.0, IIRC) was fully supported under the linux binary compat functionality of FreeBSD. What this meant was that circa 2002/2003 you could run vmware workstation on FreeBSD and it worked perfectly. I ran all manner of Windows and Linux VMs under it. I currently use vmware fusion on OSX so I haven't given it a try lately, but my impression is that spinning up a windows VM on a FreeBSD workstation is still not as painless as it was back then ...
- _paulc 9y ago> I couldn’t get networking working Try using the e1000 network adapter emulation - Win10/Server 2016 work fine with this.
- krylon 9y agoTotally OT rant, but here goes: > Even then, I still used some of the FreeBSD Handbook to learn Linux, because Debian didn’t have the great Reference that it does now. At work, we are pretty much a Windows shop, and I am often frustrated by the state of Microsoft's documentation. Some parts, say, .Net API reference, are pretty good. Reference material for SQL Server is quite good, too (and I will am very grateful for that, because I have to deal with SQL Server a lot). But in other parts, documentation is crappy or non-existant (I am looking at you, SharePoint!) to such a degree that sometimes I wonder if they do this on purpose to generate business for the hordes of consultants and authors to write books (although all the SharePoint books I have looked at, sucked, too - the only helpful search results tend to be the blogs of SharePoint consultants, those poor souls). And when people tell me to stop ranting because that is just the way things are, I tell them to look at the FreeBSD Handbook. Or the OpenBSD documentation. If these projects that are largely volunteer-driven are able to supply such excellent documentation, why can't Microsoft? Okay, enough with the ranting, let me close on a more positive note: I run my home server on FreeBSD, mostly because of ZFS, but I have come to appreciate jails and bhyve, too. I love it, because it has not given me any trouble. It was straightforward to install and set up, and once it was working the way I wanted it to, it just kept going. (I check for updates regularly, of course, but that does not take much time, and I would have to do that on any other OS, too.)
- biohax2015 9y ago> But in other parts, documentation is crappy or non-existant (I am looking at you, SharePoint!) to such a degree that sometimes I wonder if they do this on purpose to generate business for the hordes of consultants and authors to write books Very likely. See: Oracle.
- equalunique 9y agoI would say "See: IBM" but sometimes their documentation is brokered by their sales division, so there isn't anything to see for many.
- combatentropy 9y ago> I wonder if they do this on purpose to generate business It's ironic that money can make a product worse.
- davidgerard 9y ago> The bad: package management > Roughly 20 years ago, this was one of the things that pulled me to Debian. yep. synaptic was the thing that drew me from FreeBSD to Ubuntu 5.04. It was so clearly the Right Thing. I wanted to go back and say GUYS HAVE YOU SEEN THIS that and that on FreeBSD, I kept finding myself running Linux binaries under compat, rather than native binaries, because they were actually more stable. sigh.
- krylon 9y ago"There are only two FreeBSD filesystems that are really useable: UFS2 and ZFS." Keep in mind that the intense proliferation of different filesystems on Linux is the rare exception. On Windows, you get FAT, NTFS and ReFS, but nobody uses ReFS, and FAT is mostly for USB drives, SD cards and such. On macOS, the situation is not that much different: They have HFS+, more recently APFS, and they support FAT so you can use USB drives and such. In practice is not much of a problem. Especially when one of your two options is ZFS. ;-)
- qmarchi 9y agoYou're also forgetting about exFAT which is also supported with full r/w on Windows, macOS, and Linux. Personally, I've got a partition with exFAT so I can transfer data between everything on my drives...
- donatj 9y agoI keep all my external drives ExFAT so I can use them easily everywhere.
- terminalcommand 9y agoExFAT can be problematic due to corruption. I used to have an external HDD formatted to ExFAT plugged in on my raspberry pi. When crashes occured whilst having torrent open, the disk never fully recovered. I had to constantly run repairs. For small drives e.g. USB sticks ExFAT is great but for larger drives I'd stay away from ExFAT.
- glenneroo 9y agoMy own anecdota: I haven't experienced this ever with exFat on 20+ USB Flash/HDD drives and I regularly experience crashing Raspberry Pi's (Raspbian OS) and various flavors of Windows.
- B1FF_PSUVM 9y agoMicrosoft's own OneDrive refuses to use ExFat volumes, as of last year.
- ggm 9y agoAs an ongoing FreeBSD user, a BSD user since the 1980s, and a Debian user since about 5 years ago I agree with this article in main sense. I might differ in details, but its an even handed and fair summary.
- chungy 9y agoWhile I note this article is from 2015, Synthing is a very good, open source, file synchronization tool that should work on both FreeBSD and Linux. Nice replacement for Dropbox :)
- Ericson2314 9y agoWe really need to support more kernels on NixOS. Different distros duplicating work is unfortunate, and muddles the experiment.
- WhyNotHugo 9y agoI'm really surprise how many users see Debian's packing as being so great. I've contributed to several projects upstream, and, as devs, Debian's packaging is a PITA. We constantly get bug reports for _very old_ major versions, because Debian is way out of date. We don't support these versions, but bug reports from Debian users keep coming because it's the latest in debian. But there's actually a worse scenario: bug reports we can't reproduce. Because Debian packagers consistently patch applications in their packages. A lot. So we get bug reports that aren't from our actual code, but rather a "Debian-forked-version". Clearly, the end-user interests are completely different from the upstream devs'. But the issues are pretty evident from the other side.