10 ms·

FreeBSD Celebrates 25th Anniversary

191 points by vermaden 8y ago

alxlaz 8y ago
FreeBSD was my first real introduction to Unix and, even though I don't use it anymore, I'm still very fond of it. This was about 15 or 16 years ago, I think. That was back when hardware support, both in Linux and in FreeBSD (and in most other free operating systems) was very flaky, and FreeBSD was the only one that I could get my network card and RAID controller to reliably work on. I ran Linux for a while, but unreliably and with out-of-tree drivers running over strange Frankenkernels. One sleepless, outrageously hot summer night, I tried FreeBSD (4.1, I think? Or 5.0?) and it remained on my hard drive for a pretty long time. I learned to properly use Emacs on it, after outgrowing NEdit and SciTE. I learned how to write portable (hah...) Unix code, learned about SSH and kqueue and ACPI and firewalls. I learned to use patch and wrote my first open source program from scratch, whose source code has been thankfully buried forever but for a summer or so, I wrote the worst Windows desktop clone you have ever seen (that was back when Qt 3 could deliver us from STL and everyone wrote their own window manager for fun and it had real artwork, not boring, flat themes). I also learned ksh, having learned that bash is not the only shell in this world. I learned about OSS and could not quite stomach Alsa ever since. I learned about the ports system and that was a whole new world for me and I'd spend days tinkering with programs I didn't really need, just for the fun of it. I mostly lurked on the mailing lists. I was thankfully past my script kiddie period and was comfortable admitting I didn't know much about programming and system administration, so I was a little intimidated; I joined discussions rarely, and under a pseudonym, but I read the public mailing lists religiously, and learned a lot from them. Unfortunately, using FreeBSD on a desktop today is a little harder for me, now that portability is considered more of a stone-age concept for old farts who haven't yet installed Arch Linux on their laptops. It's certainly possible (I toyed with 11.1 a little and it's great) but it requires a little more tinkering than I have time for. Admittedly, that's mostly my fault; I chose a career path (embedded systems) that involves weird FPGAs and microcontrollers and the Linux bandwagon, so the little free time I have is spent getting up to date with stuff like Wayland. Sometimes I tell to myself I'm going to get a long vacation and work on something useful for OpenBSD or FreeBSD and maybe work my way into a job (or a consulting gig, and then another, and then another...) where I can use one of them, but then real life kicks in and I'm back to the Land of Useless Manpages. I've long lost touch with FreeBSD development and don't know too much about what's happened lately. I've heard that the project has made a number of questionable choices in terms of development, and something about the security team being slow, but I really don't know too much on the subject, so it didn't get a chance to change my opiniong of this project. Granted, I don't know if this is true anymore -- but back then, I thought FreeBSD's pragmatism and clean approach to engineering was something to strive for, and I'm pretty disappointed that it hasn't become more popular in the open source world. Happy birthday, FreeBSD! Here's for another 25 years of quality software.
- josteink 8y ago
  > That was back when hardware support, both in Linux and in FreeBSD (and in most other free operating systems) was very flaky, and FreeBSD was the only one that I could get my network card and RAID controller to reliably work on. Same here. I was a student working as a part-time employee in a IT-department and whenever machines were deemed too expensive to fix, I would harvest the parts which still seemed to be good... which I eventually managed to assembly into a full working server. And on a student-economy, a free server like that was a big deal. There was only one catch: I couldn't get it to boot. Neither Linux nor Windows. So the department Unix-guru asked me why I didn't try FreeBSD, something he was somewhat fond of. "It's like Linux, but different" he said. I was a bit confused, but thought it was worth a shot, and what do you know? FreeBSD not only booted the machine, but kept it running nicely for over half a decade. In effect, FreeBSD gave me a free server when I could afford hardware the least. That's not something you forget :) I later learned that the mainboard had a serious chipset-failure (which was probably caused Linux and Windows to fail), but FreeBSD seemingly managed to work around that and just kept on running. As far as I can recall, this most has been the most stable server I've ever run. These days I have a hard time letting go of the impression that FreeBSD is made of better stuff than other OSes, and has been engineered from the core and up to be more reliable. Despite that I almost exclusively use Linux now (because it's more plug'n'play but IMO more flaky). I still have fond feelings for FreeBSD in my heart though. I wish I had time to setup a working FreeBSD laptop, but with small 2 kids and a wife... Those times seems long gone. Anyhow: Hopefully FreeBSD will still be around when I have time for that. Here's to another 25 years!
- pjmlp 8y ago
  > Unfortunately, using FreeBSD on a desktop today is a little harder for me, now that portability is considered more of a stone-age concept for old farts who haven't yet installed Arch Linux on their laptops. It is impressive how Linux changed from being yet another UNIX clone to being UNIX in most people minds, to the point many say Linux when they actually mean UNIX.
  - sgift 8y ago
    I find it even more impressive how the mentality changed. When Linux was still the underdog everyone cried that you should think about Linux, don't develop for Windows only and so on. Now? "Eh, you run FreeBSD? Your problem. Use Linux." How power corrupts ..
WhyDoPeople 8y ago
To think, if it weren't for the AT&T lawsuit, we may all be using FreeBSD (or some other BSD) rather than Debian, Redhat, Ubuntu, etc.
- pjmlp 8y ago
  Actually I think we would all using Aix, Solaris, HP-UX, Tru64, DG/UX, .... instead, given the amount of contributions that BSD has gotten back throughout all these years.
- lmm 8y ago
  We'd probably still be using Debian (which does have a kFreeBSD distribution, or at least did prior to systemd ruining everything). The GNU userland is genuinely more user-friendly (even on BSD I tend to use gnu ls, tar, make, ...), and the bazaar "distribution" model (where a "linux distribution" is an assemblage of packages from any number of different projects) works better than the BSD cathedral.
  - nils-m-holm 8y ago
    I'm glad that BSD's have their own ls, tar, make and friends. Color that will not go away even with TERM=vt100? Seriously? Give me a BSD userland any time!
    - lmm 8y ago
      Are you sure you're not forcing colour on with an alias or something? I'm pretty sure it's off by default.
      - JdeBP 8y ago
        Xe might be referring to the oft-made error of thinking that DEC VT 1xx terminals supported multiple colours. * https://invisible-island.net/ncurses/ncurses.faq.html#vt100_color https://invisible-island.net/ncurses/ncurses.faq.html#vt100_... There is irony in your "off by default" statement when it comes to GNU toolsets. ECMA48 colour and italics support is on by default in GNU troff, which should not come as a surprise as GNU troff was begun over a decade after ECMA48 was first published and the idea of multiple colours was fairly normalized and widespread at that point. Linux distributors and FreeBSD people later went to significant lengths to turn it off, with extra flags and macros. * http://jdebp.info./Softwares/nosh/italics-in-manuals.html http://jdebp.info./Softwares/nosh/italics-in-manuals.html
vermaden 8y ago
I use FreeBSD on servers and desktops since 15 years. Yes, it takes more time to create your desktop then just install Elementary OS or Ubuntu where someone else made that for You, but once You have your configuration files, its similar experience. On a new box You just install it, add needed packages and put your configs in the ${HOME} directory, same for FreeBSD, same for Ubuntu. You will also 'lose' less time later since You will have bulletproof upgrades with ZFS Boot Environments (sysutils/beadm) and a lot more stable environment - no rush changes - no systemd - no ifconfig/ip problem - no netstat/ss problem - etc.
- danieldk 8y ago
  But also relatively outdated graphics drivers outside the NVIDIA proprietary drivers (yes, I know that there is a branch with Linux DRM drivers). This also means relatively limited support for Wayland, so you have to use X11, which is insecure. Even though there are proprietary NVIDIA drivers, CUDA is not supported, which excludes most modern machine learning. [edit: removed some criticism, not nice on a birthday :)] I really like FreeBSD as a clean, understandable UNIX system, it wish it had more momentum (and thus more hardware support, testing, etc.).
  - sureaboutthis 8y ago
    While other OSes may support 10,000 hardware devices, and FreeBSD only supports 9374 of them, you only need one of those devices and chances are the one popular one you want to use works on FreeBSD, too.
  - vermaden 8y ago
    > But also relatively outdated graphics drivers outside the NVIDIA proprietary drivers (yes, I know that there is a branch with Linux DRM drivers). This was true until drm-next-kmod and drm-stable-kmod ports appeared. Now you have very similar Linux and FreeBSD graphics experience. > This also means relatively limited support for Wayland, so you have to use X11, which is insecure. Wayland is enabled by default since recently. As we talk about security... * Linux - Vulnerabilities (2103) - https://www.cvedetails.com/vendor/33/Linux.html https://www.cvedetails.com/vendor/33/Linux.html * FreeBSD - Vulnerabilities (368) - https://www.cvedetails.com/vendor/6/Freebsd.html https://www.cvedetails.com/vendor/6/Freebsd.html About 7 times more on the Linux side, do not mix X11 into that :) FreeBSD as every system has its limitations, that is for sure, but as I track its developments of the span of 15 years its just getting better and better, in all aspects - including desktop. Of course there are 'environments' where its all or nothing like 'mobile', Linux has most of the market here with Android while FreeBSD has nothing.
Cieplak 8y ago
I’ve been using FreeBSD in production on AWS for a few years now and it’s been great, thanks to ZFS, jails and pf. There are lots of different ways to configure jails, which unfortunately means there are lots of places to get stuck. I typically deploy to x1.* instances, which have NVMe drives. I create a zpool of all the NVMe drives, and then mount a zfs filesystem on the zpool at /mnt/jails. I run all my services in jails. Each jail gets its own IP address on the host, and services are made available to the outside world using pf rdr rules. Services in jails are allowed to access the outside network using pf nat rules. pf makes it easy to monitor and restrict network activity for each service. Once you’ve configured a jail, you can snapshot it with zfs, compress the snapshot, archive it and rsync it to other FreeBSD hosts. Once copied to other hosts, starting the jail simply requires registering it in /etc/jail.conf and running `service jail start $JailName`. I’ve started documenting this and have been thinking hard about how to provide a more generic container interface on top of this implementation. If you’re interested in the shell scripts, I’ve started posting them here: https://github.com/cieplak/jz https://github.com/cieplak/jz
- krn 8y ago
  A honest question: why would one choose FreeBSD with jails over something like CoreOS with rkt for a stateless cloud application? If I am not mistaken, Netflix uses FreeBSD on a bare metal for CDN, but prefers Linux for applications on AWS.
  - lmm 8y ago
    Maturity; an organisation that's been going for 25 years (and maintained backwards compatibility for most of that), a decade or more of documentation/tutorials/... that one can be confident will still work. rkt might offer the same thing but you need a compelling reason to pick something newer and less established.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
  - tannhaeuser 8y ago
oldcynic 8y ago
I am so glad I discovered FreeBSD. I've been running it since '95 and I think 2.2.5. Still detest the awful, bland 3D generated "new" logo and flat variant. Please bring back the original. It saved me from wasting so much money. I was in the process of giving up on the Amiga and had just bought a top spec dual boot NT/95 machine (2x Pentium II, Adaptec SCSI, SCSI cd writer, Seagate Cheetahs, something very expensive for graphics and sound). It was a pile of shite that was objectively slower and worse than the 040 Amiga at every task I tried. Burn a CD sir? Sure, just don't do anything else at the same time, you must disable screensavers or receive a coaster. Move the mouse? Gosh that's brave sir. FreeBSD gave something that wasn't brain dead, and actually worked, from that horribly expensive failure. Made a useful home file and printer server. Gave a similar desktop to the Suns at work. I took out a sub with CDROM.com that I kept running until they died. I've had a BSD box as some variation of home NAS/media server ever since. The Amiga would surprisingly live 5 more years as daily driver (with one of the 10k Cheetahs). Windows 2000 was actually reliable enough to use. When retired that first BSD box had an uptime in years. Oh those simple times before constant security updates! I'd love to have used FreeBSD as the daily driver but software and laptop support was lacking in comparison to Windows (I did try a time or two), and OSX that I leapt to as daily machine when it was released. Thankfully today FreeBSD hardware support is much better. So from chance discovery to the most reliable platform I'm ever likely to get my hands on. Especially with jails, ZFS etc. I just wish it was a little better known compared to Linux.
tachion 8y ago
While you're here, have you donated[0][1] yet? :) You may or may not be aware, but FreeBSD runs your movies on Netflix, your games on PlayStation, your files on FreeNAS and ZFS, your friends on WhatsApp and OpenBSD runs everywhere else as OpenSSH. ;) So, you may or may not know that, but you need FreeBSD and OpenBSD and they also need you! Every cent counts and so does every contributor, that helps the foundations keep their non-profit status. Also, you CAN be the change, if you specify what you'd like your donation to be used for (like more secure defaults for the OS or towards code review and bugs fixing). [0]https://www.freebsdfoundation.org/donate/ https://www.freebsdfoundation.org/donate/ [1]https://www.openbsd.org/donations.html https://www.openbsd.org/donations.html
- JdeBP 8y ago
  I pointed out the problems with this boilerplate spiel that you keep posting over and over to Hacker News, 5 months ago, ironically in a thread where you triggered exactly the same side-discussion yet again. I see that you have not changed the boilerplate. * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16039947 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16039947
  - tachion 8y ago
    This is because 5 months ago I didn't agree with your points and I don't agree with them today, therefore I see no reason for any change. Peace! :)
    - JdeBP 8y ago
      So you don't agree that every time that you post this boilerplate, to discussion after discussion on Hacker News, people repetitively re-hash the same old arguments, even though it happened in the several instances that I pointed to 5 months ago, happened in that discussion itself, and has now happened in this discussion?
      - tachion 8y ago
        I don't. I consider this to be educational effort, to discuss these arguments with people and to change their mind on that, so that next time they won't bring them up and they'd educate their peers on the matters.

191 points by vermaden 8y ago

FreeBSD was my first real introduction to Unix and, even though I don't use it anymore, I'm still very fond of it. This was about 15 or 16 years ago, I think. That was back when hardware support, both in Linux and in FreeBSD (and in most other free operating systems) was very flaky, and FreeBSD was the only one that I could get my network card and RAID controller to reliably work on. I ran Linux for a while, but unreliably and with out-of-tree drivers running over strange Frankenkernels. One sleepless, outrageously hot summer night, I tried FreeBSD (4.1, I think? Or 5.0?) and it remained on my hard drive for a pretty long time. I learned to properly use Emacs on it, after outgrowing NEdit and SciTE. I learned how to write portable (hah...) Unix code, learned about SSH and kqueue and ACPI and firewalls. I learned to use patch and wrote my first open source program from scratch, whose source code has been thankfully buried forever but for a summer or so, I wrote the worst Windows desktop clone you have ever seen (that was back when Qt 3 could deliver us from STL and everyone wrote their own window manager for fun and it had real artwork, not boring, flat themes). I also learned ksh, having learned that bash is not the only shell in this world. I learned about OSS and could not quite stomach Alsa ever since. I learned about the ports system and that was a whole new world for me and I'd spend days tinkering with programs I didn't really need, just for the fun of it. I mostly lurked on the mailing lists. I was thankfully past my script kiddie period and was comfortable admitting I didn't know much about programming and system administration, so I was a little intimidated; I joined discussions rarely, and under a pseudonym, but I read the public mailing lists religiously, and learned a lot from them. Unfortunately, using FreeBSD on a desktop today is a little harder for me, now that portability is considered more of a stone-age concept for old farts who haven't yet installed Arch Linux on their laptops. It's certainly possible (I toyed with 11.1 a little and it's great) but it requires a little more tinkering than I have time for. Admittedly, that's mostly my fault; I chose a career path (embedded systems) that involves weird FPGAs and microcontrollers and the Linux bandwagon, so the little free time I have is spent getting up to date with stuff like Wayland. Sometimes I tell to myself I'm going to get a long vacation and work on something useful for OpenBSD or FreeBSD and maybe work my way into a job (or a consulting gig, and then another, and then another...) where I can use one of them, but then real life kicks in and I'm back to the Land of Useless Manpages. I've long lost touch with FreeBSD development and don't know too much about what's happened lately. I've heard that the project has made a number of questionable choices in terms of development, and something about the security team being slow, but I really don't know too much on the subject, so it didn't get a chance to change my opiniong of this project. Granted, I don't know if this is true anymore -- but back then, I thought FreeBSD's pragmatism and clean approach to engineering was something to strive for, and I'm pretty disappointed that it hasn't become more popular in the open source world. Happy birthday, FreeBSD! Here's for another 25 years of quality software.

josteink 8y ago
> That was back when hardware support, both in Linux and in FreeBSD (and in most other free operating systems) was very flaky, and FreeBSD was the only one that I could get my network card and RAID controller to reliably work on. Same here. I was a student working as a part-time employee in a IT-department and whenever machines were deemed too expensive to fix, I would harvest the parts which still seemed to be good... which I eventually managed to assembly into a full working server. And on a student-economy, a free server like that was a big deal. There was only one catch: I couldn't get it to boot. Neither Linux nor Windows. So the department Unix-guru asked me why I didn't try FreeBSD, something he was somewhat fond of. "It's like Linux, but different" he said. I was a bit confused, but thought it was worth a shot, and what do you know? FreeBSD not only booted the machine, but kept it running nicely for over half a decade. In effect, FreeBSD gave me a free server when I could afford hardware the least. That's not something you forget :) I later learned that the mainboard had a serious chipset-failure (which was probably caused Linux and Windows to fail), but FreeBSD seemingly managed to work around that and just kept on running. As far as I can recall, this most has been the most stable server I've ever run. These days I have a hard time letting go of the impression that FreeBSD is made of better stuff than other OSes, and has been engineered from the core and up to be more reliable. Despite that I almost exclusively use Linux now (because it's more plug'n'play but IMO more flaky). I still have fond feelings for FreeBSD in my heart though. I wish I had time to setup a working FreeBSD laptop, but with small 2 kids and a wife... Those times seems long gone. Anyhow: Hopefully FreeBSD will still be around when I have time for that. Here's to another 25 years!
pjmlp 8y ago
> Unfortunately, using FreeBSD on a desktop today is a little harder for me, now that portability is considered more of a stone-age concept for old farts who haven't yet installed Arch Linux on their laptops. It is impressive how Linux changed from being yet another UNIX clone to being UNIX in most people minds, to the point many say Linux when they actually mean UNIX.
- sgift 8y ago
  I find it even more impressive how the mentality changed. When Linux was still the underdog everyone cried that you should think about Linux, don't develop for Windows only and so on. Now? "Eh, you run FreeBSD? Your problem. Use Linux." How power corrupts ..

WhyDoPeople 8y ago

To think, if it weren't for the AT&T lawsuit, we may all be using FreeBSD (or some other BSD) rather than Debian, Redhat, Ubuntu, etc.

pjmlp 8y ago
Actually I think we would all using Aix, Solaris, HP-UX, Tru64, DG/UX, .... instead, given the amount of contributions that BSD has gotten back throughout all these years.
lmm 8y ago
We'd probably still be using Debian (which does have a kFreeBSD distribution, or at least did prior to systemd ruining everything). The GNU userland is genuinely more user-friendly (even on BSD I tend to use gnu ls, tar, make, ...), and the bazaar "distribution" model (where a "linux distribution" is an assemblage of packages from any number of different projects) works better than the BSD cathedral.
- nils-m-holm 8y ago
  I'm glad that BSD's have their own ls, tar, make and friends. Color that will not go away even with TERM=vt100? Seriously? Give me a BSD userland any time!
  - lmm 8y ago
    Are you sure you're not forcing colour on with an alias or something? I'm pretty sure it's off by default.
    - JdeBP 8y ago
      Xe might be referring to the oft-made error of thinking that DEC VT 1xx terminals supported multiple colours. * https://invisible-island.net/ncurses/ncurses.faq.html#vt100_color https://invisible-island.net/ncurses/ncurses.faq.html#vt100_... There is irony in your "off by default" statement when it comes to GNU toolsets. ECMA48 colour and italics support is on by default in GNU troff, which should not come as a surprise as GNU troff was begun over a decade after ECMA48 was first published and the idea of multiple colours was fairly normalized and widespread at that point. Linux distributors and FreeBSD people later went to significant lengths to turn it off, with extra flags and macros. * http://jdebp.info./Softwares/nosh/italics-in-manuals.html http://jdebp.info./Softwares/nosh/italics-in-manuals.html

vermaden 8y ago

I use FreeBSD on servers and desktops since 15 years. Yes, it takes more time to create your desktop then just install Elementary OS or Ubuntu where someone else made that for You, but once You have your configuration files, its similar experience. On a new box You just install it, add needed packages and put your configs in the ${HOME} directory, same for FreeBSD, same for Ubuntu. You will also 'lose' less time later since You will have bulletproof upgrades with ZFS Boot Environments (sysutils/beadm) and a lot more stable environment - no rush changes - no systemd - no ifconfig/ip problem - no netstat/ss problem - etc.

danieldk 8y ago
But also relatively outdated graphics drivers outside the NVIDIA proprietary drivers (yes, I know that there is a branch with Linux DRM drivers). This also means relatively limited support for Wayland, so you have to use X11, which is insecure. Even though there are proprietary NVIDIA drivers, CUDA is not supported, which excludes most modern machine learning. [edit: removed some criticism, not nice on a birthday :)] I really like FreeBSD as a clean, understandable UNIX system, it wish it had more momentum (and thus more hardware support, testing, etc.).
- sureaboutthis 8y ago
  While other OSes may support 10,000 hardware devices, and FreeBSD only supports 9374 of them, you only need one of those devices and chances are the one popular one you want to use works on FreeBSD, too.
- vermaden 8y ago
  > But also relatively outdated graphics drivers outside the NVIDIA proprietary drivers (yes, I know that there is a branch with Linux DRM drivers). This was true until drm-next-kmod and drm-stable-kmod ports appeared. Now you have very similar Linux and FreeBSD graphics experience. > This also means relatively limited support for Wayland, so you have to use X11, which is insecure. Wayland is enabled by default since recently. As we talk about security... * Linux - Vulnerabilities (2103) - https://www.cvedetails.com/vendor/33/Linux.html https://www.cvedetails.com/vendor/33/Linux.html * FreeBSD - Vulnerabilities (368) - https://www.cvedetails.com/vendor/6/Freebsd.html https://www.cvedetails.com/vendor/6/Freebsd.html About 7 times more on the Linux side, do not mix X11 into that :) FreeBSD as every system has its limitations, that is for sure, but as I track its developments of the span of 15 years its just getting better and better, in all aspects - including desktop. Of course there are 'environments' where its all or nothing like 'mobile', Linux has most of the market here with Android while FreeBSD has nothing.

Cieplak 8y ago

I’ve been using FreeBSD in production on AWS for a few years now and it’s been great, thanks to ZFS, jails and pf. There are lots of different ways to configure jails, which unfortunately means there are lots of places to get stuck. I typically deploy to x1.* instances, which have NVMe drives. I create a zpool of all the NVMe drives, and then mount a zfs filesystem on the zpool at /mnt/jails. I run all my services in jails. Each jail gets its own IP address on the host, and services are made available to the outside world using pf rdr rules. Services in jails are allowed to access the outside network using pf nat rules. pf makes it easy to monitor and restrict network activity for each service. Once you’ve configured a jail, you can snapshot it with zfs, compress the snapshot, archive it and rsync it to other FreeBSD hosts. Once copied to other hosts, starting the jail simply requires registering it in /etc/jail.conf and running `service jail start $JailName`. I’ve started documenting this and have been thinking hard about how to provide a more generic container interface on top of this implementation. If you’re interested in the shell scripts, I’ve started posting them here: https://github.com/cieplak/jz https://github.com/cieplak/jz

krn 8y ago
A honest question: why would one choose FreeBSD with jails over something like CoreOS with rkt for a stateless cloud application? If I am not mistaken, Netflix uses FreeBSD on a bare metal for CDN, but prefers Linux for applications on AWS.
- lmm 8y ago
  Maturity; an organisation that's been going for 25 years (and maintained backwards compatibility for most of that), a decade or more of documentation/tutorials/... that one can be confident will still work. rkt might offer the same thing but you need a compelling reason to pick something newer and less established.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
- tannhaeuser 8y ago

oldcynic 8y ago

I am so glad I discovered FreeBSD. I've been running it since '95 and I think 2.2.5. Still detest the awful, bland 3D generated "new" logo and flat variant. Please bring back the original. It saved me from wasting so much money. I was in the process of giving up on the Amiga and had just bought a top spec dual boot NT/95 machine (2x Pentium II, Adaptec SCSI, SCSI cd writer, Seagate Cheetahs, something very expensive for graphics and sound). It was a pile of shite that was objectively slower and worse than the 040 Amiga at every task I tried. Burn a CD sir? Sure, just don't do anything else at the same time, you must disable screensavers or receive a coaster. Move the mouse? Gosh that's brave sir. FreeBSD gave something that wasn't brain dead, and actually worked, from that horribly expensive failure. Made a useful home file and printer server. Gave a similar desktop to the Suns at work. I took out a sub with CDROM.com that I kept running until they died. I've had a BSD box as some variation of home NAS/media server ever since. The Amiga would surprisingly live 5 more years as daily driver (with one of the 10k Cheetahs). Windows 2000 was actually reliable enough to use. When retired that first BSD box had an uptime in years. Oh those simple times before constant security updates! I'd love to have used FreeBSD as the daily driver but software and laptop support was lacking in comparison to Windows (I did try a time or two), and OSX that I leapt to as daily machine when it was released. Thankfully today FreeBSD hardware support is much better. So from chance discovery to the most reliable platform I'm ever likely to get my hands on. Especially with jails, ZFS etc. I just wish it was a little better known compared to Linux.

tachion 8y ago

While you're here, have you donated[0][1] yet? :) You may or may not be aware, but FreeBSD runs your movies on Netflix, your games on PlayStation, your files on FreeNAS and ZFS, your friends on WhatsApp and OpenBSD runs everywhere else as OpenSSH. ;) So, you may or may not know that, but you need FreeBSD and OpenBSD and they also need you! Every cent counts and so does every contributor, that helps the foundations keep their non-profit status. Also, you CAN be the change, if you specify what you'd like your donation to be used for (like more secure defaults for the OS or towards code review and bugs fixing). [0]https://www.freebsdfoundation.org/donate/ https://www.freebsdfoundation.org/donate/ [1]https://www.openbsd.org/donations.html https://www.openbsd.org/donations.html

JdeBP 8y ago
I pointed out the problems with this boilerplate spiel that you keep posting over and over to Hacker News, 5 months ago, ironically in a thread where you triggered exactly the same side-discussion yet again. I see that you have not changed the boilerplate. * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16039947 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16039947
- tachion 8y ago
  This is because 5 months ago I didn't agree with your points and I don't agree with them today, therefore I see no reason for any change. Peace! :)
  - JdeBP 8y ago
    So you don't agree that every time that you post this boilerplate, to discussion after discussion on Hacker News, people repetitively re-hash the same old arguments, even though it happened in the several instances that I pointed to 5 months ago, happened in that discussion itself, and has now happened in this discussion?
    - tachion 8y ago
      I don't. I consider this to be educational effort, to discuss these arguments with people and to change their mind on that, so that next time they won't bring them up and they'd educate their peers on the matters.