5 ms·

People who run BSD

69 points by vetelko 8y ago

stingraycharles 8y ago
I really like BSD myself, I used it as my primary OS for both desktop and server back in the early 00s. Nowadays, with a container-centric cloud architecture, it seems like BSD doesn't really have a good answer to Kubernetes, Nomad, etc. If anything, the projects are experimental and/or hobby projects.
- ivoras 8y ago
  Which is a bit bizarre because FeeeBSD jails were world's first containers on a vaguely desktop-ish unix-ish systems. The crowd just never had the hype power of Linux and no big player took to developing cool things on top. It just shows you that having a technically good solution is irrelevant if there's no marketing behind it.
  - tannhaeuser 8y ago
    It maybe also shows how brainwashed or resume-oriented the tech crowd is.
    - lima 8y ago
      Network effects are real though.
  - stingraycharles 8y ago
    Exactly, Docker was able to get a lot of traction because of a variety of reasons (timing and usability, to name a few), even though from a technical perspective it's very much a suboptimal implementation. And right now you just have a huge network effect around containers + linux: the tooling + support is the most compelling reason to "suck it up" and just fire up Ubuntu and call it a day.
  - ignoramous 8y ago
    > no big player took to developing cool things on top. Just one data-point, but WhatsApp engineering was adamant that FreeBSD was a key precursor that allowed them to scale 2m+ connections per host on their (rather beefy) boxes: https://youtu.be/TneLO5TdW_M https://youtu.be/TneLO5TdW_M > It just shows you that having a technically good solution is irrelevant. True. I've seen many promising projects die/stagnate at the hands of unpopularity, *BSDs wouldn't be the first. Sigh.
  - pjmlp 8y ago
    I remember using Tru64 and HP-UX containers before any BSD got them.
    - inferiorhuman 8y ago
      And Solaris zones. But FreeBSD is far more desktop oriented than anything Sun or HP put out (and yes I ran Solaris as a desktop OS for a bit, but still).
- inferiorhuman 8y ago
  Given its scope, iocage has been an excellent way to manage jails for me. What docker brings to the table is a fairly easy way to build the containers themselves.
pfortuny 8y ago
Just installed openBSD on my 2007 MBPro (OS X does not update etc.). What a charm. I bought another MBPro in 2017 because I needed the power and the old one had become unreliable (shutdowns due to heat etc.) I use now the old one for home work and as a remote terminal. Could not be happier.
- lelf 8y ago
  In case you ever run it from the battery, how is the power consumption?
  - pfortuny 8y ago
    Never run it from battery: it has become just a backup for fast moves from room to room. However, I have managed to get the processor get at 1Ghz when not under too much stress automatically (there is a switch which I do not recall, sorry).
h1d 8y ago
I always thought BSD is surviving due to its liberal license allowing many companies to use it as a base OS for their prodcits without any liability to open their code leading to financial supports. From a consumer perspective where a license choice doesn't really matter, I don't find much reason to use BSD over Linux, though I keep a FreeBSD just to keep up with the difference.
- sureaboutthis 8y ago
  I saw someone post that "FreeBSD is a professional operating system for professionals" so consumer perspectives don't really matter. That Netflix, Whatsapp, Sony and most of the world's major internet traffic routers run FreeBSD, via Juniper Networks, is more significant to me.
  - sirn 8y ago
    Sony also deploys FreeBSD in one of their major consumer product: a PlayStation 4, which runs Orbis OS, a fork of FreeBSD 9[1] [1]: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTM5NDI https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTM5NDI
setquk 8y ago
The only reason I don’t run a BSD derivative is laziness. It requires more maintenance effort than xubuntu. Back in the distant past I ran NetBSD on SPARC at home. I’d quite happily be paid to work with it all day but no one wants to hire me to do that. So centos it is.
decasteve 8y ago
I run OpenBSD on a PC Engines apu2 as my main router. I have a 1 Gbit fiber going into a TP-Link converter and then directly into the OpenBSD router which completely bypasses the POS router provided by my ISP. When I first started poking around with BSD I searched for tutorials online for the things I wanted to do. As I often do when I want to learn something. Early on in this process I came across a suggestion to just read the man pages (RTFM!). So I stopped searching and just read the official documentation. I was surprised how it was all just there! For almost everything I needed to do the man pages were enough.
- aerique 8y ago
  When coming from Linux one is not used to this but the OpenBSD and FreeBSD man pages and documentation are actually useful!
veryworried 8y ago
I would like to use FreeBSD myself on my laptop, but I really need those intel WiFi drivers to support 802.11ac
- pfortuny 8y ago
  Have you tried OpenBSD?
karmakaze 8y ago
I tried to use OpenBSD for software development and deployments. It didn't work well because it seemed that packages didn't get as much use judging by inconsistent documentation and sometimes faulty defaults. I didn't care enough to contribute to fix the issues I ran into. Instead I went back to the Ubuntu LTS as before. I briefly also looked at kFreeBSD with a Debian userland to address the issue but it seemed to be even less well traveled.
- sirn 8y ago
  I wonder what kind of development and deployments you do and whether FreeBSD might work better. For instance, FreeBSD packages (ports/pkgng) has two branches: latest and quarterly. I've found latest often closely tracking upstream releases. My work consist of Elixir/Erlang development and a bit of deployments with Kubernetes/Helm/Kapitan/Jsonnet. I primarily work on iPad and login to the FreeBSD workspace via Blink.sh/Mosh and it all worked really well. That said, if your work involve Haskell and Stack, you might want to stick with FreeBSD 11.2 since Stack still hasn't release a version that supported FreeBSD 12 (which broke due to FreeBSD 12.0 change to inode64)
  - karmakaze 8y ago
    My motivation for trying *BSD over Linux is for security/stability which is OpenBSD's goal more than FreeBSD.

69 points by vetelko 8y ago

I really like BSD myself, I used it as my primary OS for both desktop and server back in the early 00s. Nowadays, with a container-centric cloud architecture, it seems like BSD doesn't really have a good answer to Kubernetes, Nomad, etc. If anything, the projects are experimental and/or hobby projects.

ivoras 8y ago
Which is a bit bizarre because FeeeBSD jails were world's first containers on a vaguely desktop-ish unix-ish systems. The crowd just never had the hype power of Linux and no big player took to developing cool things on top. It just shows you that having a technically good solution is irrelevant if there's no marketing behind it.
- tannhaeuser 8y ago
  It maybe also shows how brainwashed or resume-oriented the tech crowd is.
  - lima 8y ago
    Network effects are real though.
- stingraycharles 8y ago
  Exactly, Docker was able to get a lot of traction because of a variety of reasons (timing and usability, to name a few), even though from a technical perspective it's very much a suboptimal implementation. And right now you just have a huge network effect around containers + linux: the tooling + support is the most compelling reason to "suck it up" and just fire up Ubuntu and call it a day.
- ignoramous 8y ago
  > no big player took to developing cool things on top. Just one data-point, but WhatsApp engineering was adamant that FreeBSD was a key precursor that allowed them to scale 2m+ connections per host on their (rather beefy) boxes: https://youtu.be/TneLO5TdW_M https://youtu.be/TneLO5TdW_M > It just shows you that having a technically good solution is irrelevant. True. I've seen many promising projects die/stagnate at the hands of unpopularity, *BSDs wouldn't be the first. Sigh.
- pjmlp 8y ago
  I remember using Tru64 and HP-UX containers before any BSD got them.
  - inferiorhuman 8y ago
    And Solaris zones. But FreeBSD is far more desktop oriented than anything Sun or HP put out (and yes I ran Solaris as a desktop OS for a bit, but still).
inferiorhuman 8y ago
Given its scope, iocage has been an excellent way to manage jails for me. What docker brings to the table is a fairly easy way to build the containers themselves.

pfortuny 8y ago

Just installed openBSD on my 2007 MBPro (OS X does not update etc.). What a charm. I bought another MBPro in 2017 because I needed the power and the old one had become unreliable (shutdowns due to heat etc.) I use now the old one for home work and as a remote terminal. Could not be happier.

lelf 8y ago
In case you ever run it from the battery, how is the power consumption?
- pfortuny 8y ago
  Never run it from battery: it has become just a backup for fast moves from room to room. However, I have managed to get the processor get at 1Ghz when not under too much stress automatically (there is a switch which I do not recall, sorry).

h1d 8y ago

I always thought BSD is surviving due to its liberal license allowing many companies to use it as a base OS for their prodcits without any liability to open their code leading to financial supports. From a consumer perspective where a license choice doesn't really matter, I don't find much reason to use BSD over Linux, though I keep a FreeBSD just to keep up with the difference.

sureaboutthis 8y ago
I saw someone post that "FreeBSD is a professional operating system for professionals" so consumer perspectives don't really matter. That Netflix, Whatsapp, Sony and most of the world's major internet traffic routers run FreeBSD, via Juniper Networks, is more significant to me.
- sirn 8y ago
  Sony also deploys FreeBSD in one of their major consumer product: a PlayStation 4, which runs Orbis OS, a fork of FreeBSD 9[1] [1]: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTM5NDI https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTM5NDI

setquk 8y ago

The only reason I don’t run a BSD derivative is laziness. It requires more maintenance effort than xubuntu. Back in the distant past I ran NetBSD on SPARC at home. I’d quite happily be paid to work with it all day but no one wants to hire me to do that. So centos it is.

decasteve 8y ago

I run OpenBSD on a PC Engines apu2 as my main router. I have a 1 Gbit fiber going into a TP-Link converter and then directly into the OpenBSD router which completely bypasses the POS router provided by my ISP. When I first started poking around with BSD I searched for tutorials online for the things I wanted to do. As I often do when I want to learn something. Early on in this process I came across a suggestion to just read the man pages (RTFM!). So I stopped searching and just read the official documentation. I was surprised how it was all just there! For almost everything I needed to do the man pages were enough.

aerique 8y ago
When coming from Linux one is not used to this but the OpenBSD and FreeBSD man pages and documentation are actually useful!

veryworried 8y ago

I would like to use FreeBSD myself on my laptop, but I really need those intel WiFi drivers to support 802.11ac

pfortuny 8y ago
Have you tried OpenBSD?

karmakaze 8y ago

I tried to use OpenBSD for software development and deployments. It didn't work well because it seemed that packages didn't get as much use judging by inconsistent documentation and sometimes faulty defaults. I didn't care enough to contribute to fix the issues I ran into. Instead I went back to the Ubuntu LTS as before. I briefly also looked at kFreeBSD with a Debian userland to address the issue but it seemed to be even less well traveled.

sirn 8y ago
I wonder what kind of development and deployments you do and whether FreeBSD might work better. For instance, FreeBSD packages (ports/pkgng) has two branches: latest and quarterly. I've found latest often closely tracking upstream releases. My work consist of Elixir/Erlang development and a bit of deployments with Kubernetes/Helm/Kapitan/Jsonnet. I primarily work on iPad and login to the FreeBSD workspace via Blink.sh/Mosh and it all worked really well. That said, if your work involve Haskell and Stack, you might want to stick with FreeBSD 11.2 since Stack still hasn't release a version that supported FreeBSD 12 (which broke due to FreeBSD 12.0 change to inode64)
- karmakaze 8y ago
  My motivation for trying *BSD over Linux is for security/stability which is OpenBSD's goal more than FreeBSD.