4 ms·

Uh oh. I was planning to set up my new home server with FreeBSD next week, but after reading this I’m a bit concerned... It would have been interesting to have

Uh oh. I was planning to set up my new home server with FreeBSD next week, but after reading this I’m a bit concerned... It would have been interesting to have some more info on this part too: >It does not go in depth about changing FreeBSD's more serious low-level problems that require code changes. Does anyone have any resources to read up on this? I’ve been reading “The design and implementation of the FreeBSD operating system” by the way.

ghuntley 7y ago
Try out nixos instead :-)
snazz 7y ago
It seems to mostly be a philosophical issue. FreeBSD security is certainly a lot better than it was, just expect that the defaults probably aren’t what you’re looking for. OpenBSD developers almost always change features for security reasons. They aren’t afraid of writing their own utilities or maintaining entire projects to do things in a cleaner way. This can lead to compatibility and/or performance issues, but at the same time you get a very nicely integrated base system. I know less about FreeBSD, but they seem to place more responsibility on the user for building a system using their primitives. The choices they make with regards to backwards compatibility and defaults make sense in this context. FreeBSD is also usually the first stop for ex-Linux users who have become disenchanted by systemd or other changes to the system. Linux as a whole doesn’t really have to choose a side because distributions have their own opinions and there’s enough eyes across popular packages to have decent security while maintaining a huge number of features.
ysleepy 7y ago
FreeBSD is a mature and rock-solid OS whose maintainers care a lot about professional users. I feel very at home with FreeBSD and it has been a consistently good experience over many years.

4 ms·

Uh oh. I was planning to set up my new home server with FreeBSD next week, but after reading this I’m a bit concerned... It would have been interesting to have

by layoutIfNeeded 7y ago

ghuntley 7y ago
Try out nixos instead :-)
snazz 7y ago
It seems to mostly be a philosophical issue. FreeBSD security is certainly a lot better than it was, just expect that the defaults probably aren’t what you’re looking for. OpenBSD developers almost always change features for security reasons. They aren’t afraid of writing their own utilities or maintaining entire projects to do things in a cleaner way. This can lead to compatibility and/or performance issues, but at the same time you get a very nicely integrated base system. I know less about FreeBSD, but they seem to place more responsibility on the user for building a system using their primitives. The choices they make with regards to backwards compatibility and defaults make sense in this context. FreeBSD is also usually the first stop for ex-Linux users who have become disenchanted by systemd or other changes to the system. Linux as a whole doesn’t really have to choose a side because distributions have their own opinions and there’s enough eyes across popular packages to have decent security while maintaining a huge number of features.
ysleepy 7y ago
FreeBSD is a mature and rock-solid OS whose maintainers care a lot about professional users. I feel very at home with FreeBSD and it has been a consistently good experience over many years.