15 ms·

FreeBSD is an amazing operating system

395 points by hggh 7y ago

jbverschoor 7y ago
I hope FreeBSD we’ll get more love in the future. Just like Postgres vs MySQL.
_sbrk 7y ago
One "make world" and your world is changed. Not to mention the absence of systemd and its overly-complex solution to non-problems. FBSD-er since '98.
- andoriyu 7y ago
  Hopefully you making a joke with `make world` because it's deprecated way of doing it.
giancarlostoro 7y ago
How well is it on a Macbook Pro? I just cant run FreeBSD for the same reason I cant be bothered to use Slackware Linux anymore. I love Slackware but too much manual labor when there are plenty of useful UI utilities to achieve more with less. I prefer user oriented KISS not just developer oriented KISS.
- saghm 7y ago
  Last time I checked (maybe a year ago), FreeBSD didn't have wifi drivers for a early 2015 Macbook. I think even Linux doesn't have drivers for the wifi card in the touchbar-era Macbooks, so I'd be very surprised if Freebase did.
- huh_lost_email 7y ago
  Isn't Mac based upon freebsd? I've never used freebsd itself, so I'm not sure what the actual difference is besides ux.
  - otterley 7y ago
    Not really. The roots of OS X/MacOS are in NeXTSTEP. It uses a Mach microkernel that originated at CMU, as opposed to the FreeBSD kernel (or anything like it, really). That said, a bunch of FreeBSD userland code and utilities were ported over to make the OS POSIX-ish. It's probably easiest to think of a Mac as an amalgam of many different influences and operating behaviors, as opposed to a direct descendant of any one particular lineage.
    - icodestuff 7y ago
      This is about right, and it's changed to be more this way over time. Early versions of OS X had user lands which were more BSD-like than they are now (and optional! Used to be you had to install the "BSD Subsystem" package from your install CD if you wanted to get a proper POSIX environment). For instance, early versions used BSD init, but that was replaced with launchd.
      - danieldk 7y ago
        Early versions of OS X had user lands which were more BSD-like than they are now They still have a lot of userland BSD parts. Including the very broken grep from FreeBSD (which is fixed in FreeBSD now IIRC): $ echo "abcdef" | /usr/bin/grep -o "^..." abc def (I have to use the full path to grep, because I replace macOS grep by GNU grep.)
        JdeBP 7y ago
        People really should complain to Apple about this. * https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/398249/5132 https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/398249/5132
    - sardon 7y ago
      The Darwin kernel in OSX has more than userland code taken from FreeBSD. "The kernel of Darwin is XNU, a hybrid kernel which uses OSFMK (Open Software Foundation Mach Kernel) from the OSF, various elements of FreeBSD (including the process model, network stack, and virtual file system)" [0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darwin_%28operating_system%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darwin_%28operating_system%29
- _paulc 7y ago
  To be honest it’s probably not worth running FreeBSD on a laptop/desktop - it’s really a server operating system. If you are looking for a well engineered, stable, ‘traditional’ UNIX system sitting in a rack and happy with a terminal interface it’s an amazing OS. Lots of people however seem to be trying out on laptops/desktops and being disappointed which isn't a huge surprise. (FreeBSD user since 2.0.5 - 1995)
- atomize 7y ago
  FreeBSD is the reference for OS X, but they used different kernels. Many of the BSD flavored behaviors are/were retained, however.
  - sigjuice 7y ago
    What would be examples of the retained BSD flavored behaviors?
    - spijdar 7y ago
      A couple examples off the top of my head: Userland tools tend to be the BSD ones with BSD style arguments. e.g. BSD du vs GNU du, GNU requires size suffixes in uppercase, BSD takes lowercase. MacOS tends to include the more useful GNU tools though, like grep. Find is still BSD, and the missing GNU extensions occasionally causes grief. SIGINFO is preserved. On BSD, pressing Ctrl+t in the terminal will print process status. Some processes add extra info, but it always gives at least CPU load and running time. This is a distinctly BSD feature.
cinnamonheart 7y ago
As a long time fan of Gentoo, I felt very at home on FreeBSD, and quite liked how everything in it worked. I remember my frustration was more around software and hardware issues. In the end, it wasn't Linux; I felt left in the cold if I ever wanted to use something that wasn't made for FreeBSD. FreeBSD itself was a pleasure and I wish I could use it more. I've not found a linux distribution I've found quite as nice.
roboman 7y ago
I think OpenBSD is still more secure than FreeBSD
- type0 7y ago
  It is, and also less useful
  - uncle_j 7y ago
    Untrue. It works better than most people give it credit for. I run quite a lot of stuff on OpenBSD and it works for the most part fine. Sure if you are running Netflix or something at mega scale it probably won't be any good, but it works quite well for a lot of hosting scenarios. I can make a pretty decent desktop OS as well.
    - yjftsjthsd-h 7y ago
      I think it's strictly true that OpenBSD doesn't do as much as FreeBSD. You may well argue that it's sufficient, but the claim isn't untrue.
      - uncle_j 7y ago
        It can do the same stuff in a lot of cases. It won't scale as well but that is a different discussion. You can always find things another OS can't do.
      - tedunangst 7y ago
        Unproven that doing less is synonymous with less useful.
  - anthk 7y ago
    Eh, I am coding in C and Scheme rn under OpenBSD. Iridium works, html5 video works, so do the videos under MPV. I've heard succesful stories from OpenBSD users with Vulkan under MESA. Even amdgpu works, but the -current release is better for that. PPSSPP and some C# gaming works; so does N64, NES, SNES, PSX and even maybe DC emulation. A PS2 emulation is WIP, and it's not PCSX2. Then there is Dolphin, Nethack, ScummVM, lots of source ports... You have LibreOffice if you want, among a lot of known ports https://openports.pl https://openports.pl such as Python3, R, Node, and so on. No Netflix, but maybe with fake mobile UA's under Chromium you can override the DRM. CWM+XClock+Xlock as my "DE". I don't need more.
atomize 7y ago
Nice to see some love for FreeBSD. My intro to +nix in the mid 90s started with FreeBSD as well. Back then, I used to tag along with my dad in the summer to work occasionally (two working parents, and dad ran/runs a small telecom business). In the supply closet I saw a shelf with boxes lined up that all had a cool-ass little devil on them. Being interested in computers from my fathers influence, I asked him what the 'Devil Software' was in the storage closet, and he explained that it was an operating system like Windows sort-of (which at the time I was already well in to understanding how to re-install =), but that it ran on Voicemail Servers - stuff with specific needs - because it was very 'flexible in configuration', as he put it. He then gave me a voicemail box and the manual, and said he would give me $20 if I could get the 'Devil Software' installed on the machine from a blank HDD. This. was. huge. $20 to a 13 yr old was serious dough. Eventually I was successful (to his surprise? or dismay? haha since he was out 20 bucks). He was proud, and that made me proud, and that started the journey that is still ongoing to this day. Will note, father exploited me for cheap labor throughout my teens as my interest/experience with BSD, and eventually GNU/Linux increased =). Although I am a GNU person these days, FreeBSD is always close to my heart, and helped me understand the +nix ecosystem from an early age.
- ahmedalsudani 7y ago
  That is a great story, and you have a cool dad!
- ChuckNorris89 7y ago
  Just out of curiosity, how did your dad exploit you for cheap labor with BSD? I mean I also did a lot of chores around the house and was the responsible IT repair guy of the house but I thought that's a pretty good deal for being housed, fed and clothed for 20 years.
  - montenegrohugo 7y ago
    I think it was meant more in a tongue in cheek manner. Obviously his dad gave him IT related tasks over the years, but I think both enjoyed it and I imagine it oftentimes was a learning experience for both of them. I think generally kids can benefit and grow a lot from being treated and talked to like responsible adults sometimes, and not as if they were useless small people that have to be constantly supervised.
whalesalad 7y ago
I would probably daily drive FreeBSD or OpenBSD if the desktop situation was better. I don't know how people survive open-source desktop environments. I've spent the last couple of weeks trying to build a reasonable HiDPI desktop environment on a variety of open source platforms and nothing has the level of fit and finish I am looking for. So far I have been happiest with Elementary OS and their treatments to Gnome... but it preturbs me that getting a new rig setup is so fickle and unrepeatable. You can spend hours tweaking shit and experimenting with no reasonable way to save your changes to be applied later to a clean install or even a different platform. I wish I could check my entire configuration into git. Would love if the hackers here would share their FreeBSD (or any Nix) desktop environment configuration (including window manager etc...)
- Lammy 7y ago
  KDE has the best HiDPI support I've seen, but I don't really care for KDE itself and as soon as I step outside the QT ecosystem all bets are off.
- jethro_tell 7y ago
  With gnome, you can export the gconf database and check it into git if that's your thing.
- big_chungus 7y ago
  I've got a arch i3 config I like. I've tuned a little over the years, but it's remained mostly the same. I keep the dotfiles in the same repo I keep useful shell scripts I've built, other program config files, etc. Many people, me included, gravitate towards the more "minimalist" linux configs for that reason. If I get time to make sure I haven't accidentally left a password in an old script, I'll make a public repo and link it.
- ingenieroariel 7y ago
  I had great looking results with sway + alacritty + swaybar + firefox-wayland on Nixos 20.03-pre.
  - 7y ago
iagovar 7y ago
I always struggled with linux, because there's so many of everything. It's too much choice. I don't really have many sysadmin skills and discovering FreeBSD has been a blessing for me. When I have a problem the documentation is... IDK, consistent? It's like I can follow it, and it's useful, same with forums and the helpful community. I'm so thankful, honestly. I finally can have my VPSs without feeling like I'm dumb or I need to devote so much time and effort to sysadmin skills that I don't have nor I enjoy. I still use Xubuntu in my laptop and Windows in my desktop, because of the lack of drivers and because they work out of the box (well, almost with Xubuntu), but still, for some reason I really feel confortable with FreeBSD, and this is coming from someone who just wants to spin DBs, sites, and cron scripts, and I don't have enough knowledge to appreciate jails and so many other things that other people likes about FreeBSD. So guys, thank you.
- stiray 7y ago
  I so much agree. I am using FreeBSD on home server (and few others) trying to push it to the limits. I just love it. It seems like order in all the chaos of operating systems (from windows kernel32 getting com objects to all the chaos in linux, from systemd to docker,...). Please if you are trying to use freebsd TRY jails (to shorten tldr, use iocage). They are just great :) And dont go desktop. Just isnt worth it. Not enough people troubling with gfx support. Keep it as it is. Server.
  - inopinatus 7y ago
    There is a variant of FreeBSD with terrific graphics support, and although limited to just one hardware vendor, there’s no doubting its popularity: it’s in every PlayStation 4. There’s FreeBSD in almost every data centre. But it’s at a level most application developers just never see. Many infrastructure elements - from storage heads, to core routers, to enterprise application and security appliances - have chosen FreeBSD as the high quality, reliable, consistent, and liberally licensed base for their control plane software. The point being, this is where FreeBSD has the greatest influence and adoption: as a platform, not the product, and not at all obvious even to those that thereby rely upon it. That being said, yes it works great as the instance OS in EC2 and as a die-hard acolyte since 2.1-RELEASE you’ll pry my production application jails from my cold dead hands
bureaucrat 7y ago
If I want lot of work and an amazing operating system, I'd' ve built an operating system myself. Since I'm a person with a job, run serious things and has a deadline, I use linux.
deepspace 7y ago
My experience with FreeBSD started more than 20 years ago when I built my first home file server, managing a whopping 200G of storage (huge for the time). Since then I built several more generations of file server, all running FreeBSD and all absolutely rock solid. They all typically had a 3-5 year service life, with uptimes of 1-2 years at a time. Each of them were only replaced for capacity reasons, with the previous generation server typically serving as a backup target for the next one. Around 2002, broadcast and cable TV was still a thing, and rudimentary PVRs were becoming available but were pricey with few features. So I decided to build my own. I started with Linux, thinking that it would provide better hardware compatibility, but stability issues soon drove me back to FreeBSD, and I managed to create a very complete FreeBSD based PVR solution, complete with remote control, automatic program scheduling, multiple simultaneous recording and viewing streams, auto DVD ripping and very intuitive remote (web) and onscreen user interfaces. That thing ran rock solid for 10 years, until replaced by Netflix. I guess the point I am trying to make is that I fully agree with the author. FreeBSD is in a different league than many other operating systems in terms of capability and stability, while being surprisingly compatible with a lot of hardware.
- boznz 7y ago
  Me too, built BSD/MySQL server from scratch following the on-line documentation and everything just worked. Server is still running after 5 years with two outages for power problems. I think I chose FreeBSD at the time for the ZFS file system which was its big selling point over linux.
- lizknope 7y ago
  I bought my first Tivo in 1999. It ran Linux and a Tivo hacking community quickly appeared. Added a second hard drive (just put it in your Linux PC first and run a command to format it) Bought an ethernet adapter and ran a command to install the driver. It had an FTP server so I could just type "get Friends-10-21-1999.mpg" and have the unencrypted file on my computer. It also had a web server to schedule recordings or act as a remote control. Never had an issue with it.
bauerd 7y ago
If only one of the BSDs had a container runtime, it's the only real showstopper for me
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- dijit 7y ago
  Docker was working[0]. But it depends what you want from containers I guess. Layers? Most of the container use-cases that aren’t layers work fine under jails. But it’s a more primitive tool, definitely not as user friendly. [0]: https://wiki.freebsd.org/Docker https://wiki.freebsd.org/Docker
  - bauerd 7y ago
    Need it to integrate with tooling I use, orchestrators, etc.
  - mr__y 7y ago
    >Most of the container use-cases that aren’t layers work fine under jails I'm pretty sure that with unionfs you could get layer-ish equivalent for most use cases. Not going to question that it wouldn't be user friendly though
  - andoriyu 7y ago
    Wrong. There were 2 attempts at bringing docker to freebsd: - Docker tooling on top of jails (what you linked) - kernel shims in linux-compat (better) Neither one of them was delivering usable experience. UnionFS is broken and not recommended to use. ZFS snapshots aren't layers. FreeBSD has loosely coupled tools to make something like docker, but nothing remotely close to full docker is available atm.
- waz0wski 7y ago
  freebsd has 'containers' called jails, first released in ~2000, pre-empting solaris zones by four years, openvz by 5 years, lxc by 8 years, and docker by 10+ years. jails were/are common in the webhosting and gaming industries, and nowdays they can be managed with infrastructure-as-code tools like ansible or puppet. when backed by zfs, they can be made to behave very similarly to docker containers. with the demise of docker the company and the fractured ecosystem of competing container runtimes, specifications, kernel compatibility issues, and management tools, jails are worth testing out. iocage is one way to start managing them.
linguae 7y ago
I've been using FreeBSD as my Unix of choice for desktop PCs, Unix development inside VMs, and for servers since 2004 when a community college CS instructor told me about it and gave me an install disc. I love the documentation that ships with FreeBSD, including the high-quality man pages, the excellent handbook that explains how to perform many administrative tasks, and the collection of historical Unix documents that come from Bell Labs. I am also a fan of the book "The Design and Implementation of the FreeBSD Operating System." I have the second edition of this book and it's one of the most well-written operating systems textbooks available. I also like the quality of the source code. With that being said, on laptops Linux and macOS are my Unix-based operating systems of choice because of increased hardware support, although on older laptops I do have success with FreeBSD. But if I need a Unix-based operating system for a desktop, a server, or a VM, my first choice is FreeBSD unless the software I need specifically requires Linux.
3xblah 7y ago
I have been trying Ubuntu for about a year now, taking a break from BSD. This is the longest I have ever used Linux continuously for personal use. I always work entirely in RAM. Everything is mounted tmpfs. Occasionally I accidentally exceed the amount of RAM I have available. Some file grows too large. One of the things I always liked about BSD was how well it handled this situation.^1 It had no lasting effect on the operation of the OS. The only things affected were running applications that needed write space. Thus all I had to worry about were the running daemons I use that are continuously writing to logs. The OS would otherwise continue to function. Whereas when I run out of space in a tmpfs-mounted directory in Ubuntu, I get filesystem errors. I cannot simply remove the excessively large file, and expect to continue to work indefinitely. I get I/O errors. I am eventually forced to reboot. Obviously I am not well-versed on Linux but as far as I can tell so far, this is a known problem. 1. This was NetBSD but I assume that FreeBSD and OpenBSD would be no different.
- alcover 7y ago
  Thank you for mentioning this. As someone interested also in RAM-only, that is a strong additional point for BSD.
- aruggirello 7y ago
  Yes, this is a known problem for Linux desktop, and the upcoming EarlyOOM monitor is designed precisely to detect such OOM situations and handle them better, avoiding system unresponsiveness etc. But maybe it's not yet ready for prime time. Fedora was about to add EarlyOOM in the 32 release, but they'll probably defer this until at least 33: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Fedora-FESCo-Defers-EarlyOOM https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Fedora-F...
- LargoLasskhyfv 7y ago
  Hm yeah, i recall NetBSD to be 'unbreakable' in that, and some other ways from personal experiences in the past.* Anyways, there are Linux distros who specialize in this use case, and have sane and proven defaults tuned for that. Sometimes they seem a little bit 'ghettoish', but one can remove anything which is unnecessary, add needed stuff, even remaster in RAM and then rewrite that to another boot media. Or being lazy and just using an overlay to the stock image. [1] https://antixlinux.com/ https://antixlinux.com/ for instance works very well. [2] http://grml.org/ http://grml.org/ is another Debian based one, altough a little bit lagging behind nowadays. But many others also. [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Linux_distributions_that_run_from_RAM https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Linux_distributions_th... Ubuntu is not a good starting point for that use case. * Like carefully unplugging the SCSI controller from the running system, while it had no other available mass storage, watching the console being flooded with messages akin to 'Arrgh! I'm dying! Where is my...?', carefully reinserting the controller into the PCI-slot without causing shorts, console turning back to normal. And switching back to the running X as if nothing had happened. (And no file system damage in spite of having soft updates on UFS active, and running tasks with many open files) Amazing.
city41 7y ago
Anyone here using FreeBSD for JavaScript/Node/PHP dev? Curious if there are any common tools that don't work or any unexpected gotchas. I currently am using Ubuntu, but would be curious to give FreeBSD a try. I used to run it about a decade ago and always liked it.
- nuccy 7y ago
  VS Code can be installed via ports https://www.freshports.org/editors/vscode/ https://www.freshports.org/editors/vscode/
gregf 7y ago
I been daily driving FreeBSD for the last 3 or 4 years. I was frustrated by a lot of things in Linux at the time, no this wasn't just because of systemd. I don't actually mind systemd on my desktop. Everything was very easy much like Debian maybe to get going. There's over 10,000 ports most are in package form at any time. Sometimes the build process fails and a package goes away for a short time, but you can always install it via ports. My biggest gripe is and always will be the fact I can't use my spotify account on my FreeBSD desktop. I don't see this ever changing though. What I have done is gone back to relying on my local music collection a bit more again. I also bluetooth stream spotify from my phone to my receiver, but I'm lazy, hate phones, and don't generally like to do this. It also has easiest operating system upgrade path out there that I have experienced. Just freebsd-update, reboot, done. Jails are great, but they need work to be a bit more modern at this point. Docker has kinda showed some type of image repository is a nice feature. I'm not sure we'll see this right away, but BastilleBSD is working on some nice jails based solutions. Based off of FreeBSD, i'm pretty excited to possibly use this in the future.
- throw0101a 7y ago
  > There's over 10,000 ports ... For the record it is currently over 38,000: * https://www.freshports.org https://www.freshports.org
- w4n9r3ntru3 7y ago
  Mac is based on FreeBSD I think, and so far in the two years I use one I'm loving it.
gautamcgoel 7y ago
I installed FreeBSD on my machine about a year ago, and went so far as to buy a copy of Absolute FreeBSD (3rd ed) by Michael Lucas. Much as I admire the FreeBSD ethos, I always end up coming back to Fedora for a very simple reason: the desktop experience on the BSD's has always been painful for me. First, FreeBSD didn't have the driver for my iGPU (Coffeelake), though Linux had support at least six months prior. FreeBSD devs to their credit were very helpful and welcoming when I tried troubleshooting my graphics situation, even writing a small patch for me. Then, when I installed the patched version of the driver and got video output, I had to be careful to maintain the patch. One time I accidentally upgraded all packages, overwriting the patched file and undoing the video support. Eventually I got fed up and just installed Fedora, which always works perfectly, runs like butter, and looks great. I get that the FreeBSD project is much smaller than GNU/Linux, and hardware vendors like Intel and Nvidia are not nearly as supportive in terms of contributing code/checking compatibility. I want to run FreeBSD, I really do. But at the end of the day I just don't have enough hours in the week to be troubleshooting my desktop, I'd rather spend those hours being productive (or being unproductive in a manner of my choosing). It's a great project - with a bit more love for newbies and the desktop experience I think FreeBSD could really shine. One option I think FreeBSD should consider is to offer separate server and workstation editions of each release, like Fedora does. This would help bring resources/attention to the desktop situation and provide an on-ramp for new users who want to try out FreeBSD without diving headfirst into config files and device drivers.
- santoshalper 7y ago
  I don't think the FreeBSD team has the resources to maintain multiple editions for personal and server use, nor do I think it really fits their ethos. Unless you are trying to immerse yourself in it, I would avoid FreeBSD on your personal computer and use it for what it is, one of the best designed server operating systems in the world.
  - gautamcgoel 7y ago
    I see your point, but I'd like to make an observation: most people start of running OSS on their laptops/desktops, and only then move to server/cloud setups, usually sticking to the platform they already knew. For example, I started off installing Linux Mint on my desktop machine and college, way before I ever SSHed into a server setup. By giving up on the desktop, the BSDs are making it unlikely that the next generation of devs will ever both exploring their server offerings.
pfortran 7y ago
I remember that book fondly - I'd dabbled with BSD/OS at one company, then at the next gig set up their production servers on a couple of FreeBSD boxes running Apache. The book was a constant companion at my desk. For running servers, FreeBSD was hard to beat back then!
insulanian 7y ago
Honestly I don't think FreeBSD should focus on desktop story at all. Resources, as limited as they are, should be spent on making FreeBSD an obvious and compelling choice for the servers. Although FreeBSD looks cleaner and more consistent than Linux, it's not really clear why should one use it over Linux. I hope the team will define strategic goals and try to develop some competitive advantage, even if it means focusing only on certain niches in the beginning. E.g. encouraging development of the OS modules in a safe language like Rust would probably lead to more stable system less vulnerable to exploits, and make it a more attractive choice for mission-critical deployments.
- muxator 7y ago
  At least for me, being able to use Linux as daily driver on my desktop was instrumental at making me more proficient. At that point using it in the server became natural. Nothing beats the exercise of being able to use the same environment for everyday computing and for running "serious" services. I guess a good desktop experience has the same utility to the freebsd ecosystem.
  - dddddaviddddd 7y ago
    I've had the same experience. Used FreeBSD as a server OS long enough to switch to it as my main desktop OS. In return I've learned a lot more that has made server administration better.
  - jayd16 7y ago
    I'm not sure I'd apply this to Windows, personally.
    - pmontra 7y ago
      Companies started to use Windows NT servers in the 90s maybe because they cost less than UNIX servers from HP, IBM, Sun etc but also because they had a lot of technical staff which only knew Windows.
- wolco 7y ago
jedberg 7y ago
FreeBSD was the first Unix I ever worked on professionally. I agree, it's amazing, and I love admining it. The only reason reddit wasn't on BSD was because of lack of package support and then when we moved to AWS, lack of BSD support in AWS. Although that's since been fixed, thanks in large part to CPercival, creator of TarSnap, yay! The way it is set up just makes so much more sense to me, and tweaking the kernel is just so much easier. Also the focus on stability over supporting the latest technologies is a big plus for business servers.
girvo 7y ago
So, I adore the idea of FreeBSD. Anyone had much luck running it as a mostly exclusive VM on top of a more standard desktop OS as the hypervisor? Hyper-V, Xhyve, etc.
- loeg 7y ago
  It should run fine as a guest in any hypervisor.
- toast0 7y ago
  The FreeBSD release process includes producing virtual machine images if you want to get started they're linked from the download page: https://www.freebsd.org/where.html https://www.freebsd.org/where.html
AndrewUnmuted 7y ago
To me, FreeBSD represents the OS that gave me a realistic path I could travel to achieve my computing dreams. I knew that to really achieve my ambitions, I'd need a way to store 50-100TB of data with high resilience and well-managed replication. Until I discovered FreeBSD and ZFS, I simply considered that kind of thing outside the realm of affordability and practicality. But please know, fellow readers - it is affordable and it is practical. FreeBSD makes it so.
- dkarras 7y ago
  What were your ambitions that required such resilient storage if I may ask? Not being snarky or anything, genuinely curious.
blunte 7y ago
I like what works. On servers, Linux seems to work. Maybe it's not as good as bsd in some cases, but I don't know those cases; and Linux has thus far worked. Where bsd has worked for me is on macOS. I think that's a bit less about bsd and more about desktop/UI decisions dating back to the Steve Jobs days (idiosyncrasies aside). But I have doubts about how much the underlying OS had to do with the experience at the UI level. Whether a bsd or linux, the desktop story is terrible compared to macOS. Even Windows has some advantage if certain app dependencies are considered. As a developer (who must still also perform some business tasks), macOS is the best option. Linux desktops are almost as good, with some big exceptions. BSD desktops might perhaps be on par with Linux, but they will fail on some of the development requirements. I know competition is good for innovation, but at some point I would like to see the highly fragmented OSS desktop efforts consolidate. At this point, long after Jobs's death, macOS has fallen greatly in terms of quality and usability; so surpassing it isn't _that_ hard. Windows still doesn't, but I doubt it ever will. In fact, Windows has increased significantly as a development platform while still remaining horrible from a desktop user perspective. macOS has slipped. Linux has gained only slightly. BSD, who knows... but it cannot have improved more than Linux. Whether Linux or BSD, there's plenty of achievable gains to make if motivated OSS folks would consolidate more.
- haolez 7y ago
  Linux works. Docker works. Node.js works. VSCode works. Until your competitor leverages outlier technologies to outcompete you. That's basically what Paul Graham did in the nineties :)
- lmm 7y ago
  > Linux has gained only slightly. BSD, who knows... but it cannot have improved more than Linux. Why is that so impossible? Konqueror had a tiny fraction of the contributors that Mozilla had, but since it was better designed it was still able to get ahead, and now almost everyone is using a Konqueror-derived rendering engine. If they had "consolidated" with Mozilla we would have missed out on that. Right now, FreeBSD does a lot of things better than Linux. ZFS is better than anything Linux can offer. Jails are still ahead of Linux containers. OSSv4 is still nicer than ALSA. FreeBSD ifconfig is still nicer than whatever you have to use to configure your wifi this week. I'm not going to switch to a worse OS, and I'm not sure why you'd expect anyone else to.
miguelmota 7y ago
FreeBSD is awesome on the server and the ports package manager is amazing but wouldn't recommend it on desktop if you need driver software for new hardware since it won't be readily available.
lifeisstillgood 7y ago
A long time ago I toyed with the idea of a kickstarter campaign that would design and build a range of freebsd laptops - they would just work. fixed components and still having all the nice features like a /etc/resolv.conf you can edit
indigodaddy 7y ago
I love the simple and minimal site design of this website. Kudos!
loeg 7y ago
This article makes several misstatements or factual errors, unfortunately. > What I failed to realize back then was that FreeBSD was (and it still is) designed as a complete multi-purpose operating system meant to be setup and tuned according to specific use cases. IMO, if it needs to be manually tuned, that's a bug, not a feature. (And I'm speaking as a FreeBSD developer on that.) > FreeBSD sets the kernel and the base system apart from third party packages. This is unique to FreeBSD and none of the other BSDs do that. Um, nope, this is how all of the BSDs do it. > FreeBSD is installed only with the features you enable and nothing is running that you don't know about. sendmail, cron, and ntpd run out of the box, to name a few. > The FreeBSD code is meticulously maintained and very well documented. Not really (especially in random drivers) and usually not (in the code, anyway). We have pretty decent manual pages. > The FreeBSD rc system that reads this file understands dependencies between services and it can automatically launch them in parallel, or wait until one is finished before starting the things that it needs. The parallelism part is not true. > I believe it is important to understand that FreeBSD is not like a GNU/Linux distribution. Not really true? In a lot of ways FreeBSD is like a GNU/Linux distribution; it just happens to bundle the equivalent of coreutils, binutils, gcc, etc with the kernel. > FreeBSD is an operating system made by developers who are also system administrators. Definitely not true (or at least, in no respect different than the developers of the broader Linux ecosystem). > A Linux distribution is a collection of tools written by different groups of people, often with conflicting interests and priorities. This is true! Especially for core bits of the system, like glibc and the kernel. > A Linux distribution needs ..., additional third party software, the X Window System, a window manager, and a desktop environment, and it then needs to combine these different components into the resulting distribution. This is of course no different than FreeBSD's ports system; we face the same integration challenges as Linux distributions. > there are no conflicting interests in the [FreeBSD] project Ha. ha. ha.
- jpeeler 7y ago
  As a FreeBSD developer, perhaps you know what tunables are being talked about for specific use cases? Unrelated, I find it surprising that any major operating system these days need rebooting because "every third day or so otherwise the performance degraded a lot". Or maybe they just didn't increase the sysctl var kern.full_performance_days high enough ;)
JeremyMorgan 7y ago
My experience with FreeBSD mirrors the author's quite a bit. I bought that same book, installed it on a system, struggled like hell and went through it cover to cover. It was my "daily driver" for probably 5-6 years after that. The experience got me a job at an ISP running FreeBSD and later I started a web hosting business with FreeBSD backing. I love it and love how easy and simple it is, but I too had to stray into Linux because that's where the crowd went. Hardware and software availability are key factors. I also think they should drop the focus on Desktop and go towards servers. I've never administered servers that were as painless as those old BSD boxes. There is so much value in things that "just work" and documentation that's accurate. Yes there's a learning curve but it pays off exponentially. Linux is being plagued by too many choices and too much change. RTFM doesn't do you a lot of good when it's out of date. It's only my decades of experience that help me figure things out when problems arise, I'd hate to be a beginner with Linux now. While Linux on the server is pretty tame the desktop world is out of control. I would like to see the FreeBSD folks just focus on making it the server/container host of choice.
myrandomcomment 7y ago
NetFlix CDN HW that they drop at the local ISP level is a FreeBSD box that they have tuned to be able to fill 100G NICs no issue. There you go.
known 7y ago
Porting FreeBSD to GPL can promote its user base;
- clarry 7y ago
  It can also drive away all its users.
- pmlnr 7y ago
  Hell no. I used to be all-in for GPL, but GPL is an ideology. Just like with philosophies/ideologies, one exclusively is never true enough for reality. There's absolutely nothing wrong with the BSD licensing: it allows multiple views on the world to co-exist, unlike GPL.
pyuser583 7y ago
Can you install the latest version of Java on it?
- olavgg 7y ago
  Yes, at the time for this writing OpenJDK 13.02 and 11.0.6 is available in ports
abinaya_b 7y ago
Any ides if FreeBSD can be installed on a Macbook Pro 15inch 2015 edition?
jacobush 7y ago
https://www.dragonflybsd.org/ https://www.dragonflybsd.org/ gotta mention it too, that it just exists is both surprising and great.
idclip 7y ago
Yes, yes it is.
newnewpdro 7y ago
I've been using Linux since the days of hand crafting Modeline entries for an unstable XFree86 running as root, and installed FreeBSD a number of times over the years but never really enjoyed the userspace as much as GNU. I simply preferred the ergonomics of GNU, it's what was more familiar since I was introduced to UNIX via GNU/Linux in my teens. Having said that however, I absolutely loved the FreeBSD books by Marshall Kirk McKusick. The red hardcover Design and Implementation of FreeBSD book was my go-to bathroom reading for well over a year. I also was lucky enough to attend viewings of VHS recordings from his operating systems class featuring FreeBSD. Those tapes were something like $1k/tape if memory serves, a friend's employer bought the entire set and would host group viewings on weekends. Such great memories from those times, McKusick was humorous and never missed an opportunity to take jabs at emacs while explaining how paging and swap worked, poor little vi being paged out because someone started emacs, etc. There's a lot to love about FreeBSD, I hope it continues to exist and can attract enough new talent to thrive in the future.
naikrovek 7y ago
One of the neat things about working at Yahoo! when I did (which was when it still had the "!" as part of the branding) was knowing that we had a small number of FreeBSD core maintainers on the payroll, and that those folks could get hardware if they needed it for the FreeBSD project. Not to provide infrastructure to the project, but to give those core maintainers hardware to use and to add support for. We just provided them with the things they needed, almost no questions asked. Those people didn't answer to anyone, they were just paid to work on the OS. Yahoo! made heavy use of FreeBSD at the time (almost 20 years ago, now) so it was decided that since we were using this free software so extensively that it would be good to give back to that community. I wish this notion that giving a small amount of resources to open source projects that have saved your company millions of dollars per year was more common than it is. I don't know of any large company that does what Yahoo! did back then. I work for a large company now, and as far as anyone I've asked can tell, we give exactly nothing to any of the hundreds or possibly thousands of open source projects we use daily, and it does not put a good feeling in my stomach.
- drewg123 7y ago
  At Netflix, in my larger work group, we have at least 7 FreeBSD committers, and one core team member (and I'm sure I'm forgetting some folks and I'm sorry!). We have employed (on specific contracts) many other committers and core team members. Unlike Yahoo, we are accountable to Netflix's business goals of increasing our streaming customer's Quality of Experience while still maintaining or reducing the cost to deliver content. Frequently those goals align nicely with FreeBSD's goals, and we have contributed a great deal (async sendfile, kTLS, unmapped mbufs, epoch stabilization, NUMA work, RACK TCP, BBR TCP, TCP pacing, and tons of stuff I'm forgetting).
  - naikrovek 7y ago
    That's excellent, and I'm very happy to learn this. Thank you.
  - porker 7y ago
    > At Netflix, in my larger work group, we have at least 7 FreeBSD committers Oh that's good to hear. Reading Brendan Gregg's blog [1] I got the impression that Netflix had switched to Linux. 1. http://www.brendangregg.com/ http://www.brendangregg.com/
bluedino 7y ago
What a silly article. He mentions he ran a home FTP server on FreeBSD, switches it out for a Linux ftp server, because it needed a reboot every third day. Meanwhile Walnut Creek cd-rom was setting bandwidth and uptime records with a P6-200 running FreeBSD as their ftp server

395 points by hggh 7y ago

I hope FreeBSD we’ll get more love in the future. Just like Postgres vs MySQL.

One "make world" and your world is changed. Not to mention the absence of systemd and its overly-complex solution to non-problems. FBSD-er since '98.

andoriyu 7y ago
Hopefully you making a joke with `make world` because it's deprecated way of doing it.

giancarlostoro 7y ago

How well is it on a Macbook Pro? I just cant run FreeBSD for the same reason I cant be bothered to use Slackware Linux anymore. I love Slackware but too much manual labor when there are plenty of useful UI utilities to achieve more with less. I prefer user oriented KISS not just developer oriented KISS.

saghm 7y ago
Last time I checked (maybe a year ago), FreeBSD didn't have wifi drivers for a early 2015 Macbook. I think even Linux doesn't have drivers for the wifi card in the touchbar-era Macbooks, so I'd be very surprised if Freebase did.
huh_lost_email 7y ago
Isn't Mac based upon freebsd? I've never used freebsd itself, so I'm not sure what the actual difference is besides ux.
- otterley 7y ago
  Not really. The roots of OS X/MacOS are in NeXTSTEP. It uses a Mach microkernel that originated at CMU, as opposed to the FreeBSD kernel (or anything like it, really). That said, a bunch of FreeBSD userland code and utilities were ported over to make the OS POSIX-ish. It's probably easiest to think of a Mac as an amalgam of many different influences and operating behaviors, as opposed to a direct descendant of any one particular lineage.
  - icodestuff 7y ago
    This is about right, and it's changed to be more this way over time. Early versions of OS X had user lands which were more BSD-like than they are now (and optional! Used to be you had to install the "BSD Subsystem" package from your install CD if you wanted to get a proper POSIX environment). For instance, early versions used BSD init, but that was replaced with launchd.
    - danieldk 7y ago
      Early versions of OS X had user lands which were more BSD-like than they are now They still have a lot of userland BSD parts. Including the very broken grep from FreeBSD (which is fixed in FreeBSD now IIRC): $ echo "abcdef" | /usr/bin/grep -o "^..." abc def (I have to use the full path to grep, because I replace macOS grep by GNU grep.)
      - JdeBP 7y ago
        People really should complain to Apple about this. * https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/398249/5132 https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/398249/5132
  - sardon 7y ago
    The Darwin kernel in OSX has more than userland code taken from FreeBSD. "The kernel of Darwin is XNU, a hybrid kernel which uses OSFMK (Open Software Foundation Mach Kernel) from the OSF, various elements of FreeBSD (including the process model, network stack, and virtual file system)" [0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darwin_%28operating_system%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darwin_%28operating_system%29
_paulc 7y ago
To be honest it’s probably not worth running FreeBSD on a laptop/desktop - it’s really a server operating system. If you are looking for a well engineered, stable, ‘traditional’ UNIX system sitting in a rack and happy with a terminal interface it’s an amazing OS. Lots of people however seem to be trying out on laptops/desktops and being disappointed which isn't a huge surprise. (FreeBSD user since 2.0.5 - 1995)
atomize 7y ago
FreeBSD is the reference for OS X, but they used different kernels. Many of the BSD flavored behaviors are/were retained, however.
- sigjuice 7y ago
  What would be examples of the retained BSD flavored behaviors?
  - spijdar 7y ago
    A couple examples off the top of my head: Userland tools tend to be the BSD ones with BSD style arguments. e.g. BSD du vs GNU du, GNU requires size suffixes in uppercase, BSD takes lowercase. MacOS tends to include the more useful GNU tools though, like grep. Find is still BSD, and the missing GNU extensions occasionally causes grief. SIGINFO is preserved. On BSD, pressing Ctrl+t in the terminal will print process status. Some processes add extra info, but it always gives at least CPU load and running time. This is a distinctly BSD feature.

cinnamonheart 7y ago

As a long time fan of Gentoo, I felt very at home on FreeBSD, and quite liked how everything in it worked. I remember my frustration was more around software and hardware issues. In the end, it wasn't Linux; I felt left in the cold if I ever wanted to use something that wasn't made for FreeBSD. FreeBSD itself was a pleasure and I wish I could use it more. I've not found a linux distribution I've found quite as nice.

roboman 7y ago

I think OpenBSD is still more secure than FreeBSD

type0 7y ago
It is, and also less useful
- uncle_j 7y ago
  Untrue. It works better than most people give it credit for. I run quite a lot of stuff on OpenBSD and it works for the most part fine. Sure if you are running Netflix or something at mega scale it probably won't be any good, but it works quite well for a lot of hosting scenarios. I can make a pretty decent desktop OS as well.
  - yjftsjthsd-h 7y ago
    I think it's strictly true that OpenBSD doesn't do as much as FreeBSD. You may well argue that it's sufficient, but the claim isn't untrue.
    - uncle_j 7y ago
      It can do the same stuff in a lot of cases. It won't scale as well but that is a different discussion. You can always find things another OS can't do.
    - tedunangst 7y ago
      Unproven that doing less is synonymous with less useful.
- anthk 7y ago
  Eh, I am coding in C and Scheme rn under OpenBSD. Iridium works, html5 video works, so do the videos under MPV. I've heard succesful stories from OpenBSD users with Vulkan under MESA. Even amdgpu works, but the -current release is better for that. PPSSPP and some C# gaming works; so does N64, NES, SNES, PSX and even maybe DC emulation. A PS2 emulation is WIP, and it's not PCSX2. Then there is Dolphin, Nethack, ScummVM, lots of source ports... You have LibreOffice if you want, among a lot of known ports https://openports.pl https://openports.pl such as Python3, R, Node, and so on. No Netflix, but maybe with fake mobile UA's under Chromium you can override the DRM. CWM+XClock+Xlock as my "DE". I don't need more.

atomize 7y ago

Nice to see some love for FreeBSD. My intro to +nix in the mid 90s started with FreeBSD as well. Back then, I used to tag along with my dad in the summer to work occasionally (two working parents, and dad ran/runs a small telecom business). In the supply closet I saw a shelf with boxes lined up that all had a cool-ass little devil on them. Being interested in computers from my fathers influence, I asked him what the 'Devil Software' was in the storage closet, and he explained that it was an operating system like Windows sort-of (which at the time I was already well in to understanding how to re-install =), but that it ran on Voicemail Servers - stuff with specific needs - because it was very 'flexible in configuration', as he put it. He then gave me a voicemail box and the manual, and said he would give me $20 if I could get the 'Devil Software' installed on the machine from a blank HDD. This. was. huge. $20 to a 13 yr old was serious dough. Eventually I was successful (to his surprise? or dismay? haha since he was out 20 bucks). He was proud, and that made me proud, and that started the journey that is still ongoing to this day. Will note, father exploited me for cheap labor throughout my teens as my interest/experience with BSD, and eventually GNU/Linux increased =). Although I am a GNU person these days, FreeBSD is always close to my heart, and helped me understand the +nix ecosystem from an early age.

ahmedalsudani 7y ago
That is a great story, and you have a cool dad!
ChuckNorris89 7y ago
Just out of curiosity, how did your dad exploit you for cheap labor with BSD? I mean I also did a lot of chores around the house and was the responsible IT repair guy of the house but I thought that's a pretty good deal for being housed, fed and clothed for 20 years.
- montenegrohugo 7y ago
  I think it was meant more in a tongue in cheek manner. Obviously his dad gave him IT related tasks over the years, but I think both enjoyed it and I imagine it oftentimes was a learning experience for both of them. I think generally kids can benefit and grow a lot from being treated and talked to like responsible adults sometimes, and not as if they were useless small people that have to be constantly supervised.

whalesalad 7y ago

I would probably daily drive FreeBSD or OpenBSD if the desktop situation was better. I don't know how people survive open-source desktop environments. I've spent the last couple of weeks trying to build a reasonable HiDPI desktop environment on a variety of open source platforms and nothing has the level of fit and finish I am looking for. So far I have been happiest with Elementary OS and their treatments to Gnome... but it preturbs me that getting a new rig setup is so fickle and unrepeatable. You can spend hours tweaking shit and experimenting with no reasonable way to save your changes to be applied later to a clean install or even a different platform. I wish I could check my entire configuration into git. Would love if the hackers here would share their FreeBSD (or any Nix) desktop environment configuration (including window manager etc...)

Lammy 7y ago
KDE has the best HiDPI support I've seen, but I don't really care for KDE itself and as soon as I step outside the QT ecosystem all bets are off.
jethro_tell 7y ago
With gnome, you can export the gconf database and check it into git if that's your thing.
big_chungus 7y ago
I've got a arch i3 config I like. I've tuned a little over the years, but it's remained mostly the same. I keep the dotfiles in the same repo I keep useful shell scripts I've built, other program config files, etc. Many people, me included, gravitate towards the more "minimalist" linux configs for that reason. If I get time to make sure I haven't accidentally left a password in an old script, I'll make a public repo and link it.
ingenieroariel 7y ago
I had great looking results with sway + alacritty + swaybar + firefox-wayland on Nixos 20.03-pre.
- 7y ago

iagovar 7y ago

I always struggled with linux, because there's so many of everything. It's too much choice. I don't really have many sysadmin skills and discovering FreeBSD has been a blessing for me. When I have a problem the documentation is... IDK, consistent? It's like I can follow it, and it's useful, same with forums and the helpful community. I'm so thankful, honestly. I finally can have my VPSs without feeling like I'm dumb or I need to devote so much time and effort to sysadmin skills that I don't have nor I enjoy. I still use Xubuntu in my laptop and Windows in my desktop, because of the lack of drivers and because they work out of the box (well, almost with Xubuntu), but still, for some reason I really feel confortable with FreeBSD, and this is coming from someone who just wants to spin DBs, sites, and cron scripts, and I don't have enough knowledge to appreciate jails and so many other things that other people likes about FreeBSD. So guys, thank you.

stiray 7y ago
I so much agree. I am using FreeBSD on home server (and few others) trying to push it to the limits. I just love it. It seems like order in all the chaos of operating systems (from windows kernel32 getting com objects to all the chaos in linux, from systemd to docker,...). Please if you are trying to use freebsd TRY jails (to shorten tldr, use iocage). They are just great :) And dont go desktop. Just isnt worth it. Not enough people troubling with gfx support. Keep it as it is. Server.
- inopinatus 7y ago
  There is a variant of FreeBSD with terrific graphics support, and although limited to just one hardware vendor, there’s no doubting its popularity: it’s in every PlayStation 4. There’s FreeBSD in almost every data centre. But it’s at a level most application developers just never see. Many infrastructure elements - from storage heads, to core routers, to enterprise application and security appliances - have chosen FreeBSD as the high quality, reliable, consistent, and liberally licensed base for their control plane software. The point being, this is where FreeBSD has the greatest influence and adoption: as a platform, not the product, and not at all obvious even to those that thereby rely upon it. That being said, yes it works great as the instance OS in EC2 and as a die-hard acolyte since 2.1-RELEASE you’ll pry my production application jails from my cold dead hands

bureaucrat 7y ago

If I want lot of work and an amazing operating system, I'd' ve built an operating system myself. Since I'm a person with a job, run serious things and has a deadline, I use linux.

deepspace 7y ago

My experience with FreeBSD started more than 20 years ago when I built my first home file server, managing a whopping 200G of storage (huge for the time). Since then I built several more generations of file server, all running FreeBSD and all absolutely rock solid. They all typically had a 3-5 year service life, with uptimes of 1-2 years at a time. Each of them were only replaced for capacity reasons, with the previous generation server typically serving as a backup target for the next one. Around 2002, broadcast and cable TV was still a thing, and rudimentary PVRs were becoming available but were pricey with few features. So I decided to build my own. I started with Linux, thinking that it would provide better hardware compatibility, but stability issues soon drove me back to FreeBSD, and I managed to create a very complete FreeBSD based PVR solution, complete with remote control, automatic program scheduling, multiple simultaneous recording and viewing streams, auto DVD ripping and very intuitive remote (web) and onscreen user interfaces. That thing ran rock solid for 10 years, until replaced by Netflix. I guess the point I am trying to make is that I fully agree with the author. FreeBSD is in a different league than many other operating systems in terms of capability and stability, while being surprisingly compatible with a lot of hardware.

boznz 7y ago
Me too, built BSD/MySQL server from scratch following the on-line documentation and everything just worked. Server is still running after 5 years with two outages for power problems. I think I chose FreeBSD at the time for the ZFS file system which was its big selling point over linux.
lizknope 7y ago
I bought my first Tivo in 1999. It ran Linux and a Tivo hacking community quickly appeared. Added a second hard drive (just put it in your Linux PC first and run a command to format it) Bought an ethernet adapter and ran a command to install the driver. It had an FTP server so I could just type "get Friends-10-21-1999.mpg" and have the unencrypted file on my computer. It also had a web server to schedule recordings or act as a remote control. Never had an issue with it.

bauerd 7y ago

If only one of the BSDs had a container runtime, it's the only real showstopper for me

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
dijit 7y ago
Docker was working[0]. But it depends what you want from containers I guess. Layers? Most of the container use-cases that aren’t layers work fine under jails. But it’s a more primitive tool, definitely not as user friendly. [0]: https://wiki.freebsd.org/Docker https://wiki.freebsd.org/Docker
- bauerd 7y ago
  Need it to integrate with tooling I use, orchestrators, etc.
- mr__y 7y ago
  >Most of the container use-cases that aren’t layers work fine under jails I'm pretty sure that with unionfs you could get layer-ish equivalent for most use cases. Not going to question that it wouldn't be user friendly though
- andoriyu 7y ago
  Wrong. There were 2 attempts at bringing docker to freebsd: - Docker tooling on top of jails (what you linked) - kernel shims in linux-compat (better) Neither one of them was delivering usable experience. UnionFS is broken and not recommended to use. ZFS snapshots aren't layers. FreeBSD has loosely coupled tools to make something like docker, but nothing remotely close to full docker is available atm.
waz0wski 7y ago
freebsd has 'containers' called jails, first released in ~2000, pre-empting solaris zones by four years, openvz by 5 years, lxc by 8 years, and docker by 10+ years. jails were/are common in the webhosting and gaming industries, and nowdays they can be managed with infrastructure-as-code tools like ansible or puppet. when backed by zfs, they can be made to behave very similarly to docker containers. with the demise of docker the company and the fractured ecosystem of competing container runtimes, specifications, kernel compatibility issues, and management tools, jails are worth testing out. iocage is one way to start managing them.

linguae 7y ago

I've been using FreeBSD as my Unix of choice for desktop PCs, Unix development inside VMs, and for servers since 2004 when a community college CS instructor told me about it and gave me an install disc. I love the documentation that ships with FreeBSD, including the high-quality man pages, the excellent handbook that explains how to perform many administrative tasks, and the collection of historical Unix documents that come from Bell Labs. I am also a fan of the book "The Design and Implementation of the FreeBSD Operating System." I have the second edition of this book and it's one of the most well-written operating systems textbooks available. I also like the quality of the source code. With that being said, on laptops Linux and macOS are my Unix-based operating systems of choice because of increased hardware support, although on older laptops I do have success with FreeBSD. But if I need a Unix-based operating system for a desktop, a server, or a VM, my first choice is FreeBSD unless the software I need specifically requires Linux.

3xblah 7y ago

I have been trying Ubuntu for about a year now, taking a break from BSD. This is the longest I have ever used Linux continuously for personal use. I always work entirely in RAM. Everything is mounted tmpfs. Occasionally I accidentally exceed the amount of RAM I have available. Some file grows too large. One of the things I always liked about BSD was how well it handled this situation.^1 It had no lasting effect on the operation of the OS. The only things affected were running applications that needed write space. Thus all I had to worry about were the running daemons I use that are continuously writing to logs. The OS would otherwise continue to function. Whereas when I run out of space in a tmpfs-mounted directory in Ubuntu, I get filesystem errors. I cannot simply remove the excessively large file, and expect to continue to work indefinitely. I get I/O errors. I am eventually forced to reboot. Obviously I am not well-versed on Linux but as far as I can tell so far, this is a known problem. 1. This was NetBSD but I assume that FreeBSD and OpenBSD would be no different.

alcover 7y ago
Thank you for mentioning this. As someone interested also in RAM-only, that is a strong additional point for BSD.
aruggirello 7y ago
Yes, this is a known problem for Linux desktop, and the upcoming EarlyOOM monitor is designed precisely to detect such OOM situations and handle them better, avoiding system unresponsiveness etc. But maybe it's not yet ready for prime time. Fedora was about to add EarlyOOM in the 32 release, but they'll probably defer this until at least 33: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Fedora-FESCo-Defers-EarlyOOM https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Fedora-F...
LargoLasskhyfv 7y ago
Hm yeah, i recall NetBSD to be 'unbreakable' in that, and some other ways from personal experiences in the past.* Anyways, there are Linux distros who specialize in this use case, and have sane and proven defaults tuned for that. Sometimes they seem a little bit 'ghettoish', but one can remove anything which is unnecessary, add needed stuff, even remaster in RAM and then rewrite that to another boot media. Or being lazy and just using an overlay to the stock image. [1] https://antixlinux.com/ https://antixlinux.com/ for instance works very well. [2] http://grml.org/ http://grml.org/ is another Debian based one, altough a little bit lagging behind nowadays. But many others also. [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Linux_distributions_that_run_from_RAM https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Linux_distributions_th... Ubuntu is not a good starting point for that use case. * Like carefully unplugging the SCSI controller from the running system, while it had no other available mass storage, watching the console being flooded with messages akin to 'Arrgh! I'm dying! Where is my...?', carefully reinserting the controller into the PCI-slot without causing shorts, console turning back to normal. And switching back to the running X as if nothing had happened. (And no file system damage in spite of having soft updates on UFS active, and running tasks with many open files) Amazing.

city41 7y ago

Anyone here using FreeBSD for JavaScript/Node/PHP dev? Curious if there are any common tools that don't work or any unexpected gotchas. I currently am using Ubuntu, but would be curious to give FreeBSD a try. I used to run it about a decade ago and always liked it.

nuccy 7y ago
VS Code can be installed via ports https://www.freshports.org/editors/vscode/ https://www.freshports.org/editors/vscode/

gregf 7y ago

I been daily driving FreeBSD for the last 3 or 4 years. I was frustrated by a lot of things in Linux at the time, no this wasn't just because of systemd. I don't actually mind systemd on my desktop. Everything was very easy much like Debian maybe to get going. There's over 10,000 ports most are in package form at any time. Sometimes the build process fails and a package goes away for a short time, but you can always install it via ports. My biggest gripe is and always will be the fact I can't use my spotify account on my FreeBSD desktop. I don't see this ever changing though. What I have done is gone back to relying on my local music collection a bit more again. I also bluetooth stream spotify from my phone to my receiver, but I'm lazy, hate phones, and don't generally like to do this. It also has easiest operating system upgrade path out there that I have experienced. Just freebsd-update, reboot, done. Jails are great, but they need work to be a bit more modern at this point. Docker has kinda showed some type of image repository is a nice feature. I'm not sure we'll see this right away, but BastilleBSD is working on some nice jails based solutions. Based off of FreeBSD, i'm pretty excited to possibly use this in the future.

throw0101a 7y ago
> There's over 10,000 ports ... For the record it is currently over 38,000: * https://www.freshports.org https://www.freshports.org
w4n9r3ntru3 7y ago
Mac is based on FreeBSD I think, and so far in the two years I use one I'm loving it.

gautamcgoel 7y ago

I installed FreeBSD on my machine about a year ago, and went so far as to buy a copy of Absolute FreeBSD (3rd ed) by Michael Lucas. Much as I admire the FreeBSD ethos, I always end up coming back to Fedora for a very simple reason: the desktop experience on the BSD's has always been painful for me. First, FreeBSD didn't have the driver for my iGPU (Coffeelake), though Linux had support at least six months prior. FreeBSD devs to their credit were very helpful and welcoming when I tried troubleshooting my graphics situation, even writing a small patch for me. Then, when I installed the patched version of the driver and got video output, I had to be careful to maintain the patch. One time I accidentally upgraded all packages, overwriting the patched file and undoing the video support. Eventually I got fed up and just installed Fedora, which always works perfectly, runs like butter, and looks great. I get that the FreeBSD project is much smaller than GNU/Linux, and hardware vendors like Intel and Nvidia are not nearly as supportive in terms of contributing code/checking compatibility. I want to run FreeBSD, I really do. But at the end of the day I just don't have enough hours in the week to be troubleshooting my desktop, I'd rather spend those hours being productive (or being unproductive in a manner of my choosing). It's a great project - with a bit more love for newbies and the desktop experience I think FreeBSD could really shine. One option I think FreeBSD should consider is to offer separate server and workstation editions of each release, like Fedora does. This would help bring resources/attention to the desktop situation and provide an on-ramp for new users who want to try out FreeBSD without diving headfirst into config files and device drivers.

santoshalper 7y ago
I don't think the FreeBSD team has the resources to maintain multiple editions for personal and server use, nor do I think it really fits their ethos. Unless you are trying to immerse yourself in it, I would avoid FreeBSD on your personal computer and use it for what it is, one of the best designed server operating systems in the world.
- gautamcgoel 7y ago
  I see your point, but I'd like to make an observation: most people start of running OSS on their laptops/desktops, and only then move to server/cloud setups, usually sticking to the platform they already knew. For example, I started off installing Linux Mint on my desktop machine and college, way before I ever SSHed into a server setup. By giving up on the desktop, the BSDs are making it unlikely that the next generation of devs will ever both exploring their server offerings.

pfortran 7y ago

I remember that book fondly - I'd dabbled with BSD/OS at one company, then at the next gig set up their production servers on a couple of FreeBSD boxes running Apache. The book was a constant companion at my desk. For running servers, FreeBSD was hard to beat back then!

insulanian 7y ago

Honestly I don't think FreeBSD should focus on desktop story at all. Resources, as limited as they are, should be spent on making FreeBSD an obvious and compelling choice for the servers. Although FreeBSD looks cleaner and more consistent than Linux, it's not really clear why should one use it over Linux. I hope the team will define strategic goals and try to develop some competitive advantage, even if it means focusing only on certain niches in the beginning. E.g. encouraging development of the OS modules in a safe language like Rust would probably lead to more stable system less vulnerable to exploits, and make it a more attractive choice for mission-critical deployments.

muxator 7y ago
At least for me, being able to use Linux as daily driver on my desktop was instrumental at making me more proficient. At that point using it in the server became natural. Nothing beats the exercise of being able to use the same environment for everyday computing and for running "serious" services. I guess a good desktop experience has the same utility to the freebsd ecosystem.
- dddddaviddddd 7y ago
  I've had the same experience. Used FreeBSD as a server OS long enough to switch to it as my main desktop OS. In return I've learned a lot more that has made server administration better.
- jayd16 7y ago
  I'm not sure I'd apply this to Windows, personally.
  - pmontra 7y ago
    Companies started to use Windows NT servers in the 90s maybe because they cost less than UNIX servers from HP, IBM, Sun etc but also because they had a lot of technical staff which only knew Windows.
wolco 7y ago

jedberg 7y ago

FreeBSD was the first Unix I ever worked on professionally. I agree, it's amazing, and I love admining it. The only reason reddit wasn't on BSD was because of lack of package support and then when we moved to AWS, lack of BSD support in AWS. Although that's since been fixed, thanks in large part to CPercival, creator of TarSnap, yay! The way it is set up just makes so much more sense to me, and tweaking the kernel is just so much easier. Also the focus on stability over supporting the latest technologies is a big plus for business servers.

girvo 7y ago

So, I adore the idea of FreeBSD. Anyone had much luck running it as a mostly exclusive VM on top of a more standard desktop OS as the hypervisor? Hyper-V, Xhyve, etc.

loeg 7y ago
It should run fine as a guest in any hypervisor.
toast0 7y ago
The FreeBSD release process includes producing virtual machine images if you want to get started they're linked from the download page: https://www.freebsd.org/where.html https://www.freebsd.org/where.html

AndrewUnmuted 7y ago

To me, FreeBSD represents the OS that gave me a realistic path I could travel to achieve my computing dreams. I knew that to really achieve my ambitions, I'd need a way to store 50-100TB of data with high resilience and well-managed replication. Until I discovered FreeBSD and ZFS, I simply considered that kind of thing outside the realm of affordability and practicality. But please know, fellow readers - it is affordable and it is practical. FreeBSD makes it so.

dkarras 7y ago
What were your ambitions that required such resilient storage if I may ask? Not being snarky or anything, genuinely curious.

blunte 7y ago

I like what works. On servers, Linux seems to work. Maybe it's not as good as bsd in some cases, but I don't know those cases; and Linux has thus far worked. Where bsd has worked for me is on macOS. I think that's a bit less about bsd and more about desktop/UI decisions dating back to the Steve Jobs days (idiosyncrasies aside). But I have doubts about how much the underlying OS had to do with the experience at the UI level. Whether a bsd or linux, the desktop story is terrible compared to macOS. Even Windows has some advantage if certain app dependencies are considered. As a developer (who must still also perform some business tasks), macOS is the best option. Linux desktops are almost as good, with some big exceptions. BSD desktops might perhaps be on par with Linux, but they will fail on some of the development requirements. I know competition is good for innovation, but at some point I would like to see the highly fragmented OSS desktop efforts consolidate. At this point, long after Jobs's death, macOS has fallen greatly in terms of quality and usability; so surpassing it isn't _that_ hard. Windows still doesn't, but I doubt it ever will. In fact, Windows has increased significantly as a development platform while still remaining horrible from a desktop user perspective. macOS has slipped. Linux has gained only slightly. BSD, who knows... but it cannot have improved more than Linux. Whether Linux or BSD, there's plenty of achievable gains to make if motivated OSS folks would consolidate more.

haolez 7y ago
Linux works. Docker works. Node.js works. VSCode works. Until your competitor leverages outlier technologies to outcompete you. That's basically what Paul Graham did in the nineties :)
lmm 7y ago
> Linux has gained only slightly. BSD, who knows... but it cannot have improved more than Linux. Why is that so impossible? Konqueror had a tiny fraction of the contributors that Mozilla had, but since it was better designed it was still able to get ahead, and now almost everyone is using a Konqueror-derived rendering engine. If they had "consolidated" with Mozilla we would have missed out on that. Right now, FreeBSD does a lot of things better than Linux. ZFS is better than anything Linux can offer. Jails are still ahead of Linux containers. OSSv4 is still nicer than ALSA. FreeBSD ifconfig is still nicer than whatever you have to use to configure your wifi this week. I'm not going to switch to a worse OS, and I'm not sure why you'd expect anyone else to.

miguelmota 7y ago

FreeBSD is awesome on the server and the ports package manager is amazing but wouldn't recommend it on desktop if you need driver software for new hardware since it won't be readily available.

lifeisstillgood 7y ago

A long time ago I toyed with the idea of a kickstarter campaign that would design and build a range of freebsd laptops - they would just work. fixed components and still having all the nice features like a /etc/resolv.conf you can edit

indigodaddy 7y ago

I love the simple and minimal site design of this website. Kudos!

loeg 7y ago

This article makes several misstatements or factual errors, unfortunately. > What I failed to realize back then was that FreeBSD was (and it still is) designed as a complete multi-purpose operating system meant to be setup and tuned according to specific use cases. IMO, if it needs to be manually tuned, that's a bug, not a feature. (And I'm speaking as a FreeBSD developer on that.) > FreeBSD sets the kernel and the base system apart from third party packages. This is unique to FreeBSD and none of the other BSDs do that. Um, nope, this is how all of the BSDs do it. > FreeBSD is installed only with the features you enable and nothing is running that you don't know about. sendmail, cron, and ntpd run out of the box, to name a few. > The FreeBSD code is meticulously maintained and very well documented. Not really (especially in random drivers) and usually not (in the code, anyway). We have pretty decent manual pages. > The FreeBSD rc system that reads this file understands dependencies between services and it can automatically launch them in parallel, or wait until one is finished before starting the things that it needs. The parallelism part is not true. > I believe it is important to understand that FreeBSD is not like a GNU/Linux distribution. Not really true? In a lot of ways FreeBSD is like a GNU/Linux distribution; it just happens to bundle the equivalent of coreutils, binutils, gcc, etc with the kernel. > FreeBSD is an operating system made by developers who are also system administrators. Definitely not true (or at least, in no respect different than the developers of the broader Linux ecosystem). > A Linux distribution is a collection of tools written by different groups of people, often with conflicting interests and priorities. This is true! Especially for core bits of the system, like glibc and the kernel. > A Linux distribution needs ..., additional third party software, the X Window System, a window manager, and a desktop environment, and it then needs to combine these different components into the resulting distribution. This is of course no different than FreeBSD's ports system; we face the same integration challenges as Linux distributions. > there are no conflicting interests in the [FreeBSD] project Ha. ha. ha.

jpeeler 7y ago
As a FreeBSD developer, perhaps you know what tunables are being talked about for specific use cases? Unrelated, I find it surprising that any major operating system these days need rebooting because "every third day or so otherwise the performance degraded a lot". Or maybe they just didn't increase the sysctl var kern.full_performance_days high enough ;)

JeremyMorgan 7y ago

My experience with FreeBSD mirrors the author's quite a bit. I bought that same book, installed it on a system, struggled like hell and went through it cover to cover. It was my "daily driver" for probably 5-6 years after that. The experience got me a job at an ISP running FreeBSD and later I started a web hosting business with FreeBSD backing. I love it and love how easy and simple it is, but I too had to stray into Linux because that's where the crowd went. Hardware and software availability are key factors. I also think they should drop the focus on Desktop and go towards servers. I've never administered servers that were as painless as those old BSD boxes. There is so much value in things that "just work" and documentation that's accurate. Yes there's a learning curve but it pays off exponentially. Linux is being plagued by too many choices and too much change. RTFM doesn't do you a lot of good when it's out of date. It's only my decades of experience that help me figure things out when problems arise, I'd hate to be a beginner with Linux now. While Linux on the server is pretty tame the desktop world is out of control. I would like to see the FreeBSD folks just focus on making it the server/container host of choice.

myrandomcomment 7y ago

NetFlix CDN HW that they drop at the local ISP level is a FreeBSD box that they have tuned to be able to fill 100G NICs no issue. There you go.

known 7y ago

Porting FreeBSD to GPL can promote its user base;

clarry 7y ago
It can also drive away all its users.
pmlnr 7y ago
Hell no. I used to be all-in for GPL, but GPL is an ideology. Just like with philosophies/ideologies, one exclusively is never true enough for reality. There's absolutely nothing wrong with the BSD licensing: it allows multiple views on the world to co-exist, unlike GPL.

pyuser583 7y ago

Can you install the latest version of Java on it?

olavgg 7y ago
Yes, at the time for this writing OpenJDK 13.02 and 11.0.6 is available in ports

abinaya_b 7y ago

Any ides if FreeBSD can be installed on a Macbook Pro 15inch 2015 edition?

jacobush 7y ago

https://www.dragonflybsd.org/ https://www.dragonflybsd.org/ gotta mention it too, that it just exists is both surprising and great.

idclip 7y ago

Yes, yes it is.

newnewpdro 7y ago

I've been using Linux since the days of hand crafting Modeline entries for an unstable XFree86 running as root, and installed FreeBSD a number of times over the years but never really enjoyed the userspace as much as GNU. I simply preferred the ergonomics of GNU, it's what was more familiar since I was introduced to UNIX via GNU/Linux in my teens. Having said that however, I absolutely loved the FreeBSD books by Marshall Kirk McKusick. The red hardcover Design and Implementation of FreeBSD book was my go-to bathroom reading for well over a year. I also was lucky enough to attend viewings of VHS recordings from his operating systems class featuring FreeBSD. Those tapes were something like $1k/tape if memory serves, a friend's employer bought the entire set and would host group viewings on weekends. Such great memories from those times, McKusick was humorous and never missed an opportunity to take jabs at emacs while explaining how paging and swap worked, poor little vi being paged out because someone started emacs, etc. There's a lot to love about FreeBSD, I hope it continues to exist and can attract enough new talent to thrive in the future.

naikrovek 7y ago

One of the neat things about working at Yahoo! when I did (which was when it still had the "!" as part of the branding) was knowing that we had a small number of FreeBSD core maintainers on the payroll, and that those folks could get hardware if they needed it for the FreeBSD project. Not to provide infrastructure to the project, but to give those core maintainers hardware to use and to add support for. We just provided them with the things they needed, almost no questions asked. Those people didn't answer to anyone, they were just paid to work on the OS. Yahoo! made heavy use of FreeBSD at the time (almost 20 years ago, now) so it was decided that since we were using this free software so extensively that it would be good to give back to that community. I wish this notion that giving a small amount of resources to open source projects that have saved your company millions of dollars per year was more common than it is. I don't know of any large company that does what Yahoo! did back then. I work for a large company now, and as far as anyone I've asked can tell, we give exactly nothing to any of the hundreds or possibly thousands of open source projects we use daily, and it does not put a good feeling in my stomach.

drewg123 7y ago
At Netflix, in my larger work group, we have at least 7 FreeBSD committers, and one core team member (and I'm sure I'm forgetting some folks and I'm sorry!). We have employed (on specific contracts) many other committers and core team members. Unlike Yahoo, we are accountable to Netflix's business goals of increasing our streaming customer's Quality of Experience while still maintaining or reducing the cost to deliver content. Frequently those goals align nicely with FreeBSD's goals, and we have contributed a great deal (async sendfile, kTLS, unmapped mbufs, epoch stabilization, NUMA work, RACK TCP, BBR TCP, TCP pacing, and tons of stuff I'm forgetting).
- naikrovek 7y ago
  That's excellent, and I'm very happy to learn this. Thank you.
- porker 7y ago
  > At Netflix, in my larger work group, we have at least 7 FreeBSD committers Oh that's good to hear. Reading Brendan Gregg's blog [1] I got the impression that Netflix had switched to Linux. 1. http://www.brendangregg.com/ http://www.brendangregg.com/

bluedino 7y ago

What a silly article. He mentions he ran a home FTP server on FreeBSD, switches it out for a Linux ftp server, because it needed a reboot every third day. Meanwhile Walnut Creek cd-rom was setting bandwidth and uptime records with a P6-200 running FreeBSD as their ftp server