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- Hardware support out of the box I can be given a work laptop, slap some Debian or derivative along with XFCE, and I know that most hardware will work out of
by znpy 6y ago
- Hardware support out of the box
I can be given a work laptop, slap some Debian or derivative along with XFCE, and I know that most hardware will work out of the box without much fuss (including but not limited to: webcams, video cards, wireless/bluetooth, thunderbolt docking station).
- Containers
They're just very good. FreeBSD looks like it has most of the pieces to get containers going but it's not their priority to get that going. The people at Joyend did that, reimplementing the docker server APIs to manage underlying zones. I wonder why don't FreeBSD do something similar.
- Reference documentation
I like to use RHEL and derivatives (CentOS) when I can, and the reference documentation its so, so, so good, ample and complete. The FreeBSD reference guide is good, but not as thorough and/or up to date as the RHEL documentation.
- systemd & NetworkManager
They're rock solid, battle tested and well-thought. systemd is much more than init and does a lot of system management, stuff that previously was simply not being done by anything else. BSDs lack that completely -- see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_AIw9bGogo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_AIw9bGogo
- eb0la 6y agoFunny, I choose OpenBSD (back in '94) instead of Linux as a desktop (text-only) because it had very good documentation available for kernel and userland stuff. I am typing this from Ubuntu because I need some basic Wine emulation, Docker, and K8s. Not for work, just for tinkering. I still have an OpenBSD vm around, but I don't use it much :-(
- runjake 6y agoFreeBSD arguably did containers before Linux — except they’re called Jails in the BSD world. But it looks like FreeBSD is joining the Linux container party with their recent release which implements initial support for native Linux containers.
- pmiller2 6y agoDon’t forget the Arch wiki for documentation! Sure, only a minority of users run Arch, and probably a minority of those users are running it in production. But, it has some amazing documentation, especially when it comes to weird combinations of things people don’t usually see.