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I have seen FreeBSD and other non-mainstream OS (as in not: windows, macos, linux variants) keep going but I have never seen a "reason" to use those except for

by Qahlel 6y ago

I have seen FreeBSD and other non-mainstream OS (as in not: windows, macos, linux variants) keep going but I have never seen a "reason" to use those except for the bragging rights. Can the developpers of these OS please enlighten me why I or anyone should use them?

Koshkin 6y ago
[Not an OS developer] In my (admittedly limited) experience, a BSD somehow works better when you need an "appliance" that you can turn on and forget about.
jxy 6y ago
Stability. I don't have to chase the "next shinny thingamajig". For example, I have a code that uses OSS that worked 20 years ago on FreeBSD, and it still works now.
tlhunter 6y ago
If you hop in one of the BSD subreddits you'll find that every other post is someone asking your same question. You might find some enlightenment there.
- Koshkin 6y ago
  Unfortunately, most of the answers that I have seen come down to saying one and the same thing, namely, that a BSD is better because its userland is "part of the OS." Though could be true, this is not very enlightening.
  - ragnese 6y ago
    I agree. That's not a very compelling argument at all, IMO. I've read some other stuff, too, though, such as praise for the ports system and FreeBSD's "jails" feature. But I imagine it's a little like Linux distros. If you don't already use Linux, it's kind of hard to understand why anyone cares about the minor differences between distros.
  - 0xFFFE 6y ago
    Perhaps your question is too generic? It all boils down to "right tool for the job". If you need support for latest hardware (as a Desktop OS) you will have better luck with Linux than the BSDs. On the other hand if you want a free, rock solid UNIX OS to run a network/file server, look no further. Also, ZFS & Jails (before Docker was cool).
  - blacktriangle 6y ago
    This is a struggle for any system where the advantages really are in the details, but that's probably the best reason to choose BSD over linux. At some point you just have to commit enough effort to try it out and experience the difference, or just be happy with Linux. After all if you're happy with Linux, then BSD's userland is part of the OS isn't a fix for you. But if working with Linux leaves you with this weird itching sensation in your brain that there should be a better way, give BSD a shot.
  - JdeBP 6y ago
    Perhaps your path to enlightenment is different. Try reading these manual pages and this handbook: * https://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=ps https://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=ps ps has one set of options and has used getopt() since April 1990. * https://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=inittodr&sektion=9 https://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=inittodr&sektion=9 Documenting the operating system encompasses documenting the kernel as well. * https://docs.freebsd.org/en/books/handbook/ https://docs.freebsd.org/en/books/handbook/ "Part of the o/s" is not the best description. The idea is that there is a clear demarcation between all of the programs that come as part of the operating system, and all of the programs that are applications softwares that are installed on top of the operating system.
brobdingnagians 6y ago
I use OpenBSD for most of my servers, with FreeBSD mixed in too. It is very simple to administer, easy to upgrade (sysupgrade every six months, syspatch otherwise), reliable, and fits how I like to administer it. Pf on OpenBSD has pf auth which allows unblocking ports for users who have sshed in, which is nice when you are on a dynamic IP. It is generally just a nice system, minimalist, and straight forward. I don't want a million moving parts, just a UNIX platform to build on.
- mjthompson 6y ago
  I've recently switched my home network jump box to OpenBSD. Still learning the basics. I didn't even know about authpf. I'm reading the docs now and it looks great. Thanks for sharing that.
- aj3 6y ago
  > sysupgrade every six months, syspatch otherwise But that won't keep your system up to date with security patches, because OpenBSD does not rebuild binary packages.
  - nix23 6y ago
    Sure they do, and he talked just about the system, remember packets and the system are two different thing in the bsd-world.
    - aj3 6y ago
      I doubt anyone manages to get with just the OpenBSD system on their desktop. Browsers in particular are a gaping security hole if not updated regularly.
      - nix23 6y ago
        https://stable.mtier.org/ https://stable.mtier.org/
        6y ago
hpoe 6y ago
I'll say that the reason I have been considering switching is more of an ideological, not bragging rights, but after years of seeing free software be attacked and assaulted by supposedly "friendly" companies, who are constantly trying to take away my power to control my machine it pushes me to want to take some sort of stand. It may not be much but least I am doing something. The only other big thing holding me back was the tooling but now that I've switched most of my workflow to Emacs, the option of choosing FreeBSD is becoming more and more appealing. EDIT: Just be clear, I have been using Ubuntu as my daily driver since 2012; however I don't love all the decisions Canonical has made, I don't like how the entire ecosystem has grown to a level of complexity that makes it hard to understand what the hell is happening under the hood, and I am beyond peeved about the havoc systemd-resolver has wrought on my system. EDIT 2: If anyone has any other suggestions for a better more free distro that I can use I'd love the advice, the thing keeping me form Hurd is worrying that it won't have full driver support.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 6y ago
  Why FreeBSD and not Linux?
  - spijdar 6y ago
    Based on the subtext of GP's comment, I'm guessing they're either offended by RedHat, Canonical, and/or Microsoft's various involvements, things like systemd or snapd, and think it taints the whole linux ecosystem.
    - selectodude 6y ago
      I'm curious how they would feel about Bell Labs. Sounds like a proprietary OS that happened to be open source wouldn't go over well either.
  - jtdev 6y ago
    > "years of seeing free software be attacked and assaulted by supposedly "friendly" companies, who are constantly trying to take away my power to control my machine"
scaladev 6y ago
Well, if you're Sony, the BSD license lets you take the code, make hundreds of millions of dollars off it, and give absolutely nothing back. The PlayStation 3, 4, and (I believe) 5 operating systems are built on FreeBSD. I've seen some of the BSD folk present that as a good thing. To each his own, I guess. Concerning desktop/server usage, I like this quote: > “If it ain't broke, don't fix it”: If you already use an open source operating system, and you are happy with it, there is probably no good reason to change. https://docs.freebsd.org/en/articles/explaining-bsd/comparing-bsd-and-linux.html https://docs.freebsd.org/en/articles/explaining-bsd/comparin...
- andrewzah 6y ago
  "I've seen some of the BSD folk present that as a good thing. To each his own, I guess." Yes, this is the whole point of making something Open Source. With FreeBSD companies like Netflix contribute to it, and I'd imagine it's similar for OpenBSD as well.
  - scaladev 6y ago
    I thought the original idea behind free software was to provide more freedom to the users (to thinker with, replace, and learn from said software), and not to pad the bottom line of a multi-billion dollar company by saving them the need to spend millions of man-hours building their own OS from scratch? If GPL didn't force companies to contribute back, would Linux ever be where it is today?
    - andrewzah 6y ago
      "not to pad the bottom line of a multi-billion dollar company" The freedom in F/OSS licensing applies to me just as much as it does to multi-billion dollar corporations, as it turns out. Sorry, but this is a fundamental misunderstanding about the purpose and intent of Open Source software. If you want to arbitrarily restrict people from using your code, that's fine, but at that point it no longer is open source. It's completely within one's rights to maintain their intellectual property and license it out to businesses at a cost, but all of us benefit from F/OSS software, so it comes down to a personal decision. Imagine if things like curl were proprietary... They chose to use BSD licenses, which are fairly permissive. The most common F/OSS license is MIT, which is also very permissive. You could use GPL, AGPL, or LGPL "copy-left" licenses which impose specific requirements, but many orgs won't even look at projects with those licenses. edit: wording
remexre 6y ago
My shortlist would be, PF, jails, and the handbook. PF in particular is much nicer to use than iptables to an incredible degree.
thesuitonym 6y ago
No. The BSD world doesn't work like that. You either use the system because you like it, or you don't. Nobody is going to convince you. The only "reason" to use any BSD over another system is because you want to. That's why you never get a good answer.
waynesonfire 6y ago
I've been a life-long Linux user and took a dive into the deep-end with FreeBSD recently. I find it extremely difficult to articulate the why. For example, you can say things like, the entire stack is maintained by the same entity. Ookkayy... so what? But it matters, and it matters in a nuance ways that's difficult to articulate but you notice it when using the system. Kinda feel bad for not being able to articulate it. It's not like I can point at one thing, e.g. the system call function foobar(2) is better. I either don't have enough FreeBSD experience or I'm not smart enough. Here are some things I've enjoyed: - I didn't realize how terrible iptables was until I used pf on FreeBSD - I didn't want to master yet another networking abstraction that docker introduces for configuring containers. Granted, I have not used VNETs on Jails. - I like to _invest_ in the tech stack that I learn and not have it change the next release. I have more trust in the stability of FreeBSDs choices and roadmap. - I like how light-weight the base OS install is. - I like that FreeBSD doesn't use systemd and I like the simplicity of rc(8). - I like that jail has stronger integration with the OS, like installing packages into a jail. - I like that the book, "design and implementation of freebsd o/s 2nd edition" is available and my hope is that it's still relevant. Something things I don't like: - There are subtle differences in tooling and outputs that surprise me. Nothing I haven't been able to work-around. E.g. I learned that GNU Make has made _vast_ improvements to make that's available on BSDs. Not a big deal but had to install gnu make and invoke it as gmake. - I miss cgroups.
- ianai 6y ago
  You can usually trust the manpage in bsd land. That’s not anywhere near as dependable in Linux land. The system upgrades are much tighter when every component is maintained by one organization. Its historical killer feature (for a while) was zfs, but Linux has that now too. In FreeBSD though zfs is ‘native’.
andrewzah 6y ago
For me, stability. I put OpenBSD on my router and it is really quite nice to administrate it with unbound, dhcpd, and pf. Rc is significantly nicer to work with than systemd. OpenBSD's documentation in general is very high quality, and FreeBSD to a lesser extent. Other distros are not really documented as well, so I have to rely on adapting information from the arch wiki most of the time. For FreeBSD, jails are nice but I prefer docker. (which I have to use anyways for work). Both FreeBSD & OpenBSD have a nicer user experience in general, in my experience. That said, I can't use them as daily drivers due to not having docker and other tools, and gaming. Linux isn't stellar for games but I can at least run a lot of games these days through Proton, etc.
aduitsis 6y ago
Previous job was at a University, 15+ years using FreeBSD for almost all services. We've had Jails, ZFS, etc for a good part of those 15+ years, which was a huge asset. Not that it was completely trouble free, but assuming that with anything else it would have been easier, is simply a delusion. Why we went with FreeBSD in the early 2000s? If memory serves, the ports tree and the package management were completely blowing away anything else at that point. Nowadays it is considered given for any platform, but it was a great advantage to be able to compile packages reliably with your own options back in the day! The fact is, FreeBSD is (and was for a very long time) a trustworthy and very stable platform to run services in. FreeBSD has a very deep philosophy of trying to minimize surprises, which means that most of the time you can focus on your real tasks instead of fighting what has changed in the last version. And Jails are still a major plus, at least from a certain point of view, since they are very easy to manage, copy, install, administer, etc. Even today where Linux has catch up in all aspects, if you have a large set of services on FreeBSD, you'll invariably have to pay a huge upfront cost to switch everything to Linux and re-learn stuff all over again. It's not a question of freedom or open-source (FreeBSD and Linux are totally free and open-source, in their own way each), it's a question of overcoming the mountain to get across to the other green side. I'm sure it's exactly the same for Linux shops that would like to try out FreeBSD. Why should they pay the cost, if they cannot really get any significant advantage or profit out of it? So one basically sticks to what's known and trustworthy from before, since the investment has already been made and most people don't like doing the same stuff all over again.
downut 6y ago
Not a developer, and if I were I might find such a question puzzling. Here's why I use it: +zfs +(poudriere & /usr/ports) +(helpful mail lists) +bhyve !systemd FreeBSD since 1994, Debian since 1998. But underneath it all is a philosophy about how to live your life. If you want Big Corps deciding your computational experience, good for you, even Linux can provide that for you now. I don't. I don't care if I'm irrelevant. I approach cooking, reading, travel, etc the same way. And there are ranges. OpenBSD goes even further. I respect that. My partner lives in Big Corp IT land during the day and she loves the in house experience of our rather extravagent mostly FreeBSD "cloud". Some Debian in there too; got to run some appliances like unifi-video. Writing this on a FreeBSD NVIDIA desktop. Which I'm going to use to do my own taxes myself, with org-mode, and I'm going to file here shortly. For that I need chromium, which works fine. Otherwise I use Firefox, which ports tracks releases quite closely. All this unnecessary effort! Why would anyone do such a thing. Mysteries.
- toomanyducks 6y ago
  > FreeBSD NVIDIA desktop. Any links to guides/docs? My GPU is really the one reason I haven't yet at the very least tried FreeBSD on my desktop.
  - my123 6y ago
    The Nvidia binary driver is provided for FreeBSD too. Guide at http://us.download.nvidia.com/XFree86/FreeBSD-x86_64/460.56/README/index.html http://us.download.nvidia.com/XFree86/FreeBSD-x86_64/460.56/... and driver at https://www.nvidia.com/Download/driverResults.aspx/170806/en-us https://www.nvidia.com/Download/driverResults.aspx/170806/en... for the currently latest one.
  - ashafer 6y ago
    I am biased but FreBSD is very well supported on NVIDIA, so I wouldn't let it hold you back from trying it out. I think you could load NomadBSD on a usb and have NVIDIA drivers set up without any real trouble.
  - lmm 6y ago
torstenvl 6y ago
FreeBSD is a nice, solid piece of Shaker furniture. It's simple, elegant, and done "the right way," meticulously planned out. There are no extraneous seams. GNU/Linux is an amalgamation of 2-3 of the highest quality IKEA sets. It's more up-to-date, with more bells and whistles. If you don't like one component from one set, you can (with enough elbow grease and fuckery) replace it with the analogous component from another set. However, there are bespoke seams everywhere, and the theoretical flexibility is often more trouble than its worth (just try using a mainstream distro but replacing systemd, for example). Also, the documentation is sometimes out of date, causing things to fail in utterly inexplicable ways, forcing you to resort to online forums and mailing lists. FreeBSD has somewhat fewer features, and doesn't work as well with the latest hardware. But the things that are supported largely Just Work(tm). It is, by and large, just less hassle to run FreeBSD and you don't have to tinker as much.
- nix23 6y ago
  >GNU/Linux is an amalgamation of 2-3 of the highest quality IKEA sets. Depends on the distribution :)
  - ghostpepper 6y ago
    What are some of the more cohesive distributions? Elementary comes to mind
    - nix23 6y ago
      I talked about the quality of distributions.
- zokula 6y ago
  Typical BSD user cult-member response.
brightball 6y ago
I switched from Mac to Ubuntu 4 years ago and I'll happily say that I won't go back. Everything does "just work" and I have a development environment that mirrors my production environment because of it. All of the dev tools run smoothly with Linux. As a bonus, I can run it on any laptop I like regardless of whether Apple decides the configuration should exist (RIP 17" MBP). Corporate environments or personal stuff, I haven't found anything that I personally need that I can't do. Legitimately, the only tool that I miss from OSX is OmniGraffle for making diagrams. Draw.io is good, but Omni was a special kind of polished. If they ever decided to release a cross platform version I'd buy. There was an initial learning curve the first month when I committed to it, but I don't spend time having to get into the weeds of the system unless I just want to do something complicated. All that said, this is something that I'm personally happy with and love. I won't recommend it to family and friends. I'll recommend Apple for them because I know I can count on Apple Care to handle all of their problems, which keeps me from getting those same tech support calls. For me though? I'll never go back if I can avoid it.
- darrowG 6y ago
  Hello fellow Ubuntu user! I made the switch from Windows almost 8 years ago, i actually loved the Uinity DE, these days i'm rocking Kubuntu on my work laptop, somehow Gnome 3 doesn't feel the same...but i reeallly like Plasma. Somehow everything just works, my hardware is probably running on blobs of proprietary software but i really don't care ( i care about getting my work done tho). I actually recommend Ubuntu/Linux to family and friends (granted that they don't do any kind of specialized work), my 8-yo nephews have been using KDE since the beginning of the pandemic and after a week of getting used to it i haven't received a support call. Totally understand the appeal of configuring/tweaking every single detail of the OS to one's desire (been there,done that), as times goes by and life happens i rather spent that time with my family or hobbies
- jll29 6y ago
  I would agree Omni's software is the one thing that one might miss moving from MacOS to Linux. For me, I miss OmniGraffle and also OmniPlan. OmniGraffle lets one make nicer-looking drawings more quickly than anything on Linux that I've seen (xfig, ImageMagick & co.), and OmniGraffle is a slick and much simplear and cleaner project management software than e.g. MS Project and even Merlin. (For the record, I never "moved" from MacOS to Linux, but I've been using Macs on and off at work as secondary machines in parallel to Slackware Linux, SuSe Linux, Red Hat Linux and eventually the Ubuntu LTS Linux of the day).
craftkiller 6y ago
I'm not a developer of either OS, but I use both. Pro FreeBSD: - ZFS, the best file system. Its fully integrated into the OS so it always works and its always there. I've always run into issues using ZFS on linux like cache not getting freed causing processes to get killed when I should have had ram available. - VNET Jails. I can give each light container (FreeBSD would be jails, Linux would be docker/lxd/nspawn...) its own networking stack so it can bring its own network interface up and down, assign its IP address, get an address from my router over DHCP like any other computer, and run its own firewall. The firewall bit is particularly helpful for running brute force protection like fail2ban/sshguard/blacklistd. - Additionally, I can delegate a ZFS dataset to a jail and let the jail manage it itself. This lets the jail create sub-datasets with control settings like transparent compression. - After using pf (its a firewall) on FreeBSD, using iptables on Linux makes me want to walk into the ocean. - Its really trivial to build everything from source on FreeBSD. The base system comes with everything you need to build the operating system so rebuilding FreeBSD and installing your new build is just a couple of make commands away. For packages, FreeBSD has a tool call poudriere which is the best package builder I've ever used. I use that to compile packages with custom options and CPU optimizations enabled for the specific processor in each of my machines for multiple versions of FreeBSD. It also makes debugging and modifying FreeBSD a breeze. For example, at my previous company we had 802.1x authentication for our ethernet, but I wanted to run a container directly connecting to the network so I had it behind a bridge. Turns out in the 802.1d spec it specifies that the ethernet frames used for 802.1x authentication should not be passed over a bridge, so I found the part of the code that did that filtering, commented it out, rebuilt FreeBSD, and everything started working! - Bragging rights Pros for Linux: - The Arch Linux wiki is really top-notch. The FreeBSD man pages are better than the man pages on Linux but I much prefer the Arch Linux wiki over the FreeBSD handbook. - You get a lot of features from systemd that aren't in widespread use in FreeBSD. For example, you trivially get process monitoring/restarting and stdout/stderr capture for every service. You can get the same functionality with a built-in tool called "daemon" in FreeBSD but its up to each service to call daemon as opposed to being built into the init system so its a lot less common. Essentially, I have to write custom service files a lot more often on FreeBSD. - systemd user services - steam
- JdeBP 6y ago
jbverschoor 6y ago
Actually, I was "forced" to go back, as java only did green threads on bsd, and the market was moving towards Linux. Super sad to do that, I loved my BSD jails back in '98 or before :-)
ChuckMcM 6y ago
This got really long. Sorry for that, TL;DR answer is "To understand design choices in OS design." Now for the full answer, with more than a bit of historical perspective ... It is a subjective topic of course. In "theory" there are 2.5 forms of mainstream operating systems; Windows, UNIX, and Microkernel UNIX (Mach derivatives). Microsoft has invested in Windows. Apple has invested in Mach/UNIX in the form of MacOS after the purchase of Next. (prior versions of MacOS are essentially dead). Then there is UNIX. UNIX was a product of AT&T, later it became the property of Novell and then the OpenGroup. Because it was a research OS originally (before System V was released) its source code was shared to other researchers and the folks at Berkeley Computer Science Research Group (CSRG)) created a their version of UNIX which they called the Berkeley Standard Distribution (BSD). Sun Microsystems worked with CSRG to turn BSD into a commercially successful OS (SunOS) while AT&T struggled to turn their distribution into a commercially successful OS (System V). This got ugly and legal fights ensued and AT&T paid Sun about a billion dollars to merge their successful OS with the unsuccessful OS. It also resulted in the Regents of California working to rewrite/remove any "AT&T proprietary code" from their distribution which left them with a research OS that they controlled and didn't have to worry about getting sued over. That OS, called FreeBSD, is pretty much as close as you can get to being a UNIX OS without owning the trademark (which OpenGroup now owns). Then there is Linux. Andrew Tannenbaum wrote a "toy" OS that could be used to teach operating systems principles to college students and based it loosely on UNIX. He called it "Minix" for "minimum UNIX". Tannenbaum is, and this is putting it nicely, off-putting. He is one of those people who seem to rub people the wrong way. He got into an online fight with a teenager named Linus who had written his own "toy" OS that ran on the PC/AT computers at the time. He called it "Linux" and in his Usenet post suggested he didn't think it would amount to much. A satellite player, who becomes important later, is Richard Stallman. Who was so affronted by the legal shennanigans that AT&T was pulling, the increased restrictions on access to SunOS that Sun was pulling (mirroring DEC before them) that he decided he was going do his own thing and nobody would have any way of hiding any of it. He called it "GNU" for, "GNU is Not UNIX." He took a lot of pleasure in the recursive acronym, it is the kind of thing folks in the MIT AI lab would chortle at. He was explicitly calling out "Not UNIX" not because UNIX was bad, but because everyone wanted to run UNIX and AT&T was being a huge pain about people calling things UNIX when they weren't paying taxes to AT&T. So the joke was it is EXACTLY LIKE UNIX but we're "saying" it is NOT UNIX. See? Fun joke. We get to use all your cool OS abstractions and knowledge and you can't sue us, nyah, nyah, hee, hee! Step one was "We need a C compiler" and so that was the first thing they built, gcc, binutils, and make. At the time it was created, Linux, and the people who contributed code to Linux, were all UNIX fanbois. That is they loved "sticking it to the man" by building their own version of something that they wanted that someone else told them they couldn't have unless they paid them. At the same time Windows was a computer science joke. It was for "stupid people who didn't understand multi-tasking" and only lived in a single address space where random things could crash the system, and every tiny change required you reboot the thing from scratch. The joke was "did you try rebooting it" and used with much derision. Now here we get to an interesting fork. The Regents of California could not abide the "copyleft" ideas of Stallman and the nascent Free Software movement. It wasn't because they wanted things to be proprietary, rather it was because they had gone through a protracted legal battle and knew their their licensing had been litigated and would hold up. As a result, the CSRG was not going to use anything like gcc with its GPL license and stuck with their portable C compiler and later variants. Meanwhile the rebuffed Stallman found a lot of people who were willing to use their stuff and contribute to Linux[1]. Writing as user land to mimic the UNIX tools was "easy" and done quickly, X was already open source from MIT and so that came too, and many people started writing the myriad of small device drivers that were needed to have this new OS boot on different systems. Many hands make for light work, and it flourished. In 1996 I had to choose between using FreeBSD 2.x or Linux 2.x in an Internet Appliance our company was building. While we loved that new drivers were appearing regularly for Linux, the entire environment churned with change. There was no discipline in the userland between release to release. Command line options changed or were added, behaviors varied, and every new release had to be scoured for random "wouldn't it be neat if ..." kinds of change that someone had thrown in. FreeBSD on the other hand didn't get drivers as quickly but it evolved in an easy to comprehend way that didn't involve a lot of churn and it never changed important things in a "dot" (or worse dot dot) release. So the environment was that the "cool" companies, Sun, SGI, Next->Apple, HP, were using UNIX so the open source community worked to make Linux as UNIX-like as possible. And of the UNIXes (BSD 4.x, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD) moved along more slowly but with a very UNIX direction. Jump ahead now 5 - 6 years. And Sun, SGI, and HP are all dead. The "cool" companies (FAANG) are using Linux in their data centers (or as in Apple's case still a UNIX derived OS) but Microsoft has upped their game and now they have a fully multi-tasking OS that a bunch of teenagers spent their formative years using and learning to tweak. Those same teenagers would love to have an "open source" version of Windows but Microsoft is not going to accommodate them. So once again, you've got the "BSDs" which have a disciplined, ordered integration schedule. And you have Linux with its free-for-all user land. And these same folks decide they are going to start integrating features that they like about the Windows OS into Linux, in part because they can, and in part because Windows is no longer the lame besmirched OS that "only losers" use. And as a result of that activity, Linux begins to turn toward a new "north star" which is now Windows rather than UNIX. We can argue all day and all night if operating system configuration is best done with a registry or a series of text files, and never get anywhere. They are subjective choices and so, like policy choices, arguing them is not going to get you anywhere. There are a lot of such choices that go into OS implementation. But as a result of the new influx of contributors to the Linux user land, and their early computer experiences, Linux is now mimicking Windows design philosophies rather than UNIX design philosophies. So to answer your question about "Why should anyone use them?" the answer is to broaden your understanding of OS design philosophies so that you might better understand the tradeoffs and make better choices about which OS you might choose to support or not support in the future. Phew. [1] Linus has a similarly cautious attitude about the GPL as evidenced by his messaging over the years.
centimeter 6y ago
I tried FreeBSD for the first time last year on a network appliance. Never going back to linux (for a server). It's so elegant and well-put-together, and "just works" to a much larger degree as long as you don't need a fancy GUI. Has lots of awesome features like boot-from-ZFS. For a desktop/laptop computer, I do not use it.

by Qahlel 6y ago

Koshkin 6y ago

[Not an OS developer] In my (admittedly limited) experience, a BSD somehow works better when you need an "appliance" that you can turn on and forget about.

jxy 6y ago

Stability. I don't have to chase the "next shinny thingamajig". For example, I have a code that uses OSS that worked 20 years ago on FreeBSD, and it still works now.

tlhunter 6y ago

If you hop in one of the BSD subreddits you'll find that every other post is someone asking your same question. You might find some enlightenment there.

Koshkin 6y ago
Unfortunately, most of the answers that I have seen come down to saying one and the same thing, namely, that a BSD is better because its userland is "part of the OS." Though could be true, this is not very enlightening.
- ragnese 6y ago
  I agree. That's not a very compelling argument at all, IMO. I've read some other stuff, too, though, such as praise for the ports system and FreeBSD's "jails" feature. But I imagine it's a little like Linux distros. If you don't already use Linux, it's kind of hard to understand why anyone cares about the minor differences between distros.
- 0xFFFE 6y ago
  Perhaps your question is too generic? It all boils down to "right tool for the job". If you need support for latest hardware (as a Desktop OS) you will have better luck with Linux than the BSDs. On the other hand if you want a free, rock solid UNIX OS to run a network/file server, look no further. Also, ZFS & Jails (before Docker was cool).
- blacktriangle 6y ago
  This is a struggle for any system where the advantages really are in the details, but that's probably the best reason to choose BSD over linux. At some point you just have to commit enough effort to try it out and experience the difference, or just be happy with Linux. After all if you're happy with Linux, then BSD's userland is part of the OS isn't a fix for you. But if working with Linux leaves you with this weird itching sensation in your brain that there should be a better way, give BSD a shot.
- JdeBP 6y ago
  Perhaps your path to enlightenment is different. Try reading these manual pages and this handbook: * https://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=ps https://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=ps ps has one set of options and has used getopt() since April 1990. * https://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=inittodr&sektion=9 https://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=inittodr&sektion=9 Documenting the operating system encompasses documenting the kernel as well. * https://docs.freebsd.org/en/books/handbook/ https://docs.freebsd.org/en/books/handbook/ "Part of the o/s" is not the best description. The idea is that there is a clear demarcation between all of the programs that come as part of the operating system, and all of the programs that are applications softwares that are installed on top of the operating system.

brobdingnagians 6y ago

I use OpenBSD for most of my servers, with FreeBSD mixed in too. It is very simple to administer, easy to upgrade (sysupgrade every six months, syspatch otherwise), reliable, and fits how I like to administer it. Pf on OpenBSD has pf auth which allows unblocking ports for users who have sshed in, which is nice when you are on a dynamic IP. It is generally just a nice system, minimalist, and straight forward. I don't want a million moving parts, just a UNIX platform to build on.

mjthompson 6y ago
I've recently switched my home network jump box to OpenBSD. Still learning the basics. I didn't even know about authpf. I'm reading the docs now and it looks great. Thanks for sharing that.
aj3 6y ago
> sysupgrade every six months, syspatch otherwise But that won't keep your system up to date with security patches, because OpenBSD does not rebuild binary packages.
- nix23 6y ago
  Sure they do, and he talked just about the system, remember packets and the system are two different thing in the bsd-world.
  - aj3 6y ago
    I doubt anyone manages to get with just the OpenBSD system on their desktop. Browsers in particular are a gaping security hole if not updated regularly.
    - nix23 6y ago
      https://stable.mtier.org/ https://stable.mtier.org/
      - 6y ago

hpoe 6y ago

I'll say that the reason I have been considering switching is more of an ideological, not bragging rights, but after years of seeing free software be attacked and assaulted by supposedly "friendly" companies, who are constantly trying to take away my power to control my machine it pushes me to want to take some sort of stand. It may not be much but least I am doing something. The only other big thing holding me back was the tooling but now that I've switched most of my workflow to Emacs, the option of choosing FreeBSD is becoming more and more appealing. EDIT: Just be clear, I have been using Ubuntu as my daily driver since 2012; however I don't love all the decisions Canonical has made, I don't like how the entire ecosystem has grown to a level of complexity that makes it hard to understand what the hell is happening under the hood, and I am beyond peeved about the havoc systemd-resolver has wrought on my system. EDIT 2: If anyone has any other suggestions for a better more free distro that I can use I'd love the advice, the thing keeping me form Hurd is worrying that it won't have full driver support.

2OEH8eoCRo0 6y ago
Why FreeBSD and not Linux?
- spijdar 6y ago
  Based on the subtext of GP's comment, I'm guessing they're either offended by RedHat, Canonical, and/or Microsoft's various involvements, things like systemd or snapd, and think it taints the whole linux ecosystem.
  - selectodude 6y ago
    I'm curious how they would feel about Bell Labs. Sounds like a proprietary OS that happened to be open source wouldn't go over well either.
- jtdev 6y ago
  > "years of seeing free software be attacked and assaulted by supposedly "friendly" companies, who are constantly trying to take away my power to control my machine"

scaladev 6y ago

Well, if you're Sony, the BSD license lets you take the code, make hundreds of millions of dollars off it, and give absolutely nothing back. The PlayStation 3, 4, and (I believe) 5 operating systems are built on FreeBSD. I've seen some of the BSD folk present that as a good thing. To each his own, I guess. Concerning desktop/server usage, I like this quote: > “If it ain't broke, don't fix it”: If you already use an open source operating system, and you are happy with it, there is probably no good reason to change. https://docs.freebsd.org/en/articles/explaining-bsd/comparing-bsd-and-linux.html https://docs.freebsd.org/en/articles/explaining-bsd/comparin...

andrewzah 6y ago
"I've seen some of the BSD folk present that as a good thing. To each his own, I guess." Yes, this is the whole point of making something Open Source. With FreeBSD companies like Netflix contribute to it, and I'd imagine it's similar for OpenBSD as well.
- scaladev 6y ago
  I thought the original idea behind free software was to provide more freedom to the users (to thinker with, replace, and learn from said software), and not to pad the bottom line of a multi-billion dollar company by saving them the need to spend millions of man-hours building their own OS from scratch? If GPL didn't force companies to contribute back, would Linux ever be where it is today?
  - andrewzah 6y ago
    "not to pad the bottom line of a multi-billion dollar company" The freedom in F/OSS licensing applies to me just as much as it does to multi-billion dollar corporations, as it turns out. Sorry, but this is a fundamental misunderstanding about the purpose and intent of Open Source software. If you want to arbitrarily restrict people from using your code, that's fine, but at that point it no longer is open source. It's completely within one's rights to maintain their intellectual property and license it out to businesses at a cost, but all of us benefit from F/OSS software, so it comes down to a personal decision. Imagine if things like curl were proprietary... They chose to use BSD licenses, which are fairly permissive. The most common F/OSS license is MIT, which is also very permissive. You could use GPL, AGPL, or LGPL "copy-left" licenses which impose specific requirements, but many orgs won't even look at projects with those licenses. edit: wording

remexre 6y ago

My shortlist would be, PF, jails, and the handbook. PF in particular is much nicer to use than iptables to an incredible degree.

thesuitonym 6y ago

No. The BSD world doesn't work like that. You either use the system because you like it, or you don't. Nobody is going to convince you. The only "reason" to use any BSD over another system is because you want to. That's why you never get a good answer.

waynesonfire 6y ago

I've been a life-long Linux user and took a dive into the deep-end with FreeBSD recently. I find it extremely difficult to articulate the why. For example, you can say things like, the entire stack is maintained by the same entity. Ookkayy... so what? But it matters, and it matters in a nuance ways that's difficult to articulate but you notice it when using the system. Kinda feel bad for not being able to articulate it. It's not like I can point at one thing, e.g. the system call function foobar(2) is better. I either don't have enough FreeBSD experience or I'm not smart enough. Here are some things I've enjoyed: - I didn't realize how terrible iptables was until I used pf on FreeBSD - I didn't want to master yet another networking abstraction that docker introduces for configuring containers. Granted, I have not used VNETs on Jails. - I like to _invest_ in the tech stack that I learn and not have it change the next release. I have more trust in the stability of FreeBSDs choices and roadmap. - I like how light-weight the base OS install is. - I like that FreeBSD doesn't use systemd and I like the simplicity of rc(8). - I like that jail has stronger integration with the OS, like installing packages into a jail. - I like that the book, "design and implementation of freebsd o/s 2nd edition" is available and my hope is that it's still relevant. Something things I don't like: - There are subtle differences in tooling and outputs that surprise me. Nothing I haven't been able to work-around. E.g. I learned that GNU Make has made _vast_ improvements to make that's available on BSDs. Not a big deal but had to install gnu make and invoke it as gmake. - I miss cgroups.

ianai 6y ago
You can usually trust the manpage in bsd land. That’s not anywhere near as dependable in Linux land. The system upgrades are much tighter when every component is maintained by one organization. Its historical killer feature (for a while) was zfs, but Linux has that now too. In FreeBSD though zfs is ‘native’.

andrewzah 6y ago

For me, stability. I put OpenBSD on my router and it is really quite nice to administrate it with unbound, dhcpd, and pf. Rc is significantly nicer to work with than systemd. OpenBSD's documentation in general is very high quality, and FreeBSD to a lesser extent. Other distros are not really documented as well, so I have to rely on adapting information from the arch wiki most of the time. For FreeBSD, jails are nice but I prefer docker. (which I have to use anyways for work). Both FreeBSD & OpenBSD have a nicer user experience in general, in my experience. That said, I can't use them as daily drivers due to not having docker and other tools, and gaming. Linux isn't stellar for games but I can at least run a lot of games these days through Proton, etc.

aduitsis 6y ago

Previous job was at a University, 15+ years using FreeBSD for almost all services. We've had Jails, ZFS, etc for a good part of those 15+ years, which was a huge asset. Not that it was completely trouble free, but assuming that with anything else it would have been easier, is simply a delusion. Why we went with FreeBSD in the early 2000s? If memory serves, the ports tree and the package management were completely blowing away anything else at that point. Nowadays it is considered given for any platform, but it was a great advantage to be able to compile packages reliably with your own options back in the day! The fact is, FreeBSD is (and was for a very long time) a trustworthy and very stable platform to run services in. FreeBSD has a very deep philosophy of trying to minimize surprises, which means that most of the time you can focus on your real tasks instead of fighting what has changed in the last version. And Jails are still a major plus, at least from a certain point of view, since they are very easy to manage, copy, install, administer, etc. Even today where Linux has catch up in all aspects, if you have a large set of services on FreeBSD, you'll invariably have to pay a huge upfront cost to switch everything to Linux and re-learn stuff all over again. It's not a question of freedom or open-source (FreeBSD and Linux are totally free and open-source, in their own way each), it's a question of overcoming the mountain to get across to the other green side. I'm sure it's exactly the same for Linux shops that would like to try out FreeBSD. Why should they pay the cost, if they cannot really get any significant advantage or profit out of it? So one basically sticks to what's known and trustworthy from before, since the investment has already been made and most people don't like doing the same stuff all over again.

downut 6y ago

Not a developer, and if I were I might find such a question puzzling. Here's why I use it: +zfs +(poudriere & /usr/ports) +(helpful mail lists) +bhyve !systemd FreeBSD since 1994, Debian since 1998. But underneath it all is a philosophy about how to live your life. If you want Big Corps deciding your computational experience, good for you, even Linux can provide that for you now. I don't. I don't care if I'm irrelevant. I approach cooking, reading, travel, etc the same way. And there are ranges. OpenBSD goes even further. I respect that. My partner lives in Big Corp IT land during the day and she loves the in house experience of our rather extravagent mostly FreeBSD "cloud". Some Debian in there too; got to run some appliances like unifi-video. Writing this on a FreeBSD NVIDIA desktop. Which I'm going to use to do my own taxes myself, with org-mode, and I'm going to file here shortly. For that I need chromium, which works fine. Otherwise I use Firefox, which ports tracks releases quite closely. All this unnecessary effort! Why would anyone do such a thing. Mysteries.

toomanyducks 6y ago
> FreeBSD NVIDIA desktop. Any links to guides/docs? My GPU is really the one reason I haven't yet at the very least tried FreeBSD on my desktop.
- my123 6y ago
  The Nvidia binary driver is provided for FreeBSD too. Guide at http://us.download.nvidia.com/XFree86/FreeBSD-x86_64/460.56/README/index.html http://us.download.nvidia.com/XFree86/FreeBSD-x86_64/460.56/... and driver at https://www.nvidia.com/Download/driverResults.aspx/170806/en-us https://www.nvidia.com/Download/driverResults.aspx/170806/en... for the currently latest one.
- ashafer 6y ago
  I am biased but FreBSD is very well supported on NVIDIA, so I wouldn't let it hold you back from trying it out. I think you could load NomadBSD on a usb and have NVIDIA drivers set up without any real trouble.
- lmm 6y ago

torstenvl 6y ago

FreeBSD is a nice, solid piece of Shaker furniture. It's simple, elegant, and done "the right way," meticulously planned out. There are no extraneous seams. GNU/Linux is an amalgamation of 2-3 of the highest quality IKEA sets. It's more up-to-date, with more bells and whistles. If you don't like one component from one set, you can (with enough elbow grease and fuckery) replace it with the analogous component from another set. However, there are bespoke seams everywhere, and the theoretical flexibility is often more trouble than its worth (just try using a mainstream distro but replacing systemd, for example). Also, the documentation is sometimes out of date, causing things to fail in utterly inexplicable ways, forcing you to resort to online forums and mailing lists. FreeBSD has somewhat fewer features, and doesn't work as well with the latest hardware. But the things that are supported largely Just Work(tm). It is, by and large, just less hassle to run FreeBSD and you don't have to tinker as much.

nix23 6y ago
>GNU/Linux is an amalgamation of 2-3 of the highest quality IKEA sets. Depends on the distribution :)
- ghostpepper 6y ago
  What are some of the more cohesive distributions? Elementary comes to mind
  - nix23 6y ago
    I talked about the quality of distributions.
zokula 6y ago
Typical BSD user cult-member response.

brightball 6y ago

I switched from Mac to Ubuntu 4 years ago and I'll happily say that I won't go back. Everything does "just work" and I have a development environment that mirrors my production environment because of it. All of the dev tools run smoothly with Linux. As a bonus, I can run it on any laptop I like regardless of whether Apple decides the configuration should exist (RIP 17" MBP). Corporate environments or personal stuff, I haven't found anything that I personally need that I can't do. Legitimately, the only tool that I miss from OSX is OmniGraffle for making diagrams. Draw.io is good, but Omni was a special kind of polished. If they ever decided to release a cross platform version I'd buy. There was an initial learning curve the first month when I committed to it, but I don't spend time having to get into the weeds of the system unless I just want to do something complicated. All that said, this is something that I'm personally happy with and love. I won't recommend it to family and friends. I'll recommend Apple for them because I know I can count on Apple Care to handle all of their problems, which keeps me from getting those same tech support calls. For me though? I'll never go back if I can avoid it.

darrowG 6y ago
Hello fellow Ubuntu user! I made the switch from Windows almost 8 years ago, i actually loved the Uinity DE, these days i'm rocking Kubuntu on my work laptop, somehow Gnome 3 doesn't feel the same...but i reeallly like Plasma. Somehow everything just works, my hardware is probably running on blobs of proprietary software but i really don't care ( i care about getting my work done tho). I actually recommend Ubuntu/Linux to family and friends (granted that they don't do any kind of specialized work), my 8-yo nephews have been using KDE since the beginning of the pandemic and after a week of getting used to it i haven't received a support call. Totally understand the appeal of configuring/tweaking every single detail of the OS to one's desire (been there,done that), as times goes by and life happens i rather spent that time with my family or hobbies
jll29 6y ago
I would agree Omni's software is the one thing that one might miss moving from MacOS to Linux. For me, I miss OmniGraffle and also OmniPlan. OmniGraffle lets one make nicer-looking drawings more quickly than anything on Linux that I've seen (xfig, ImageMagick & co.), and OmniGraffle is a slick and much simplear and cleaner project management software than e.g. MS Project and even Merlin. (For the record, I never "moved" from MacOS to Linux, but I've been using Macs on and off at work as secondary machines in parallel to Slackware Linux, SuSe Linux, Red Hat Linux and eventually the Ubuntu LTS Linux of the day).

craftkiller 6y ago

I'm not a developer of either OS, but I use both. Pro FreeBSD: - ZFS, the best file system. Its fully integrated into the OS so it always works and its always there. I've always run into issues using ZFS on linux like cache not getting freed causing processes to get killed when I should have had ram available. - VNET Jails. I can give each light container (FreeBSD would be jails, Linux would be docker/lxd/nspawn...) its own networking stack so it can bring its own network interface up and down, assign its IP address, get an address from my router over DHCP like any other computer, and run its own firewall. The firewall bit is particularly helpful for running brute force protection like fail2ban/sshguard/blacklistd. - Additionally, I can delegate a ZFS dataset to a jail and let the jail manage it itself. This lets the jail create sub-datasets with control settings like transparent compression. - After using pf (its a firewall) on FreeBSD, using iptables on Linux makes me want to walk into the ocean. - Its really trivial to build everything from source on FreeBSD. The base system comes with everything you need to build the operating system so rebuilding FreeBSD and installing your new build is just a couple of make commands away. For packages, FreeBSD has a tool call poudriere which is the best package builder I've ever used. I use that to compile packages with custom options and CPU optimizations enabled for the specific processor in each of my machines for multiple versions of FreeBSD. It also makes debugging and modifying FreeBSD a breeze. For example, at my previous company we had 802.1x authentication for our ethernet, but I wanted to run a container directly connecting to the network so I had it behind a bridge. Turns out in the 802.1d spec it specifies that the ethernet frames used for 802.1x authentication should not be passed over a bridge, so I found the part of the code that did that filtering, commented it out, rebuilt FreeBSD, and everything started working! - Bragging rights Pros for Linux: - The Arch Linux wiki is really top-notch. The FreeBSD man pages are better than the man pages on Linux but I much prefer the Arch Linux wiki over the FreeBSD handbook. - You get a lot of features from systemd that aren't in widespread use in FreeBSD. For example, you trivially get process monitoring/restarting and stdout/stderr capture for every service. You can get the same functionality with a built-in tool called "daemon" in FreeBSD but its up to each service to call daemon as opposed to being built into the init system so its a lot less common. Essentially, I have to write custom service files a lot more often on FreeBSD. - systemd user services - steam

JdeBP 6y ago

jbverschoor 6y ago

Actually, I was "forced" to go back, as java only did green threads on bsd, and the market was moving towards Linux. Super sad to do that, I loved my BSD jails back in '98 or before :-)

ChuckMcM 6y ago

This got really long. Sorry for that, TL;DR answer is "To understand design choices in OS design." Now for the full answer, with more than a bit of historical perspective ... It is a subjective topic of course. In "theory" there are 2.5 forms of mainstream operating systems; Windows, UNIX, and Microkernel UNIX (Mach derivatives). Microsoft has invested in Windows. Apple has invested in Mach/UNIX in the form of MacOS after the purchase of Next. (prior versions of MacOS are essentially dead). Then there is UNIX. UNIX was a product of AT&T, later it became the property of Novell and then the OpenGroup. Because it was a research OS originally (before System V was released) its source code was shared to other researchers and the folks at Berkeley Computer Science Research Group (CSRG)) created a their version of UNIX which they called the Berkeley Standard Distribution (BSD). Sun Microsystems worked with CSRG to turn BSD into a commercially successful OS (SunOS) while AT&T struggled to turn their distribution into a commercially successful OS (System V). This got ugly and legal fights ensued and AT&T paid Sun about a billion dollars to merge their successful OS with the unsuccessful OS. It also resulted in the Regents of California working to rewrite/remove any "AT&T proprietary code" from their distribution which left them with a research OS that they controlled and didn't have to worry about getting sued over. That OS, called FreeBSD, is pretty much as close as you can get to being a UNIX OS without owning the trademark (which OpenGroup now owns). Then there is Linux. Andrew Tannenbaum wrote a "toy" OS that could be used to teach operating systems principles to college students and based it loosely on UNIX. He called it "Minix" for "minimum UNIX". Tannenbaum is, and this is putting it nicely, off-putting. He is one of those people who seem to rub people the wrong way. He got into an online fight with a teenager named Linus who had written his own "toy" OS that ran on the PC/AT computers at the time. He called it "Linux" and in his Usenet post suggested he didn't think it would amount to much. A satellite player, who becomes important later, is Richard Stallman. Who was so affronted by the legal shennanigans that AT&T was pulling, the increased restrictions on access to SunOS that Sun was pulling (mirroring DEC before them) that he decided he was going do his own thing and nobody would have any way of hiding any of it. He called it "GNU" for, "GNU is Not UNIX." He took a lot of pleasure in the recursive acronym, it is the kind of thing folks in the MIT AI lab would chortle at. He was explicitly calling out "Not UNIX" not because UNIX was bad, but because everyone wanted to run UNIX and AT&T was being a huge pain about people calling things UNIX when they weren't paying taxes to AT&T. So the joke was it is EXACTLY LIKE UNIX but we're "saying" it is NOT UNIX. See? Fun joke. We get to use all your cool OS abstractions and knowledge and you can't sue us, nyah, nyah, hee, hee! Step one was "We need a C compiler" and so that was the first thing they built, gcc, binutils, and make. At the time it was created, Linux, and the people who contributed code to Linux, were all UNIX fanbois. That is they loved "sticking it to the man" by building their own version of something that they wanted that someone else told them they couldn't have unless they paid them. At the same time Windows was a computer science joke. It was for "stupid people who didn't understand multi-tasking" and only lived in a single address space where random things could crash the system, and every tiny change required you reboot the thing from scratch. The joke was "did you try rebooting it" and used with much derision. Now here we get to an interesting fork. The Regents of California could not abide the "copyleft" ideas of Stallman and the nascent Free Software movement. It wasn't because they wanted things to be proprietary, rather it was because they had gone through a protracted legal battle and knew their their licensing had been litigated and would hold up. As a result, the CSRG was not going to use anything like gcc with its GPL license and stuck with their portable C compiler and later variants. Meanwhile the rebuffed Stallman found a lot of people who were willing to use their stuff and contribute to Linux[1]. Writing as user land to mimic the UNIX tools was "easy" and done quickly, X was already open source from MIT and so that came too, and many people started writing the myriad of small device drivers that were needed to have this new OS boot on different systems. Many hands make for light work, and it flourished. In 1996 I had to choose between using FreeBSD 2.x or Linux 2.x in an Internet Appliance our company was building. While we loved that new drivers were appearing regularly for Linux, the entire environment churned with change. There was no discipline in the userland between release to release. Command line options changed or were added, behaviors varied, and every new release had to be scoured for random "wouldn't it be neat if ..." kinds of change that someone had thrown in. FreeBSD on the other hand didn't get drivers as quickly but it evolved in an easy to comprehend way that didn't involve a lot of churn and it never changed important things in a "dot" (or worse dot dot) release. So the environment was that the "cool" companies, Sun, SGI, Next->Apple, HP, were using UNIX so the open source community worked to make Linux as UNIX-like as possible. And of the UNIXes (BSD 4.x, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD) moved along more slowly but with a very UNIX direction. Jump ahead now 5 - 6 years. And Sun, SGI, and HP are all dead. The "cool" companies (FAANG) are using Linux in their data centers (or as in Apple's case still a UNIX derived OS) but Microsoft has upped their game and now they have a fully multi-tasking OS that a bunch of teenagers spent their formative years using and learning to tweak. Those same teenagers would love to have an "open source" version of Windows but Microsoft is not going to accommodate them. So once again, you've got the "BSDs" which have a disciplined, ordered integration schedule. And you have Linux with its free-for-all user land. And these same folks decide they are going to start integrating features that they like about the Windows OS into Linux, in part because they can, and in part because Windows is no longer the lame besmirched OS that "only losers" use. And as a result of that activity, Linux begins to turn toward a new "north star" which is now Windows rather than UNIX. We can argue all day and all night if operating system configuration is best done with a registry or a series of text files, and never get anywhere. They are subjective choices and so, like policy choices, arguing them is not going to get you anywhere. There are a lot of such choices that go into OS implementation. But as a result of the new influx of contributors to the Linux user land, and their early computer experiences, Linux is now mimicking Windows design philosophies rather than UNIX design philosophies. So to answer your question about "Why should anyone use them?" the answer is to broaden your understanding of OS design philosophies so that you might better understand the tradeoffs and make better choices about which OS you might choose to support or not support in the future. Phew. [1] Linus has a similarly cautious attitude about the GPL as evidenced by his messaging over the years.

centimeter 6y ago

I tried FreeBSD for the first time last year on a network appliance. Never going back to linux (for a server). It's so elegant and well-put-together, and "just works" to a much larger degree as long as you don't need a fancy GUI. Has lots of awesome features like boot-from-ZFS. For a desktop/laptop computer, I do not use it.