6 ms·

FreeBSD is such an excellent operating system, I applaud all developers and users that have kept it going all these years. I've been toying around with it in a

by chungy 6y ago

FreeBSD is such an excellent operating system, I applaud all developers and users that have kept it going all these years. I've been toying around with it in a virtual machine since 13.0-RC2, in many ways it can feel like a foreign system (compared to my Linux background), but there are a lot of nice things that also make it feel "greener" on the FreeBSD side. It's honestly hard to understate the value of boot environments and the boot loader's capability to swap between them or even roll back to a spool checkpoint. It makes almost all upgrades and system changes risk-free.

throw4738 6y ago
Maybe have a look at OpenSuse, it has rollback as well and feels like traditional Linux.
- nix23 6y ago
  Haha no not really, i have tumbleweed installed on my laptop and love it BUT it's NOT traditional.
  - yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago
    Other than btrfs, what's nontraditional? It's GNU/Linux with glibc and a RPM-based package manager.
    - petre 6y ago
      We use openSuSE Leap in production. It's not traditional in the sense of Ubuntu/Debian but somehow the configuration structure is more sane actually. No more /etc/nginx/modules|sites-available and a plethora of symlinks and conf.d directories spread around all over the place for instace.
    - nix23 6y ago
      Yast. Please don't get me wrong i LOVE OpenSuse, but traditional is Slackware/Arch/Gentoo/Debian but NOT Suse.
      - pnutjam 6y ago
        You know, you don't have to use yast. It's an option. You can ignore it.
        nix23 6y ago
        Yes thanks i know that.
- chungy 6y ago
  Last I knew, this requires OpenSUSE on btrfs. It's a pale shadow in functionality compared to ZFS... not to mention stability, too.
  - nix23 6y ago
    True btrfs is BS, i have XFS with tumbleweed and pretty happy (on the laptop), everything else freebsd all the way..if i can.
  - catblast01 6y ago
    It has some features that zfs lacks such as a dedup story that is actually usable, plus more flexibility in reshaping. Other than its native raid 5/6 story what major features is it lacking in comparison to zfs? I agree the tooling is trash compared to zfs (zfs command line is a delight by comparison). Also stability wise i haven’t noted problems in years. Not to take anything away from zfs which has proven itself in its particular use cases, but btrfs is alright.
    - ac29 6y ago
      Agreed, btrfs has been stable for a long time, aside from RAID5/6, which are going to be uncommon on a laptop or desktop computer. Unfortunately, 10 years ago this was definitely not the case, and btrfs hasnt been able to shake off that reputation among some people since then.
    - yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago
      > Also stability wise i haven’t noted problems in years. Counter anecdote: I have a laptop (single disk) running opensuse tumbleweed with root on btrfs, and it's managed to completely break its root filesystem twice. One of those times I tried to recover it, but in the end I just reinstalled.
      - jhoechtl 6y ago
        I had such issues like 5 years ago. Since then no issue with a btrfs root fs.
Arelius 6y ago
Having come into Linux from FreeBSD, I agree, FreeBSD does feel "greener"
- mnd999 6y ago
  As someone who’s done the same (although I’m still using FreeBSD on my NAS) I missed decent documentation the most. I felt most at home on Arch because the wiki is pretty decent.
  - mvanbaak 6y ago
    The man pages on FreeBSD are a lot better than on Linux. And you can read them without network and/or browser.
    - chungy 6y ago
      The Arch Wiki is alright if you run Arch, but I definitely prefer well-written and fully up-to-date manpages from the offset. For starters, it doesn't require me to open a web browser first; it also doesn't depend on me having network connectivity at any particular time. My take is definitely different from GP: I find FreeBSD to have a much better documentation story compared to Linux (even Arch).
      - yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago
        > The Arch Wiki is alright if you run Arch No, it's pretty broadly useful; I've used it on at least Ubuntu, Fedora, and centos. It helps that Arch is pretty close to upstream, so docs are usually pretty generic. I can't disagree about offline docs and the extraordinary quality of BSD manpages, though:)
        jhvkjhk 6y ago
        Yeah I see Arch Wiki as Linux Wiki when I’m using Ubuntu.(and Ask Ubuntu as Ask Linux)
        6y ago
E39M5S62 6y ago
Take a look at https://github.com/zbm-dev/zfsbootmenu/ https://github.com/zbm-dev/zfsbootmenu/ . Full boot environment support for Linux, along with the ability to create a new environment from a snapshot in your bootloader, live-diff snapshots to see _when_ something changed, and even chroot into a boot environment to fix things.
yrgulation 6y ago
It has been 15 years since i last used freebsd in a commercial setting. Linux since then. In many ways linux feels alien to me. I still default to “pkg add” in my mind before “apt get”. A shame it didnt gain more traction, as i really loved this OS.

by chungy 6y ago

throw4738 6y ago

Maybe have a look at OpenSuse, it has rollback as well and feels like traditional Linux.

nix23 6y ago
Haha no not really, i have tumbleweed installed on my laptop and love it BUT it's NOT traditional.
- yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago
  Other than btrfs, what's nontraditional? It's GNU/Linux with glibc and a RPM-based package manager.
  - petre 6y ago
    We use openSuSE Leap in production. It's not traditional in the sense of Ubuntu/Debian but somehow the configuration structure is more sane actually. No more /etc/nginx/modules|sites-available and a plethora of symlinks and conf.d directories spread around all over the place for instace.
  - nix23 6y ago
    Yast. Please don't get me wrong i LOVE OpenSuse, but traditional is Slackware/Arch/Gentoo/Debian but NOT Suse.
    - pnutjam 6y ago
      You know, you don't have to use yast. It's an option. You can ignore it.
      - nix23 6y ago
        Yes thanks i know that.
chungy 6y ago
Last I knew, this requires OpenSUSE on btrfs. It's a pale shadow in functionality compared to ZFS... not to mention stability, too.
- nix23 6y ago
  True btrfs is BS, i have XFS with tumbleweed and pretty happy (on the laptop), everything else freebsd all the way..if i can.
- catblast01 6y ago
  It has some features that zfs lacks such as a dedup story that is actually usable, plus more flexibility in reshaping. Other than its native raid 5/6 story what major features is it lacking in comparison to zfs? I agree the tooling is trash compared to zfs (zfs command line is a delight by comparison). Also stability wise i haven’t noted problems in years. Not to take anything away from zfs which has proven itself in its particular use cases, but btrfs is alright.
  - ac29 6y ago
    Agreed, btrfs has been stable for a long time, aside from RAID5/6, which are going to be uncommon on a laptop or desktop computer. Unfortunately, 10 years ago this was definitely not the case, and btrfs hasnt been able to shake off that reputation among some people since then.
  - yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago
    > Also stability wise i haven’t noted problems in years. Counter anecdote: I have a laptop (single disk) running opensuse tumbleweed with root on btrfs, and it's managed to completely break its root filesystem twice. One of those times I tried to recover it, but in the end I just reinstalled.
    - jhoechtl 6y ago
      I had such issues like 5 years ago. Since then no issue with a btrfs root fs.

Arelius 6y ago

Having come into Linux from FreeBSD, I agree, FreeBSD does feel "greener"

mnd999 6y ago
As someone who’s done the same (although I’m still using FreeBSD on my NAS) I missed decent documentation the most. I felt most at home on Arch because the wiki is pretty decent.
- mvanbaak 6y ago
  The man pages on FreeBSD are a lot better than on Linux. And you can read them without network and/or browser.
  - chungy 6y ago
    The Arch Wiki is alright if you run Arch, but I definitely prefer well-written and fully up-to-date manpages from the offset. For starters, it doesn't require me to open a web browser first; it also doesn't depend on me having network connectivity at any particular time. My take is definitely different from GP: I find FreeBSD to have a much better documentation story compared to Linux (even Arch).
    - yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago
      > The Arch Wiki is alright if you run Arch No, it's pretty broadly useful; I've used it on at least Ubuntu, Fedora, and centos. It helps that Arch is pretty close to upstream, so docs are usually pretty generic. I can't disagree about offline docs and the extraordinary quality of BSD manpages, though:)
      - jhvkjhk 6y ago
        Yeah I see Arch Wiki as Linux Wiki when I’m using Ubuntu.(and Ask Ubuntu as Ask Linux)
      - 6y ago

E39M5S62 6y ago

Take a look at https://github.com/zbm-dev/zfsbootmenu/ https://github.com/zbm-dev/zfsbootmenu/ . Full boot environment support for Linux, along with the ability to create a new environment from a snapshot in your bootloader, live-diff snapshots to see _when_ something changed, and even chroot into a boot environment to fix things.

yrgulation 6y ago

It has been 15 years since i last used freebsd in a commercial setting. Linux since then. In many ways linux feels alien to me. I still default to “pkg add” in my mind before “apt get”. A shame it didnt gain more traction, as i really loved this OS.