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FreeBSD is an amazing operating system. I've started to use it with the 13.0 release and it never fails to impress me. Everything is very well-documented, you

by chungy 5y ago

FreeBSD is an amazing operating system. I've started to use it with the 13.0 release and it never fails to impress me. Everything is very well-documented, you get a fairly clean centralization of configuration, non-base OS software is installed by default in /usr/local while giving you the option to move it elsewhere if you so desire. 3rd party software config doesn't get intermixed with the OS. It's similar on the surface to Linux but you can really feel the totally different DNA it's composed of. Well worth looking over.

petre 5y ago
Yes, it's great. I can't wait to update my 11.4 systems to 12.3. Just make sure you use ZFS as a file system if you have enough memory because the tooling is great and you can resize or reconfigure your storage more easily, or mount it in Linux with ZoL. I recently had to relocate and grow a UFS partition on a VM and it was a bit of a pain compared to ext4 and gparted. Had to grow the qcow2 disk image, make another slice (partition) at the end, dump /usr onto that, remove the original /usr slice to make room to grow /var, create a new /usr, restore onto it, delete the partition that held the dump, grow the new /usr to fill up the empty space. With ZFS, the BSD slices holding UFS filesystems becone ZFS datasets, you have the full zpool free space available on all of them, just like when using a single partition, but it can also span multiple disks.
mekster 5y ago
Not exactly their fault but given up using FreeBSD when they cannot support docker properly for quite a while. I have plenty of containers that I'd like to use but there's no way to do it in FreeBSD. Besides, I don't see benefit of using it over Linux except to learn and keep up with the difference between the two.
- petre 5y ago
  There are jails. I use both Linux (since 1.2.13) and FreeBSD (since 4.0), there are not much differences to keep up in FreeBSD, rather than between Linux distributions and new vs. old versions of these distributions. FreeBSD has always been consistent and there's no hype driven change occuring, breaking things up and always creating annoyances for the grumpy sysadmin.
  - mekster 5y ago
    I'm not talking about the inability to use virtualization. Not being able to use the docker container ecosystem is just making me give up. Any differences between system versions is up to you to learn but having no access to third party resources isn't anything you can get around with.
    - petre 5y ago
      Docker is a Linux thing (cgroups, overlay fs etc). On Mac and Windows it's emulated using Linux VMs and of course it thus runs like crap on older hardware. Just keep using Linux if you need Docker or Podman. There's also a proof of concept implementation of OCI on FreeBSD called runj, but it's incomplete due to the fact that OCI relies on Linuxisms. https://freebsdfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/Understanding-Docker-For-FreeBSD-Users.pdf https://freebsdfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/Und...
DarkUranium 5y ago
Started with 9.x here (I don't remember which 'x'), and I agree wholeheartedly. I use it both as a desktop and on my personal servers (most of them). Also used it in professional capacity in the past.

by chungy 5y ago

petre 5y ago

Yes, it's great. I can't wait to update my 11.4 systems to 12.3. Just make sure you use ZFS as a file system if you have enough memory because the tooling is great and you can resize or reconfigure your storage more easily, or mount it in Linux with ZoL. I recently had to relocate and grow a UFS partition on a VM and it was a bit of a pain compared to ext4 and gparted. Had to grow the qcow2 disk image, make another slice (partition) at the end, dump /usr onto that, remove the original /usr slice to make room to grow /var, create a new /usr, restore onto it, delete the partition that held the dump, grow the new /usr to fill up the empty space. With ZFS, the BSD slices holding UFS filesystems becone ZFS datasets, you have the full zpool free space available on all of them, just like when using a single partition, but it can also span multiple disks.

mekster 5y ago

Not exactly their fault but given up using FreeBSD when they cannot support docker properly for quite a while. I have plenty of containers that I'd like to use but there's no way to do it in FreeBSD. Besides, I don't see benefit of using it over Linux except to learn and keep up with the difference between the two.

petre 5y ago
There are jails. I use both Linux (since 1.2.13) and FreeBSD (since 4.0), there are not much differences to keep up in FreeBSD, rather than between Linux distributions and new vs. old versions of these distributions. FreeBSD has always been consistent and there's no hype driven change occuring, breaking things up and always creating annoyances for the grumpy sysadmin.
- mekster 5y ago
  I'm not talking about the inability to use virtualization. Not being able to use the docker container ecosystem is just making me give up. Any differences between system versions is up to you to learn but having no access to third party resources isn't anything you can get around with.
  - petre 5y ago
    Docker is a Linux thing (cgroups, overlay fs etc). On Mac and Windows it's emulated using Linux VMs and of course it thus runs like crap on older hardware. Just keep using Linux if you need Docker or Podman. There's also a proof of concept implementation of OCI on FreeBSD called runj, but it's incomplete due to the fact that OCI relies on Linuxisms. https://freebsdfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/Understanding-Docker-For-FreeBSD-Users.pdf https://freebsdfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/Und...

DarkUranium 5y ago

Started with 9.x here (I don't remember which 'x'), and I agree wholeheartedly. I use it both as a desktop and on my personal servers (most of them). Also used it in professional capacity in the past.