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FreeBSD is the appeal. Back in the earlier days of containerisation Linux had no options (Linux was pretty late to that particular game) and Solaris wasn’t fre
by laumars 5y ago
FreeBSD is the appeal.
Back in the earlier days of containerisation Linux had no options (Linux was pretty late to that particular game) and Solaris wasn’t free. So FreeBSD made a lot of sense.
These days the tooling around Linux is better and there are open source forks of Solaris so FreeBSD might seem like an odd choice for some. However I still think FreeBSD is a rock solid operating system and one that doesn’t get taken as seriously these days as it should do.
- AndrewUnmuted 5y agoFreeBSD's appeal for me is the easy maintenance. Everything related to config is in /etc/rc.conf; tunables in /boot/loader.conf. The ZFS implementation is rock-solid. I therefore only have to fiddle with my FreeBSD server, running 80TB ZFS storage pool, once a year or so. No other OS gives me this kind of comfort and stability.
- freemint 5y agoI wonder if Solaris has bigger userbase it would also appeal to you.
- AndrewUnmuted 5y agoPerhaps it would! But the userbase is definitely what finally got me into FreeBSD. The fact that hobbyists were contributing such excellent cli tools as `iocage` [0] and `vm-bhyve` [1] really is what got me over my fears. [0] https://iocage.io/ https://iocage.io/ [1] https://github.com/churchers/vm-bhyve https://github.com/churchers/vm-bhyve
- deltarholamda 5y agoWay back when OpenSolaris was around, I put it on a server to experiment with. There was a lot to like about it, but one thing I didn't like was there was a lot of obvious cruft that has built up over the years. Things were in places that I didn't expect, but they had been there since 1904 when people wrote C with a quill pen, so SUN couldn't just move it around, because it would break MasterCard or something. The base FreeBSD system is well thought out, and because it had the ability to, it coalesced into a very coherent system. Man pages are great, everything is where it should be.
- int_19h 5y agoTo be fair, "a lot of obvious cruft that has built up over the years" also describes old-school Unix as a whole, FreeBSD included. It's just that we got used to many of those things.
- lordgroff 5y agoWhile I'm thoroughly a Linux person, I agree. I understand why Docker and the Linux container won the day, but the fact that FreeBSD is one system helps a ton with the overall intelligibility of the system inside that container. Oh, this container is Debian based, this is Centos, that one is busybox... No, every jail is just a FreeBSD system you know what you get for its bones. That's really nice.