18 ms·

What FreeBSD can offer compared to other operating systems (2020)

147 points by open-source-ux 4y ago

steeleduncan 4y ago
Is there a tool like multipass out there where I can boot and run a FreeBSD VM to try it out easily? Even if there were some bash script in the form of a Gist that curls an ISO and boots in in QEMU that would be fantastic.
- znpy 4y ago
  vagrant ?
  - steeleduncan 4y ago
    Ah, thanks, I'll try that
- hericium 4y ago
  > multipass I don't know that tool but I like its 5th Element name.
ainar-g 4y ago
A similar review of OpenBSD's features: https://why.openbsd.rocks/fact/ https://why.openbsd.rocks/fact/.
mxey 4y ago
I feel like these articles always do a disservice by misrepresenting things about Linux. Just some parts I stumbled over: > [about jails] They are also very easy to debug and troubleshoot comparing even to plain Docker – not to even mention Kubernetes which requires whole team of highly skilled people to maintain. Yeah, of course, a single-node container tool is easier to run than a Kubernetes cluster. > Can you tell my how many steps (and which ones are required) to rebuild CentOS or Ubuntu for example without Bluetooth support? Why do I need to rebuild without Bluetooth support? > When using systemd(1) you never know how the services gonna start because it will be different each time. Zero determinism. systemd starts services in dependency order. The author makes it sound like systemd just randomly shuffles the services each boot for fun.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- ahoka 4y ago
  Yeah, totally clueless BSD fanboy. I have seen many during the time I was a heavy BSD user.
  - nix23 4y ago
    > Yeah, totally clueless BSD fanboy. I have seen many during the time I was a heavy BSD user. He works at Kyndryl do you know what it is/was?
  - bigpeopleareold 4y ago
    He might be, but adding some levity to this, it might be that he is just deeply ironic (even if some here complain of things incorrect in his analysis.) :D
- nix23 4y ago
  >Yeah, of course, a single-node container tool is easier to run than a Kubernetes cluster. >>comparing even to plain Docker – not to even mention Kubernetes >Why do I need to rebuild without Bluetooth support? Because you don't need it? Or you don't want it, but cannot deactivate it in bios? Security and Kernel-size >> services gonna start because it will be different each time Please read and don't make your own interpretation like with docker -> kubernetes
  - cassianoleal 4y ago
    > Because you don't need it? Or you don't want it, but cannot deactivate it in bios? Security and Kernel-size Just blacklist the kernel modules, then. Or even plain delete them from disk.
    - A4ET8a8uTh0 4y ago
      You don't have to blacklist or delete anything if it is not there to begin with, which is the point of OP.
jillesvangurp 4y ago
Unless you absolutely need BSD in production, there's a lot to be said to just use something more common/mainstream instead. I.e. Linux. It's probably going to be a lot cheaper and there's not a lot it can't do. I'm sure BSD has some unique features and properties that make it very appealing to use for certain things. However, what makes it very unappealing is the fact that there just aren't a lot of people with relevant skills and that the ones that do exist are probably on the expensive side. Many Linux users could probably train up, if they wanted or needed to. But the reality is that most never do that. Either way, hiring people with BSD skills is probably harder than finding people with Linux skills. The price of running BSD in production in a responsible way is that you need a fairly sizable team of >4-6 people. Probably salary cost alone would run close to a million per year. That's a big commitment to run anything and hiring is going to be tough. Bare metal linux has the same problem but with the difference that a lot of people have experience using it and there are all sorts of companies that can support you with this. And people tend to start using linux in cloud based environments where they can outsource the business of keeping the environment up and running. So Linux allows you to start very cheaply, relying on skills most devops people and developers already have, and then later transition to a bare metal setup with some standardized thing from a company that can offer you lots of support. No reason BSD could not work like that but of course it has been historically been like that at all and is mostly a thing that shows up on bare metal instead in a few companies that for whatever reason decided that was a good idea; maybe a very long time ago. Running BSD on a vm hosted on linux is of course possible but probably does not make a lot of sense. Doing it the other way around might make sense if you are in the PAAS/IAAS business but it seems most of that industry has long standardized on Linux. Would there be any benefit for them to switch?
- steeleduncan 4y ago
  > The price of running BSD in production in a responsible way . . . would run close to a million per year If true, this would of course be a great reason not to use BSD, but I've seen too many single person startups on HN using FreeBSD over the years to believe this statement.
  - jillesvangurp 4y ago
dools 4y ago
FreeBSD was the first *nix distro I used, and I used it for many years as both a server environment and a workstation. I agree with every point I ever see (in this and similar articles) about why FreeBSD is awesome, but I don't use it because when I create a virtual machine on GCP the default is Debian, and when I download disk images from the Orange PI or Raspberry PI websites they're Debian. I know that I can set up FreeBSD on both those platforms, but it's way easier to use the default because it's the thing that's most widely supported and has the most documentation. Nowadays the internet is so well stocked with answers that I can find copy and paste ready configuration and/or commands for just about everything I need to do with Linux on StackOverflow so the fact that I don't particularly know a lot about Debian doesn't really matter. I have no idea how or why Debian became so popular, and I have no idea how FreeBSD could replace it. I hope someone figures it out though! There's a lot to love about FreeBSD.
- mekster 4y ago
  I'm tired of hearing theoretical awesomeness but is there actually any practical awesomeness about FreeBSD? FreeBSD just lacks the modern tooling environment that is Homebrew and Docker and I no longer even consider using FreeBSD as a hobby server.
  - kitsunesoba 4y ago
    As a long time Mac user with a FreeBSD home server… what does homebrew do that pkg doesn’t? I guess homebrew has casks but that’s moot on a server that’s never going to run anything with a UI. I don’t have much to say about docker except that its dominance can be irritating when you don’t want to strongly couple all your things with Linux (yes, it technically runs on macOS and Windows but not very nicely…). I keep hoping for a more platform agnostic container to steal the show.
    - mekster 4y ago
      I actually thought I had missing packages that I use via Homebrew on FreeBSD packages but I was surprised that it's covered pretty well now. I guess it's only Docker that bothers me then.
frankjr 4y ago
To suggest that writing a shell script is superior to declaratively specifying what binary to run is just plain ridiculous.
- trasz 4y ago
  A shell script _is_ a way of specifying what binary to run. It's just that it's standardised and relatively well thought-out, as opposed to one-off hacks, like with systemd.
  - ungamed 4y ago
    I find that shell scripts feel like the hack compared to systemd startup scripts.
    - bigpeopleareold 4y ago
      Possibly. But, FWIW, this was posted a few days ago and it was good at explaining the design decisions in NetBSD's rc system over earlier versions that FreeBSD uses as well (there are a few differences): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31637755 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31637755.
  - nerdponx 4y ago
    Maybe if it was in Lua or Scheme. But Bourne shell script is a nasty messy language. Pretty much the only thing about shell scripting that is useful and not easy to do in other languages is input/output redirection and piping. Service managers should take care of things like figuring out where stdout and stderr logs are sent to, so you shouldn't have to do that stuff in your service scripts. Thus there is no benefit to shell compared to other languages / formats, and there are a lot of problems with shell scripting otherwise.
    - trasz 4y ago
      >Service managers should take care of things like figuring out where stdout and stderr logs are sent to, so you shouldn't have to do that stuff in your service scripts. You don't have to. The fact that Linux had anachronisms like that wasn't because of shell scripts, it's an entirely orthogonal issue; a typical rc script in, say, FreeBSD, looks like this: https://github.com/freebsd/freebsd-src/blob/main/libexec/rc/rc.d/ctld https://github.com/freebsd/freebsd-src/blob/main/libexec/rc/.... It's declarative, it's easy to understand, but it also provides you with flexibility when you need it, as opposed to one-off hacks with custom, fixed functionality and random syntax.
haunter 4y ago
Is the PS5 OS still a fork of FreeBSD? I know that was the case with the PS3 and PS4
- niea_11 4y ago
  This page says that the kernel is based on Freebsd 11's kernel : https://www.playstationdev.wiki/ps5devwiki/index.php?title=Kernel https://www.playstationdev.wiki/ps5devwiki/index.php?title=K... But the freebsd license isn't listed in this page : https://doc.dl.playstation.net/doc/ps5-oss/index.html https://doc.dl.playstation.net/doc/ps5-oss/index.html So I'm not sure if the first page is correct. For PS4, the freebsd license was listed here : https://doc.dl.playstation.net/doc/ps4-oss/index.html https://doc.dl.playstation.net/doc/ps4-oss/index.html
  - mekster 4y ago
    I guess the only advantage of FreeBSD is that it's got a permissive license for them to not open up the modification sources which can be a primary concern for corporates.
    - niea_11 4y ago
      Sony Visual Products (a Sony subsidiary) uses Linux (which is lincensed under GPL) on their BRAVIA TVs : https://oss.sony.net/Products/Linux/TV/KD-43XE7000_v8902.html https://oss.sony.net/Products/Linux/TV/KD-43XE7000_v8902.htm... Playstation is made by Sony Interactive Entertainment so they probably have different directives/rules
olavgg 4y ago
I can't use FreeBSD for storage anymore. I mostly use iSER(iSCSI) or NVMe-oF with RDMA transport, sadly FreeBSD doesn't support this.
bigpeopleareold 4y ago
I have been toying again with FreeBSD after a 15 year absence for fun. The intent of the project was to document every experience I have with it, from setup, to packages installed (with shell scripts to cover setting it up) and then do things like catch errors. I installed and toyed with it on another laptop and just moved to my main personal laptop a few days ago. Why FreeBSD though? I used it for two years in college, so it has a sentimental quality for me :) But also, I want to catch up when life took over (i.e. job, etc.) and understand more of my own and other biases about UNIX operating systems, particularly as I understood and now understand it. It is also a way to comfortably go through problems I encounter without mental commitments. For example, I have two issues now: the wireless doesn't load after resume sometimes and sometimes X crashes. It's ok it happens - the FreeBSD is not even setup for desktop use by default. Anything I learn here like this gets applied to work, even if it is on Linux systems. It's a form of freshening up my problem solving skills, something I miss sometimes from work. BTW, vermaden's guides are great. I use his desktop configurations and they are filled with things to look into.
j16sdiz 4y ago
The audio thing is so true. OSS is the unix de-facto standard. All problem with OSS was fixed in OSS4.
- PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago
  It might (just barely) be an accurate description of (some) of the issues, but it is absolutely not "so true". OSS is not a de-facto standard, and has many issues that led to us moving on from it back in the late 1990s. It might offer you precisely what you want, but it does not solve all the problems, and in addition is still absolutely the wrong API to offer for application development. Hint: you don't use open/read/write/close to do video, and for some similar reasons and some different ones, it's the wrong model for audio too. I've been doing audio development on Linux (and macOS and tangentially Windows) for more than 20 years. I wrote device drivers for pro-audio interfaces, application frameworks (JACK) and large applications (Ardour); I used to have to spend the closing part of the aughts and early part of the 2010's explaining to seriously misinformed people what all the problems with OSS were. That doesn't mean that there have not been issues with audio on Linux, but OSS (4 or otherwise) is not the answer to those problems and never was.
  - trasz 4y ago
    OSS is definitely not the right thing for end applications to use, I fully agree here, but what's wrong with OSS as a kernel API, compared to ALSA?
    - PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago
      Why do you think ALSA was developed? Do you imagine that it was just a temporary whim of a developer somewhere "oh, I think I'll write a new driver stack for audio on linux"? The issues are too many (and too old) for me to list them all, but the biggest of all was that OSS tries to do everything inside the kernel, which is (a) inefficient (b) prevents the use of floating point (the preferred sample format for mixing) (c) makes inserting processing elements within audio streams much more complex (and likely to be rejected because of Linus' practice of mechanism not policy). Even macOS, which originally implemented its audio mix engine in the kernel, gave up on this idea, and moved it into user space (coreaudiod). OSS's API also made dealing with pro-audio interfaces quite difficult, because of channel layout. I can't recall if OSS4 fixed this, but OSS also did not offer mmap. When it comes to device control, you really not want to export thousands of OSS_IOCTL_FOOBAR constants to describe every control on every device, so ALSA made an attempt to create a parallel control API (parallel to the I/O API). This has been partially successful, but not entirely (note that on other platforms, there is frequently a dedicated device control app; more recently a few h/w makers have shifted to provide a web interface for device control)
efortis 4y ago
Heterogeneous infrastructure was my main motivator to learn FreeBSD.
SnowHill9902 4y ago
What’s useful about FreeBSD is that one can understand the whole system and have a complete model of it in your mind. Then you feel like it’s an extension of yourself. With Linux complexity skyrockets and sub-systems are not always consistent.
- mekster 4y ago
  What? Are you high?
- 5e92cb50239222b 4y ago
  If you can fully understand just the kernel, I think you have managed to achieve some sort of god-like transcendence. This is well above the abilities of us mere mortals. I don't even want to talk about understanding the whole system (maybe back in the 70s...)
- arminiusreturns 4y ago
  Here is the main disconnect I've found as a user of both in the past (FreeBSD 3-4 era). Everyone forgets the GNU in GNU/Linux. Everyone forgets the unix philosophy. So they get on linux, and with no care of licensing, bloat, etc, tend to overutilize the vast package repos without taking a moment to think about their computing strategy. Computing is inherently, a philosophical choice! So for me, only having actually embraced the four computing freedoms as articulated by those such as RMS and Eben Moglen and the FSF, I transitioned into working towards making as much of my compute stack gpl-first, with compat licenses allowed but not preferred, and later, gplv3+ preferred. What I found was that I started gravitating to tools that were often built in GNU-land tools that had been ignored while chasing the latest thing. Emacs probably being the largest game changer for this. But often third party tools written in gpl tend to remember and adopt the unix philosophy of doing one thing and doing it well, and are still a part of my userland. Truly, there is much more behind the oft told joke, GNU is my operating system, Linux is just my (current) kernel. Linux complexity hasnt skyrocketed that much, the available ecosystem around it core has. Thus, when keeping the core pure, I find gnu/linux just as easy to have a mental model of as freebsd. FreeBSD keeps to the unix philosophy by nature, hence the at a glance disparity.
blippage 4y ago
My main desktop is Debian Stable. A few years ago I tried FreeBSD, but its desktop didn't work properly. A couple of weeks ago I decided to try it again for an amd64 server and a Raspberry Pi (model 1), headless, without desktop. The ports collection for the amd64 is extensive. Undoubtedly it is not is not as wide as Debian. FreeBSD had a binary port for Zig, which Debian doesn't have in any of its versions. The FreeBSD ports seem quite fresh, too. The letdown for me is that the binary ports for the Pi 1 (which will also include the Pi 0) on FreeBSD was much more restricted compared to amd64. I don't want to get involved in compiling from source. I did try compiling Zig, and there seemed to be a problem with the version on llvm involved. This means that for the Pi 1 I'm going back to Raspberry Pi OS. FreeBSD vs Linux: they each have their pros and cons. A lot of the technical arguments on either side tend to be overblown. You pays your money and you takes your choice. But if you held a gun to my head and said I could only choose one, I'd choose Linux. I'd say, though, that if you like Slackware, then you'll probably like FreeBSD more.
- krylon 4y ago
  > I'd say, though, that if you like Slackware, then you'll probably like FreeBSD more Hehe, someone saying this exact thing to me was what made look into BSD for the first time, and whoever said it to me was correct. On the desktop/laptop, I prefer GNU/Linux, because the hardware support etc. is just much better. My home server runs FreeBSD, though, and it hasn't given me any trouble in almost seven years (other than a µSD card dying, but I don't think the OS is to blame here).
mekster 4y ago
> After a week or month many of these packages will get updates sometimes making this CentOS system unusable or even unbootable (recent GRUB Boothole problem for example). Exaggerating a niche case doesn't do it any justice. I usually use Ubuntu but never had the system become unusable with package updates for 15 years. People say FreeBSD is more integrated but never felt it brings any benefit from user's perspective. Tried to like FreeBSD by using it on a personal server on several occasions but I see no reason to use it anymore because it lacks Homebrew and Docker which is becoming more essential to make a comfortable environment with modern tools and apps. The only better part is zfs integration but Ubuntu also has a very painless integration of zfs, I see no advantage at all. > When using systemd(1) you never know how the services gonna start because it will be different each time. What is this guy talking about? Apparently the article is heavily biased only trying to make it look like FreeBSD is saner but apparently not.
- nerdponx 4y ago
  > After a week or month many of these packages will get updates sometimes making this CentOS system unusable or even unbootable (recent GRUB Boothole problem for example). I sometimes feel like some people live in an alternate dimension where everything is broken all the time. I can't remember a single time that a Linux system I use was rendered unbootable from a regular update. It happened once, when I was messing around with nonfree Nvidia drivers under OpenSUSE, which had (has?) poor support for such things. I know it does happen to some people once in a while, but I feel like some people complain about it as if it happened to them constantly.
pjmlp 4y ago
Somehow I think there is some irony, that although FreeBSD lost to GNU/Linux in installed based, there is a growing number of MIT/BSD/Apache OSes targeting the IoT space like Azure RTOS, NuttX, Zephyr, Mbed. And bare metal runtimes like Arduino and ESP-IDF. Kind of proving the point GNU/Linux partnership was a lucky one.
- 5e92cb50239222b 4y ago
  Oh look, a proper usage of the term "bare metal"! BSD also somehow lost the embedded and appliance market where GNU is nowhere to be found. (Yes, we all know of the two or three exceptions like PlayStation and a couple of NAS vendors, which just proves the point.); that is harder for me to understand. Is the driver support and more widespread knowledge of the Linux kernel to blame for that?
  - pjmlp 4y ago
    Most likely, Android kind of proves the point that OEMs can do whatever they feel like without complying with GPL requirements, and hardly it matter to their bottom line. Still, that increase in alternative OSes seem to be triggered by not wanting to deal with Linux despite of that.
linsomniac 4y ago
One thing that FreeBSD really was great at was setting up traffic shaping for a large network. I set up per-user shaping of all DSL users for a rural ISP in maybe a couple commands and it worked very reliably. Meanwhile in Linux I've tried several times to set up shaping, and anything more than just the most basic setup I've never really gotten working reliably.
- cyberpunk 4y ago
  pf or ipfw?
  - linsomniac 4y ago
    I'm afraid I don't recall.
Koshkin 4y ago
In all fairness all these comparisons and all these BSD vs. another BSD vs. Linux OS wars are becoming long in the tooth. There haven't been any news or revelations in a long, long time. Want to try a BSD (or a Linux distro) on a VPS? Good for you. Want to do it on a laptop? By all means. Want things to work out of the box? Get a system with an OS preinstalled (and supported). Otherwise, the differences between the OS you'll find will be minor.
- dr-neptune 4y ago
  > Otherwise, the differences between the OS you'll find will be minor I think this is by design. If things are too different from one os to another, it raises the barrier to entry and hampers adoption. Furthermore, Linux distributions often also rely on things like standardized tooling and file system layout to ensure backwards compatibility There are people who try to do new things in the space (gnu guix and nixos come to mind), but they tend to be comparably fringe when put side by side with something more mainstream (and perhaps battle-tested) like Debian or BSD
diffeomorphism 4y ago
The problem with lists like this is that any possibly convincing feature tends to get copied after a while. For instance, jails are nice -> docker, podman,... exist. Might be better or worse for your use case, but similar enough that it is not worth switching for. Or ZFS is nice -> ZFS is still nice and also available on linux. Btrfs also exists. Boot environments are nice -> Snapper does this and more and things like NixOS or Fedora Silverblue go much further still. Popular package is in the repos of ... -> It is in any OS's repo. Package manager is good -> Even Windows now includes apt-... er, winget https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/package-manager/winget/ https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/package-manager/win... Kdeconnect offers nice integration of your phones, tablets and pcs -> Apple copies it, MS copies it; gsconnect, mconnect.... Combine that with the fact that switching always involves some uncomfortable adjustment and any "killer feature" becomes -> Eh, now I will have to wait a bit until it is available on the OS I am comfortable with.
- krylon 4y ago
  Yes, FreeBSD these days does not really have any unique selling point. Anything you can do on FreeBSD, you can do on Linux. But you can also do them on FreeBSD, and usually do them well. But having some variety is good thing in itself, IMHO. I recall some major DNS company making a point of always running a mixture of various hardware/OS platforms to ensure that a problem with a particular configuration would not take down the entire site. (This is a bigger issue, too - on the server and desktop, you basically have the choice between Windows and some variant of Unix[0]. There are a few alternatives on the server, OS/400, OpenVMS, z/OS, etc., but those are pretty niche.)
  - smm11 4y ago
    Diversification is the key here, but not so much when your last failsafe has one expert on earth and they're 5000 miles away.
Mister_Snuggles 4y ago
Honestly, I like and use FreeBSD. FreeBSD definitely has things to offer compared to other operating systems, but I'd also argue that the reverse is true in many cases. Linux, generally speaking, has a much nicer upgrade story. FreeBSD's works, but having to reboot and run freebsd-update multiple times during a major upgrade is annoying. FreeBSD's init system works and is generally fine, but I much prefer the simplicity of systemd unit files over FreeBSD's rc scripts. The common use-case of "Run $X as user $Y, capture it's output, restart it if it dies, and track it's PID" is incredibly easy to do in a systemd unit file. FreeBSD could learn a lot here[0]. Related to the upgrade story, packaging is interesting in FreeBSD. The base system is just "there" and managed by freebsd-update, but 3rd party software is installed via packages (ports build a package then install it). The separation of base (/, /usr, etc) vs 3rd party (/usr/local) is good, but it would be nice if all of the software was managed the same way. FreeBSD has started work on this[1], but I have no idea if it's actually going anywhere. [0] https://papers.freebsd.org/2018/bsdcan/rice-the_tragedy_of_systemd/ https://papers.freebsd.org/2018/bsdcan/rice-the_tragedy_of_s... [1] https://wiki.freebsd.org/PkgBase https://wiki.freebsd.org/PkgBase
- dsr_ 4y ago
  "Run $X as user $Y, capture its output, restart it if it dies, and track its PID" for daemontools-style systems: #!/bin/bash cd /opt/minecraft-player exec 2>&1 exec setuidgid minecraft /usr/bin/java -Xmx2048M -Xms1024M -jar /opt/minecraft-player/server.jar --nogui --port 32122 and logging: #!/bin/bash exec multilog s10485760 n5 /var/log/minecraft-player Logging is set for 10MB files, keep last 5. The first one goes into a servicename/run file, and the second into servicename/log/run. Running the run file is precisely what the daemontools system will do. There's no need to track the PID. `svstat servicename` will tell you how long it's been running or if it's disabled. The default is to restart on death, and if it flickers too much, disable it. Adding /etc/init.d wrappers to this is a 60 second edit of a skeleton file. Code is superior to configuration when the code is this simple.
  - dijit 4y ago
    As much as I really really dislike systemd, bash is not the answer. I think we should try to do something better, I’m certain nobody will agree on a good language to use but I might propose starlark (a dialect of python, which recently got a rust implementation of the language thanks to Facebook). I should add: I’m quite adept at bash (I have the LinkedIn skill badge! (This is a joke)) but I can agree with people who dislike it, there are too many edge cases, it’s not easy to understand and while expressive and powerful: evidently we should have something that is easy too.
kalleboo 4y ago
My only experience with FreeBSD is running a TrueNAS server, and there's some weird bug where once a month or so all the RAM (literally like 70 GB) gets eaten up by FreeBSD Laundry which crowds out the ZFS cache causing performance to tank and then never goes down again. I've not installed anything "weird", just running a few basic jails like FAMP. I've taken to periodically running a task that allocates craploads of memory and lightly dirties it to force the OS to "collect" the laundry. Googling it finds a random smattering of other people who have the same issue but no solutions. So my take on FreeBSD is that it's pretty nice but without the larger user base of Linux it has more weird bugs that don't get teased out.
hereforphone 4y ago
The reason FreeBSD is not my daily driver is 1) limited video card support, and 2) limited steam/proton support. In other words, I game on my desktop machine, and play Windows games under Steam in Linux. I have moved to using FreeBSD for my servers though, and am happy with it for the most part.
- cyberpunk 4y ago
  I run a lot of unmodified linux binaries on my FreeBSD box. I've not tried any games though, but linux binaries generally 'just work' on FreeBSD.
giantrobot 4y ago
I always want to love FreeBSD, it's the first Unix system I used with any regularity many years ago. Every few years I get some inspiration to load it up and play. Without fail every time I have tried I've run into some problem with hardware support. From it just refusing to boot on an Opteron server to networking just not working on a mini PC. Ubuntu on those same machines had zero problems. So it doesn't matter what FreeBSD can offer if I can't run it on the hardware I have available. If I'm stuck running it in a VM why would I bother with it?
vogon_laureate 4y ago
I got started with BSDs just over 20 years ago when I needed to setup some servers and firewalls and the choice was between linux 2.2's ipchains or OpenBSD's pf. I was blown away by the simplicity of the firewall rules syntax for pf and then became enamoured with other niceties like the emphasis on security and correctness, the logical filesystem hierarchy, the simple licensing, the UNIX pedigree (sort of), the completely integrated build system for userspace and kernel, the fact that you had to actually turn services on rather than have several daemons running unnecessarily, and MAN pages that actually were useful and had examples and everything. I'm still a big fan and have at least one of each major BSD variant running on one server or another just to keep up with developments across the space. So many innovations we take for granted come from the BSDs or were incubated there and they continue to innovate and refine the OSes in ways that I think more people should pay attention to. Just a few of the things that we can thank BSDs for: • The 'TCP/IP stack' • OpenSSH • OpenSMTPd • OpenBGPd • OpenNTPd • LibreSSL • privilege separation • pf • Darwin (The MacOS Kernel) • The Ports system (pkgsrc in NetBSD and DragonflyBSD. Inspired Gentoo) • A whole slew of security innovations : https://www.openbsd.org/innovations.html https://www.openbsd.org/innovations.html • NetBSD can run your toaster: https://wiki.netbsd.org/ports/ https://wiki.netbsd.org/ports/ • DragonflyBSD's HAMMER filestystem • OpenBSD's Todd Miller also looks after development of sudo
mrtweetyhack 4y ago

Is there a tool like multipass out there where I can boot and run a FreeBSD VM to try it out easily? Even if there were some bash script in the form of a Gist that curls an ISO and boots in in QEMU that would be fantastic.

znpy 4y ago
vagrant ?
- steeleduncan 4y ago
  Ah, thanks, I'll try that
hericium 4y ago
> multipass I don't know that tool but I like its 5th Element name.

ainar-g 4y ago

A similar review of OpenBSD's features: https://why.openbsd.rocks/fact/ https://why.openbsd.rocks/fact/.

mxey 4y ago

I feel like these articles always do a disservice by misrepresenting things about Linux. Just some parts I stumbled over: > [about jails] They are also very easy to debug and troubleshoot comparing even to plain Docker – not to even mention Kubernetes which requires whole team of highly skilled people to maintain. Yeah, of course, a single-node container tool is easier to run than a Kubernetes cluster. > Can you tell my how many steps (and which ones are required) to rebuild CentOS or Ubuntu for example without Bluetooth support? Why do I need to rebuild without Bluetooth support? > When using systemd(1) you never know how the services gonna start because it will be different each time. Zero determinism. systemd starts services in dependency order. The author makes it sound like systemd just randomly shuffles the services each boot for fun.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
ahoka 4y ago
Yeah, totally clueless BSD fanboy. I have seen many during the time I was a heavy BSD user.
- nix23 4y ago
  > Yeah, totally clueless BSD fanboy. I have seen many during the time I was a heavy BSD user. He works at Kyndryl do you know what it is/was?
- bigpeopleareold 4y ago
  He might be, but adding some levity to this, it might be that he is just deeply ironic (even if some here complain of things incorrect in his analysis.) :D
nix23 4y ago
>Yeah, of course, a single-node container tool is easier to run than a Kubernetes cluster. >>comparing even to plain Docker – not to even mention Kubernetes >Why do I need to rebuild without Bluetooth support? Because you don't need it? Or you don't want it, but cannot deactivate it in bios? Security and Kernel-size >> services gonna start because it will be different each time Please read and don't make your own interpretation like with docker -> kubernetes
- cassianoleal 4y ago
  > Because you don't need it? Or you don't want it, but cannot deactivate it in bios? Security and Kernel-size Just blacklist the kernel modules, then. Or even plain delete them from disk.
  - A4ET8a8uTh0 4y ago
    You don't have to blacklist or delete anything if it is not there to begin with, which is the point of OP.

jillesvangurp 4y ago

Unless you absolutely need BSD in production, there's a lot to be said to just use something more common/mainstream instead. I.e. Linux. It's probably going to be a lot cheaper and there's not a lot it can't do. I'm sure BSD has some unique features and properties that make it very appealing to use for certain things. However, what makes it very unappealing is the fact that there just aren't a lot of people with relevant skills and that the ones that do exist are probably on the expensive side. Many Linux users could probably train up, if they wanted or needed to. But the reality is that most never do that. Either way, hiring people with BSD skills is probably harder than finding people with Linux skills. The price of running BSD in production in a responsible way is that you need a fairly sizable team of >4-6 people. Probably salary cost alone would run close to a million per year. That's a big commitment to run anything and hiring is going to be tough. Bare metal linux has the same problem but with the difference that a lot of people have experience using it and there are all sorts of companies that can support you with this. And people tend to start using linux in cloud based environments where they can outsource the business of keeping the environment up and running. So Linux allows you to start very cheaply, relying on skills most devops people and developers already have, and then later transition to a bare metal setup with some standardized thing from a company that can offer you lots of support. No reason BSD could not work like that but of course it has been historically been like that at all and is mostly a thing that shows up on bare metal instead in a few companies that for whatever reason decided that was a good idea; maybe a very long time ago. Running BSD on a vm hosted on linux is of course possible but probably does not make a lot of sense. Doing it the other way around might make sense if you are in the PAAS/IAAS business but it seems most of that industry has long standardized on Linux. Would there be any benefit for them to switch?

steeleduncan 4y ago
> The price of running BSD in production in a responsible way . . . would run close to a million per year If true, this would of course be a great reason not to use BSD, but I've seen too many single person startups on HN using FreeBSD over the years to believe this statement.
- jillesvangurp 4y ago

dools 4y ago

FreeBSD was the first *nix distro I used, and I used it for many years as both a server environment and a workstation. I agree with every point I ever see (in this and similar articles) about why FreeBSD is awesome, but I don't use it because when I create a virtual machine on GCP the default is Debian, and when I download disk images from the Orange PI or Raspberry PI websites they're Debian. I know that I can set up FreeBSD on both those platforms, but it's way easier to use the default because it's the thing that's most widely supported and has the most documentation. Nowadays the internet is so well stocked with answers that I can find copy and paste ready configuration and/or commands for just about everything I need to do with Linux on StackOverflow so the fact that I don't particularly know a lot about Debian doesn't really matter. I have no idea how or why Debian became so popular, and I have no idea how FreeBSD could replace it. I hope someone figures it out though! There's a lot to love about FreeBSD.

mekster 4y ago
I'm tired of hearing theoretical awesomeness but is there actually any practical awesomeness about FreeBSD? FreeBSD just lacks the modern tooling environment that is Homebrew and Docker and I no longer even consider using FreeBSD as a hobby server.
- kitsunesoba 4y ago
  As a long time Mac user with a FreeBSD home server… what does homebrew do that pkg doesn’t? I guess homebrew has casks but that’s moot on a server that’s never going to run anything with a UI. I don’t have much to say about docker except that its dominance can be irritating when you don’t want to strongly couple all your things with Linux (yes, it technically runs on macOS and Windows but not very nicely…). I keep hoping for a more platform agnostic container to steal the show.
  - mekster 4y ago
    I actually thought I had missing packages that I use via Homebrew on FreeBSD packages but I was surprised that it's covered pretty well now. I guess it's only Docker that bothers me then.

frankjr 4y ago

To suggest that writing a shell script is superior to declaratively specifying what binary to run is just plain ridiculous.

trasz 4y ago
A shell script _is_ a way of specifying what binary to run. It's just that it's standardised and relatively well thought-out, as opposed to one-off hacks, like with systemd.
- ungamed 4y ago
  I find that shell scripts feel like the hack compared to systemd startup scripts.
  - bigpeopleareold 4y ago
    Possibly. But, FWIW, this was posted a few days ago and it was good at explaining the design decisions in NetBSD's rc system over earlier versions that FreeBSD uses as well (there are a few differences): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31637755 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31637755.
- nerdponx 4y ago
  Maybe if it was in Lua or Scheme. But Bourne shell script is a nasty messy language. Pretty much the only thing about shell scripting that is useful and not easy to do in other languages is input/output redirection and piping. Service managers should take care of things like figuring out where stdout and stderr logs are sent to, so you shouldn't have to do that stuff in your service scripts. Thus there is no benefit to shell compared to other languages / formats, and there are a lot of problems with shell scripting otherwise.
  - trasz 4y ago
    >Service managers should take care of things like figuring out where stdout and stderr logs are sent to, so you shouldn't have to do that stuff in your service scripts. You don't have to. The fact that Linux had anachronisms like that wasn't because of shell scripts, it's an entirely orthogonal issue; a typical rc script in, say, FreeBSD, looks like this: https://github.com/freebsd/freebsd-src/blob/main/libexec/rc/rc.d/ctld https://github.com/freebsd/freebsd-src/blob/main/libexec/rc/.... It's declarative, it's easy to understand, but it also provides you with flexibility when you need it, as opposed to one-off hacks with custom, fixed functionality and random syntax.

haunter 4y ago

Is the PS5 OS still a fork of FreeBSD? I know that was the case with the PS3 and PS4

niea_11 4y ago
This page says that the kernel is based on Freebsd 11's kernel : https://www.playstationdev.wiki/ps5devwiki/index.php?title=Kernel https://www.playstationdev.wiki/ps5devwiki/index.php?title=K... But the freebsd license isn't listed in this page : https://doc.dl.playstation.net/doc/ps5-oss/index.html https://doc.dl.playstation.net/doc/ps5-oss/index.html So I'm not sure if the first page is correct. For PS4, the freebsd license was listed here : https://doc.dl.playstation.net/doc/ps4-oss/index.html https://doc.dl.playstation.net/doc/ps4-oss/index.html
- mekster 4y ago
  I guess the only advantage of FreeBSD is that it's got a permissive license for them to not open up the modification sources which can be a primary concern for corporates.
  - niea_11 4y ago
    Sony Visual Products (a Sony subsidiary) uses Linux (which is lincensed under GPL) on their BRAVIA TVs : https://oss.sony.net/Products/Linux/TV/KD-43XE7000_v8902.html https://oss.sony.net/Products/Linux/TV/KD-43XE7000_v8902.htm... Playstation is made by Sony Interactive Entertainment so they probably have different directives/rules

olavgg 4y ago

I can't use FreeBSD for storage anymore. I mostly use iSER(iSCSI) or NVMe-oF with RDMA transport, sadly FreeBSD doesn't support this.

bigpeopleareold 4y ago

I have been toying again with FreeBSD after a 15 year absence for fun. The intent of the project was to document every experience I have with it, from setup, to packages installed (with shell scripts to cover setting it up) and then do things like catch errors. I installed and toyed with it on another laptop and just moved to my main personal laptop a few days ago. Why FreeBSD though? I used it for two years in college, so it has a sentimental quality for me :) But also, I want to catch up when life took over (i.e. job, etc.) and understand more of my own and other biases about UNIX operating systems, particularly as I understood and now understand it. It is also a way to comfortably go through problems I encounter without mental commitments. For example, I have two issues now: the wireless doesn't load after resume sometimes and sometimes X crashes. It's ok it happens - the FreeBSD is not even setup for desktop use by default. Anything I learn here like this gets applied to work, even if it is on Linux systems. It's a form of freshening up my problem solving skills, something I miss sometimes from work. BTW, vermaden's guides are great. I use his desktop configurations and they are filled with things to look into.

j16sdiz 4y ago

The audio thing is so true. OSS is the unix de-facto standard. All problem with OSS was fixed in OSS4.

PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago
It might (just barely) be an accurate description of (some) of the issues, but it is absolutely not "so true". OSS is not a de-facto standard, and has many issues that led to us moving on from it back in the late 1990s. It might offer you precisely what you want, but it does not solve all the problems, and in addition is still absolutely the wrong API to offer for application development. Hint: you don't use open/read/write/close to do video, and for some similar reasons and some different ones, it's the wrong model for audio too. I've been doing audio development on Linux (and macOS and tangentially Windows) for more than 20 years. I wrote device drivers for pro-audio interfaces, application frameworks (JACK) and large applications (Ardour); I used to have to spend the closing part of the aughts and early part of the 2010's explaining to seriously misinformed people what all the problems with OSS were. That doesn't mean that there have not been issues with audio on Linux, but OSS (4 or otherwise) is not the answer to those problems and never was.
- trasz 4y ago
  OSS is definitely not the right thing for end applications to use, I fully agree here, but what's wrong with OSS as a kernel API, compared to ALSA?
  - PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago
    Why do you think ALSA was developed? Do you imagine that it was just a temporary whim of a developer somewhere "oh, I think I'll write a new driver stack for audio on linux"? The issues are too many (and too old) for me to list them all, but the biggest of all was that OSS tries to do everything inside the kernel, which is (a) inefficient (b) prevents the use of floating point (the preferred sample format for mixing) (c) makes inserting processing elements within audio streams much more complex (and likely to be rejected because of Linus' practice of mechanism not policy). Even macOS, which originally implemented its audio mix engine in the kernel, gave up on this idea, and moved it into user space (coreaudiod). OSS's API also made dealing with pro-audio interfaces quite difficult, because of channel layout. I can't recall if OSS4 fixed this, but OSS also did not offer mmap. When it comes to device control, you really not want to export thousands of OSS_IOCTL_FOOBAR constants to describe every control on every device, so ALSA made an attempt to create a parallel control API (parallel to the I/O API). This has been partially successful, but not entirely (note that on other platforms, there is frequently a dedicated device control app; more recently a few h/w makers have shifted to provide a web interface for device control)

efortis 4y ago

Heterogeneous infrastructure was my main motivator to learn FreeBSD.

SnowHill9902 4y ago

What’s useful about FreeBSD is that one can understand the whole system and have a complete model of it in your mind. Then you feel like it’s an extension of yourself. With Linux complexity skyrockets and sub-systems are not always consistent.

mekster 4y ago
What? Are you high?
5e92cb50239222b 4y ago
If you can fully understand just the kernel, I think you have managed to achieve some sort of god-like transcendence. This is well above the abilities of us mere mortals. I don't even want to talk about understanding the whole system (maybe back in the 70s...)
arminiusreturns 4y ago
Here is the main disconnect I've found as a user of both in the past (FreeBSD 3-4 era). Everyone forgets the GNU in GNU/Linux. Everyone forgets the unix philosophy. So they get on linux, and with no care of licensing, bloat, etc, tend to overutilize the vast package repos without taking a moment to think about their computing strategy. Computing is inherently, a philosophical choice! So for me, only having actually embraced the four computing freedoms as articulated by those such as RMS and Eben Moglen and the FSF, I transitioned into working towards making as much of my compute stack gpl-first, with compat licenses allowed but not preferred, and later, gplv3+ preferred. What I found was that I started gravitating to tools that were often built in GNU-land tools that had been ignored while chasing the latest thing. Emacs probably being the largest game changer for this. But often third party tools written in gpl tend to remember and adopt the unix philosophy of doing one thing and doing it well, and are still a part of my userland. Truly, there is much more behind the oft told joke, GNU is my operating system, Linux is just my (current) kernel. Linux complexity hasnt skyrocketed that much, the available ecosystem around it core has. Thus, when keeping the core pure, I find gnu/linux just as easy to have a mental model of as freebsd. FreeBSD keeps to the unix philosophy by nature, hence the at a glance disparity.

blippage 4y ago

My main desktop is Debian Stable. A few years ago I tried FreeBSD, but its desktop didn't work properly. A couple of weeks ago I decided to try it again for an amd64 server and a Raspberry Pi (model 1), headless, without desktop. The ports collection for the amd64 is extensive. Undoubtedly it is not is not as wide as Debian. FreeBSD had a binary port for Zig, which Debian doesn't have in any of its versions. The FreeBSD ports seem quite fresh, too. The letdown for me is that the binary ports for the Pi 1 (which will also include the Pi 0) on FreeBSD was much more restricted compared to amd64. I don't want to get involved in compiling from source. I did try compiling Zig, and there seemed to be a problem with the version on llvm involved. This means that for the Pi 1 I'm going back to Raspberry Pi OS. FreeBSD vs Linux: they each have their pros and cons. A lot of the technical arguments on either side tend to be overblown. You pays your money and you takes your choice. But if you held a gun to my head and said I could only choose one, I'd choose Linux. I'd say, though, that if you like Slackware, then you'll probably like FreeBSD more.

krylon 4y ago
> I'd say, though, that if you like Slackware, then you'll probably like FreeBSD more Hehe, someone saying this exact thing to me was what made look into BSD for the first time, and whoever said it to me was correct. On the desktop/laptop, I prefer GNU/Linux, because the hardware support etc. is just much better. My home server runs FreeBSD, though, and it hasn't given me any trouble in almost seven years (other than a µSD card dying, but I don't think the OS is to blame here).

mekster 4y ago

> After a week or month many of these packages will get updates sometimes making this CentOS system unusable or even unbootable (recent GRUB Boothole problem for example). Exaggerating a niche case doesn't do it any justice. I usually use Ubuntu but never had the system become unusable with package updates for 15 years. People say FreeBSD is more integrated but never felt it brings any benefit from user's perspective. Tried to like FreeBSD by using it on a personal server on several occasions but I see no reason to use it anymore because it lacks Homebrew and Docker which is becoming more essential to make a comfortable environment with modern tools and apps. The only better part is zfs integration but Ubuntu also has a very painless integration of zfs, I see no advantage at all. > When using systemd(1) you never know how the services gonna start because it will be different each time. What is this guy talking about? Apparently the article is heavily biased only trying to make it look like FreeBSD is saner but apparently not.

nerdponx 4y ago
> After a week or month many of these packages will get updates sometimes making this CentOS system unusable or even unbootable (recent GRUB Boothole problem for example). I sometimes feel like some people live in an alternate dimension where everything is broken all the time. I can't remember a single time that a Linux system I use was rendered unbootable from a regular update. It happened once, when I was messing around with nonfree Nvidia drivers under OpenSUSE, which had (has?) poor support for such things. I know it does happen to some people once in a while, but I feel like some people complain about it as if it happened to them constantly.

pjmlp 4y ago

Somehow I think there is some irony, that although FreeBSD lost to GNU/Linux in installed based, there is a growing number of MIT/BSD/Apache OSes targeting the IoT space like Azure RTOS, NuttX, Zephyr, Mbed. And bare metal runtimes like Arduino and ESP-IDF. Kind of proving the point GNU/Linux partnership was a lucky one.

5e92cb50239222b 4y ago
Oh look, a proper usage of the term "bare metal"! BSD also somehow lost the embedded and appliance market where GNU is nowhere to be found. (Yes, we all know of the two or three exceptions like PlayStation and a couple of NAS vendors, which just proves the point.); that is harder for me to understand. Is the driver support and more widespread knowledge of the Linux kernel to blame for that?
- pjmlp 4y ago
  Most likely, Android kind of proves the point that OEMs can do whatever they feel like without complying with GPL requirements, and hardly it matter to their bottom line. Still, that increase in alternative OSes seem to be triggered by not wanting to deal with Linux despite of that.

linsomniac 4y ago

One thing that FreeBSD really was great at was setting up traffic shaping for a large network. I set up per-user shaping of all DSL users for a rural ISP in maybe a couple commands and it worked very reliably. Meanwhile in Linux I've tried several times to set up shaping, and anything more than just the most basic setup I've never really gotten working reliably.

cyberpunk 4y ago
pf or ipfw?
- linsomniac 4y ago
  I'm afraid I don't recall.

Koshkin 4y ago

In all fairness all these comparisons and all these BSD vs. another BSD vs. Linux OS wars are becoming long in the tooth. There haven't been any news or revelations in a long, long time. Want to try a BSD (or a Linux distro) on a VPS? Good for you. Want to do it on a laptop? By all means. Want things to work out of the box? Get a system with an OS preinstalled (and supported). Otherwise, the differences between the OS you'll find will be minor.

dr-neptune 4y ago
> Otherwise, the differences between the OS you'll find will be minor I think this is by design. If things are too different from one os to another, it raises the barrier to entry and hampers adoption. Furthermore, Linux distributions often also rely on things like standardized tooling and file system layout to ensure backwards compatibility There are people who try to do new things in the space (gnu guix and nixos come to mind), but they tend to be comparably fringe when put side by side with something more mainstream (and perhaps battle-tested) like Debian or BSD

diffeomorphism 4y ago

The problem with lists like this is that any possibly convincing feature tends to get copied after a while. For instance, jails are nice -> docker, podman,... exist. Might be better or worse for your use case, but similar enough that it is not worth switching for. Or ZFS is nice -> ZFS is still nice and also available on linux. Btrfs also exists. Boot environments are nice -> Snapper does this and more and things like NixOS or Fedora Silverblue go much further still. Popular package is in the repos of ... -> It is in any OS's repo. Package manager is good -> Even Windows now includes apt-... er, winget https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/package-manager/winget/ https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/package-manager/win... Kdeconnect offers nice integration of your phones, tablets and pcs -> Apple copies it, MS copies it; gsconnect, mconnect.... Combine that with the fact that switching always involves some uncomfortable adjustment and any "killer feature" becomes -> Eh, now I will have to wait a bit until it is available on the OS I am comfortable with.

krylon 4y ago
Yes, FreeBSD these days does not really have any unique selling point. Anything you can do on FreeBSD, you can do on Linux. But you can also do them on FreeBSD, and usually do them well. But having some variety is good thing in itself, IMHO. I recall some major DNS company making a point of always running a mixture of various hardware/OS platforms to ensure that a problem with a particular configuration would not take down the entire site. (This is a bigger issue, too - on the server and desktop, you basically have the choice between Windows and some variant of Unix[0]. There are a few alternatives on the server, OS/400, OpenVMS, z/OS, etc., but those are pretty niche.)
- smm11 4y ago
  Diversification is the key here, but not so much when your last failsafe has one expert on earth and they're 5000 miles away.

Mister_Snuggles 4y ago

Honestly, I like and use FreeBSD. FreeBSD definitely has things to offer compared to other operating systems, but I'd also argue that the reverse is true in many cases. Linux, generally speaking, has a much nicer upgrade story. FreeBSD's works, but having to reboot and run freebsd-update multiple times during a major upgrade is annoying. FreeBSD's init system works and is generally fine, but I much prefer the simplicity of systemd unit files over FreeBSD's rc scripts. The common use-case of "Run $X as user $Y, capture it's output, restart it if it dies, and track it's PID" is incredibly easy to do in a systemd unit file. FreeBSD could learn a lot here[0]. Related to the upgrade story, packaging is interesting in FreeBSD. The base system is just "there" and managed by freebsd-update, but 3rd party software is installed via packages (ports build a package then install it). The separation of base (/, /usr, etc) vs 3rd party (/usr/local) is good, but it would be nice if all of the software was managed the same way. FreeBSD has started work on this[1], but I have no idea if it's actually going anywhere. [0] https://papers.freebsd.org/2018/bsdcan/rice-the_tragedy_of_systemd/ https://papers.freebsd.org/2018/bsdcan/rice-the_tragedy_of_s... [1] https://wiki.freebsd.org/PkgBase https://wiki.freebsd.org/PkgBase

dsr_ 4y ago
"Run $X as user $Y, capture its output, restart it if it dies, and track its PID" for daemontools-style systems: #!/bin/bash cd /opt/minecraft-player exec 2>&1 exec setuidgid minecraft /usr/bin/java -Xmx2048M -Xms1024M -jar /opt/minecraft-player/server.jar --nogui --port 32122 and logging: #!/bin/bash exec multilog s10485760 n5 /var/log/minecraft-player Logging is set for 10MB files, keep last 5. The first one goes into a servicename/run file, and the second into servicename/log/run. Running the run file is precisely what the daemontools system will do. There's no need to track the PID. `svstat servicename` will tell you how long it's been running or if it's disabled. The default is to restart on death, and if it flickers too much, disable it. Adding /etc/init.d wrappers to this is a 60 second edit of a skeleton file. Code is superior to configuration when the code is this simple.
- dijit 4y ago
  As much as I really really dislike systemd, bash is not the answer. I think we should try to do something better, I’m certain nobody will agree on a good language to use but I might propose starlark (a dialect of python, which recently got a rust implementation of the language thanks to Facebook). I should add: I’m quite adept at bash (I have the LinkedIn skill badge! (This is a joke)) but I can agree with people who dislike it, there are too many edge cases, it’s not easy to understand and while expressive and powerful: evidently we should have something that is easy too.

kalleboo 4y ago

My only experience with FreeBSD is running a TrueNAS server, and there's some weird bug where once a month or so all the RAM (literally like 70 GB) gets eaten up by FreeBSD Laundry which crowds out the ZFS cache causing performance to tank and then never goes down again. I've not installed anything "weird", just running a few basic jails like FAMP. I've taken to periodically running a task that allocates craploads of memory and lightly dirties it to force the OS to "collect" the laundry. Googling it finds a random smattering of other people who have the same issue but no solutions. So my take on FreeBSD is that it's pretty nice but without the larger user base of Linux it has more weird bugs that don't get teased out.

hereforphone 4y ago

The reason FreeBSD is not my daily driver is 1) limited video card support, and 2) limited steam/proton support. In other words, I game on my desktop machine, and play Windows games under Steam in Linux. I have moved to using FreeBSD for my servers though, and am happy with it for the most part.

cyberpunk 4y ago
I run a lot of unmodified linux binaries on my FreeBSD box. I've not tried any games though, but linux binaries generally 'just work' on FreeBSD.

giantrobot 4y ago

I always want to love FreeBSD, it's the first Unix system I used with any regularity many years ago. Every few years I get some inspiration to load it up and play. Without fail every time I have tried I've run into some problem with hardware support. From it just refusing to boot on an Opteron server to networking just not working on a mini PC. Ubuntu on those same machines had zero problems. So it doesn't matter what FreeBSD can offer if I can't run it on the hardware I have available. If I'm stuck running it in a VM why would I bother with it?

vogon_laureate 4y ago

I got started with BSDs just over 20 years ago when I needed to setup some servers and firewalls and the choice was between linux 2.2's ipchains or OpenBSD's pf. I was blown away by the simplicity of the firewall rules syntax for pf and then became enamoured with other niceties like the emphasis on security and correctness, the logical filesystem hierarchy, the simple licensing, the UNIX pedigree (sort of), the completely integrated build system for userspace and kernel, the fact that you had to actually turn services on rather than have several daemons running unnecessarily, and MAN pages that actually were useful and had examples and everything. I'm still a big fan and have at least one of each major BSD variant running on one server or another just to keep up with developments across the space. So many innovations we take for granted come from the BSDs or were incubated there and they continue to innovate and refine the OSes in ways that I think more people should pay attention to. Just a few of the things that we can thank BSDs for: • The 'TCP/IP stack' • OpenSSH • OpenSMTPd • OpenBGPd • OpenNTPd • LibreSSL • privilege separation • pf • Darwin (The MacOS Kernel) • The Ports system (pkgsrc in NetBSD and DragonflyBSD. Inspired Gentoo) • A whole slew of security innovations : https://www.openbsd.org/innovations.html https://www.openbsd.org/innovations.html • NetBSD can run your toaster: https://wiki.netbsd.org/ports/ https://wiki.netbsd.org/ports/ • DragonflyBSD's HAMMER filestystem • OpenBSD's Todd Miller also looks after development of sudo

mrtweetyhack 4y ago