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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

by 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.
    - nix23 4y ago
      >I guess it's only Docker that bothers me then. https://bastillebsd.org/ https://bastillebsd.org/
      - mekster 4y ago
        What I value is the ease of deployment through docker repository ecosystem and not exactly about containerization.
        nix23 4y ago
        Ah ok, well that's different, i just use base images a make my "apps".
cogman10 4y ago
> I have no idea how or why Debian became so popular Oh, that's simple, it's the package management system, debs. The early redhat experience involved opening up the redhat webpage and downloading every rpm related to the system you were maintaining in order to update or install stuff. yum came in 2002. Debian started with apt-get in 1998. With debian, it was `apt-get update`, `apt-get install thing`, and `apt-get upgrade` and you get everything you want/need to run stuff. For why not FreeBSD, IDK, but I'll guess that the linux kernel simply got more attention and corporate support. I don't think there's much beyond that.
pvaldes 4y ago
> I have no idea how or why Debian became so popular Ah, the old days of sourceforge, when each package downloaded for configuring something in redhat asked for a couple of another missing packages. Packages that in turn asked for a trio of missing packages. Each one of them asking for four new libraries missing...
- dools 4y ago
  Well you see I missed that because I was using FreeBSD ;)
LeFantome 4y ago
Linux became more popular than BSD because the AT&T lawsuits made the legal status of BSD questionable. By the time it was cleared up, Linux had the momentum. I am not sure that Debian popularity really had much to do with it. The first Linux distro to really pull away from the pack was Red Hat ( pre RHEL and Fedora ) with the introduction of a package manager ( RPM ). Most of the other popular distros of that era were based off RPM ( Mandrake and SUSE for example ). But RPM at first required downloading packages individually before they could be installed or upgraded. You could upgrade an entire installation to the next release with a CD that had all the new RPMs on it. Debian solved that problem by introducing the concept of a repository. While .deb files worked similarly to RPM, “apt-get update && apt-get upgrade” was a new thing. Even then, Debian was kind of a niche, power-user distro. The revolution came when Ubuntu created a more user friendly version of Debian. RPM based distros eventually got YUM and other repository based equivalents to apt-get but by then Ubuntu had the momentum. I think Debian became more popular later because of Ubuntu ( though I may have that wrong ). Ubuntu itself had a huge diaspora with many other popular distros starting off as basically Ubuntu modified to address some user complaint or other. These days, it feels like the torch is being passed to the Arch based distros. FreeBSD may never regain its position vs Linux but it has maintained its market position pretty well relative to some Linux distros I would say.
- pxc 4y ago
  > These days, it feels like the torch is being passed to the Arch based distros. It does. What would you say are the features driving that? My guesses are: 1. Users find repository management painful or cumbersome, especially but not exclusively on deb-based distros. On Arch you've basically got a couple of distro repos plus a giant catch-all (the AUR) so there's no real repo management in practice. 2. Speed is a package manager's most visible, user-facing feature, and pacman is very fast, relatively speaking. 3. People have bad experiences of botched release upgrades, and most Arch-based distros just don't have those 4. The AUR has a very low barrier to entry, which substantially soothes the typical 'straying from the happy path' pain point, because it means there are easily available packages for novel, proprietary, and quirky or ill-behaved applications which can be difficult, impossible, or slow to get packaged and maintained so they can reside in a distro's main repos.

by dools 4y ago

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.
  - nix23 4y ago
    >I guess it's only Docker that bothers me then. https://bastillebsd.org/ https://bastillebsd.org/
    - mekster 4y ago
      What I value is the ease of deployment through docker repository ecosystem and not exactly about containerization.
      - nix23 4y ago
        Ah ok, well that's different, i just use base images a make my "apps".

cogman10 4y ago

> I have no idea how or why Debian became so popular Oh, that's simple, it's the package management system, debs. The early redhat experience involved opening up the redhat webpage and downloading every rpm related to the system you were maintaining in order to update or install stuff. yum came in 2002. Debian started with apt-get in 1998. With debian, it was `apt-get update`, `apt-get install thing`, and `apt-get upgrade` and you get everything you want/need to run stuff. For why not FreeBSD, IDK, but I'll guess that the linux kernel simply got more attention and corporate support. I don't think there's much beyond that.

pvaldes 4y ago

> I have no idea how or why Debian became so popular Ah, the old days of sourceforge, when each package downloaded for configuring something in redhat asked for a couple of another missing packages. Packages that in turn asked for a trio of missing packages. Each one of them asking for four new libraries missing...

dools 4y ago
Well you see I missed that because I was using FreeBSD ;)

LeFantome 4y ago

Linux became more popular than BSD because the AT&T lawsuits made the legal status of BSD questionable. By the time it was cleared up, Linux had the momentum. I am not sure that Debian popularity really had much to do with it. The first Linux distro to really pull away from the pack was Red Hat ( pre RHEL and Fedora ) with the introduction of a package manager ( RPM ). Most of the other popular distros of that era were based off RPM ( Mandrake and SUSE for example ). But RPM at first required downloading packages individually before they could be installed or upgraded. You could upgrade an entire installation to the next release with a CD that had all the new RPMs on it. Debian solved that problem by introducing the concept of a repository. While .deb files worked similarly to RPM, “apt-get update && apt-get upgrade” was a new thing. Even then, Debian was kind of a niche, power-user distro. The revolution came when Ubuntu created a more user friendly version of Debian. RPM based distros eventually got YUM and other repository based equivalents to apt-get but by then Ubuntu had the momentum. I think Debian became more popular later because of Ubuntu ( though I may have that wrong ). Ubuntu itself had a huge diaspora with many other popular distros starting off as basically Ubuntu modified to address some user complaint or other. These days, it feels like the torch is being passed to the Arch based distros. FreeBSD may never regain its position vs Linux but it has maintained its market position pretty well relative to some Linux distros I would say.

pxc 4y ago
> These days, it feels like the torch is being passed to the Arch based distros. It does. What would you say are the features driving that? My guesses are: 1. Users find repository management painful or cumbersome, especially but not exclusively on deb-based distros. On Arch you've basically got a couple of distro repos plus a giant catch-all (the AUR) so there's no real repo management in practice. 2. Speed is a package manager's most visible, user-facing feature, and pacman is very fast, relatively speaking. 3. People have bad experiences of botched release upgrades, and most Arch-based distros just don't have those 4. The AUR has a very low barrier to entry, which substantially soothes the typical 'straying from the happy path' pain point, because it means there are easily available packages for novel, proprietary, and quirky or ill-behaved applications which can be difficult, impossible, or slow to get packaged and maintained so they can reside in a distro's main repos.