14 ms·

FreeBSD really deserves all the love it can get. It is an amazing system to work with and develop on, and I'll never stop evangelizing everyone about it.

nurettin 4y ago
In your opinion, what is the best thing that FreeBSD offers?
- dangerface 4y ago
  Consistency, I have been using linux for 20+ years but if its not redhat or debian based I couldn't tell you how to start or stop services etc as its always different from the unix standard and every other linux. FreeBSD is unix it doesn't try to be that and something else at the same time.
  - nix23 4y ago
    >but if its not redhat or debian based I couldn't tell you how to start or stop services The same way as in freebsd "service blabla start" it's a compatibility hook.
    - dangerface 4y ago
      on fedora its systemctl instead of service because they are all systemd up, other distros might use something other than systemd and a compatibility hook is entirely dependant on the distro deciding it cares about backwards compatibility which isn't the case for fedora or debian at least in comparison to freebsd you can still build work the old school way.
      - cesarb 4y ago
        > on fedora its systemctl instead of service because they are all systemd up Fedora (and its derivatives like RHEL/CentOS/etc) still has the "service" command, it forwards to the corresponding systemctl command. The same for Debian (the comments in Debian's "service" command even mention it's a modified version of the RHEL/Fedora one).
  - anthk 4y ago
    This, this. On Debian I had to run rcconf since Debian Sarge. On OpenBSD there's rcctl and /etc/rc.conf.local. MUCH saner. If I had internet at home before 2010, a lot of things would be far easier. My fist Linux was from 2003-4, Debian Woody. Why I learned was until 2007-8 mainly the bunch of tools from Debconf (the installer, update-alternatives, apt, dpkg-reconfigure, make-kpkg (to compile a newer kernel), debhelper and so on), not the Unix way to do things. In 2006-2009 I knew how to compile Mplayer from source (tgz) and a bunch of other tools (Cedega from CVS) with apt-get build-dep to fetch the deps and a bit more, that's it. From 2009-2010, I've got a brief match with Slackware and Arch, and from that, OpenBSD. OpenBSD was dumb simple in design, seriously. With Linux you had to do voodoo with Artsd/ESD disabling them and then more fuckery with UCM files and DMIX. OSS under BSD's (I liked FreesBIE, a lovely live CD with FreeBSD and XFCE) just worked. And it ran faster than Linux. Also, the Bash guides from the Howto's were utterly difficult, much more than the Ksh ones from Orelly (learning Perl for scripting was far easier, trust me).
- nix23 4y ago
  https://klarasystems.com/articles/deep-diving-into-the-strengths-of-freebsd/ https://klarasystems.com/articles/deep-diving-into-the-stren... https://vermaden.wordpress.com/2020/09/07/quare-freebsd/ https://vermaden.wordpress.com/2020/09/07/quare-freebsd/
  - flanked-evergl 4y ago
    I'm not sure anything of the first article can really be said to be unique value propositions, though to be fair this is not what you are claiming either. But just to go into some specifics. > One of the best features of FreeBSD is that it can be used as a general-purpose operating system. That means that FreeBSD can be used as a server, as an embedded system, or in networking. Same for Linux. > FreeBSD provides simplified software management with the help of its packaging system and the ports collection. Not a ports experts but the difference between ports and Gentoo portage does not really seem that big, certainly nothing of FreeBSD itself makes it more suitable to working with ports than a Linux kernel. And there is guix and nix also which really should cover most software management needs and flexibility anyone has. > One of the many great advantages of FreeBSD is that it allows you to customize the operating system, according to your needs. Again Gentoo, nix and guix covers this quite well. > You don’t need lots of cores – but you can definitely run it on huge multicore systems, can easily run a highly graphical interface, or choose the simpler way; FreeBSD will support you either way. Linux definitely does scale up and down, maybe FreeBSD scales down a bit smaller than Linux, but I would have to see numbers to back this up, and I don't think it is that significant in difference. > FreeBSD has been ported to a variety of instruction set architectures. Again this is not something unique to FreeBSD and Linux has a proven track record of portability. > FreeBSD includes two native file systems, the Unix File System (UFS) and the Z File System (ZFS). I guess "native" ZFS is the closest it comes to a UVP, but given Linux support for ZFS is quite good to the point where ZFS on root is possible I'm nto sure it qualifies. Not saying FreeBSD is not great, but not sure it really has any unique value propositions.
    - philjohn 4y ago
      The killer for me is that it's a full-fledged operating system, not just a kernel. Kernel and Userspace are developed, and packaged together, in the same repo.
- jlouis 4y ago
  Documentation. Everything is in one place, and it is maintained. In contrast, Linux requires you to go look up documentation in a lot of different places, and it is highly dependent on distribution what to do in a given situation. One reason for this is that FreeBSD maintains not only a kernel, but also a userland. This means a change in the kernel can immediately be followed by appropriate changes in the userland and vice versa.
  - zeendo 4y ago
    Yeah. And the exception (as a desktop user) - ArchLinux - really proves the rule here. I like Arch for a handful of reasons but the documentation is really the standout one. But my experience with FreeBSD's docs are even better - and most of that experience is quite old at this point. I can't imagine how much better the situation has gotten since FreeBSD only seems to mature and not degrade (based on comments like yours which are very common).
    - xxpor 4y ago
      I use Arch docs all the time, even for non-Arch distros. What really makes the wiki stand out is its focus on practical problems with examples, more than man-pages style docs. Is there anything similar for FreeBSD? I know the man pages are supposed to be amazing, but it's just a different problem to solve IMO. I also seriously dislike the BSD's tendency towards making --help useless, forcing you to bring up the man page. This is just for practical reasons. It's easier to hit up arrow, dash dash help pipe less than up arrow, ctrl+a, man, alt+f, ctrl+k to kill the arguments you've already written :)
      - rabf 4y ago
        https://docs.freebsd.org/en/books/handbook/ https://docs.freebsd.org/en/books/handbook/
        xxpor 4y ago
        Oh this looks really nice! /me adds a new project to the backlog...
- pjmlp 4y ago
  Being a proper UNIX descendant, but it hardly matters to most folks.
  - DominoTree 4y ago
    Funny enough, it's not quite the same, but Huawei has a Linux distribution that is certified to conform to the Unix 03 standard https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EulerOS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EulerOS
  - nurettin 4y ago
    "It's like that thing, if you care" is a very poor answer. What makes it like that thing more than others? Why is that a strong enough point to mention? You think you can run old unix software on it?
- efortis 4y ago
  An alternative OS for an heterogeneous infrastructure. For example, when there is a security bug in Linux you can shutdown those servers and spin up FreeBSD ones while the patch is being made.
  - hobo_mark 4y ago
    I guess that makes some sense if you were already running both operating systems in production. Maintaining an alternative stack would be almost twice the work otherwise.
    - efortis 4y ago
      It depends on the risk. Sometimes shutting down vulnerable servers is not worth it.
- adrian_b 4y ago
  I have been using both FreeBSD and Linux for many decades. Until around 2003 to 2005, FreeBSD had much better performance and reliability than Linux. That changed after Intel introduced Pentium 4 with multiple threads in 2003 and AMD introduced CPUs with multiple cores in 2005. Before that, multiple hardware threads were available only in very expensive computers, which were inaccessible for most people. Linux was adapted very quickly to work on multi-core or multi-thread CPUs, while FreeBSD required many years for that transition. At that time, Linux got a great advance in performance over FreeBSD, which was difficult to recover later. Nowadays, FreeBSD has device driver support for a much less number of devices than Linux, so you must be more careful when choosing hardware for it. Nevertheless, even if I use Linux in laptops, desktops and computational servers, I have continued to use FreeBSD in networking servers until today. The main reason is that the administration of a FreeBSD server requires much less time than the administration of a Linux server (which requires much less time than the administration of a Windows server). With FreeBSD, I may not do anything manually for years, if I have configured it to make certain automatic updates. With Linux, at least with the distributions that I like for other reasons, I have to always supervise the updates, because the updates frequently break things. (I assume that this might not happen with something like Debian stable, but whenever I have looked to a Linux distribution like that, it was too antiquated for my needs.) One of the main culprits is always Python, because there are a huge number of packages that insist that they are compatible only with a certain Python version, and they conflict between themselves even when I have all the possible Python versions installed. I could understand that passing from Python 2 to 3 has broken things, but why some packages like Python 3.9 and dislike 3.10 is beyond me. Also the compatibility with various Qt versions frequently causes update problems. On FreeBSD all the system is more consistent, so I need to spend no more than a couple of hours for a server after several years of 24/7 functioning, when I make some hardware update and when I might replace the major FreeBSD version at the same time.
  - capableweb 4y ago
    I have just about zero experience running any kind of BSD systems, but I just wanted to know a bit more about this: > With Linux, at least with the distributions that I like for other reasons, I have to always supervise the updates, because the updates frequently break things What distributions have you run into these issues with and how often is "frequently" for you? I'm running Arch Linux on my desktop and bunch of servers, for more than five years each one and can count the number of breakages on one hand. On the other hand, I run Ubuntu on my laptop and stopped counting the amount of issues I've had with upgrades. But I'd consider that amount of breakage from my Arch installs very infrequent, but maybe I'm comparing it to the wrong thing, as as I said before, I don't have any experience with BSD systems, maybe breakage there is even more uncommon?
- qalmakka 4y ago
  There are several, to be honest, but my favourite by far is that it cleanly separates, like all BSDs, the base system and the external packages. You can have a stable or bleeding edge base system depending on what suits your tastes, and on it install the lastest extra packages you need. They completely reside under /usr/local and are installed through different channels (the ports), cleanly separating the system from the user software, like it happens on Windows or macOS but arguably less clunky. This is something is sincerely miss in Linux, where more often than not you have to either decide between having bleeding edge packages on a bleeding edge system (like Linux, or Debian Sid) or having to deal with old packages and third party repositories (like on Debian or Red Hat). Also, the fact the whole system is shipped, tested and built by a closely knit group of developers is a huge bonus to me - the overall experience feels polished and well integrated, something Linux distros often seriously lack. At times on Linux it just feels as if some packages have just been bundled haphazardly together with zero care about documenting their interactions or how they are supposed to work, or that the packagers do not agree with upstream and do random modifications that just complicate things (like on Debian or Red Hat). Lots of stuff in FreeBSD has no upstream - FreeBSD and the other BSDs write and maintain their own kernel, libc, core utils, init system, bootloader, ...
  - CoolCold 4y ago
    Q1: what's your impression/general thoughts on immutable OSes? To name a few - Bottlerocket, Flatcar and Talos Linux, Fedora Silverblue and Android? Q2: a bit different, but similar as the end goal - immutable infrastructure where you say update your AMIs and migrating services there, shutting down old "unapgraded" servers at all?
  - anthk 4y ago
    >You can have a stable or bleeding edge base system depending on what suits your tastes, Not with OpenBSD. If you run -current, please, do not mix -release and -current pkgs/ports. NetBSD it's bound to major releases: https://www.netbsd.org/docs/misc/index.html#package-management https://www.netbsd.org/docs/misc/index.html#package-manageme...
    - 4y ago
CoolCold 4y ago
If you need fresh ears/someone to practice on - I'm all yours. I'm not ready to discuss usage on desktop - in my opinion it even more useless than Linux, but on server side, for web services related projects I'm fine. My upper limit would be ~ 5000 servers in use, 3-500 web related developers for that system/servers.
- deltarholamda 4y ago
  I would say that you can look at poudriere and jails then. You can tweak your many systems for optimal performance and have a build environment plus update system to keep them all running all on your own infrastructure, and roll out updates as required. Jails are fantastic for segregation of services. Linux has comparable things, but I've always been more comfortable in the jail environment. It just makes more sense to me. FreeBSD is much more of a Unix-y way of doing things, and if that's the kind of thing you prefer, it's excellent. I'm not a systemd hater in particular, but I do prefer Ye Olde Wayes.
  - CoolCold 4y ago
    I'm not sure what is evangelical here using FreeBSD in your reply, can you highlight? If its tweaking, then im trying to remember any kind of tweaking of the system beyond sysctls that I'd practically need ..cannot much. Jails probably OK, but as you mentioned it's nothing unique like it was till 2006.. I don't see your selling point.
mistrial9 4y ago
Is it really a good idea to make your graphical logo as "a Devil smiling" ?
- xxpor 4y ago
  This is one of those cases of if you're going to raise a stink about it, the community probably doesn't want to deal with you regardless.
- ComputerGuru 4y ago
  That ship sailed a long time ago, friend.

nurettin 4y ago

In your opinion, what is the best thing that FreeBSD offers?

dangerface 4y ago
Consistency, I have been using linux for 20+ years but if its not redhat or debian based I couldn't tell you how to start or stop services etc as its always different from the unix standard and every other linux. FreeBSD is unix it doesn't try to be that and something else at the same time.
- nix23 4y ago
  >but if its not redhat or debian based I couldn't tell you how to start or stop services The same way as in freebsd "service blabla start" it's a compatibility hook.
  - dangerface 4y ago
    on fedora its systemctl instead of service because they are all systemd up, other distros might use something other than systemd and a compatibility hook is entirely dependant on the distro deciding it cares about backwards compatibility which isn't the case for fedora or debian at least in comparison to freebsd you can still build work the old school way.
    - cesarb 4y ago
      > on fedora its systemctl instead of service because they are all systemd up Fedora (and its derivatives like RHEL/CentOS/etc) still has the "service" command, it forwards to the corresponding systemctl command. The same for Debian (the comments in Debian's "service" command even mention it's a modified version of the RHEL/Fedora one).
- anthk 4y ago
  This, this. On Debian I had to run rcconf since Debian Sarge. On OpenBSD there's rcctl and /etc/rc.conf.local. MUCH saner. If I had internet at home before 2010, a lot of things would be far easier. My fist Linux was from 2003-4, Debian Woody. Why I learned was until 2007-8 mainly the bunch of tools from Debconf (the installer, update-alternatives, apt, dpkg-reconfigure, make-kpkg (to compile a newer kernel), debhelper and so on), not the Unix way to do things. In 2006-2009 I knew how to compile Mplayer from source (tgz) and a bunch of other tools (Cedega from CVS) with apt-get build-dep to fetch the deps and a bit more, that's it. From 2009-2010, I've got a brief match with Slackware and Arch, and from that, OpenBSD. OpenBSD was dumb simple in design, seriously. With Linux you had to do voodoo with Artsd/ESD disabling them and then more fuckery with UCM files and DMIX. OSS under BSD's (I liked FreesBIE, a lovely live CD with FreeBSD and XFCE) just worked. And it ran faster than Linux. Also, the Bash guides from the Howto's were utterly difficult, much more than the Ksh ones from Orelly (learning Perl for scripting was far easier, trust me).
nix23 4y ago
https://klarasystems.com/articles/deep-diving-into-the-strengths-of-freebsd/ https://klarasystems.com/articles/deep-diving-into-the-stren... https://vermaden.wordpress.com/2020/09/07/quare-freebsd/ https://vermaden.wordpress.com/2020/09/07/quare-freebsd/
- flanked-evergl 4y ago
  I'm not sure anything of the first article can really be said to be unique value propositions, though to be fair this is not what you are claiming either. But just to go into some specifics. > One of the best features of FreeBSD is that it can be used as a general-purpose operating system. That means that FreeBSD can be used as a server, as an embedded system, or in networking. Same for Linux. > FreeBSD provides simplified software management with the help of its packaging system and the ports collection. Not a ports experts but the difference between ports and Gentoo portage does not really seem that big, certainly nothing of FreeBSD itself makes it more suitable to working with ports than a Linux kernel. And there is guix and nix also which really should cover most software management needs and flexibility anyone has. > One of the many great advantages of FreeBSD is that it allows you to customize the operating system, according to your needs. Again Gentoo, nix and guix covers this quite well. > You don’t need lots of cores – but you can definitely run it on huge multicore systems, can easily run a highly graphical interface, or choose the simpler way; FreeBSD will support you either way. Linux definitely does scale up and down, maybe FreeBSD scales down a bit smaller than Linux, but I would have to see numbers to back this up, and I don't think it is that significant in difference. > FreeBSD has been ported to a variety of instruction set architectures. Again this is not something unique to FreeBSD and Linux has a proven track record of portability. > FreeBSD includes two native file systems, the Unix File System (UFS) and the Z File System (ZFS). I guess "native" ZFS is the closest it comes to a UVP, but given Linux support for ZFS is quite good to the point where ZFS on root is possible I'm nto sure it qualifies. Not saying FreeBSD is not great, but not sure it really has any unique value propositions.
  - philjohn 4y ago
    The killer for me is that it's a full-fledged operating system, not just a kernel. Kernel and Userspace are developed, and packaged together, in the same repo.
jlouis 4y ago
Documentation. Everything is in one place, and it is maintained. In contrast, Linux requires you to go look up documentation in a lot of different places, and it is highly dependent on distribution what to do in a given situation. One reason for this is that FreeBSD maintains not only a kernel, but also a userland. This means a change in the kernel can immediately be followed by appropriate changes in the userland and vice versa.
- zeendo 4y ago
  Yeah. And the exception (as a desktop user) - ArchLinux - really proves the rule here. I like Arch for a handful of reasons but the documentation is really the standout one. But my experience with FreeBSD's docs are even better - and most of that experience is quite old at this point. I can't imagine how much better the situation has gotten since FreeBSD only seems to mature and not degrade (based on comments like yours which are very common).
  - xxpor 4y ago
    I use Arch docs all the time, even for non-Arch distros. What really makes the wiki stand out is its focus on practical problems with examples, more than man-pages style docs. Is there anything similar for FreeBSD? I know the man pages are supposed to be amazing, but it's just a different problem to solve IMO. I also seriously dislike the BSD's tendency towards making --help useless, forcing you to bring up the man page. This is just for practical reasons. It's easier to hit up arrow, dash dash help pipe less than up arrow, ctrl+a, man, alt+f, ctrl+k to kill the arguments you've already written :)
    - rabf 4y ago
      https://docs.freebsd.org/en/books/handbook/ https://docs.freebsd.org/en/books/handbook/
      - xxpor 4y ago
        Oh this looks really nice! /me adds a new project to the backlog...
pjmlp 4y ago
Being a proper UNIX descendant, but it hardly matters to most folks.
- DominoTree 4y ago
  Funny enough, it's not quite the same, but Huawei has a Linux distribution that is certified to conform to the Unix 03 standard https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EulerOS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EulerOS
- nurettin 4y ago
  "It's like that thing, if you care" is a very poor answer. What makes it like that thing more than others? Why is that a strong enough point to mention? You think you can run old unix software on it?
efortis 4y ago
An alternative OS for an heterogeneous infrastructure. For example, when there is a security bug in Linux you can shutdown those servers and spin up FreeBSD ones while the patch is being made.
- hobo_mark 4y ago
  I guess that makes some sense if you were already running both operating systems in production. Maintaining an alternative stack would be almost twice the work otherwise.
  - efortis 4y ago
    It depends on the risk. Sometimes shutting down vulnerable servers is not worth it.
adrian_b 4y ago
I have been using both FreeBSD and Linux for many decades. Until around 2003 to 2005, FreeBSD had much better performance and reliability than Linux. That changed after Intel introduced Pentium 4 with multiple threads in 2003 and AMD introduced CPUs with multiple cores in 2005. Before that, multiple hardware threads were available only in very expensive computers, which were inaccessible for most people. Linux was adapted very quickly to work on multi-core or multi-thread CPUs, while FreeBSD required many years for that transition. At that time, Linux got a great advance in performance over FreeBSD, which was difficult to recover later. Nowadays, FreeBSD has device driver support for a much less number of devices than Linux, so you must be more careful when choosing hardware for it. Nevertheless, even if I use Linux in laptops, desktops and computational servers, I have continued to use FreeBSD in networking servers until today. The main reason is that the administration of a FreeBSD server requires much less time than the administration of a Linux server (which requires much less time than the administration of a Windows server). With FreeBSD, I may not do anything manually for years, if I have configured it to make certain automatic updates. With Linux, at least with the distributions that I like for other reasons, I have to always supervise the updates, because the updates frequently break things. (I assume that this might not happen with something like Debian stable, but whenever I have looked to a Linux distribution like that, it was too antiquated for my needs.) One of the main culprits is always Python, because there are a huge number of packages that insist that they are compatible only with a certain Python version, and they conflict between themselves even when I have all the possible Python versions installed. I could understand that passing from Python 2 to 3 has broken things, but why some packages like Python 3.9 and dislike 3.10 is beyond me. Also the compatibility with various Qt versions frequently causes update problems. On FreeBSD all the system is more consistent, so I need to spend no more than a couple of hours for a server after several years of 24/7 functioning, when I make some hardware update and when I might replace the major FreeBSD version at the same time.
- capableweb 4y ago
  I have just about zero experience running any kind of BSD systems, but I just wanted to know a bit more about this: > With Linux, at least with the distributions that I like for other reasons, I have to always supervise the updates, because the updates frequently break things What distributions have you run into these issues with and how often is "frequently" for you? I'm running Arch Linux on my desktop and bunch of servers, for more than five years each one and can count the number of breakages on one hand. On the other hand, I run Ubuntu on my laptop and stopped counting the amount of issues I've had with upgrades. But I'd consider that amount of breakage from my Arch installs very infrequent, but maybe I'm comparing it to the wrong thing, as as I said before, I don't have any experience with BSD systems, maybe breakage there is even more uncommon?
qalmakka 4y ago
There are several, to be honest, but my favourite by far is that it cleanly separates, like all BSDs, the base system and the external packages. You can have a stable or bleeding edge base system depending on what suits your tastes, and on it install the lastest extra packages you need. They completely reside under /usr/local and are installed through different channels (the ports), cleanly separating the system from the user software, like it happens on Windows or macOS but arguably less clunky. This is something is sincerely miss in Linux, where more often than not you have to either decide between having bleeding edge packages on a bleeding edge system (like Linux, or Debian Sid) or having to deal with old packages and third party repositories (like on Debian or Red Hat). Also, the fact the whole system is shipped, tested and built by a closely knit group of developers is a huge bonus to me - the overall experience feels polished and well integrated, something Linux distros often seriously lack. At times on Linux it just feels as if some packages have just been bundled haphazardly together with zero care about documenting their interactions or how they are supposed to work, or that the packagers do not agree with upstream and do random modifications that just complicate things (like on Debian or Red Hat). Lots of stuff in FreeBSD has no upstream - FreeBSD and the other BSDs write and maintain their own kernel, libc, core utils, init system, bootloader, ...
- CoolCold 4y ago
  Q1: what's your impression/general thoughts on immutable OSes? To name a few - Bottlerocket, Flatcar and Talos Linux, Fedora Silverblue and Android? Q2: a bit different, but similar as the end goal - immutable infrastructure where you say update your AMIs and migrating services there, shutting down old "unapgraded" servers at all?
- anthk 4y ago
  >You can have a stable or bleeding edge base system depending on what suits your tastes, Not with OpenBSD. If you run -current, please, do not mix -release and -current pkgs/ports. NetBSD it's bound to major releases: https://www.netbsd.org/docs/misc/index.html#package-management https://www.netbsd.org/docs/misc/index.html#package-manageme...
  - 4y ago

CoolCold 4y ago

If you need fresh ears/someone to practice on - I'm all yours. I'm not ready to discuss usage on desktop - in my opinion it even more useless than Linux, but on server side, for web services related projects I'm fine. My upper limit would be ~ 5000 servers in use, 3-500 web related developers for that system/servers.

deltarholamda 4y ago
I would say that you can look at poudriere and jails then. You can tweak your many systems for optimal performance and have a build environment plus update system to keep them all running all on your own infrastructure, and roll out updates as required. Jails are fantastic for segregation of services. Linux has comparable things, but I've always been more comfortable in the jail environment. It just makes more sense to me. FreeBSD is much more of a Unix-y way of doing things, and if that's the kind of thing you prefer, it's excellent. I'm not a systemd hater in particular, but I do prefer Ye Olde Wayes.
- CoolCold 4y ago
  I'm not sure what is evangelical here using FreeBSD in your reply, can you highlight? If its tweaking, then im trying to remember any kind of tweaking of the system beyond sysctls that I'd practically need ..cannot much. Jails probably OK, but as you mentioned it's nothing unique like it was till 2006.. I don't see your selling point.

mistrial9 4y ago

Is it really a good idea to make your graphical logo as "a Devil smiling" ?

xxpor 4y ago
This is one of those cases of if you're going to raise a stink about it, the community probably doesn't want to deal with you regardless.
ComputerGuru 4y ago
That ship sailed a long time ago, friend.