4 ms·

This is untrue in my experience. I've used FreeBSD a fair bit in the past and Ubuntu and Debian more continuously. Unless something radically changed recently.

by tomxor 4y ago

This is untrue in my experience. I've used FreeBSD a fair bit in the past and Ubuntu and Debian more continuously. Unless something radically changed recently. My experience is about 6-8 years old now but FreeBSD requires a lot more configuration when setting up common services, whereas Ubuntu and even Debian have good defaults that you can usually bring up without having to first consume the entire manual for that service. There's probably a reasonable sounding argument buried behind this like "you cannot run a service securely if you do not fully understand the configuration first." but in practice this just results in poor initial configurations because it takes time to fully understand all of the knobs of configuration on a service. FreeBSD can be a solid system, but it's less practical in many ways for reasons like this.

lstodd 4y ago
This is untrue in my experience. I was using FreeBSD as my desktop for almost 15 years, since the 4.1 times, and the amount of work it took to make some sane vpn client out of an ubuntu is nowhere near what I had as my griefs with FreeBSD back then. Not even mentioning pf vs iptables and how 20(?) years passed before linux had something comparable like nftables. Nowadays it's mostly fine, but.. Case in point : I had to write and contribute wireguard support to the netplan to make it marginally sane.
- tomxor 4y ago
  I sense that we might be basing our conclusion on qualitatively and temporally different things. My limited experience with FreeBSD was as a desktop and server for a few years around 2009ish to 2012, but also as a basic user of basic services. From memory a lot more hoops had to be jumped to get equivalent things working on FreeBSD, and I was always left with a nagging feeling after initial setup on FreeBSD that I didn't yet know enough to feel confident in the configurations I had produced, compared to Debian and et al at the time, where configuration felt like they left the bare minimum for you to customise, and working defaults for the rest that you could gradually learn to tweak without the pressure of getting every variable correct from the get go. However as a user who already thoroughly understands the service or it's domain I expect this kind of detail may be lost... instead you can compare based more on the flaws of the configurations and their implementations (which I suspect applies to your experience). But for the rest of us it results in flaky custom initial configuration. It's the same for me if I pick out a piece of software now that I have become very familiar with and already know how to configure inside out - i wouldn't experience the same kind of problem that someone unfamiliar would. To clarify, I guess I'm talking about sane defaults from the perspective of new users, poor defaults combined with new users can end up with insecure or problematic results - even if the default configuration alone is technically fine. I expect Linux and FreeBSD and other BSDs have likely improved a lot over the last decade from either perspective anyway.

by tomxor 4y ago

lstodd 4y ago

This is untrue in my experience. I was using FreeBSD as my desktop for almost 15 years, since the 4.1 times, and the amount of work it took to make some sane vpn client out of an ubuntu is nowhere near what I had as my griefs with FreeBSD back then. Not even mentioning pf vs iptables and how 20(?) years passed before linux had something comparable like nftables. Nowadays it's mostly fine, but.. Case in point : I had to write and contribute wireguard support to the netplan to make it marginally sane.

tomxor 4y ago
I sense that we might be basing our conclusion on qualitatively and temporally different things. My limited experience with FreeBSD was as a desktop and server for a few years around 2009ish to 2012, but also as a basic user of basic services. From memory a lot more hoops had to be jumped to get equivalent things working on FreeBSD, and I was always left with a nagging feeling after initial setup on FreeBSD that I didn't yet know enough to feel confident in the configurations I had produced, compared to Debian and et al at the time, where configuration felt like they left the bare minimum for you to customise, and working defaults for the rest that you could gradually learn to tweak without the pressure of getting every variable correct from the get go. However as a user who already thoroughly understands the service or it's domain I expect this kind of detail may be lost... instead you can compare based more on the flaws of the configurations and their implementations (which I suspect applies to your experience). But for the rest of us it results in flaky custom initial configuration. It's the same for me if I pick out a piece of software now that I have become very familiar with and already know how to configure inside out - i wouldn't experience the same kind of problem that someone unfamiliar would. To clarify, I guess I'm talking about sane defaults from the perspective of new users, poor defaults combined with new users can end up with insecure or problematic results - even if the default configuration alone is technically fine. I expect Linux and FreeBSD and other BSDs have likely improved a lot over the last decade from either perspective anyway.