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As a fedora user, why would I consider FreeBSD? I don't know enough about the differences. All I know is that FreeBSD is currently behind on features and tool v

As a fedora user, why would I consider FreeBSD? I don't know enough about the differences. All I know is that FreeBSD is currently behind on features and tool versions

TacticalCoder 2y ago
> As a fedora user, why would I consider FreeBSD? The vid talks about how big Linux vendor, like Red Hat, betrayed the Linux community (their words, not mine). If you're fine with the "microsoftization" of Linux, then you're all good and set with Fedora or Ubuntu. For many users Linux is just "Windows but sucking a bit less than Windows". But others do feel the betrayal they talk about in the vid. For me for example systemd and systemd's author now officially being on Microsoft' payroll is a very hard pill to swallow. Same for many non-portable things now targeting only the bastardized Linux ecosystem, instead of targeting all the Unixes still out there (including FreeBSD and OpenBSD). Thankfully due to the unfathomably big number of Linux containers / virtual machines being spun on and off and the need for utmost speed of these, systemd ain't much of a thing in the Linux container world. And Linux is still the kernel and it's still possible to have both systemd-less containers and systemd-less distros. I'm not sure how long that'll last though seen how systemd is spreading its tentacles everywhere. For people who love Microsoft INI files and who love the rube-goldberg monstrosity that Windows is, systemd Linux distros with snap and whatnots are just fine. To them Linux is just basically a Windows a tiny bit more secure and crashing a tiny bit less. And don't worry: Microsoft employees are hard at work making sure Linux gets shittier by the day, emulating the mistakes of the biggest turd of an OS ever made (that'd be Windows). For others, thankfully the BSDs do still exists.
- myaccountonhn 2y ago
  There’s also Void, Alpine and Guix if you don’t want to use systemd. What I personally really like about the BSDs are that they are very hackable with great documentation. The code base is much smaller and building your own kernel is very straightforward. I was able to even fix some of my own drivers and learnt a ton in the process.
  - bch 2y ago
    > There’s also Void [...] Started[0] by NetBSDs (and Hacker News') own jmmv[1]. So if you're getting BSD vibes, now you know why. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Void_Linux?#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Void_Linux?#History [1] https://jmmv.dev/software/netbsd.html https://jmmv.dev/software/netbsd.html
    - jmmv 2y ago
      Heh, not quite! Void Linux was started by the _other_ NetBSD developer from Spain: xtraeme.
      - bch 2y ago
        D’oh!
- homebrewer 2y ago
  You're unlikely to convert anyone with that kind of attitude and these massive exaggerations, which are obvious to anyone who knows their linuxen. Some BSD advocates are like sandpaper, unfortunately, which is not helping the OSes, which often get defined in terms of what they're not.
  - Rotundo 2y ago
    Unlikely to convert anyone, but they are not wrong either. I don't use BSD, but as a long time user of Linux (started with Yggdrasil) I can't help but think Linux is slowly but surely getting sabotaged. Systemd, Wayland, Pulseaudio, it is all needlessly complicated and introduces dependencies in other software that shouldn't be there. Maybe I _should_ take a good look at the BSD's after all.
    - nolist_policy 2y ago
      Go pair a Bluetooth headset with your Machine, then we can talk about needless complexities.
binkHN 2y ago
I find the BSDs, in general, take a more holistic approach to the operating design and everything feels very cohesive. In contrast, Linux feels more like an assembly of parts to form a unit and everything feels far more disjointed. That said, I run Linux on my production workstation because it supports more modern stuff. However, OpenBSD is one of my favorite operating systems to put on the back end because of its very simple and consistent design, and, well, strong focus on security.
- linguae 2y ago
  Exactly. The reason why I'm a fan of the BSDs in general is because of the cohesion of the base system, not to mention the high quality of its documentation and source code. I tend to prefer cleaner, cohesive systems that seem "designed" (System 7 Unix, the BSDs, Plan 9, C, NeXT and early Mac OS X, Smalltalk, many functional programming languages like Scheme and Standard ML) to large, complex systems that seem "evolved" (Windows, Linux, C++, JavaScript, the Web in general). I also like the conservative, deliberate approach that the BSDs take when it comes to the inclusion of new features. I remember reading a FreeBSD guide about 20 years ago that said something to the effect of "BSD is what you get when Unix hackers make a Unix for a PC, while Linux is what you get when PC hackers make a Unix for a PC." The spirit of that quote is that the BSDs tend to adhere to the Unix philosophy and thus their feature additions are in line with the philosophy of the overall system. The consequence of this, though, is that the BSDs are slower to adopt new technologies compared to Linux, though there is, in my opinion, a tendency in the Linux ecosystem for new technologies to be pushed before they are 100% ready, and the Linux ecosystem, as you said, feels more like an assembly of parts, each with their own design philosophies, rather than a cohesive system. Linux is certainly good, but I personally find FreeBSD more pleasant. With that said, I use FreeBSD for my home server and also inside VMs, but I find myself using Linux more. There are many situations where I often need to use Linux instead of FreeBSD due to either software compatibility reasons or lack of drivers.
  - xk_id 2y ago
    Thank you for this thoughtful explanation. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about this and your post convinced me that FreeBSD with virtualisation for occasional use of linux software is the right choice for me.
loeg 2y ago
No real reason to as an end user. Maybe better ZFS integration out of the box is appealing for a NAS or something like that. But the desktop user experience on FreeBSD is not great. Lots of regressions in things you might care about (wifi, kde/gnome, chrome web browser) relative to Linux.
- IWeldMelons 2y ago
  Did you actually use it for desktop? Yes it has some regressions and rough edges, but it has very nice release cycle for packages - quarterly (much like ubuntu but twice as fast), and separate schedule for the base system; the makes borking OS more difficult. Packages are fresh, security updates frequents, what not to like? Hardware support is abysmal though.
  - loeg 2y ago
    > Did you actually use it for desktop? Yes.
    - IWeldMelons 2y ago
      I personally use it frequently in a VM, and I find it nicer than Ubuntu as I get fresh packages, without risk of borking os itself, ass base and packages separate. Other than that, chrome/kde works about same.
- hnlmorg 2y ago
  What sort of regressions are there in KDE and Chrome?
  - loeg 2y ago
    A variety of things don't work or break frequently. Google does not support Chrome on BSD at all and refuses to upstream any BSD support patches in chromium, so ports maintainers struggle to re-port new chromium releases to BSD (there is a giant stack of patches that keeps growing bigger). Updates lag upstream, often by a long time. Chrome's core security sandboxing features are broken on BSD (it just runs un-sandboxed!), which is kind of a major issue that no one talks about.
carapace 2y ago
As a fedora user you probably shouldn't consider FreeBSD, it's more for servers than desktop systems. E.g. I run it on my laptop even though I can't adjust the brightness of the monitor. For me being "behind on features and tool versions" actually means that there's much less going on so I'm more confident that everything works and works well together. From my POV Linux has developed a case of Winchester Mystery House syndrome.
- craftkiller 2y ago
  Have you tried the backlight[0] utility they added to the base system? None of the sysctls I've found have worked at adjusting my laptop's backlight but the backlight utility itself succeeds for me (on an AMD framework laptop). [0] https://man.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?backlight https://man.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?backlight
  - carapace 2y ago
    I haven't, thanks for the tip! :D
craftkiller 2y ago
> behind [..] tool versions I run both Arch Linux and FreeBSD. It is not uncommon that FreeBSD's packages update faster than Arch Linux. Make sure you update your pkg config to use the latest packages instead of the quarterly packages it uses by default. Also, I'd like to point out that FreeBSD has thousands of more packages than Fedora: https://repology.org/repositories/statistics/newest https://repology.org/repositories/statistics/newest > why would I consider FreeBSD ZFS: Since FreeBSD isn't encumbered by the GPL, it has fully integrated ZFS which is a far better experience than on Linux. On FreeBSD ZFS always works, whereas on Linux ZFS is an out-of-tree module and your dkms builds breaks frequently when the kernel updates. Also, a lot of software on FreeBSD takes advantage of the features of ZFS, whereas on Linux most software doesn't use the features of either btrfs or ZFS. PF: This firewall has a great config format. After using PF, Linux's iptables makes me want to walk into the ocean. poudriere: A great and easy-to-use package builder. I use this to build both my OS and all my software with CPU optimizations for my specific processor (but FreeBSD has official package repositories, so you don't need to build your own if you don't want to.) kqueue: FreeBSD uses the kqeueue syscall. Later Linux created their own syscall: epoll. But epoll is fundamentally broken: https://idea.popcount.org/2017-02-20-epoll-is-fundamentally-broken-12/ https://idea.popcount.org/2017-02-20-epoll-is-fundamentally-... jails: more secure than Linux containers despite being invented 7 years earlier. sysctl instead of /proc: On FreeBSD, when you're listing the running processes (for example, top, htop, or ps), it uses sysctl which gets an atomic snapshot of the running processes. On Linux, you have to crawl through the /proc filesystem which is MANY more syscalls and the contents of /proc are changing out from under you while you're crawling through it. ----- That being said, Linux has some wins over FreeBSD: systemd: As controversial as it is, I think systemd is nicer than FreeBSD's init system. systemd supports user services whereas the built-in FreeBSD service manager does not (3rd party ones do though). Systemd automatically captures stdout/stderr to a log whereas FreeBSD relies on each service invoking the daemon tool to redirect their stdout/stderr. FreeBSD still uses pidfiles for everything which is flawed. documentation: FreeBSD has much better man pages than Linux, but the Arch Linux wiki is the champion, no contest. wifi: FreeBSD's wifi support is definitely not great. There are efforts under way to make a shim that will allow FreeBSD to use the Linux wifi drivers (similar to what they did for graphics drivers) but where it stands today, the wifi support is not great. That being said, there is a package called "wifibox" that spins up a tiny Linux VM and has Linux drive your wifi card, bridging the connection back to FreeBSD. ------ Finally, this is a popular blog post on why someone would choose FreeBSD over Linux: <go see Vermaden's post at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41820161 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41820161 > Edit: Vermaden himself has posted the link to his blog post at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41820161 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41820161 so I am removing the link.
vermaden 2y ago
Some reasons here: - https://vermaden.wordpress.com/2020/09/07/quare-freebsd/ https://vermaden.wordpress.com/2020/09/07/quare-freebsd/
BSDobelix 2y ago
>All I know is that FreeBSD is currently behind on features and tool versions Well, I don't want to be that guy, but you're wrong about that too ;)
ofalkaed 2y ago
The main benefit for me is that it provides a very stable user experience since it is not under the influence of the war between linux distros; you learn the system once and you might spend 5 minutes after a major update learning what is new and configuring. But much of that software in ports is developed for linux with no consideration for BSD so it can cause headaches since the maintainers of those ports can not possibly test every possible use case and generally port it for their own case. A big rub for me is the sound situation, I love OSS but not all programs support it so I still get stuck using Jack. I almost made the switch to FreeBSD a few times but Slackware still offers fewer compromises for me with the same ridiculously stable user experience and I don't have to worry as much about drivers when computer shopping. I assume I will end up switching to FreeBSD when Patrick dies since Slackware will probably die with him so I keep an eye on it and play with it once every year or two.
hedora 2y ago
For my use cases (a stable environment for writing and running systems code locally, browsing the internet, reading pdfs, etc), desktop Linux peaked about ten years ago. That was back before systemd/wayland, and back when deleting pulseaudio just made everything work better. Also, minimal window managers like evilwm were more tenable, since the only useful thing that really used the notification area/dbus was wifi. Anyway, being behind on the spiral of instability I’ve seen with recent Linux desktop environments seems like a feature, not a bug.

As a fedora user, why would I consider FreeBSD? I don't know enough about the differences. All I know is that FreeBSD is currently behind on features and tool versions

TacticalCoder 2y ago

> As a fedora user, why would I consider FreeBSD? The vid talks about how big Linux vendor, like Red Hat, betrayed the Linux community (their words, not mine). If you're fine with the "microsoftization" of Linux, then you're all good and set with Fedora or Ubuntu. For many users Linux is just "Windows but sucking a bit less than Windows". But others do feel the betrayal they talk about in the vid. For me for example systemd and systemd's author now officially being on Microsoft' payroll is a very hard pill to swallow. Same for many non-portable things now targeting only the bastardized Linux ecosystem, instead of targeting all the Unixes still out there (including FreeBSD and OpenBSD). Thankfully due to the unfathomably big number of Linux containers / virtual machines being spun on and off and the need for utmost speed of these, systemd ain't much of a thing in the Linux container world. And Linux is still the kernel and it's still possible to have both systemd-less containers and systemd-less distros. I'm not sure how long that'll last though seen how systemd is spreading its tentacles everywhere. For people who love Microsoft INI files and who love the rube-goldberg monstrosity that Windows is, systemd Linux distros with snap and whatnots are just fine. To them Linux is just basically a Windows a tiny bit more secure and crashing a tiny bit less. And don't worry: Microsoft employees are hard at work making sure Linux gets shittier by the day, emulating the mistakes of the biggest turd of an OS ever made (that'd be Windows). For others, thankfully the BSDs do still exists.

myaccountonhn 2y ago
There’s also Void, Alpine and Guix if you don’t want to use systemd. What I personally really like about the BSDs are that they are very hackable with great documentation. The code base is much smaller and building your own kernel is very straightforward. I was able to even fix some of my own drivers and learnt a ton in the process.
- bch 2y ago
  > There’s also Void [...] Started[0] by NetBSDs (and Hacker News') own jmmv[1]. So if you're getting BSD vibes, now you know why. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Void_Linux?#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Void_Linux?#History [1] https://jmmv.dev/software/netbsd.html https://jmmv.dev/software/netbsd.html
  - jmmv 2y ago
    Heh, not quite! Void Linux was started by the _other_ NetBSD developer from Spain: xtraeme.
    - bch 2y ago
      D’oh!
homebrewer 2y ago
You're unlikely to convert anyone with that kind of attitude and these massive exaggerations, which are obvious to anyone who knows their linuxen. Some BSD advocates are like sandpaper, unfortunately, which is not helping the OSes, which often get defined in terms of what they're not.
- Rotundo 2y ago
  Unlikely to convert anyone, but they are not wrong either. I don't use BSD, but as a long time user of Linux (started with Yggdrasil) I can't help but think Linux is slowly but surely getting sabotaged. Systemd, Wayland, Pulseaudio, it is all needlessly complicated and introduces dependencies in other software that shouldn't be there. Maybe I _should_ take a good look at the BSD's after all.
  - nolist_policy 2y ago
    Go pair a Bluetooth headset with your Machine, then we can talk about needless complexities.

binkHN 2y ago

I find the BSDs, in general, take a more holistic approach to the operating design and everything feels very cohesive. In contrast, Linux feels more like an assembly of parts to form a unit and everything feels far more disjointed. That said, I run Linux on my production workstation because it supports more modern stuff. However, OpenBSD is one of my favorite operating systems to put on the back end because of its very simple and consistent design, and, well, strong focus on security.

linguae 2y ago
Exactly. The reason why I'm a fan of the BSDs in general is because of the cohesion of the base system, not to mention the high quality of its documentation and source code. I tend to prefer cleaner, cohesive systems that seem "designed" (System 7 Unix, the BSDs, Plan 9, C, NeXT and early Mac OS X, Smalltalk, many functional programming languages like Scheme and Standard ML) to large, complex systems that seem "evolved" (Windows, Linux, C++, JavaScript, the Web in general). I also like the conservative, deliberate approach that the BSDs take when it comes to the inclusion of new features. I remember reading a FreeBSD guide about 20 years ago that said something to the effect of "BSD is what you get when Unix hackers make a Unix for a PC, while Linux is what you get when PC hackers make a Unix for a PC." The spirit of that quote is that the BSDs tend to adhere to the Unix philosophy and thus their feature additions are in line with the philosophy of the overall system. The consequence of this, though, is that the BSDs are slower to adopt new technologies compared to Linux, though there is, in my opinion, a tendency in the Linux ecosystem for new technologies to be pushed before they are 100% ready, and the Linux ecosystem, as you said, feels more like an assembly of parts, each with their own design philosophies, rather than a cohesive system. Linux is certainly good, but I personally find FreeBSD more pleasant. With that said, I use FreeBSD for my home server and also inside VMs, but I find myself using Linux more. There are many situations where I often need to use Linux instead of FreeBSD due to either software compatibility reasons or lack of drivers.
- xk_id 2y ago
  Thank you for this thoughtful explanation. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about this and your post convinced me that FreeBSD with virtualisation for occasional use of linux software is the right choice for me.

loeg 2y ago

No real reason to as an end user. Maybe better ZFS integration out of the box is appealing for a NAS or something like that. But the desktop user experience on FreeBSD is not great. Lots of regressions in things you might care about (wifi, kde/gnome, chrome web browser) relative to Linux.

IWeldMelons 2y ago
Did you actually use it for desktop? Yes it has some regressions and rough edges, but it has very nice release cycle for packages - quarterly (much like ubuntu but twice as fast), and separate schedule for the base system; the makes borking OS more difficult. Packages are fresh, security updates frequents, what not to like? Hardware support is abysmal though.
- loeg 2y ago
  > Did you actually use it for desktop? Yes.
  - IWeldMelons 2y ago
    I personally use it frequently in a VM, and I find it nicer than Ubuntu as I get fresh packages, without risk of borking os itself, ass base and packages separate. Other than that, chrome/kde works about same.
hnlmorg 2y ago
What sort of regressions are there in KDE and Chrome?
- loeg 2y ago
  A variety of things don't work or break frequently. Google does not support Chrome on BSD at all and refuses to upstream any BSD support patches in chromium, so ports maintainers struggle to re-port new chromium releases to BSD (there is a giant stack of patches that keeps growing bigger). Updates lag upstream, often by a long time. Chrome's core security sandboxing features are broken on BSD (it just runs un-sandboxed!), which is kind of a major issue that no one talks about.

carapace 2y ago

As a fedora user you probably shouldn't consider FreeBSD, it's more for servers than desktop systems. E.g. I run it on my laptop even though I can't adjust the brightness of the monitor. For me being "behind on features and tool versions" actually means that there's much less going on so I'm more confident that everything works and works well together. From my POV Linux has developed a case of Winchester Mystery House syndrome.

craftkiller 2y ago
Have you tried the backlight[0] utility they added to the base system? None of the sysctls I've found have worked at adjusting my laptop's backlight but the backlight utility itself succeeds for me (on an AMD framework laptop). [0] https://man.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?backlight https://man.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?backlight
- carapace 2y ago
  I haven't, thanks for the tip! :D

craftkiller 2y ago

> behind [..] tool versions I run both Arch Linux and FreeBSD. It is not uncommon that FreeBSD's packages update faster than Arch Linux. Make sure you update your pkg config to use the latest packages instead of the quarterly packages it uses by default. Also, I'd like to point out that FreeBSD has thousands of more packages than Fedora: https://repology.org/repositories/statistics/newest https://repology.org/repositories/statistics/newest > why would I consider FreeBSD ZFS: Since FreeBSD isn't encumbered by the GPL, it has fully integrated ZFS which is a far better experience than on Linux. On FreeBSD ZFS always works, whereas on Linux ZFS is an out-of-tree module and your dkms builds breaks frequently when the kernel updates. Also, a lot of software on FreeBSD takes advantage of the features of ZFS, whereas on Linux most software doesn't use the features of either btrfs or ZFS. PF: This firewall has a great config format. After using PF, Linux's iptables makes me want to walk into the ocean. poudriere: A great and easy-to-use package builder. I use this to build both my OS and all my software with CPU optimizations for my specific processor (but FreeBSD has official package repositories, so you don't need to build your own if you don't want to.) kqueue: FreeBSD uses the kqeueue syscall. Later Linux created their own syscall: epoll. But epoll is fundamentally broken: https://idea.popcount.org/2017-02-20-epoll-is-fundamentally-broken-12/ https://idea.popcount.org/2017-02-20-epoll-is-fundamentally-... jails: more secure than Linux containers despite being invented 7 years earlier. sysctl instead of /proc: On FreeBSD, when you're listing the running processes (for example, top, htop, or ps), it uses sysctl which gets an atomic snapshot of the running processes. On Linux, you have to crawl through the /proc filesystem which is MANY more syscalls and the contents of /proc are changing out from under you while you're crawling through it. ----- That being said, Linux has some wins over FreeBSD: systemd: As controversial as it is, I think systemd is nicer than FreeBSD's init system. systemd supports user services whereas the built-in FreeBSD service manager does not (3rd party ones do though). Systemd automatically captures stdout/stderr to a log whereas FreeBSD relies on each service invoking the daemon tool to redirect their stdout/stderr. FreeBSD still uses pidfiles for everything which is flawed. documentation: FreeBSD has much better man pages than Linux, but the Arch Linux wiki is the champion, no contest. wifi: FreeBSD's wifi support is definitely not great. There are efforts under way to make a shim that will allow FreeBSD to use the Linux wifi drivers (similar to what they did for graphics drivers) but where it stands today, the wifi support is not great. That being said, there is a package called "wifibox" that spins up a tiny Linux VM and has Linux drive your wifi card, bridging the connection back to FreeBSD. ------ Finally, this is a popular blog post on why someone would choose FreeBSD over Linux: <go see Vermaden's post at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41820161 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41820161 > Edit: Vermaden himself has posted the link to his blog post at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41820161 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41820161 so I am removing the link.

vermaden 2y ago

Some reasons here: - https://vermaden.wordpress.com/2020/09/07/quare-freebsd/ https://vermaden.wordpress.com/2020/09/07/quare-freebsd/

BSDobelix 2y ago

>All I know is that FreeBSD is currently behind on features and tool versions Well, I don't want to be that guy, but you're wrong about that too ;)

ofalkaed 2y ago

The main benefit for me is that it provides a very stable user experience since it is not under the influence of the war between linux distros; you learn the system once and you might spend 5 minutes after a major update learning what is new and configuring. But much of that software in ports is developed for linux with no consideration for BSD so it can cause headaches since the maintainers of those ports can not possibly test every possible use case and generally port it for their own case. A big rub for me is the sound situation, I love OSS but not all programs support it so I still get stuck using Jack. I almost made the switch to FreeBSD a few times but Slackware still offers fewer compromises for me with the same ridiculously stable user experience and I don't have to worry as much about drivers when computer shopping. I assume I will end up switching to FreeBSD when Patrick dies since Slackware will probably die with him so I keep an eye on it and play with it once every year or two.

hedora 2y ago

For my use cases (a stable environment for writing and running systems code locally, browsing the internet, reading pdfs, etc), desktop Linux peaked about ten years ago. That was back before systemd/wayland, and back when deleting pulseaudio just made everything work better. Also, minimal window managers like evilwm were more tenable, since the only useful thing that really used the notification area/dbus was wifi. Anyway, being behind on the spiral of instability I’ve seen with recent Linux desktop environments seems like a feature, not a bug.