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Can someone who uses FreeBSD fill me in on the niche that it fills in the Unix space? Why not use OpenBSD or NetBSD, which are far simpler and coherent? If the

Can someone who uses FreeBSD fill me in on the niche that it fills in the Unix space? Why not use OpenBSD or NetBSD, which are far simpler and coherent? If the answer is support for stuff like ZFS, Nvidia drivers, ELF, etc. why not Linux? I'm well aware of the problems with GNU, but do you have problems even with something like Musl Void? I'm genuinely actually curious. FreeBSD exists in kind of a shadow realm for me where I've never been quite able to pin down the soul that keeps it chugging, but I know it exists somewhere in there.

wkat4242 1y ago
FreeBSD has a much bigger userbase than openbsd or netbsd. Not even comparable. Its software catalog is also much bigger. It's a viable modern desktop daily driver and I can't say that for the other two. As to why not Linux? I don't want Linux. It's too bogged down by corporate interests.
- johnnyjeans 1y ago
  My impression is that FreeBSD is Apple's shadow in FOSS, they hold a lot of soft power over it. I know the kernels are different and obviously only part of the userspace is the same, but is FreeBSD actually far enough away from Apple to say it's not bogged down by corporate interests? I don't imagine it's the same as Linux at all, but it exists in a non-trivial way, no?
  - wkat4242 1y ago
    It's not. Apple (or rather NeXT) took some of the userland for macOS but it's not contributing back and it doesn't have much influence. It's more like a fork a long time ago. A few companies do. Skype and Netflix did but hardly use it now (at least Skype left it, not sure about Netflix but I never hear about it from bsd devs). Ix systems and netgate do but they're tiny.. No, it's not influenced in a trivial way and certainly not by apple. This is a huge difference to Linux where the vast majority of kernel commits come from big tech and have nothing to do with things end users care about. Also there's nothing in the FreeBSD world like the Linux Foundation which is basically a corporate lobby group.
    - johnnyjeans 1y ago
      > but it's not contributing back and it doesn't have much influence. I understand the former. But with how Apple operates, it's really hard to believe they'd pull downstream from something they don't have some kind of soft power over. They do still pull downstream AFAIK? Maybe that's changed? >Ix systems I did some reading and saw a FreeBSD contributor ended up going to Apple until 2013 before he founded this company. https://www.ixsystems.com/clients/ https://www.ixsystems.com/clients/ Apple is listed here. Six degrees of separation and all, but probably not a coincidence. Nothing wrong with that, business is a social structure. This is how they work. We make and keep friends, even if only professionally. Backchannels are where real deals are made. But this to me is not nothing. No corporate influence means there's a lot of nice things you don't get. You just can't afford the manpower. It looks more like 9 Front than a BSD that has some serious billion-dollar problems under its belt. That sounds harsh, not a judgement. Just very deep skepticism of the assertion of no influence. I'm realizing there's not a lot that can be done to sway that intentionally. > This is a huge difference to Linux This I'm well aware of. I just like having a perspective across the fence. These days they're starting to get a little too aggressive for my tastes. FreeBSD seems fine in comparison.
      - toast0 1y ago
        > But with how Apple operates, it's really hard to believe they'd pull downstream from something they don't have some kind of soft power over. They do still pull downstream AFAIK? Maybe that's changed? Apple doesn't merge often. They basically haven't merged kernel tcp since 2002. When I started using OSX in 2011, they hadn't merged userland for several years, and when I stopped in 2019, they had only merged once. They famously stopped picking up bash when upstream changed the license, and most of the FreeBSD userland doesn't change that frequently, so most things you wouldn't notice a difference. cal(1) started highlighting the current day at some point, tar probably grew new compresion arguments, etc. Apple certainly was a major contributor/driving force/etc of LLVM for a while, not sure if they still are? And LLVM was adopted by FreeBSD, so maybe that's where this idea is coming from?
        johnnyjeans 1y ago
  - cperciva 1y ago
    I'm not sure where you're getting the "Apple holds soft power over FreeBSD" thing from. Netflix is probably at the top of the list given all their performance and stability work -- and, you know, the fact they push a large chunk of all Internet traffic using FreeBSD -- and NetApp and Juniper are somewhere up there, but I'm not convinced Apple would even be in the top 10.
    - johnnyjeans 1y ago
      > I'm not sure where you're getting the "Apple holds soft power over FreeBSD" thing from. The only thing I've ever heard from FreeBSD-land, not paying attention to users, but the maintainers and the tools. Apple comes up. In the same manner that RedHat and others come up for Linux. How to explain? It's an abstract pattern. Transparent, understandable. I mentioned somewhere about the connection through ix systems. And honestly to project, if I was a maintainer of something used between Netflix and Apple, I'd prioritize Apple. Apple has outlived IBM. If you know your history, you know how serious that is. If you've got authority over something as large as FreeBSD? Yeah, you don't ignore that kind of actual power especially when it's personal. Like I say, all based on guesses. But some things are hard to mistake.
      - cperciva 1y ago
        Apple did very important work making LLVM happen, but that was a long time ago. At this point there are lots of companies involved in that project. As far as "power" is concerned... speaking as release engineer, I don't give special treatment to anyone; nor have I even been asked to. If anyone has a special relationship it's Netflix but if anything that's the opposite way around: "Can you please throw 10% of all Internet traffic at this TCP stack patch and let us know if anything breaks" is a thing. They're incredibly helpful with Q/A.
        johnnyjeans 1y ago
        Consider me convinced. Like I say, it was never anything but empirical skepticism. Neither for or against until sufficient evidence has been collected, as painful as that can be. Thank you for your work on scrypt.
  - AdieuToLogic 1y ago
    > My impression is that FreeBSD is Apple's shadow in FOSS, they hold a lot of soft power over it. Apple has no influence over the FreeBSD project. > I know the kernels are different and obviously only part of the userspace is the same, but is FreeBSD actually far enough away from Apple to say it's not bogged down by corporate interests? Yes. OS-X (now macOS) is based on XNU[0], which itself has roots in the Mach[1] microkernel. The Unix user-space programs distributed with OS-X/macOS are those found in FreeBSD distributions AFAIK. This is also conformant with FreeBSD licenses for same. So there is no "soft power" Apple has over FreeBSD. And FreeBSD is not "Apple's shadow in FOSS". > I don't imagine it's the same as Linux at all, but it exists in a non-trivial way, no? No. It does not. EDIT: Just in case you'd like to verify any of the above yourself, see here[2]. 0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XNU https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XNU 1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mach_(kernel) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mach_(kernel) 2 - https://github.com/apple-oss-distributions/xnu https://github.com/apple-oss-distributions/xnu
    - heavyset_go 1y ago
      Just for reference, Apple's XNU-based kernels have a concept of "flavors" and use some FreeBSD code in the kernel to provide its BSD "flavor".
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
- mbac32768 1y ago
  > As to why not Linux? I don't want Linux. It's too bogged down by corporate interests. This is a rather funny statement because at various points, high level execs at Apple Computer (and on another occasion Sun Micro) invited Linus Torvalds out to lunch and pitched teaming up together to take on Microsoft. Linus turned them down. Then a little bit later Jordan Hubbard announces FreeBSD would be the UNIX layer of OS X.
  - wkat4242 1y ago
    > Then a little bit later Jordan Hubbard announces FreeBSD would be the UNIX layer of OS X. But it's not. It's NeXTStep. They took a little bit of userland but that's about it. A lot of it is not even freebsd-specific like zsh and bash (the ancient version apple ships) I wonder if more was planned at first. Similar to when Jonathan Schwartz proudly announced ZFS being part of macOS but it only ever made it to a beta and was removed again.
- int_19h 1y ago
  > It's a viable modern desktop daily driver Only if you very carefully select hardware to match, and I mean very carefully because the range of supported hardware is smaller than Linux. I've tried to install FreeBSD on my laptop recently after a long hiatus and was unpleasantly surprised that, apparently, even Intel wireless chipsets have rather poor support.
yjftsjthsd-h 1y ago
> If the answer is support for stuff like ZFS, Nvidia drivers, ELF, etc. why not Linux? FreeBSD has better ZFS support than Linux, because it doesn't have the licensing issues.
AdieuToLogic 1y ago
> Can someone who uses FreeBSD fill me in on the niche that it fills in the Unix space? Why not use OpenBSD or NetBSD, which are far simpler and coherent? If the answer is support for stuff like ZFS, Nvidia drivers, ELF, etc. why not Linux? My experience with FreeBSD is that it provides a nice balance of the concerns OpenBSD and NetBSD specifically address. Historically, FreeBSD prioritized Intel CPU's (where NetBSD had greater portability) and had solid security (where OpenBSD had more of a focus on it). The FreeBSD ZFS support really is a game changer. I believe Nvidia only recently has had native FreeBSD drivers - for a long time FreeBSD's kernel Linux support was required. > I'm genuinely actually curious. FreeBSD exists in kind of a shadow realm for me where I've never been quite able to pin down the soul that keeps it chugging, but I know it exists somewhere in there. Again, for me, FreeBSD has proven to be a nice blend of the features other BSD's provide as well as being incredibly stable on the h/w platforms I tend to use.
- johnnyjeans 1y ago
  I figured the goldilocks metric might factor in. Are you dealing with non-x86 platforms? I've always been disappointed by the ARM experience on Linux. It always feels second-class.
- assimpleaspossi 1y ago
  >>I believe Nvidia only recently has had native FreeBSD drivers When I first started using FreeBSD, in 2004, Nvidia had native FreeBSD drivers for all their boards.
  - AdieuToLogic 1y ago
    Thanks for the clarification. Apparently I did not remember correctly. :-)
toast0 1y ago
FreeBSD is throughput oriented in a way that OpenBSD certainly isn't, and I don't think NetBSD is either (although, I haven't really looked, I feel like NetBSD competes on portability and doesn't spend a lot of time making sure networking throughput is high). All of the BSDs tend to have a lot less churn, for better and worse; so IMHO, they make a nicer platform to integrate on.
- johnnyjeans 1y ago
  Very interesting. Doing more reading on FreeBSD's presence in the HPC space. Thank you.
  - toast0 1y ago
    If you want a high profile example, look at what Netflix CDN does. Could you do that work with Linux? Probably --- but nobody who does is talking about it as much. This kind of high throughput service has been a FreeBSD niche since forever too. Walnut Creek CDROM, Inc ran what was reportedly the world's busiest ftp site, ftp.cdrom.com on FreeBSD in the early days of the internet. Yahoo ran on FreeBSD (I worked there 2004-2011) WhatsApp ran on FreeBSD (I worked there 2011-2019) Both were leaving FreeBSD when I left, but sadly, I didn't leave to work somewhere else with FreeBSD :p
  - tcmart14 1y ago
    Also checkout DragonflyBSD. They, at least at one time, where gunning for the HPC use case.I don't keep up with it enough to know the current state today, to know if they are still hard charging in that direction since they forked from FreeBSD years and years ago.
broken_broken_ 1y ago
I have worked for financial services companies that used FreeBSD both in EC2 and on the metal in data centers (self managed). The two features we used all the time were zfs and jails. Each service ran in its own jail for isolation. One (not even beefy) server could run all the services which was insanely cost efficient. A cloud migration was undertaken at some point to have a hybrid setup, using a mix of Linux (k8s) and FreeBSD, and costs skyrocketed. It’s a trade off because in the data center we had to buy and replace our own disks, react to fires taking place, being only in one country etc. AWS gives you multi region, and tons of good stuff, and that has a price. ZFS was not leveraged that much but it saved our beacon once when a table in the production database was accidentally dropped and we could instantly rollback to the previous zfs snapshot (there was a tiny bit of data loss as a result but this did not matter too much for this application - uptime was more important). ZFS was also used for backups I believe. A few times I used dtrace in production to troubleshoot. When we introduced Linux to our fleet of FreeBSD servers, every team picked a different distro organically so it was a bit of a zoo. With FreeBSD on the server you only have the one variant. I still use and like both, but I must say I really like that FreeBSD is a kernel+OS integrated together.
- LeFantome 1y ago
  Your "zoo" comment is an important one. It really makes sense to think of different Linux distros as different operating systems. At the very least, the ones from different "families". There are a lot of differences between Debian and RHEL. Suse, Alpine, Void, or Chimera Linux are completely different again. In some ways, they are almost as different from each other as FreeBSD is from them. Compared to that "zoo", using FreeBSD everywhere is far more cohesive. But if you use RHEL, Alma, Rocky, and even Fedora, things are still going to feel pretty consistent. Or Debian, LMDE, and Kali. I am not advocating an ecosystem.
mtlmtlmtlmtl 1y ago
For me, who's daily driven FreeBSD in the past, and switched back to it again recently. FreeBSD serves as a refuge from systemd, and the only BSD that is a fairly drop in replacement for linux in terms of software compatibility, as well as the only game in BSD town in terms of support for modern hardware.(though it does significantly lag Linux in this regard still, so YMMV). As to why I use it over the various systemd free linux distros? Well, there's a couple things. First lot of those distros, like Artix linux say, actually have smaller communities than FreeBSD(I'm guesstimating based on the activity level in their irc channels). The Linux community might be much, much larger than the FreeBSD community, but it's also extremely fragmented. triggerwarning, hyperbole incoming. Don't bother correcting me, it's a polemic, not a scientific paper Secondly, for someone like me, who's been using various unix like OSes for two decades, FreeBSD is just a nice, batteries included, well integrated system. Things like jails, Dtrace, ZFS, Bhyve, pf etc. All being in the base install means they're just better integrated with the kernel, and eachother. Most of those things exist for linux, or have equivalents, but they're not all part of the same project. Obviously Dtrace and ZFS originated in Solaris, but they've been made first-class citizens. There's a harmony to FreeBSD that Linux distros lack. Documentation is also very good, all accessible via manpages(no GNU INFO...). And, as I mentioned briefly before. It doesn't have a lot of the cruft that's been added to linux distros over the years(though some of it is available in ports if you want it). In FreeBSD, my experience is actually useful. Things I remember how to do from 5 years ago, 10 years ago, 15 years ago, still work. If I'm on some modern, plug and play linux distro, I have no idea what's going on under the hood any more. All I know is it's not what was going on 5 years ago, which isn't what was going on 10 years ago, which isn't what was going on 15 years ago. The amount of pointless churn going on in the linux space is ridiculous. When I started using linux, what I loved about it was that it was transparent. I could change anything. The system was easy to understand. Yes, it was janky, but it was understandable jank, whereas Windows was janky in an opaque way. 20 years later, Linux is still janky, but nothing is understandable, at least not to my greybeard brain. Systemd takes over a new daemon every distro upgrade. DNS resolving now involves 4 different daemons with 15 different configuration files, there's two display protocols, both broken in different ways, /etc is full of long files written in strange, alien languages, and every file has its own bespoke language. There seems to be 54 different ways to make any change to your system, and all of them are somehow unsatisfactory in a unique way. I just can't, anymore. Enough already.
tcmart14 1y ago
First, FreeBSD is probably the most common BSD you'd run into. Definitely has the largest user base. And of course, large user base, more developers, and usually more ports maintainers. Not always true, but true most of the time. FreeBSD has also usually focused on the server case, so a lot of the improvements are improvements where servers will see the most benefit. That sorta explains the, why FreeBSD over OpenBSD and NetBSD. I personally prefer NetBSD, but there is a solid argument for FreeBSD. Why FreeBSD over Linux? To me, I would say it depends on what sort of engineering model you think works best. Linux is great, but it is essentially a giant orgy of a lot of independent projects that luckily work together to create a linux-based operating system. The kernel team is different from the gnu team that works on gnu libc and gnu core utils. Even with Rust core utils becoming a thing, it's still a separate team. Linux doesn't have a true notion of a 'base' system like the BSDs do. Each of the BSDs provide a 'true base' system. That means pretty much all of the code (maybe a few exceptions), but the core hot code on a freshly installed FreeBSD operating system is all owned and maintained by the FreeBSD team (this applies to NetBSD and OpenBSD and DragonflyBSD). This is the libc, the kernel, the user land utilities, basic programs and even some advanced ones (like OpenBSD's httpd or firewalls), and even the boot loaders! So it provides some sort of coherence to the platform that just isn't on linux. Linux, and I use that a lot to, is really an amazing anomaly in software. That in the most minimal distribution, you really have tons of software from teams that may have little to no interaction with each other, can some how all be compiled together to work. Addition: Wanted to make an addition to the difference in engineering decisions. The BSDs in general make clear distinctions between what is provided by the system and what is from third parties. An example of this is reading through some of the file system hierarchy stuff in FreeBSD. Yes, Linux technically has a file system hierarchy and things are supposed to have a designated place, but it's much more Wild West on linux. FreeBSD and the FreeBSD community generally conform to the standards defined in `hier` pretty well.

wkat4242 1y ago

FreeBSD has a much bigger userbase than openbsd or netbsd. Not even comparable. Its software catalog is also much bigger. It's a viable modern desktop daily driver and I can't say that for the other two. As to why not Linux? I don't want Linux. It's too bogged down by corporate interests.

johnnyjeans 1y ago
My impression is that FreeBSD is Apple's shadow in FOSS, they hold a lot of soft power over it. I know the kernels are different and obviously only part of the userspace is the same, but is FreeBSD actually far enough away from Apple to say it's not bogged down by corporate interests? I don't imagine it's the same as Linux at all, but it exists in a non-trivial way, no?
- wkat4242 1y ago
  It's not. Apple (or rather NeXT) took some of the userland for macOS but it's not contributing back and it doesn't have much influence. It's more like a fork a long time ago. A few companies do. Skype and Netflix did but hardly use it now (at least Skype left it, not sure about Netflix but I never hear about it from bsd devs). Ix systems and netgate do but they're tiny.. No, it's not influenced in a trivial way and certainly not by apple. This is a huge difference to Linux where the vast majority of kernel commits come from big tech and have nothing to do with things end users care about. Also there's nothing in the FreeBSD world like the Linux Foundation which is basically a corporate lobby group.
  - johnnyjeans 1y ago
    > but it's not contributing back and it doesn't have much influence. I understand the former. But with how Apple operates, it's really hard to believe they'd pull downstream from something they don't have some kind of soft power over. They do still pull downstream AFAIK? Maybe that's changed? >Ix systems I did some reading and saw a FreeBSD contributor ended up going to Apple until 2013 before he founded this company. https://www.ixsystems.com/clients/ https://www.ixsystems.com/clients/ Apple is listed here. Six degrees of separation and all, but probably not a coincidence. Nothing wrong with that, business is a social structure. This is how they work. We make and keep friends, even if only professionally. Backchannels are where real deals are made. But this to me is not nothing. No corporate influence means there's a lot of nice things you don't get. You just can't afford the manpower. It looks more like 9 Front than a BSD that has some serious billion-dollar problems under its belt. That sounds harsh, not a judgement. Just very deep skepticism of the assertion of no influence. I'm realizing there's not a lot that can be done to sway that intentionally. > This is a huge difference to Linux This I'm well aware of. I just like having a perspective across the fence. These days they're starting to get a little too aggressive for my tastes. FreeBSD seems fine in comparison.
    - toast0 1y ago
      > But with how Apple operates, it's really hard to believe they'd pull downstream from something they don't have some kind of soft power over. They do still pull downstream AFAIK? Maybe that's changed? Apple doesn't merge often. They basically haven't merged kernel tcp since 2002. When I started using OSX in 2011, they hadn't merged userland for several years, and when I stopped in 2019, they had only merged once. They famously stopped picking up bash when upstream changed the license, and most of the FreeBSD userland doesn't change that frequently, so most things you wouldn't notice a difference. cal(1) started highlighting the current day at some point, tar probably grew new compresion arguments, etc. Apple certainly was a major contributor/driving force/etc of LLVM for a while, not sure if they still are? And LLVM was adopted by FreeBSD, so maybe that's where this idea is coming from?
      - johnnyjeans 1y ago
- cperciva 1y ago
  I'm not sure where you're getting the "Apple holds soft power over FreeBSD" thing from. Netflix is probably at the top of the list given all their performance and stability work -- and, you know, the fact they push a large chunk of all Internet traffic using FreeBSD -- and NetApp and Juniper are somewhere up there, but I'm not convinced Apple would even be in the top 10.
  - johnnyjeans 1y ago
    > I'm not sure where you're getting the "Apple holds soft power over FreeBSD" thing from. The only thing I've ever heard from FreeBSD-land, not paying attention to users, but the maintainers and the tools. Apple comes up. In the same manner that RedHat and others come up for Linux. How to explain? It's an abstract pattern. Transparent, understandable. I mentioned somewhere about the connection through ix systems. And honestly to project, if I was a maintainer of something used between Netflix and Apple, I'd prioritize Apple. Apple has outlived IBM. If you know your history, you know how serious that is. If you've got authority over something as large as FreeBSD? Yeah, you don't ignore that kind of actual power especially when it's personal. Like I say, all based on guesses. But some things are hard to mistake.
    - cperciva 1y ago
      Apple did very important work making LLVM happen, but that was a long time ago. At this point there are lots of companies involved in that project. As far as "power" is concerned... speaking as release engineer, I don't give special treatment to anyone; nor have I even been asked to. If anyone has a special relationship it's Netflix but if anything that's the opposite way around: "Can you please throw 10% of all Internet traffic at this TCP stack patch and let us know if anything breaks" is a thing. They're incredibly helpful with Q/A.
      - johnnyjeans 1y ago
        Consider me convinced. Like I say, it was never anything but empirical skepticism. Neither for or against until sufficient evidence has been collected, as painful as that can be. Thank you for your work on scrypt.
- AdieuToLogic 1y ago
  > My impression is that FreeBSD is Apple's shadow in FOSS, they hold a lot of soft power over it. Apple has no influence over the FreeBSD project. > I know the kernels are different and obviously only part of the userspace is the same, but is FreeBSD actually far enough away from Apple to say it's not bogged down by corporate interests? Yes. OS-X (now macOS) is based on XNU[0], which itself has roots in the Mach[1] microkernel. The Unix user-space programs distributed with OS-X/macOS are those found in FreeBSD distributions AFAIK. This is also conformant with FreeBSD licenses for same. So there is no "soft power" Apple has over FreeBSD. And FreeBSD is not "Apple's shadow in FOSS". > I don't imagine it's the same as Linux at all, but it exists in a non-trivial way, no? No. It does not. EDIT: Just in case you'd like to verify any of the above yourself, see here[2]. 0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XNU https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XNU 1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mach_(kernel) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mach_(kernel) 2 - https://github.com/apple-oss-distributions/xnu https://github.com/apple-oss-distributions/xnu
  - heavyset_go 1y ago
    Just for reference, Apple's XNU-based kernels have a concept of "flavors" and use some FreeBSD code in the kernel to provide its BSD "flavor".
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
mbac32768 1y ago
> As to why not Linux? I don't want Linux. It's too bogged down by corporate interests. This is a rather funny statement because at various points, high level execs at Apple Computer (and on another occasion Sun Micro) invited Linus Torvalds out to lunch and pitched teaming up together to take on Microsoft. Linus turned them down. Then a little bit later Jordan Hubbard announces FreeBSD would be the UNIX layer of OS X.
- wkat4242 1y ago
  > Then a little bit later Jordan Hubbard announces FreeBSD would be the UNIX layer of OS X. But it's not. It's NeXTStep. They took a little bit of userland but that's about it. A lot of it is not even freebsd-specific like zsh and bash (the ancient version apple ships) I wonder if more was planned at first. Similar to when Jonathan Schwartz proudly announced ZFS being part of macOS but it only ever made it to a beta and was removed again.
int_19h 1y ago
> It's a viable modern desktop daily driver Only if you very carefully select hardware to match, and I mean very carefully because the range of supported hardware is smaller than Linux. I've tried to install FreeBSD on my laptop recently after a long hiatus and was unpleasantly surprised that, apparently, even Intel wireless chipsets have rather poor support.

yjftsjthsd-h 1y ago

> If the answer is support for stuff like ZFS, Nvidia drivers, ELF, etc. why not Linux? FreeBSD has better ZFS support than Linux, because it doesn't have the licensing issues.

AdieuToLogic 1y ago

> Can someone who uses FreeBSD fill me in on the niche that it fills in the Unix space? Why not use OpenBSD or NetBSD, which are far simpler and coherent? If the answer is support for stuff like ZFS, Nvidia drivers, ELF, etc. why not Linux? My experience with FreeBSD is that it provides a nice balance of the concerns OpenBSD and NetBSD specifically address. Historically, FreeBSD prioritized Intel CPU's (where NetBSD had greater portability) and had solid security (where OpenBSD had more of a focus on it). The FreeBSD ZFS support really is a game changer. I believe Nvidia only recently has had native FreeBSD drivers - for a long time FreeBSD's kernel Linux support was required. > I'm genuinely actually curious. FreeBSD exists in kind of a shadow realm for me where I've never been quite able to pin down the soul that keeps it chugging, but I know it exists somewhere in there. Again, for me, FreeBSD has proven to be a nice blend of the features other BSD's provide as well as being incredibly stable on the h/w platforms I tend to use.

johnnyjeans 1y ago
I figured the goldilocks metric might factor in. Are you dealing with non-x86 platforms? I've always been disappointed by the ARM experience on Linux. It always feels second-class.
assimpleaspossi 1y ago
>>I believe Nvidia only recently has had native FreeBSD drivers When I first started using FreeBSD, in 2004, Nvidia had native FreeBSD drivers for all their boards.
- AdieuToLogic 1y ago
  Thanks for the clarification. Apparently I did not remember correctly. :-)

toast0 1y ago

FreeBSD is throughput oriented in a way that OpenBSD certainly isn't, and I don't think NetBSD is either (although, I haven't really looked, I feel like NetBSD competes on portability and doesn't spend a lot of time making sure networking throughput is high). All of the BSDs tend to have a lot less churn, for better and worse; so IMHO, they make a nicer platform to integrate on.

johnnyjeans 1y ago
Very interesting. Doing more reading on FreeBSD's presence in the HPC space. Thank you.
- toast0 1y ago
  If you want a high profile example, look at what Netflix CDN does. Could you do that work with Linux? Probably --- but nobody who does is talking about it as much. This kind of high throughput service has been a FreeBSD niche since forever too. Walnut Creek CDROM, Inc ran what was reportedly the world's busiest ftp site, ftp.cdrom.com on FreeBSD in the early days of the internet. Yahoo ran on FreeBSD (I worked there 2004-2011) WhatsApp ran on FreeBSD (I worked there 2011-2019) Both were leaving FreeBSD when I left, but sadly, I didn't leave to work somewhere else with FreeBSD :p
- tcmart14 1y ago
  Also checkout DragonflyBSD. They, at least at one time, where gunning for the HPC use case.I don't keep up with it enough to know the current state today, to know if they are still hard charging in that direction since they forked from FreeBSD years and years ago.

broken_broken_ 1y ago

I have worked for financial services companies that used FreeBSD both in EC2 and on the metal in data centers (self managed). The two features we used all the time were zfs and jails. Each service ran in its own jail for isolation. One (not even beefy) server could run all the services which was insanely cost efficient. A cloud migration was undertaken at some point to have a hybrid setup, using a mix of Linux (k8s) and FreeBSD, and costs skyrocketed. It’s a trade off because in the data center we had to buy and replace our own disks, react to fires taking place, being only in one country etc. AWS gives you multi region, and tons of good stuff, and that has a price. ZFS was not leveraged that much but it saved our beacon once when a table in the production database was accidentally dropped and we could instantly rollback to the previous zfs snapshot (there was a tiny bit of data loss as a result but this did not matter too much for this application - uptime was more important). ZFS was also used for backups I believe. A few times I used dtrace in production to troubleshoot. When we introduced Linux to our fleet of FreeBSD servers, every team picked a different distro organically so it was a bit of a zoo. With FreeBSD on the server you only have the one variant. I still use and like both, but I must say I really like that FreeBSD is a kernel+OS integrated together.

LeFantome 1y ago
Your "zoo" comment is an important one. It really makes sense to think of different Linux distros as different operating systems. At the very least, the ones from different "families". There are a lot of differences between Debian and RHEL. Suse, Alpine, Void, or Chimera Linux are completely different again. In some ways, they are almost as different from each other as FreeBSD is from them. Compared to that "zoo", using FreeBSD everywhere is far more cohesive. But if you use RHEL, Alma, Rocky, and even Fedora, things are still going to feel pretty consistent. Or Debian, LMDE, and Kali. I am not advocating an ecosystem.

mtlmtlmtlmtl 1y ago

For me, who's daily driven FreeBSD in the past, and switched back to it again recently. FreeBSD serves as a refuge from systemd, and the only BSD that is a fairly drop in replacement for linux in terms of software compatibility, as well as the only game in BSD town in terms of support for modern hardware.(though it does significantly lag Linux in this regard still, so YMMV). As to why I use it over the various systemd free linux distros? Well, there's a couple things. First lot of those distros, like Artix linux say, actually have smaller communities than FreeBSD(I'm guesstimating based on the activity level in their irc channels). The Linux community might be much, much larger than the FreeBSD community, but it's also extremely fragmented. triggerwarning, hyperbole incoming. Don't bother correcting me, it's a polemic, not a scientific paper Secondly, for someone like me, who's been using various unix like OSes for two decades, FreeBSD is just a nice, batteries included, well integrated system. Things like jails, Dtrace, ZFS, Bhyve, pf etc. All being in the base install means they're just better integrated with the kernel, and eachother. Most of those things exist for linux, or have equivalents, but they're not all part of the same project. Obviously Dtrace and ZFS originated in Solaris, but they've been made first-class citizens. There's a harmony to FreeBSD that Linux distros lack. Documentation is also very good, all accessible via manpages(no GNU INFO...). And, as I mentioned briefly before. It doesn't have a lot of the cruft that's been added to linux distros over the years(though some of it is available in ports if you want it). In FreeBSD, my experience is actually useful. Things I remember how to do from 5 years ago, 10 years ago, 15 years ago, still work. If I'm on some modern, plug and play linux distro, I have no idea what's going on under the hood any more. All I know is it's not what was going on 5 years ago, which isn't what was going on 10 years ago, which isn't what was going on 15 years ago. The amount of pointless churn going on in the linux space is ridiculous. When I started using linux, what I loved about it was that it was transparent. I could change anything. The system was easy to understand. Yes, it was janky, but it was understandable jank, whereas Windows was janky in an opaque way. 20 years later, Linux is still janky, but nothing is understandable, at least not to my greybeard brain. Systemd takes over a new daemon every distro upgrade. DNS resolving now involves 4 different daemons with 15 different configuration files, there's two display protocols, both broken in different ways, /etc is full of long files written in strange, alien languages, and every file has its own bespoke language. There seems to be 54 different ways to make any change to your system, and all of them are somehow unsatisfactory in a unique way. I just can't, anymore. Enough already.

tcmart14 1y ago

First, FreeBSD is probably the most common BSD you'd run into. Definitely has the largest user base. And of course, large user base, more developers, and usually more ports maintainers. Not always true, but true most of the time. FreeBSD has also usually focused on the server case, so a lot of the improvements are improvements where servers will see the most benefit. That sorta explains the, why FreeBSD over OpenBSD and NetBSD. I personally prefer NetBSD, but there is a solid argument for FreeBSD. Why FreeBSD over Linux? To me, I would say it depends on what sort of engineering model you think works best. Linux is great, but it is essentially a giant orgy of a lot of independent projects that luckily work together to create a linux-based operating system. The kernel team is different from the gnu team that works on gnu libc and gnu core utils. Even with Rust core utils becoming a thing, it's still a separate team. Linux doesn't have a true notion of a 'base' system like the BSDs do. Each of the BSDs provide a 'true base' system. That means pretty much all of the code (maybe a few exceptions), but the core hot code on a freshly installed FreeBSD operating system is all owned and maintained by the FreeBSD team (this applies to NetBSD and OpenBSD and DragonflyBSD). This is the libc, the kernel, the user land utilities, basic programs and even some advanced ones (like OpenBSD's httpd or firewalls), and even the boot loaders! So it provides some sort of coherence to the platform that just isn't on linux. Linux, and I use that a lot to, is really an amazing anomaly in software. That in the most minimal distribution, you really have tons of software from teams that may have little to no interaction with each other, can some how all be compiled together to work. Addition: Wanted to make an addition to the difference in engineering decisions. The BSDs in general make clear distinctions between what is provided by the system and what is from third parties. An example of this is reading through some of the file system hierarchy stuff in FreeBSD. Yes, Linux technically has a file system hierarchy and things are supposed to have a designated place, but it's much more Wild West on linux. FreeBSD and the FreeBSD community generally conform to the standards defined in `hier` pretty well.