12 ms·

Why I love FreeBSD

530 points by enz 7mo ago

Hendrikto 7mo ago
A week ago, I decided to set up my home server with FreeBSD, after the HDD failed, just to try it out. The setup was quick and easy and everything works fine so far. I am just not sure it is worth leaving the Linux ecosystem. What if I want to run a Docker container? Do I have to trust random people for ports of software that runs natively on Linux, or port it myself? FreeBSD seems good so far, but community and ecosystem are important.
- vermaden 7mo ago
  No one prevents You from installing Linux in a Bhyve VM and running Docker there. Overhead of FreeBSD Bhyve Hypervisor is about 0.5% (measured in benchmarks) so You loose nothing. Here You have easy and complete jumpstart into Bhyve in FreeBSD: - https://vermaden.wordpress.com/2023/08/18/freebsd-bhyve-virtualization/ https://vermaden.wordpress.com/2023/08/18/freebsd-bhyve-virt... Regards, vermaden
  - ComputerGuru 7mo ago
    Isn't that no longer necessary? Doesn't linuxulator + podman suffice?
    - sidkshatriya 7mo ago
      > Doesn't linuxulator + podman suffice? No it is not reliable enough. Some syscalls not implemented, there are edge case issues with procfs etc. Best to execute in a Linux VM.
      - c-c-c-c-c 7mo ago
        it’s exceedingly rare that programs dont work with linuxulator, i use vivado daily and you can play games through linux steam and proton that way.
    - elcritch 7mo ago
      Unfortunately podman on freebsd is pretty early stage. I was only able to get very simple containers to run.
- shevy-java 7mo ago
  I can not answer the other questions; for me Linux worked and works better. But that statement here: > Do I have to trust random people for ports of software that runs natively on Linux, or port it myself? This is a bit problematic in my opinion because ultimately we have to trust all who write open source code. This works well for the most part but there are malicious actors too. See the xz backdoor as example. Or various state actors who want to sniff after people. Age verification is the current attempt to sniff for people data, trying to push legislation by claiming "this is only to protect children" (while it has some interesting side effects, e. g. becoming a stepping stone for anyone wanting to sniff user data and relay this). > FreeBSD seems good so far, but community and ecosystem are important. Well, there are many more Linux users. Whether that is better or worse ... but it is a fact too.
- fridder 7mo ago
  You can run oci containers via podman.
- mghackerlady 7mo ago
  it isn't anywhere close to the convenience of docker, but if you just need containerised OS-level virtualization FreeBSD has Jails which are really cool
- 0x457 7mo ago
  > I am just not sure it is worth leaving the Linux ecosystem. What if I want to run a Docker container? Do I have to trust random people for ports of software that runs natively on Linux, or port it myself? You already trust random people in linux, you have to trust even more random and more people when you run docker. Ports are quite large collection already. If you port yourself it's either up to 20 minutes plus compilation time or major nightmare. More and more software today assumes you run on linux only. I think FreeBSD is great for setup and forget. If you have to interact with it regularly it's not worth it. Definitely not worth it for desktop.
- Gud 7mo ago
  You should avoid Docker, is the obvious answer, and grow to love FreeBSD jails.
- cess11 7mo ago
  If you just want to run a Docker container casually, perhaps do it on your personal computer instead of the home server. If there is some service you really can't manage to get running with jails or right on the BSD, bhyve and guest Linux should be easy enough.
shevy-java 7mo ago
> had trained me to hunt for documentation in fragments: often incomplete, often outdated, sometimes already stale after barely a year. This is indeed a problem now that google search is next to useless. And AI further degrading the quality. I work around it to some extent by keeping my local knowledge base up to date, as much as that is possible; and using a ton of scripts that help me do things. That works. I am also efficient. But some projects are simply underdocumented. A random example is, in the ruby ecosystem, rack. Have a look here: https://github.com/rack/rack https://github.com/rack/rack Now find the documentation ... try it. You may find it: https://rack.github.io/rack/ https://rack.github.io/rack/ Linked from the github page. Well, have a look at it. Remain patient. Now as you have looked at it ... tell me if someone is troll-roflcopter-joking you. https://rack.github.io/rack/main/index.html https://rack.github.io/rack/main/index.html Yes, you can jump to the individual documentation of the classes, but does that really explain anything? It next to tells you nothing at all about anything about rack. If you are new to ruby, would you waste any time with such a project? Yes, rack is useful; yes, many people don't use it directly but may use sinatra, rails and so forth, I get it. But this is not the point. The point is whether the documentation is good or bad. And that is not the only example. See ruby-webassembly. Ruby-opal. Numerous more projects (I won't even mention the abandoned gems, but this is of course a problem every language faces, some code will become outdated as maintainers disappear.) So this is really nothing unique to Linux. I bet on BSD you will also find ... a lack of documentation. Probably even more as so few blog about BSD. OpenBSD claims it has great documentation. Well, if I look at what they have, and look at Arch or Gentoo wiki, then sorry but the BSDs don't understand the problem domain. It really is a general problem. Documentation is simply too crap in general, with a few exceptions. > if the team behind this OS puts this much care into its documentation, imagine how solid the system itself must be. Meh. FreeBSD documentation can barely called the stand-out role model here either. Not sure what the BSD folks think about that. > I realized almost immediately that GNU/Linux and FreeBSD were so similar they were completely different. Not really. There are some differences but I found they are very similar in their respective niche. Unfortunately my finding convinced me that Linux is the better choice for my use cases. This ranges from e. g. LFS/BLFS to 500 out of top 500 supercomputers running Linux. Sure, I am not in that use case of having a supercomputer, but the point is about quality. Linux is like chaotic quality. Messy. But it works. New Jersey model versus [insert any high quality here]. https://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is-better.html https://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is-better.html > Not only that: Linux would overheat and produce unpredictable results - errors, sudden shutdowns, fans screaming even after compilation finished. Well, hardware plays a big factor, I get it. I have issues with some nvidia cards, but other cards worked fine on the same computer. But this apocalypse scenario he writes about ... that's rubbish nonsense. Linux works. For the most part - depending on the hardware. But mostly it really works. > I could read my email in mutt while compiling, something that was practically impossible on Linux Ok sorry, I stopped reading there. My current computer was fairly cheap; I deliberately put in 64GB RAM (before the insane AI-driven cost increases) and that computer works super-fast. I compile almost everything from source. I have no real issue with anything being too slow; admittedly a few things take quite a bit of compile-power, e. g. LLVM, or qt - compiling that from source takes a while, yes, even on a fast computer. But nah, the attempt to claim how FreeBSD is so much faster than Linux is, that's simply not factual. It is rubbish nonsense. Note that OpenBSD and NetBSD folks never write such strangeness. What's wrong with the FreeBSD guys?
paseante 7mo ago
[dead]
SanjayMehta 7mo ago
I used to but driver support for wireless devices was so inconsistent I had to move to Linux.
- crdrost 7mo ago
  That's unintentionally hilarious -- some of us remember 15-20 years ago when flaky support for wireless devices was the biggest reason people would decide Linux wasn't ready for desktop yet and avoid switching from Windows to Linux. (Well, Windows to dual-boot -- Windows users were never fully willing to let go of the video games angle at the time.)
  - Gud 7mo ago
    Linux had better WiFi 20 years ago than FreeBSD has today. I still prefer FreeBSD.
  - SanjayMehta 7mo ago
    It is hilarious. When I installed SLS 1.0 I had to assemble the machine to match the drivers available. 92 or 93. I vaguely remember I needed a SCSI hard disk. Remember that most machines back then were Ethernet, not WiFi. First wifi device I used was a PCMCIA card from Lucent, claimed 2mbps speeds. Still have it somewhere. I don't think I ever got Linux or BSD to work.
    - lproven 7mo ago
      > Remember that most machines back then were Ethernet, not WiFi. Not "most" -- all. 802.11 networking was standardised in 1997. The first versions to really see significant mass adoption were 802.11b and then 802.11a in 1999. https://hewlettpackard.github.io/wireless-tools/Linux.Wireless.std.html https://hewlettpackard.github.io/wireless-tools/Linux.Wirele...
- bibimsz 7mo ago
  installed it on my n100 last night. it didn't detect my USB mouse.
amadeuspagel 7mo ago
> Over the years, FreeBSD has served me well. At a certain point it stepped down as my primary desktop - partly because I switched to Mac, partly because of unsupported hardware - but it never stopped being one of my first choices for servers and any serious workload. Not my idea of love. Maybe that hardware was supported on Linux. Switch from Linux to FreeBSD so that you can later switch to Mac when you get frustrated with unsupported hardware is not a good pitch.
- nullpoint420 7mo ago
  100%. It reminds me of how a ton of FreeBSD devs moved to Mac during the Darwin days. Then they were abandoned by Apple once they stopped contributing to upstream.
  - frumplestlatz 7mo ago
    We weren’t abandoned by Apple — Apple never contributed to upstream. Darwin and OpenDarwin were APSL projects and never fed code back into FreeBSD. Using macOS meant we got laptop hardware that worked reliably, including Wi-Fi, running a more or less BSD-derived userspace. The lack of graphics and Wi-Fi driver support on the *BSDs is not Apple’s fault. It has always been a resource issue. Thanks to the AT&T lawsuit, Linux secured momentum at a critical juncture — and here we are. Path dependence and the complexities of real life mean that “winning” is never just a question of technical merit.
    - pjmlp 7mo ago
      A consequence of the license, which allows Apple and Sony to do exactly that.
      - frumplestlatz 7mo ago
        I and other FreeBSD developers are okay with that — if we weren’t, we’d be using a different license.
imagetic 7mo ago
me too
krylon 7mo ago
My home server has been running FreeBSD for ten years now, and it has never let me down. Except for one time I got fresh with /dev/speaker and triggered a spontaneous reboot (I don't know if it's FreeBSD's fault or the hardware, though). I delayed upgrading to 15.0 after it was released, but last weekend I finally did it, and it left me wondering why I hadn't done it sooner, because it went quickly and smoothly. Is there anything FreeBSD can do that, say, Debian cannot? Probably not (at least I cannot think of anything). When I set up the server, ZFS was a huge selling point, but I heard that it works quite well on Linux, these days. But I appreciate the reliability, the good documentation, the community (when I need help).
- whizzter 7mo ago
  My current home server passed 10 years in the autnum, but I've been running FreeBSD on servers since around 2000. The main gripe is probably Docker and/or software depending on Linux-isms that can't be run natively without resorting to bhyve or smth alike that.
  - tosti 7mo ago
    [flagged]
    - jen20 7mo ago
      What exactly do you think pkg(1) is for? [1] [1]: https://docs-archive.freebsd.org/doc/10.3-RELEASE/usr/local/share/doc/freebsd/zh_TW/books/handbook/pkgng-intro.html https://docs-archive.freebsd.org/doc/10.3-RELEASE/usr/local/...
      - tosti 7mo ago
        I just use pkgsrc from netbsd
        jen20 7mo ago
        Ah right, that doesn’t have binary distribution at all. Oh wait [1]. [1]: https://www.netbsd.org/docs/pkgsrc/bulk.html https://www.netbsd.org/docs/pkgsrc/bulk.html
badgersnake 7mo ago
I love FreeBSD too, I used to use it on my desktop as a daily driver. I probably still would if it would support my video card (RDNA4).
CodeCompost 7mo ago
I'd love to move my home server to FreeBSD but I would like to run Immich on it. Immich assumes you're running Docker and I can't seem to get Linux running in a bhyve VM with Intel Quick Sync acceleration.
- messe 7mo ago
  Could be worth checking out: https://github.com/immich-app/immich/discussions/24931 https://github.com/immich-app/immich/discussions/24931
- jaypatelani 7mo ago
  I prefer syncting
smm11 7mo ago
I could never get sleep to work, and got tired of rebooting 17 times a day.
- ogogmad 7mo ago
  OpenBSD might have "better" support for sleep and hibernate, but I didn't succeed in installing it on this laptop: I think it required me to connect an Ethernet cable, which I wasn't going to do. Veering even more off-topic: I've just installed OpenSUSE Kalpa on this laptop. That's not regular OpenSUSE, by the way. Previously, each of the like, 5 problems I've encountered doing it, would've caused me to give up - but ChatGPT helped me fix all of them! I think this is going to become my daily driver for a while now.
evanjrowley 7mo ago
One of my favorite FreeBSD features is first-class support for ZFS boot environments. These have been working in FreeBSD/Solaris since 2008[0]. Having each boot environment available as a ZFS snapshot capable of being managed the same way as any other dataset, capable of being sent and received, is such a powerful feature. I dilligently watch the immutable/atomic Linux space to see when something implements this in the same fashion. Ubuntu could have been the one, but they reversed course after dropping support for Zsys in 2022[1]. If there are others, then please let me know, but as far as I can tell, the closest approximations in Linux are: - Btrfs with Snapper in OpenSuse Tumbleweed/MicroOS - Snapshot Manager/Boom in RHEL - OStree in Fedora Atomic, CarbonOS, EndlessOS - Bootable container implementations in Fedora CoreOS, RHEL10, CarbonOS, Bazzite, BlendOS, etc. - Snaps in Ubuntu Core - Generations in NixOS and Guix - A/B update mechanism in ChromeOS, IncusOS - OverlayFS in Nitrux Linux - Ad-hoc implementations with Arch, Alpine, etc. Excluding the ad-hoc implementations, only OpenSuse and Red Hat approaches allow you to treat your system image and system data the same way. They're great, but fundamentally incompatible, and neither has caught on with other distributions. Capabilities of both approaches are limited compared to ZFS. The strangest part of the Linux situation IMHO is, every time ZFS on Linux is discussed, someone will invariably bring up XFS. For the past decade, XFS on Linux contains support for Copy-on-Write (CoW) and snapshots via relinking. If this is the preferred path on Linux (for users who don't want checksumming of ZFS/Btrfs/Bcachefs), then how come no major distros besides Red Hat have embraced it[2] to provide an update rollback functionality? I concede that most of the other approaches do provide a higher level level of determinism for what your root system looks like after an upgrade. It's powerful when you can test that system as an OCI container (or as a VM with Nix/Guix). FWIW, FreeBSD can approximate this with the ability to use it's boot environments as a jail[3]. [0] https://daemonforums.org/showthread.php?t=7099 https://daemonforums.org/showthread.php?t=7099 [1] https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/ubiquity/+bug/1968150 https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/ubiquity/+bug/1968... [2] https://docs.redhat.com/en/documentation/red_hat_enterprise_linux/10/html/configuring_and_managing_logical_volumes/managing-system-upgrades-with-snapshots https://docs.redhat.com/en/documentation/red_hat_enterprise_... [3] https://man.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=bectl&sektion=8&manpath=FreeBSD#:~:text=(4).-,jail,-%5B%2DbU%5D%20%5B%7B https://man.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=bectl&sektion=8&ma...
- 7mo ago
seethishat 7mo ago
I love OpenBSD for similar reasons, except, I still run it as my primary desktop and on an old Chromebook. It just works. No drama with updates. Upgrade every six months. I'd be lost without it.
- hideout_berlin 7mo ago
  i plan to run netbsd on my chromebook do you have a good manual? or how to?
stego-tech 7mo ago
I think I finally know what to do with my second NUC: FreeBSD. I'm in the process of converting and consolidating all my home infra into a mono-compose, for the simple reason I don't want to fiddle with shit, I just want to set-and-forget. The joy of technology was in communications and experiences, not having to dive through abstraction layers to figure out why something was being fiddly. Containers promised to remove the fiddliness (as every virtualization advancement inevitably promises), and now I'm forced to either fiddle with Docker and its root security issues, fiddle with Podman and reconfiguring the OS for lower security so containers don't stop (or worse, converting compose to systemd files to make them services), or fiddle with Kubernetes to make things work with a myriad of ancillary services and CRDs for enterprises, not homelabs. For two years now, there's been a pretty consistent campaign of love-letters for the BSDs that keep tugging at what I love about technology: that the whole point was to enable you to spend more time living, rather than wrangling what a computer does and how it does it. The concept of jails where I can just run software again, no abstractions needed, and trust it to not misbehave? Amazing, I want to learn more. So yeah, in lieu of setting up the second NUC as a Debian HA node for Docker/QEMU failover, I think I'm going to slap FreeBSD on it and try porting my workloads to it via Jails. Worst case scenario, I learn something new; best case scenario, I finally get what I want and can finally catch up on my books, movies, shows, and music instead of constantly fiddling with why Plex or Jellyfin or my RSS Aggregator stopped functioning, again.
MarkusWandel 7mo ago
Early in my Unix-ish at home journey (26-ish years ago) I tried FreeBSD. It was so Unix because, well, it is. An operating system, not a collection of parts. I found at the time in Linux land Debian felt similar. But there is always pressure for more features, more bloat. In Linux, on the plus side, I can plug in some random gadget and in most cases it just works. And any laptop that's a few years old, you can just install Fedora from its bootable live image, and it will work. Secure boot, suspend, Wifi, the special buttons on the keyboard, and so on. But the downside is enormous bloat and yes, often the kind of tinkering you really don't want to do any more, such as the Brother laser printer drivers still being shipped as 32-bit binaries and the installer silently failing because one particular 32-bit dependency wasn't autoinstalled. Or having to get an Ubuntu-dedicated installer (Displaylink!) to run on Fedora. But here you have the "mainstream" Unix-ish OS absorbing all the bleeding edge stuff, all the bloat. Allowing FreeBSD free reign to be pure, with a higher average quality of user, which sets the tone of the whole scene. An echo of the old days, like Usenet before "Eternal September" and before Canter & Siegel - for those old enough to remember how it all felt back then.
- sidkshatriya 7mo ago
  > But the downside is enormous bloat If you think Linux can have "enormous bloat" then Windows bloat by the same standards is terrifyingly humongous (and slow!).
  - Asooka 7mo ago
    It is.
  - MarkusWandel 7mo ago
    Well, all those years ago, my testbed for installing and trying out FreeBSD was a 486 with 8MB of memory. That was a heck of a machine compared to the ones BSD grew up on, and it ran great. No GUI on that setup of course, but all the Unixy stuff... vi editor, C toolchain, NFS etc. I don't know what's the minimum system to run no-GUI mainline Linux on these days. I'm sure BSD has gotten bloated too, but I'll bet not as much.
gosukiwi 7mo ago
When I tried FreeBSD, I was also blown away by the manual, so simple, such high-quality documentation. I think what I liked the most is that it felt coherent, unlike modern OS like Linux and Windows. I think macOS might be the most cohesive of the popular OS's.
- hedora 7mo ago
  I recently spent 20 minutes reading forum posts and vague documentation because MacOS couldn’t confirm a .md file wasn’t free of malware. I could say some nice things about MacOS, but it certainly is not “cohesive” any more.
  - 7F902DDA 7mo ago
    > MacOS couldn’t confirm a .md file wasn’t free of malware That sounds like a hilarious story. What was going on?
sgt 7mo ago
Well written and clearly not AI generated. So refreshing these days.
commandersaki 7mo ago
Ran a FreeBSD colocated server for about a decade that went through generations of hardware. I really want to like the OS, except it's most touted feature, the network stack, was consistently unreliable for me using Intel NICs on Supermicro servers. They would go offline usually after some load due to mbuf resource exhaustion. I never got to the bottom of it even though I posted to the bugs database and would diligently follow up and perform experiments. This also happened on different incarnations of server hardware, so it wasn't the same physical NIC having the issue, but different varieties. Anyways had enough of the random downtime, I just switched to Linux which didn't have these issues. I'd say the best part of FreeBSD though is freebsd-update which was a game changer from the previous make world shenanigans.
- dewarrn1 7mo ago
  Hail u/cperciva.
  - commandersaki 7mo ago
    Or rather all hail u/cperciva for freebsd-update.
    - grahamjperrin 7mo ago
      > all hail u/cperciva Colin Percival (FreeBSD Primary Release Engineering Team Lead) longer uses that ID in Reddit. Instead: /u/perciva Most recently, in /r/freebsd https://www.reddit.com/r/freebsd/comments/1rphd7t/freebsd_144release_now_available/ https://www.reddit.com/r/freebsd/comments/1rphd7t/freebsd_14... All hail.
- doublerabbit 7mo ago
  I colocate all my servers that all run FreeBSD. Myself has been through generational hardware, and had had zero issues with any apart from when the raid card failed. Network has been solid. ZFS has just worked. Not sure what your issues were however colocating since FreeBSD 8, and now colocating 16-CURRENT on my the server. FreeBSD has been rock stable in my books. 2x Dell R630 and 1x Cisco U220 M5 doublerabbit@cookie:~ $ uname -a && uptime FreeBSD cookie.server 12.2-BETA1 FreeBSD 12.2-BETA1 r365618 GENERIC amd64 10:39PM up 1752 days, 1:31, 1 user, load averages: 0.64, 1.30, 1.31
w4rh4wk5 7mo ago
For someone who has multiple years of experience using Linux for desktop and servers, what's the best way to get into FreeBSD? Any specific recommendations for desktop, like is Wayland ready on FreeBSD?
- nesarkvechnep 7mo ago
  I'm running Sway on FreeBSD daily and it's way snappier and sharper than on any Linux distro I tried. Go ahead, it doesn't hurt.
- xenophonf 7mo ago
  I love FreeBSD for its documentation. To answer your question about Wayland specifically: https://docs.freebsd.org/en/books/handbook/wayland/ https://docs.freebsd.org/en/books/handbook/wayland/ If you want something with a graphical environment ready to run, check out GhostBSD, which is based on FreeBSD and features MATE: https://www.ghostbsd.org/ https://www.ghostbsd.org/
- adiabatichottub 7mo ago
  I've been using both Linux and BSD since 2000. Honestly, I prefer Linux on the desktop. My dev workstation runs Arch, and I keep a FreeBSD VM running to do OS and ports builds. As a server OS I find FreeBSD really consistent and easy to administrate. I never have trouble finding things: packages always go in /usr/local. The old-school init system works great at what it's designed to do, and all the startup scripts are easy to understand. The whole thing just feels kind of cozy and familiar. If you like working in a shell then FreeBSD just kind of feels like /home. Coming from modern Linux though, some of the constructs can feel a bit outdated. Usually this gives me a warm fuzzy feeling, but sometimes it's a real pain (looking at you, make(1)). It's like hacking Perl, once you understand the idiom and what it's good at then you can be good friends. If you want to run a mail server for 20 years and go through multiple hardware and OS upgrades with minimal pain and maximal uptime then you can't beat it.
myylogic 7mo ago
[flagged]
aap_ 7mo ago
I was using FreeBSD (after NetBSD) as my primary system for a while in school (no, i can't watch this youtube video, flash doesn't run on FreeBSD). i still use it for my home server, it's just cozy.
- c-c-c-c-c 7mo ago
  that makes no sense, youtube hasn’t used flash in ages. If you use any modern browser on freebsd you’d be able to play the video.
  - estebank 7mo ago
    I'd infer that the GP is talking about some time back and they are no longer in school.
brcmthrowaway 7mo ago
Does FreeBSD support latest PCIe generations and Thunderbolt?
aborsy 7mo ago
Can we say FreeBSD is more secure than Linux, because it’s smaller and less of a target? Not clear!
- aforwardslash 7mo ago
  Rule of thumb, its not. Common stuff like address randomization is a recent default, afaik still doesnt have random process ids, and the base permissions arent stellar. However I would prefer jails any day of the week vs the clusterf** that are namespaces and cgroups.
  - hedora 7mo ago
    How many remotely exploitable zero days has FreeBSD had in its init system this decade? SystemD has to be in the dozens at this point.
    - aforwardslash 7mo ago
      Right, because linux security == init system used by some distros. My experience with FreeBSD may be somewhat dated (I've used it since the 4.x days, provided commercial support for it for more than 15 years), an that is not my experience - at all. Obviously, it depends on the threat model you are considering and how far you want to go. The default install does not have (or had) sane security defaults, at least comparing to your random $ystemd linux distro; try installing both and give local shell to a red team and see how fast they get root access.
  - adiabatichottub 7mo ago
    sysctl kern.randompid=1 Oddly enough, not in the sysctl(3) manual
- msla 7mo ago
  Remember: If z/OS were as widely used as Windows 95, it would be just as insecure! God, it reminds me of Slashdot trolls in the 1990s..
dwrodri 7mo ago
Serious FreeBSD question: I like a lot of what FreeBSD promises, but have been hesitant to make the leap for my home server as I enjoy hosting game servers via steamcmd. I know FreeBSD has Linux binary compatibility, but I am unsure how this would play out for all of my hosting needs. Also, I have some old Nvidia GPUs in this machine, which I might get rid of as they are no longer supported by the latest releases of ML packages, but I also might keep them around for self-teaching CUDA. How do FreeBSD users get around the inconveniences associated with the "the rest of the world" running on Linux?
hedora 7mo ago
Hey; Linux refugee here. I want to have a bunch (5-10) of freebsd cattle-style servers to run a service on. What’s the preferred infrastructure as code style approach to setting them up? Some will be bare metal with kvm console access. Some will be VMs. They will be heterogeneous and not in one DC. I probably don’t need zfs for this application (raw iops matter more than snapshots, etc). I have previous experience with kubernetes, and am not interested in using it again. Monitoring, logging, deterministic “zero to working” install and updates are probably the main requirements.
- ijustlovemath 7mo ago
  how about ansible?
  - hedora 7mo ago
    I don’t have any experience with it, but it sounds plausible. What about FreeBSD / Unix native things, like syslog or jails?
- ochoseis 7mo ago
  Nomad?
QuantumNoodle 7mo ago
I ran a TrueNAS server that was based on BSD, loved jails. Then TrueNAS started using debian so more application can run on it. Selfishly I like getting more utility from my server so this was a welcomed change. What industry is BSD used in now a days?
- bombcar 7mo ago
  firewalls are a common example (many Linux houses have a BSD-based firewall at the edge) but any "single application" setup may run on BSD - Netflix, for example.
pfp 7mo ago
Ok, where are the companies using FreeBSD? How do you get hired if you do happen to have proper FreeBSD skills? It's notably absent from all the job listings.
- adiabatichottub 7mo ago
  Well, I mean... Netflix is the example I think most people have heard of: https://freebsdfoundation.org/end-user-stories/netflix-case-study/ https://freebsdfoundation.org/end-user-stories/netflix-case-... But it's still a pretty small market share.
  - andrehacker 7mo ago
    Word is that NetApp and Juniper are using FreeBSD. What these have in common is that they rely heavily on FreeBSD's I/O performannce and capabilities which is said to be head and shoulders above Linux.
- merpkz 7mo ago
  Playstation is based on FreeBSD, so I would guess that Sony has some serious FreeBSD people working there who created one of the most popular a video game console - that's pretty cool
- guenthert 7mo ago
  > Ok, where are the companies using FreeBSD? Not quite twenty years ago Yahoo! was using (also, I suspect) FreeBSD. > How do you get hired if you do happen to have proper FreeBSD skills? By advertising your other skills?
h4kunamata 7mo ago
I am a long time Debian Netinst (terminal) user, and Mint Cinnamon for Desktop. OPNSense run on FreeBSD and it just works. My personal issue is that I do not believe FreeBSD will give me a smooth experience to get my GPU and what not running. On Mint Cinnamon, I only had to install the latest supported kernel to get my RTX and WiFi6 card recognised. Debian, the reason why I run Debian as a server everywhere, even in my 3D printer is because it just work, and not just that. I only run Debian Netinst version, that means to only install standard system and SSH, text mode is the way. We are talking about 300MB of memory being used by Pihole + Unbound Recursive DNS of 512MB running on a Debian 13. Disk space?? 1GB or so I guess. These are my blockers to even try raw FreeBSD, lack of proper hardware support and as a server even if I remove everything I can, I do not imagine FreeBSD running with 300MB/1G of resources. Not to mention if you work in IT in any way, the last thing you wanna is fighting the system you use to solve another problem, that is why I left Ubuntu after 13years or so, it is a Windows within the Linux world now. A distro Linux must just run, no dramas, no issues, major system release goes like nothing happened. That matters!!!
olivierestsage 7mo ago
Around 10 years ago, I picked up an old Thinkpad T42, put FreeBSD on it, and had an amazing experience. Actually used it as a daily driver for a while, which seems crazy in retrospect, but I enjoy trying to work within that kind of constraint sometimes. I miss it! This post rekindles the flame...
waynesonfire 7mo ago
I just hope FreeBSD dosen't get bit by the Rust in the kernel initative. Maybe it'll have to deal with it eventually, when, for example, expanding the compatiblity layer to support interoperability with Linux. But, maybe by then, at least Rust will have gone through its hype test gauntlet and we can see it for what it is instead of being tainted by a polticial power grab.
- grahamjperrin 7mo ago
  https://wiki.freebsd.org/Rust https://wiki.freebsd.org/Rust for Rust seems to be stale, but not yet categorised as such – https://wiki.freebsd.org/CategoryStale https://wiki.freebsd.org/CategoryStale In <https://lists.freebsd.org/archives/freebsd-hackers/2025-August/004921.html https://lists.freebsd.org/archives/freebsd-hackers/2025-Augu...> (August 2025), Konstantin Belousov (kib@) write: > There was a long and hot thread about 'Rust in base' recently. … Unfortunately, the list archives are not suitably indexed by popular search engines, so, for example, https://www.startpage.com/do/dsearch?query=Rust+base+site%3Alists.freebsd.org&cat=web https://www.startpage.com/do/dsearch?query=Rust+base+site%3A... does not find what's required. Sorry. https://www.phoronix.com/news/FreeBSD-Q4-2025-Status-Report https://www.phoronix.com/news/FreeBSD-Q4-2025-Status-Report includes Michael Larabel's quote from the final status report of 2025: > At some point in early 2026 the rust KPIs should be stable enough for interested developers to try writing new code with them. They will not be perfect, but I want to make sure they work roughly like existing drivers expect and also fit the expectations of rust developers before asking for testers. Hopefully the Apple drivers will be back up to parity with the initial WIP in C in the first half of 2026 as well.
  - waynesonfire 7mo ago
    >> There was a long and hot thread about 'Rust in base' recently. … Maybe this, https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/the-case-for-rust-in-the-base-system.92024/ https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/the-case-for-rust-in-the-... ?
MrResearcher 7mo ago
What is the roadmap to ML on FreeBSD? From what I could find, apparently neither CUDA nor ROCm is supported? And there are no short-term plans to address the lack of hardware support for ML?
wang_pp8 7mo ago
These days I prefer to run small systems and basic services. I don't want webguis or docker images anymore.
- lproven 7mo ago
  FWIW, agreed. It is very odd to me that I often read people asking about alternative OSes -- Linux compared to Windows, or FreeBSD compared to Linux, or OpenBSD compared to FreeBSD -- and they say that they want to move except that they desperately need to keep {something arcane}... And often that arcane thing is why I am interested in getting off the original system under discussion.
  - bombcar 7mo ago
    The appeal of the BSDs has always been an incredibly stable entire system that means you don't need Docker to run fifteen variations of the various libraries necessary to (Stallman) build a GNU/Linux.
    - lproven 7mo ago
      While I entirely take your point and am not arguing with it, sadly, running Docker commands is now the only way that many relatively new Linux folks now how to assemble and deploy systems. Which is why the podman support in FreeBSD 14.2 was a big deal that wasn't really trumpeted enough. Podman is Red Hat's all-FOSS daemonless Docker clone, and now, FreeBSD can just understand Docker commands and run the results using Linuxulator jails. For similar reasons, this is why MS hired Lennart Poettering: to get systemd working in WSL2, because so many "techies" don't know anything else but systemd commands. They know (ish) that Ubuntu has systemd, they ran Ubuntu in WSL2, `systemctl start foo` didn't work, therefore, WSL2 was broken and incompatible. Result: hire Lenny P, get it working, let him go again. Job done.
      - bombcar 7mo ago
        I fully understand and appreciate the gifts that things like Docker and systemd and even Caddy have brought to the table, and I use them. But sometimes I'm wistful over the fact that those that come after me will not be exposed to the things that taught me what I know.
burner420042 7mo ago
I just installed FreeBSD 15 on a T480 that also runs Debian13. Do other people notice that FreeBSD has longer battery life? I'm still looking into this.
leavenotracks 7mo ago
What a delightful letter of appreciation for a project. Reminds us all to appreciate what FOSS gives the world every day and to not take it for granted!
kombine 7mo ago
I've never used FreeBSD and I appreciate the appeal, but to me the most exciting ideas in OS space are being developed within Nix/Guix projects. I am putting up a NixOS-based homelab server right now. Does FreeBSD have anything remotely similar?
- nesarkvechnep 7mo ago
  No. FreeBSD enthusiast will tell you there's no need for something even remotely similar. I love the OS but some of the zealots are the reason for the miniscule size of the community.
Arch-TK 7mo ago
FreeBSD and OpenBSD docs are great, but let's not say they're the pinnacle of docs. I like them a lot more than docs for the average Linux distribution. They're even more polished than Arch Linux wiki. But they still have room for improvement. And improving the Arch wiki is easier in my experience.
- bombcar 7mo ago
  There's three kinds of documentation: * Wiki-style "HOWTO"-based that helps you solve a particular problem (Arch and Gentoo wikis showcase this style well) * Reference documentation that reminds you how you solved a problem (man pages are great examples here) * Comprehensive documentation that truly documents the system, but can be a bit more obscure if you're not reading it "cover to cover" - textbook style (This is the older "original" software documentation type, which the BSD docs are an example of)
indigodaddy 7mo ago
I recently put it on an OVH VPS and was very surprised how easy it is to do anything. Firewall. A few ipfw rules/script (pf I think is even easier). Caddy. Just install it and then it very clearly tells you the commands to run as not root. Follow the instructions. Easy. Everything is meant to be simple. I like that. And it seems so much more memory efficient than Linux. Do processes just run better on bsd? Anyway it's been a pleasure. It's my only bsd VPS but I'm glad I've got one.
tsoukase 7mo ago
As an amateur my need is to use the same OS in all the devices from the GUI desktop, to servers, down to Raspberry Pi, having simultaneously very good documentation. And the only one that fulfills this is Arch Linux. Being excellent in device drivers, package maintenance and simplicity is also deal breaker.
aguimaraes1986 7mo ago
That's one of the best things I've read this week. Thank you.
bibimsz 7mo ago
I was inspired to install FreeBSD on my spare minipc after reading this post. After boot the USB mouse didn't work at first.
drewlander 7mo ago
I use it as a daily driver. I have tried to use it in some shape or form for the past 20 years. I made a career in Linux and Windows, but always have had a heart for FreeBSD. A person I consider by technical mentor, loved FreeBSD. My first "Admin" job was at a small ISP where he worked. That was where I got my first taste of FreeBSD which I believe was version 5.3? He made sure that all consoles were set to show beastie and I really learned a ton which set up the rest of my tech career. Later on, he committed suicide, and I use it as a daily driver in honor of him. I have Linux vms in bhyve. I use jails, etc. I find it pleasant and I prefer it over Linux, if I do not mind its paper cuts (for Desktop use). I had to previously use wifi dongles since it did not support AX200 at decent speeds. Since version 14 though, it has jumped leaps and bounds. I no longer need it. What I still have to do is use a custom xorg.conf, because I have dual amd and intel video cards. If I start without it, it says I must specify Bus Ids. I can use pure wayland, but if anything requires X, I still need a working xorg.conf. If you are willing to deal with paper cuts, and workarounds, it rocks. If you do not have time for that, it may not be for you (desktop wise). Server wise, I still love it, just like 5.3 days.
simonebrunozzi 6mo ago
I am not too familiar with the FreeBSD community, so I have a question for the experts: has it ever been for FreeBSD something similar to Ubuntu for Linux? Meaning: a successful billionaire that decides to put money and effort to create a valid, popular alternative to Windows for end users? (not saying that Ubuntu is perfect; just stating the intention).

530 points by enz 7mo ago

A week ago, I decided to set up my home server with FreeBSD, after the HDD failed, just to try it out. The setup was quick and easy and everything works fine so far. I am just not sure it is worth leaving the Linux ecosystem. What if I want to run a Docker container? Do I have to trust random people for ports of software that runs natively on Linux, or port it myself? FreeBSD seems good so far, but community and ecosystem are important.

vermaden 7mo ago
No one prevents You from installing Linux in a Bhyve VM and running Docker there. Overhead of FreeBSD Bhyve Hypervisor is about 0.5% (measured in benchmarks) so You loose nothing. Here You have easy and complete jumpstart into Bhyve in FreeBSD: - https://vermaden.wordpress.com/2023/08/18/freebsd-bhyve-virtualization/ https://vermaden.wordpress.com/2023/08/18/freebsd-bhyve-virt... Regards, vermaden
- ComputerGuru 7mo ago
  Isn't that no longer necessary? Doesn't linuxulator + podman suffice?
  - sidkshatriya 7mo ago
    > Doesn't linuxulator + podman suffice? No it is not reliable enough. Some syscalls not implemented, there are edge case issues with procfs etc. Best to execute in a Linux VM.
    - c-c-c-c-c 7mo ago
      it’s exceedingly rare that programs dont work with linuxulator, i use vivado daily and you can play games through linux steam and proton that way.
  - elcritch 7mo ago
    Unfortunately podman on freebsd is pretty early stage. I was only able to get very simple containers to run.
shevy-java 7mo ago
I can not answer the other questions; for me Linux worked and works better. But that statement here: > Do I have to trust random people for ports of software that runs natively on Linux, or port it myself? This is a bit problematic in my opinion because ultimately we have to trust all who write open source code. This works well for the most part but there are malicious actors too. See the xz backdoor as example. Or various state actors who want to sniff after people. Age verification is the current attempt to sniff for people data, trying to push legislation by claiming "this is only to protect children" (while it has some interesting side effects, e. g. becoming a stepping stone for anyone wanting to sniff user data and relay this). > FreeBSD seems good so far, but community and ecosystem are important. Well, there are many more Linux users. Whether that is better or worse ... but it is a fact too.
fridder 7mo ago
You can run oci containers via podman.
mghackerlady 7mo ago
it isn't anywhere close to the convenience of docker, but if you just need containerised OS-level virtualization FreeBSD has Jails which are really cool
0x457 7mo ago
> I am just not sure it is worth leaving the Linux ecosystem. What if I want to run a Docker container? Do I have to trust random people for ports of software that runs natively on Linux, or port it myself? You already trust random people in linux, you have to trust even more random and more people when you run docker. Ports are quite large collection already. If you port yourself it's either up to 20 minutes plus compilation time or major nightmare. More and more software today assumes you run on linux only. I think FreeBSD is great for setup and forget. If you have to interact with it regularly it's not worth it. Definitely not worth it for desktop.
Gud 7mo ago
You should avoid Docker, is the obvious answer, and grow to love FreeBSD jails.
cess11 7mo ago
If you just want to run a Docker container casually, perhaps do it on your personal computer instead of the home server. If there is some service you really can't manage to get running with jails or right on the BSD, bhyve and guest Linux should be easy enough.

shevy-java 7mo ago

> had trained me to hunt for documentation in fragments: often incomplete, often outdated, sometimes already stale after barely a year. This is indeed a problem now that google search is next to useless. And AI further degrading the quality. I work around it to some extent by keeping my local knowledge base up to date, as much as that is possible; and using a ton of scripts that help me do things. That works. I am also efficient. But some projects are simply underdocumented. A random example is, in the ruby ecosystem, rack. Have a look here: https://github.com/rack/rack https://github.com/rack/rack Now find the documentation ... try it. You may find it: https://rack.github.io/rack/ https://rack.github.io/rack/ Linked from the github page. Well, have a look at it. Remain patient. Now as you have looked at it ... tell me if someone is troll-roflcopter-joking you. https://rack.github.io/rack/main/index.html https://rack.github.io/rack/main/index.html Yes, you can jump to the individual documentation of the classes, but does that really explain anything? It next to tells you nothing at all about anything about rack. If you are new to ruby, would you waste any time with such a project? Yes, rack is useful; yes, many people don't use it directly but may use sinatra, rails and so forth, I get it. But this is not the point. The point is whether the documentation is good or bad. And that is not the only example. See ruby-webassembly. Ruby-opal. Numerous more projects (I won't even mention the abandoned gems, but this is of course a problem every language faces, some code will become outdated as maintainers disappear.) So this is really nothing unique to Linux. I bet on BSD you will also find ... a lack of documentation. Probably even more as so few blog about BSD. OpenBSD claims it has great documentation. Well, if I look at what they have, and look at Arch or Gentoo wiki, then sorry but the BSDs don't understand the problem domain. It really is a general problem. Documentation is simply too crap in general, with a few exceptions. > if the team behind this OS puts this much care into its documentation, imagine how solid the system itself must be. Meh. FreeBSD documentation can barely called the stand-out role model here either. Not sure what the BSD folks think about that. > I realized almost immediately that GNU/Linux and FreeBSD were so similar they were completely different. Not really. There are some differences but I found they are very similar in their respective niche. Unfortunately my finding convinced me that Linux is the better choice for my use cases. This ranges from e. g. LFS/BLFS to 500 out of top 500 supercomputers running Linux. Sure, I am not in that use case of having a supercomputer, but the point is about quality. Linux is like chaotic quality. Messy. But it works. New Jersey model versus [insert any high quality here]. https://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is-better.html https://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is-better.html > Not only that: Linux would overheat and produce unpredictable results - errors, sudden shutdowns, fans screaming even after compilation finished. Well, hardware plays a big factor, I get it. I have issues with some nvidia cards, but other cards worked fine on the same computer. But this apocalypse scenario he writes about ... that's rubbish nonsense. Linux works. For the most part - depending on the hardware. But mostly it really works. > I could read my email in mutt while compiling, something that was practically impossible on Linux Ok sorry, I stopped reading there. My current computer was fairly cheap; I deliberately put in 64GB RAM (before the insane AI-driven cost increases) and that computer works super-fast. I compile almost everything from source. I have no real issue with anything being too slow; admittedly a few things take quite a bit of compile-power, e. g. LLVM, or qt - compiling that from source takes a while, yes, even on a fast computer. But nah, the attempt to claim how FreeBSD is so much faster than Linux is, that's simply not factual. It is rubbish nonsense. Note that OpenBSD and NetBSD folks never write such strangeness. What's wrong with the FreeBSD guys?

paseante 7mo ago

[dead]

SanjayMehta 7mo ago

I used to but driver support for wireless devices was so inconsistent I had to move to Linux.

crdrost 7mo ago
That's unintentionally hilarious -- some of us remember 15-20 years ago when flaky support for wireless devices was the biggest reason people would decide Linux wasn't ready for desktop yet and avoid switching from Windows to Linux. (Well, Windows to dual-boot -- Windows users were never fully willing to let go of the video games angle at the time.)
- Gud 7mo ago
  Linux had better WiFi 20 years ago than FreeBSD has today. I still prefer FreeBSD.
- SanjayMehta 7mo ago
  It is hilarious. When I installed SLS 1.0 I had to assemble the machine to match the drivers available. 92 or 93. I vaguely remember I needed a SCSI hard disk. Remember that most machines back then were Ethernet, not WiFi. First wifi device I used was a PCMCIA card from Lucent, claimed 2mbps speeds. Still have it somewhere. I don't think I ever got Linux or BSD to work.
  - lproven 7mo ago
    > Remember that most machines back then were Ethernet, not WiFi. Not "most" -- all. 802.11 networking was standardised in 1997. The first versions to really see significant mass adoption were 802.11b and then 802.11a in 1999. https://hewlettpackard.github.io/wireless-tools/Linux.Wireless.std.html https://hewlettpackard.github.io/wireless-tools/Linux.Wirele...
bibimsz 7mo ago
installed it on my n100 last night. it didn't detect my USB mouse.

amadeuspagel 7mo ago

> Over the years, FreeBSD has served me well. At a certain point it stepped down as my primary desktop - partly because I switched to Mac, partly because of unsupported hardware - but it never stopped being one of my first choices for servers and any serious workload. Not my idea of love. Maybe that hardware was supported on Linux. Switch from Linux to FreeBSD so that you can later switch to Mac when you get frustrated with unsupported hardware is not a good pitch.

nullpoint420 7mo ago
100%. It reminds me of how a ton of FreeBSD devs moved to Mac during the Darwin days. Then they were abandoned by Apple once they stopped contributing to upstream.
- frumplestlatz 7mo ago
  We weren’t abandoned by Apple — Apple never contributed to upstream. Darwin and OpenDarwin were APSL projects and never fed code back into FreeBSD. Using macOS meant we got laptop hardware that worked reliably, including Wi-Fi, running a more or less BSD-derived userspace. The lack of graphics and Wi-Fi driver support on the *BSDs is not Apple’s fault. It has always been a resource issue. Thanks to the AT&T lawsuit, Linux secured momentum at a critical juncture — and here we are. Path dependence and the complexities of real life mean that “winning” is never just a question of technical merit.
  - pjmlp 7mo ago
    A consequence of the license, which allows Apple and Sony to do exactly that.
    - frumplestlatz 7mo ago
      I and other FreeBSD developers are okay with that — if we weren’t, we’d be using a different license.

imagetic 7mo ago

me too

krylon 7mo ago

My home server has been running FreeBSD for ten years now, and it has never let me down. Except for one time I got fresh with /dev/speaker and triggered a spontaneous reboot (I don't know if it's FreeBSD's fault or the hardware, though). I delayed upgrading to 15.0 after it was released, but last weekend I finally did it, and it left me wondering why I hadn't done it sooner, because it went quickly and smoothly. Is there anything FreeBSD can do that, say, Debian cannot? Probably not (at least I cannot think of anything). When I set up the server, ZFS was a huge selling point, but I heard that it works quite well on Linux, these days. But I appreciate the reliability, the good documentation, the community (when I need help).

whizzter 7mo ago
My current home server passed 10 years in the autnum, but I've been running FreeBSD on servers since around 2000. The main gripe is probably Docker and/or software depending on Linux-isms that can't be run natively without resorting to bhyve or smth alike that.
- tosti 7mo ago
  [flagged]
  - jen20 7mo ago
    What exactly do you think pkg(1) is for? [1] [1]: https://docs-archive.freebsd.org/doc/10.3-RELEASE/usr/local/share/doc/freebsd/zh_TW/books/handbook/pkgng-intro.html https://docs-archive.freebsd.org/doc/10.3-RELEASE/usr/local/...
    - tosti 7mo ago
      I just use pkgsrc from netbsd
      - jen20 7mo ago
        Ah right, that doesn’t have binary distribution at all. Oh wait [1]. [1]: https://www.netbsd.org/docs/pkgsrc/bulk.html https://www.netbsd.org/docs/pkgsrc/bulk.html

badgersnake 7mo ago

I love FreeBSD too, I used to use it on my desktop as a daily driver. I probably still would if it would support my video card (RDNA4).

CodeCompost 7mo ago

I'd love to move my home server to FreeBSD but I would like to run Immich on it. Immich assumes you're running Docker and I can't seem to get Linux running in a bhyve VM with Intel Quick Sync acceleration.

messe 7mo ago
Could be worth checking out: https://github.com/immich-app/immich/discussions/24931 https://github.com/immich-app/immich/discussions/24931
jaypatelani 7mo ago
I prefer syncting

smm11 7mo ago

I could never get sleep to work, and got tired of rebooting 17 times a day.

ogogmad 7mo ago
OpenBSD might have "better" support for sleep and hibernate, but I didn't succeed in installing it on this laptop: I think it required me to connect an Ethernet cable, which I wasn't going to do. Veering even more off-topic: I've just installed OpenSUSE Kalpa on this laptop. That's not regular OpenSUSE, by the way. Previously, each of the like, 5 problems I've encountered doing it, would've caused me to give up - but ChatGPT helped me fix all of them! I think this is going to become my daily driver for a while now.

evanjrowley 7mo ago

One of my favorite FreeBSD features is first-class support for ZFS boot environments. These have been working in FreeBSD/Solaris since 2008[0]. Having each boot environment available as a ZFS snapshot capable of being managed the same way as any other dataset, capable of being sent and received, is such a powerful feature. I dilligently watch the immutable/atomic Linux space to see when something implements this in the same fashion. Ubuntu could have been the one, but they reversed course after dropping support for Zsys in 2022[1]. If there are others, then please let me know, but as far as I can tell, the closest approximations in Linux are: - Btrfs with Snapper in OpenSuse Tumbleweed/MicroOS - Snapshot Manager/Boom in RHEL - OStree in Fedora Atomic, CarbonOS, EndlessOS - Bootable container implementations in Fedora CoreOS, RHEL10, CarbonOS, Bazzite, BlendOS, etc. - Snaps in Ubuntu Core - Generations in NixOS and Guix - A/B update mechanism in ChromeOS, IncusOS - OverlayFS in Nitrux Linux - Ad-hoc implementations with Arch, Alpine, etc. Excluding the ad-hoc implementations, only OpenSuse and Red Hat approaches allow you to treat your system image and system data the same way. They're great, but fundamentally incompatible, and neither has caught on with other distributions. Capabilities of both approaches are limited compared to ZFS. The strangest part of the Linux situation IMHO is, every time ZFS on Linux is discussed, someone will invariably bring up XFS. For the past decade, XFS on Linux contains support for Copy-on-Write (CoW) and snapshots via relinking. If this is the preferred path on Linux (for users who don't want checksumming of ZFS/Btrfs/Bcachefs), then how come no major distros besides Red Hat have embraced it[2] to provide an update rollback functionality? I concede that most of the other approaches do provide a higher level level of determinism for what your root system looks like after an upgrade. It's powerful when you can test that system as an OCI container (or as a VM with Nix/Guix). FWIW, FreeBSD can approximate this with the ability to use it's boot environments as a jail[3]. [0] https://daemonforums.org/showthread.php?t=7099 https://daemonforums.org/showthread.php?t=7099 [1] https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/ubiquity/+bug/1968150 https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/ubiquity/+bug/1968... [2] https://docs.redhat.com/en/documentation/red_hat_enterprise_linux/10/html/configuring_and_managing_logical_volumes/managing-system-upgrades-with-snapshots https://docs.redhat.com/en/documentation/red_hat_enterprise_... [3] https://man.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=bectl&sektion=8&manpath=FreeBSD#:~:text=(4).-,jail,-%5B%2DbU%5D%20%5B%7B https://man.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=bectl&sektion=8&ma...

7mo ago

seethishat 7mo ago

I love OpenBSD for similar reasons, except, I still run it as my primary desktop and on an old Chromebook. It just works. No drama with updates. Upgrade every six months. I'd be lost without it.

hideout_berlin 7mo ago
i plan to run netbsd on my chromebook do you have a good manual? or how to?

stego-tech 7mo ago

I think I finally know what to do with my second NUC: FreeBSD. I'm in the process of converting and consolidating all my home infra into a mono-compose, for the simple reason I don't want to fiddle with shit, I just want to set-and-forget. The joy of technology was in communications and experiences, not having to dive through abstraction layers to figure out why something was being fiddly. Containers promised to remove the fiddliness (as every virtualization advancement inevitably promises), and now I'm forced to either fiddle with Docker and its root security issues, fiddle with Podman and reconfiguring the OS for lower security so containers don't stop (or worse, converting compose to systemd files to make them services), or fiddle with Kubernetes to make things work with a myriad of ancillary services and CRDs for enterprises, not homelabs. For two years now, there's been a pretty consistent campaign of love-letters for the BSDs that keep tugging at what I love about technology: that the whole point was to enable you to spend more time living, rather than wrangling what a computer does and how it does it. The concept of jails where I can just run software again, no abstractions needed, and trust it to not misbehave? Amazing, I want to learn more. So yeah, in lieu of setting up the second NUC as a Debian HA node for Docker/QEMU failover, I think I'm going to slap FreeBSD on it and try porting my workloads to it via Jails. Worst case scenario, I learn something new; best case scenario, I finally get what I want and can finally catch up on my books, movies, shows, and music instead of constantly fiddling with why Plex or Jellyfin or my RSS Aggregator stopped functioning, again.

MarkusWandel 7mo ago

Early in my Unix-ish at home journey (26-ish years ago) I tried FreeBSD. It was so Unix because, well, it is. An operating system, not a collection of parts. I found at the time in Linux land Debian felt similar. But there is always pressure for more features, more bloat. In Linux, on the plus side, I can plug in some random gadget and in most cases it just works. And any laptop that's a few years old, you can just install Fedora from its bootable live image, and it will work. Secure boot, suspend, Wifi, the special buttons on the keyboard, and so on. But the downside is enormous bloat and yes, often the kind of tinkering you really don't want to do any more, such as the Brother laser printer drivers still being shipped as 32-bit binaries and the installer silently failing because one particular 32-bit dependency wasn't autoinstalled. Or having to get an Ubuntu-dedicated installer (Displaylink!) to run on Fedora. But here you have the "mainstream" Unix-ish OS absorbing all the bleeding edge stuff, all the bloat. Allowing FreeBSD free reign to be pure, with a higher average quality of user, which sets the tone of the whole scene. An echo of the old days, like Usenet before "Eternal September" and before Canter & Siegel - for those old enough to remember how it all felt back then.

sidkshatriya 7mo ago
> But the downside is enormous bloat If you think Linux can have "enormous bloat" then Windows bloat by the same standards is terrifyingly humongous (and slow!).
- Asooka 7mo ago
  It is.
- MarkusWandel 7mo ago
  Well, all those years ago, my testbed for installing and trying out FreeBSD was a 486 with 8MB of memory. That was a heck of a machine compared to the ones BSD grew up on, and it ran great. No GUI on that setup of course, but all the Unixy stuff... vi editor, C toolchain, NFS etc. I don't know what's the minimum system to run no-GUI mainline Linux on these days. I'm sure BSD has gotten bloated too, but I'll bet not as much.

gosukiwi 7mo ago

When I tried FreeBSD, I was also blown away by the manual, so simple, such high-quality documentation. I think what I liked the most is that it felt coherent, unlike modern OS like Linux and Windows. I think macOS might be the most cohesive of the popular OS's.

hedora 7mo ago
I recently spent 20 minutes reading forum posts and vague documentation because MacOS couldn’t confirm a .md file wasn’t free of malware. I could say some nice things about MacOS, but it certainly is not “cohesive” any more.
- 7F902DDA 7mo ago
  > MacOS couldn’t confirm a .md file wasn’t free of malware That sounds like a hilarious story. What was going on?

sgt 7mo ago

Well written and clearly not AI generated. So refreshing these days.

commandersaki 7mo ago

Ran a FreeBSD colocated server for about a decade that went through generations of hardware. I really want to like the OS, except it's most touted feature, the network stack, was consistently unreliable for me using Intel NICs on Supermicro servers. They would go offline usually after some load due to mbuf resource exhaustion. I never got to the bottom of it even though I posted to the bugs database and would diligently follow up and perform experiments. This also happened on different incarnations of server hardware, so it wasn't the same physical NIC having the issue, but different varieties. Anyways had enough of the random downtime, I just switched to Linux which didn't have these issues. I'd say the best part of FreeBSD though is freebsd-update which was a game changer from the previous make world shenanigans.

dewarrn1 7mo ago
Hail u/cperciva.
- commandersaki 7mo ago
  Or rather all hail u/cperciva for freebsd-update.
  - grahamjperrin 7mo ago
    > all hail u/cperciva Colin Percival (FreeBSD Primary Release Engineering Team Lead) longer uses that ID in Reddit. Instead: /u/perciva Most recently, in /r/freebsd https://www.reddit.com/r/freebsd/comments/1rphd7t/freebsd_144release_now_available/ https://www.reddit.com/r/freebsd/comments/1rphd7t/freebsd_14... All hail.
doublerabbit 7mo ago
I colocate all my servers that all run FreeBSD. Myself has been through generational hardware, and had had zero issues with any apart from when the raid card failed. Network has been solid. ZFS has just worked. Not sure what your issues were however colocating since FreeBSD 8, and now colocating 16-CURRENT on my the server. FreeBSD has been rock stable in my books. 2x Dell R630 and 1x Cisco U220 M5 doublerabbit@cookie:~ $ uname -a && uptime FreeBSD cookie.server 12.2-BETA1 FreeBSD 12.2-BETA1 r365618 GENERIC amd64 10:39PM up 1752 days, 1:31, 1 user, load averages: 0.64, 1.30, 1.31

w4rh4wk5 7mo ago

For someone who has multiple years of experience using Linux for desktop and servers, what's the best way to get into FreeBSD? Any specific recommendations for desktop, like is Wayland ready on FreeBSD?

nesarkvechnep 7mo ago
I'm running Sway on FreeBSD daily and it's way snappier and sharper than on any Linux distro I tried. Go ahead, it doesn't hurt.
xenophonf 7mo ago
I love FreeBSD for its documentation. To answer your question about Wayland specifically: https://docs.freebsd.org/en/books/handbook/wayland/ https://docs.freebsd.org/en/books/handbook/wayland/ If you want something with a graphical environment ready to run, check out GhostBSD, which is based on FreeBSD and features MATE: https://www.ghostbsd.org/ https://www.ghostbsd.org/
adiabatichottub 7mo ago
I've been using both Linux and BSD since 2000. Honestly, I prefer Linux on the desktop. My dev workstation runs Arch, and I keep a FreeBSD VM running to do OS and ports builds. As a server OS I find FreeBSD really consistent and easy to administrate. I never have trouble finding things: packages always go in /usr/local. The old-school init system works great at what it's designed to do, and all the startup scripts are easy to understand. The whole thing just feels kind of cozy and familiar. If you like working in a shell then FreeBSD just kind of feels like /home. Coming from modern Linux though, some of the constructs can feel a bit outdated. Usually this gives me a warm fuzzy feeling, but sometimes it's a real pain (looking at you, make(1)). It's like hacking Perl, once you understand the idiom and what it's good at then you can be good friends. If you want to run a mail server for 20 years and go through multiple hardware and OS upgrades with minimal pain and maximal uptime then you can't beat it.

myylogic 7mo ago

[flagged]

aap_ 7mo ago

I was using FreeBSD (after NetBSD) as my primary system for a while in school (no, i can't watch this youtube video, flash doesn't run on FreeBSD). i still use it for my home server, it's just cozy.

c-c-c-c-c 7mo ago
that makes no sense, youtube hasn’t used flash in ages. If you use any modern browser on freebsd you’d be able to play the video.
- estebank 7mo ago
  I'd infer that the GP is talking about some time back and they are no longer in school.

brcmthrowaway 7mo ago

Does FreeBSD support latest PCIe generations and Thunderbolt?

aborsy 7mo ago

Can we say FreeBSD is more secure than Linux, because it’s smaller and less of a target? Not clear!

aforwardslash 7mo ago
Rule of thumb, its not. Common stuff like address randomization is a recent default, afaik still doesnt have random process ids, and the base permissions arent stellar. However I would prefer jails any day of the week vs the clusterf** that are namespaces and cgroups.
- hedora 7mo ago
  How many remotely exploitable zero days has FreeBSD had in its init system this decade? SystemD has to be in the dozens at this point.
  - aforwardslash 7mo ago
    Right, because linux security == init system used by some distros. My experience with FreeBSD may be somewhat dated (I've used it since the 4.x days, provided commercial support for it for more than 15 years), an that is not my experience - at all. Obviously, it depends on the threat model you are considering and how far you want to go. The default install does not have (or had) sane security defaults, at least comparing to your random $ystemd linux distro; try installing both and give local shell to a red team and see how fast they get root access.
- adiabatichottub 7mo ago
  sysctl kern.randompid=1 Oddly enough, not in the sysctl(3) manual
msla 7mo ago
Remember: If z/OS were as widely used as Windows 95, it would be just as insecure! God, it reminds me of Slashdot trolls in the 1990s..

dwrodri 7mo ago

Serious FreeBSD question: I like a lot of what FreeBSD promises, but have been hesitant to make the leap for my home server as I enjoy hosting game servers via steamcmd. I know FreeBSD has Linux binary compatibility, but I am unsure how this would play out for all of my hosting needs. Also, I have some old Nvidia GPUs in this machine, which I might get rid of as they are no longer supported by the latest releases of ML packages, but I also might keep them around for self-teaching CUDA. How do FreeBSD users get around the inconveniences associated with the "the rest of the world" running on Linux?

hedora 7mo ago

Hey; Linux refugee here. I want to have a bunch (5-10) of freebsd cattle-style servers to run a service on. What’s the preferred infrastructure as code style approach to setting them up? Some will be bare metal with kvm console access. Some will be VMs. They will be heterogeneous and not in one DC. I probably don’t need zfs for this application (raw iops matter more than snapshots, etc). I have previous experience with kubernetes, and am not interested in using it again. Monitoring, logging, deterministic “zero to working” install and updates are probably the main requirements.

ijustlovemath 7mo ago
how about ansible?
- hedora 7mo ago
  I don’t have any experience with it, but it sounds plausible. What about FreeBSD / Unix native things, like syslog or jails?
ochoseis 7mo ago
Nomad?

QuantumNoodle 7mo ago

I ran a TrueNAS server that was based on BSD, loved jails. Then TrueNAS started using debian so more application can run on it. Selfishly I like getting more utility from my server so this was a welcomed change. What industry is BSD used in now a days?

bombcar 7mo ago
firewalls are a common example (many Linux houses have a BSD-based firewall at the edge) but any "single application" setup may run on BSD - Netflix, for example.

pfp 7mo ago

Ok, where are the companies using FreeBSD? How do you get hired if you do happen to have proper FreeBSD skills? It's notably absent from all the job listings.

adiabatichottub 7mo ago
Well, I mean... Netflix is the example I think most people have heard of: https://freebsdfoundation.org/end-user-stories/netflix-case-study/ https://freebsdfoundation.org/end-user-stories/netflix-case-... But it's still a pretty small market share.
- andrehacker 7mo ago
  Word is that NetApp and Juniper are using FreeBSD. What these have in common is that they rely heavily on FreeBSD's I/O performannce and capabilities which is said to be head and shoulders above Linux.
merpkz 7mo ago
Playstation is based on FreeBSD, so I would guess that Sony has some serious FreeBSD people working there who created one of the most popular a video game console - that's pretty cool
guenthert 7mo ago
> Ok, where are the companies using FreeBSD? Not quite twenty years ago Yahoo! was using (also, I suspect) FreeBSD. > How do you get hired if you do happen to have proper FreeBSD skills? By advertising your other skills?

h4kunamata 7mo ago

I am a long time Debian Netinst (terminal) user, and Mint Cinnamon for Desktop. OPNSense run on FreeBSD and it just works. My personal issue is that I do not believe FreeBSD will give me a smooth experience to get my GPU and what not running. On Mint Cinnamon, I only had to install the latest supported kernel to get my RTX and WiFi6 card recognised. Debian, the reason why I run Debian as a server everywhere, even in my 3D printer is because it just work, and not just that. I only run Debian Netinst version, that means to only install standard system and SSH, text mode is the way. We are talking about 300MB of memory being used by Pihole + Unbound Recursive DNS of 512MB running on a Debian 13. Disk space?? 1GB or so I guess. These are my blockers to even try raw FreeBSD, lack of proper hardware support and as a server even if I remove everything I can, I do not imagine FreeBSD running with 300MB/1G of resources. Not to mention if you work in IT in any way, the last thing you wanna is fighting the system you use to solve another problem, that is why I left Ubuntu after 13years or so, it is a Windows within the Linux world now. A distro Linux must just run, no dramas, no issues, major system release goes like nothing happened. That matters!!!

olivierestsage 7mo ago

Around 10 years ago, I picked up an old Thinkpad T42, put FreeBSD on it, and had an amazing experience. Actually used it as a daily driver for a while, which seems crazy in retrospect, but I enjoy trying to work within that kind of constraint sometimes. I miss it! This post rekindles the flame...

waynesonfire 7mo ago

I just hope FreeBSD dosen't get bit by the Rust in the kernel initative. Maybe it'll have to deal with it eventually, when, for example, expanding the compatiblity layer to support interoperability with Linux. But, maybe by then, at least Rust will have gone through its hype test gauntlet and we can see it for what it is instead of being tainted by a polticial power grab.

grahamjperrin 7mo ago
https://wiki.freebsd.org/Rust https://wiki.freebsd.org/Rust for Rust seems to be stale, but not yet categorised as such – https://wiki.freebsd.org/CategoryStale https://wiki.freebsd.org/CategoryStale In <https://lists.freebsd.org/archives/freebsd-hackers/2025-August/004921.html https://lists.freebsd.org/archives/freebsd-hackers/2025-Augu...> (August 2025), Konstantin Belousov (kib@) write: > There was a long and hot thread about 'Rust in base' recently. … Unfortunately, the list archives are not suitably indexed by popular search engines, so, for example, https://www.startpage.com/do/dsearch?query=Rust+base+site%3Alists.freebsd.org&cat=web https://www.startpage.com/do/dsearch?query=Rust+base+site%3A... does not find what's required. Sorry. https://www.phoronix.com/news/FreeBSD-Q4-2025-Status-Report https://www.phoronix.com/news/FreeBSD-Q4-2025-Status-Report includes Michael Larabel's quote from the final status report of 2025: > At some point in early 2026 the rust KPIs should be stable enough for interested developers to try writing new code with them. They will not be perfect, but I want to make sure they work roughly like existing drivers expect and also fit the expectations of rust developers before asking for testers. Hopefully the Apple drivers will be back up to parity with the initial WIP in C in the first half of 2026 as well.
- waynesonfire 7mo ago
  >> There was a long and hot thread about 'Rust in base' recently. … Maybe this, https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/the-case-for-rust-in-the-base-system.92024/ https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/the-case-for-rust-in-the-... ?

MrResearcher 7mo ago

What is the roadmap to ML on FreeBSD? From what I could find, apparently neither CUDA nor ROCm is supported? And there are no short-term plans to address the lack of hardware support for ML?

wang_pp8 7mo ago

These days I prefer to run small systems and basic services. I don't want webguis or docker images anymore.

lproven 7mo ago
FWIW, agreed. It is very odd to me that I often read people asking about alternative OSes -- Linux compared to Windows, or FreeBSD compared to Linux, or OpenBSD compared to FreeBSD -- and they say that they want to move except that they desperately need to keep {something arcane}... And often that arcane thing is why I am interested in getting off the original system under discussion.
- bombcar 7mo ago
  The appeal of the BSDs has always been an incredibly stable entire system that means you don't need Docker to run fifteen variations of the various libraries necessary to (Stallman) build a GNU/Linux.
  - lproven 7mo ago
    While I entirely take your point and am not arguing with it, sadly, running Docker commands is now the only way that many relatively new Linux folks now how to assemble and deploy systems. Which is why the podman support in FreeBSD 14.2 was a big deal that wasn't really trumpeted enough. Podman is Red Hat's all-FOSS daemonless Docker clone, and now, FreeBSD can just understand Docker commands and run the results using Linuxulator jails. For similar reasons, this is why MS hired Lennart Poettering: to get systemd working in WSL2, because so many "techies" don't know anything else but systemd commands. They know (ish) that Ubuntu has systemd, they ran Ubuntu in WSL2, `systemctl start foo` didn't work, therefore, WSL2 was broken and incompatible. Result: hire Lenny P, get it working, let him go again. Job done.
    - bombcar 7mo ago
      I fully understand and appreciate the gifts that things like Docker and systemd and even Caddy have brought to the table, and I use them. But sometimes I'm wistful over the fact that those that come after me will not be exposed to the things that taught me what I know.

burner420042 7mo ago

I just installed FreeBSD 15 on a T480 that also runs Debian13. Do other people notice that FreeBSD has longer battery life? I'm still looking into this.

leavenotracks 7mo ago

What a delightful letter of appreciation for a project. Reminds us all to appreciate what FOSS gives the world every day and to not take it for granted!

kombine 7mo ago

I've never used FreeBSD and I appreciate the appeal, but to me the most exciting ideas in OS space are being developed within Nix/Guix projects. I am putting up a NixOS-based homelab server right now. Does FreeBSD have anything remotely similar?

nesarkvechnep 7mo ago
No. FreeBSD enthusiast will tell you there's no need for something even remotely similar. I love the OS but some of the zealots are the reason for the miniscule size of the community.

Arch-TK 7mo ago

FreeBSD and OpenBSD docs are great, but let's not say they're the pinnacle of docs. I like them a lot more than docs for the average Linux distribution. They're even more polished than Arch Linux wiki. But they still have room for improvement. And improving the Arch wiki is easier in my experience.

bombcar 7mo ago
There's three kinds of documentation: * Wiki-style "HOWTO"-based that helps you solve a particular problem (Arch and Gentoo wikis showcase this style well) * Reference documentation that reminds you how you solved a problem (man pages are great examples here) * Comprehensive documentation that truly documents the system, but can be a bit more obscure if you're not reading it "cover to cover" - textbook style (This is the older "original" software documentation type, which the BSD docs are an example of)

indigodaddy 7mo ago

I recently put it on an OVH VPS and was very surprised how easy it is to do anything. Firewall. A few ipfw rules/script (pf I think is even easier). Caddy. Just install it and then it very clearly tells you the commands to run as not root. Follow the instructions. Easy. Everything is meant to be simple. I like that. And it seems so much more memory efficient than Linux. Do processes just run better on bsd? Anyway it's been a pleasure. It's my only bsd VPS but I'm glad I've got one.

tsoukase 7mo ago

As an amateur my need is to use the same OS in all the devices from the GUI desktop, to servers, down to Raspberry Pi, having simultaneously very good documentation. And the only one that fulfills this is Arch Linux. Being excellent in device drivers, package maintenance and simplicity is also deal breaker.

aguimaraes1986 7mo ago

That's one of the best things I've read this week. Thank you.

bibimsz 7mo ago

I was inspired to install FreeBSD on my spare minipc after reading this post. After boot the USB mouse didn't work at first.

drewlander 7mo ago

I use it as a daily driver. I have tried to use it in some shape or form for the past 20 years. I made a career in Linux and Windows, but always have had a heart for FreeBSD. A person I consider by technical mentor, loved FreeBSD. My first "Admin" job was at a small ISP where he worked. That was where I got my first taste of FreeBSD which I believe was version 5.3? He made sure that all consoles were set to show beastie and I really learned a ton which set up the rest of my tech career. Later on, he committed suicide, and I use it as a daily driver in honor of him. I have Linux vms in bhyve. I use jails, etc. I find it pleasant and I prefer it over Linux, if I do not mind its paper cuts (for Desktop use). I had to previously use wifi dongles since it did not support AX200 at decent speeds. Since version 14 though, it has jumped leaps and bounds. I no longer need it. What I still have to do is use a custom xorg.conf, because I have dual amd and intel video cards. If I start without it, it says I must specify Bus Ids. I can use pure wayland, but if anything requires X, I still need a working xorg.conf. If you are willing to deal with paper cuts, and workarounds, it rocks. If you do not have time for that, it may not be for you (desktop wise). Server wise, I still love it, just like 5.3 days.

simonebrunozzi 6mo ago

I am not too familiar with the FreeBSD community, so I have a question for the experts: has it ever been for FreeBSD something similar to Ubuntu for Linux? Meaning: a successful billionaire that decides to put money and effort to create a valid, popular alternative to Windows for end users? (not saying that Ubuntu is perfect; just stating the intention).