7 ms·

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 spont

by 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
        tosti 7mo ago
        Who besides Joyent and NetBSD would ever do a bulk build? Portage can also do binary packages. That doesn't mean you have to have them. You can just not ever enable them and be fine.
        jen20 7mo ago
        By that logic, Docker doesn't have to do image distribution either...
        tosti 7mo ago
        In pkgsrc, building packages isn't done by default and 100% optional. I'm not sure what logic you're ascertaining here. There were operating systems before package managers and AFAICT IIRC the first package manager "repository" was a stack of floppies. But yes, there's always a choice to be made. Docker could separate out the image repository elsewhere. It could integrate buildroot. It could use a suitable initramfs generator. I'm not sure why present day devs like to create a hodgepodge of different distros mashed together and even do it all from CI, while the same CI could also run gmake on a source tree. For a sysadmin, docker would be fine. For a programmer, dealing with binary blobs all day, that's IMNSHO not what programming should be about.
  - genthree 7mo ago
    Docker's what lets me spend more time using the software on my server than fiddling with it. I got the fiddling out of my system years ago, I just want shit to work now. I don't really care about it per se but having a cross-distro unified daemon config & supervisor, package manager, and ability to cram every single important file into a file tree (again, using the same interface to achieve this with every daemon) that has only those files in it (making backups and restores trivial) and then easily verify that I got all the important files (destroy image -> re-create, does it still look good? Then I got everything) makes everything so easy. I no longer put off trying a new service until the weekend because it'll take an unknown amount of time that could end up being hours. Odds are I can have anything available in the official Docker registry (which is approximately everything, these days) up in five minutes flat to try it out, and may not even need any further modifications for it to be ready for (personal) "production". I use Debian but don't even care, I haven't had to touch systemd once (thank god) and the only Debian-parts I even use are its ZFS, SSH, and Docker, with my ten or so actual user-facing services all just pulled and managed via Docker, ready to transfer to any other distro seamlessly, should I ever care to. Even Samba is under Docker (oh my god it is so much easier to configure for common use-cases this way). (I would definitely be using FreeBSD on my server if I cared about anything other than Docker, though—I haven't actually liked Linux for about fifteen years now)
  - whizzter 7mo ago
    I've fixed too many linux-isms in code manually over the years, pkg/ports does what it should but since *nix tradition relies on hardcoded paths I often wanted out-of-tree builds for various software. And that's the thing, as I grow older I feel more and more that I just want the parts of computing that I don't want to _care_ about to be stupid simple. If I'm doing a program needing a recent version of some language that doesn't have a FreeBSD port yet and some database behind it, I don't really want to configure it all manually because I don't particularly care for porting the runtime or managing the database (that isn't exposed to the outside world anyhow). This is stuff where I don't want a large CI pipe or other management (or needing to remember to upgrade the packages if I upgrade the hosting OS). Stuff like this is why "the clouds are winning", friction should be linear depending on the effort I want to put into managing something. But going for real HW or even VPS a places an "upgrade tax" on me because I can't just let non-public services like an isolated DB just ride-along over major versions (maybe Jails with isolated userlands could be an option, but that becomes painful instead when needing newer versions of the application behind the veil).
  - sauercrowd 7mo ago
    docker and flatpak/snap are _extremely_ different tools with very different purposes.
    - tosti 7mo ago
      Sure they're different. They all download blobs and can then execute them. Exactly how, when and why is completely different but they still get you blobs.
      - sauercrowd 7mo ago
        In the same way s3 is different to a dropbox, and a car being different to a bike. Can't tell if you're ragebaiting here, but I'm very confused by this question because they support an entirely different set of features, and if you use both it's painfully obvious how they're different. Docker is built for running services, distribution is part of that, but it's core is that you can pull an image and run random service on your machine packaged with all the right libraries, network them into your machine in the way you like so it can access the right things, constrain it's resources, and create our own image based on it. Snap/Flatpak is built to distribute applications, sandboxing being a core part of it, with applications wanting to integrate into distribution mechanics such as audio, URL handling, taking screenshots, ...
        tosti 7mo ago
        Exactly. Yes, I've used them and it was horrible. For me, the difference is in do I get to compile this from sources myself or do I get someone elses compiler output? IOW it's not comparing vastly different vehicles, but rather a vehicle with its blueprint. Also, a long time ago it was commonly accepted that spaghetti code is awful. Docker replaces all that with spaghetti services and debugging gets much worse.
- krylon 7mo ago
  I have not thus far had anything to do with containers, so docker is unknown territory for me. I run audiobookshelf in a Debian VM via bhyve, but I was gonna run a Debian VM anyway.
- BirAdam 7mo ago
  You could just use podman.
  - whizzter 7mo ago
    Theoretically yes, however still limited by how well the FreeBSD Linux layer handles syscalls. A year or so back I tried running .NET (just binaries, not via a container) since the port wasn't as far along as today and it crashed due to what I suspect was slight differences in signal handling defaults. And this is part of the situation that's going to get worse, io_uring will become more popular in language runtimes and iirc it's not trivial to emulate via existing FreeBSD mechanisms (kqueue). Iirc Mac docker uses xhyve (bhyve port/inspired) to run containers via Linux emulation, MS went for pv-Linux for WSL2, while FreeBSD has been "good enough" so far. But I think that for containers it's either time to shape up Linux emulation well (It's ironic that WSL1 ironed out their worst quirks just as WSL2 was introduced, although that was without io_uring) or just add an option for Podman to have a minimal pv-Linux kernel via bhyve to get better compatibility.
    - frumplestlatz 7mo ago
      Indeed, ideally we could get docker on FreeBSD using the same approach as is used on macOS — automatically run (one or more) Linux VMs under bhyve. I wonder if FreeBSD ought to consider a WSL2-style approach to Linux binary compatibility, too. Keeping the Linux syscall compatibility layer up-to-date has always been a resource problem, especially when syscalls depend on large, complex Linux kernel subsystems that just don’t map cleanly to FreeBSD kernel facilities.
    - akdev1l 7mo ago
      I’m confused because can already do this on MacOS, Windows and Linux Does `podman machine init` not work in FreeBSD? In those other platforms it will spin a small Linux VM to run containers on.
- jbverschoor 7mo ago
  Exactly the reason why I switched from FreeBSD to Debian, 25 years ago
  - TacticalCoder 7mo ago
    The difference compared to a quarter of a century ago is that hardware virtualization is an ubiquitous thing now and that machines go so much faster that you don't even realize you're running in a VM anymore: it's pretty much transparent. I run Docker on my Linux servers inside a VM. There's no way I let Docker touch the bare metal, not with a ten foot pole. If people want or need to run Docker on FreeBSD, they can run a Linux VM under bhyve.
toast0 7mo ago
> Is there anything FreeBSD can do that, say, Debian cannot? Probably not (at least I cannot think of anything). Stability of user interface and documentation.
- throwaway27448 7mo ago
  What documentation does a distro even publish? I only ask because freebsd has the most solid documentation I've used of any OS I've ever encountered. I seriously doubt Debian has documented the linux kernel that well (which, tbf, would be an insane project to even attempt)
  - toast0 7mo ago
    Debian has an installation guide[1]. I'd imagine all the major distributions do. But it probably has to change a lot for every major release, because so many things change. FreeBSD major releases have changes too, but a lot of the user interfaces are very stable and so the documentation can be too. Stable documentation allows time for it to be edited and revised to become better documentation, as well as developing quality translations. [1] https://www.debian.org/releases/stable/amd64/ https://www.debian.org/releases/stable/amd64/
    - gzread 7mo ago
      I wonder if this is a curse of popularity. Presumably the documentation is stable and good because the software is also stable, and well-specified with one way to do each thing rather than five competing projects.
    - grahamjperrin 7mo ago
      > … Stable documentation allows time for it to be edited and revised to become better documentation, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47407895 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47407895 Part of the problem is, too few committers. https://cgit.freebsd.org/doc/log/access?h=refs/internal/admin https://cgit.freebsd.org/doc/log/access?h=refs/internal/admi... > as well as developing quality translations. … https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=267274 https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=267274 https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=284875#c8 https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=284875#c8 For Russian, things are better: https://freshbsd.org/freebsd/doc?committer[]=Vladlen+Popolitov+%28vladlen%29 https://freshbsd.org/freebsd/doc?committer[]=Vladlen+Popolit... – see https://cgit.freebsd.org/doc/commit/access?h=refs/internal/admin&id=3272fb9c5505d0ca72838e10306a23cefb1631b7 https://cgit.freebsd.org/doc/commit/access?h=refs/internal/a...
MisterTea 7mo ago
ZFS on FreeBSD is first class. I had an old FreeNAS raid z5 array on 5x 500GB disks that I wanted to check 4 years after decommissioning the system. I put together a temporary machine with all the disks plugged in and without doing anything the live FreeBSD image found and configured the array. I was instantly able to look through the file system and even dump it to my current FreeBSD server with almost 0 effort. I was sold after that. These days I prefer to run small systems and basic services. I don't want webguis or docker images anymore.
- adiabatichottub 7mo ago
  Right. On my development workstation I use Arch and I'm always worried a kernel upgrade is going to break the ZFS module. For those that aren't familiar, ZFS isn't part of mainline Linux because of licensing incompatibility (and general distrust of Oracle). On FreeBSD I know its always going to work.
  - grahamjperrin 7mo ago
    > … For those that aren't familiar, ZFS isn't part of mainline Linux because of licensing incompatibility (and general distrust of Oracle). … It's probably fair to say that trust in Oracle is irrelevant to OpenZFS. Where Linux does use ZFS: to the best of my knowledge, it's typically OpenZFS – https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47407937 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47407937 is my own use case.
    - adiabatichottub 7mo ago
      I was mainly referring to statements made by Linus Torvalds that got a lot of press. Canonical seems undeterred by any such arguments.
  - akimbostrawman 7mo ago
    >I use Arch and I'm always worried a kernel upgrade is going to break the ZFS modulet That can only happen if you use the unreliable DKMS way of installing it. If you use zfs-linux provided by archzfs it will only allow updating if it's compatible with the kernel, which in linux-lts case is within couple hours of a kernel update. https://github.com/archzfs/archzfs https://github.com/archzfs/archzfs https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/ZFS#Kernel-specific_packages https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/ZFS#Kernel-specific_package...
evanjrowley 7mo ago
>Is there anything FreeBSD can do that, say, Debian cannot? ZFS boot environments. One could install Debian's root on ZFS by following the OpenZFS documentation guide, combine it with ZFSBootMenu (or similar), but there won't be any upstream support from the Debian project itself. The Nitrux Linux distribution is based on Debian and provides an immutable feature similar to boot environments, but you can't treat your immutable boot images the same way you can treat your mutable data like how you can with ZFS datasets on FreeBSD.
- sidkshatriya 7mo ago
  you can use snapper + btrfs and the end result is like `bectl`. However it not as simple/integrated as ZFS Boot environments on FreeBSD
  - shrubble 7mo ago
    The btrfs code quality seems less than ZFS, based on the reports I have read.
    - sidkshatriya 7mo ago
      btrfs is suffering from a lot of old bad publicity and some poor design decisions around RAID. But by now it is a great file system if you don't go near RAID5/6. btrfs has its flaws (ZFS has its own flaws!). However: - It's used a lot, especially by facebook and Redhat (on fedora) - Gets a lot of testing - Sees a lot of bug fixes - Has a lot of features I haven't read btrfs code but given that it is a popular file system and Linux code quality tends to be good in popular subsystems I would hesitate to say its code quality is worse than ZFS in any way.
      - HackerThemAll 7mo ago
        btrfs is pathetic when it comes to performance. So no, thanks. https://www.phoronix.com/review/linux-70-filesystems https://www.phoronix.com/review/linux-70-filesystems
zenoprax 7mo ago
> Is there anything FreeBSD can do that, say, Debian cannot? If you asked the opposite (what can Debian do that FreeBSD cannot) I would have more to say and it would mostly be preceded by "I know FreeBSD is not Linux but ...". Whenever I need to do any sort of maintenance or inspection I have to look up the equivalent commands for things like `lsblk` and something nested in `/usr/etc/...` when I'm used to finding it in `/etc/` over every other system. This is a consequence of both FreeBSD's reliability in needing very infrequent attention and my limited use-cases to use it. As a NAS it is great but I can't touch it without full-text search of all my notes on the side! Either way, no regrets about learning and relying on it after ~18 months so far.
- atmosx 7mo ago
  Lack of docker support? Docker is available on macOS through emulation yes but bhyve is a thing… so why not? :-)
  - HackerThemAll 7mo ago
    Docker is a concept resembling FreeBSD's jails that were introduced in year 2000, having much better isolation, much better security than Docker has had for a long time (perhaps even now jails are still superior to Docker).
    - overfeed 7mo ago
      Better isolation, better security, but far fewer gists and shared config-files shared ok the Internet for common tasks. Docker comprehensively wkn thr popularity contest, and is often the more convenient solution because of it, in a worse is better way.
      - st3fan 7mo ago
        People comparing Docker and Jails don't really understand that Docker is 99% about packaging and composing software. From that perspective Jails are nothing like Docker containers. No versioning, no standard, no registry, no compose, no healthchcks, no tree of containers, etc. etc. etc. If you want to compare Jails to something on Linux then I think LXD is probably much closer to what Jails are.
jmmv 7mo ago
> 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. I haven't done that yet because I think I'd want to switch to pkgbase but that makes me nervous. Did you go with that option or continued to use the sets?
- sidkshatriya 7mo ago
  Why not create a boot environment and try out FreeBSD 15 with pkgbase ? If the experiment is successful just make the boot environment the default otherwise throw it away... With such powerful tools I find it fascinating that FreeBSD users are not more willing to experiment !
  - jmmv 7mo ago
    To be honest I've never tried boot environments. I know they are a thing, and I have my whole setup on ZFS, so maybe that's the perfect use case.
- krylon 7mo ago
  I haven't switched to pkgbase. Yet. I don't intend to for the time being. I set up a VM to test it, but I haven't gotten around to actually testing it.
- grahamjperrin 7mo ago
  > … I think I'd want to switch to pkgbase but that makes me nervous. … There has been a disproportionate amount of negative noise from people who know too little about pkgbase. pkgbase is a good thing. A very good thing. A huge game-changer, in terms of testing STABLE and CURRENT.
atmosx 7mo ago
> Is there anything FreeBSD can do that, say, Debian cannot? Yes. Emulate traffic latency using IPFW and dummynet[^1]. There is no Linux (or OpenBSD, NetBSD) counterpart. The ZFS implementation is less buggy. [^1]: https://man.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?dummynet https://man.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?dummynet
- c0balt 7mo ago
  That is not really accurate? Linux traffic control (tc, [0]) exists since Kernel 2.2. It can introduce traffic latency and a few other network conditions, like packet loss. [0]: https://www.man7.org/linux/man-pages/man8/tc.8.html https://www.man7.org/linux/man-pages/man8/tc.8.html
  - atmosx 7mo ago
    Hmm kind of... I was referring to the fact that dummynet models pipes with a fixed bandwidth and centralized scheduler. Packets are released according to very high precision transmission timing. This means that serialization delay, queue buildup, and link behavior are simulated in a way that resembles real network conditions. Dummynet can provide a highly deterministic timing and queue behavior, which made it popular in networking research and WAN emulation experiments. TC cannot do that with the same accuracy. I think much like other tools, think SELinux vs OpenBSD (unveil, etc) TC is more flexible (does more things) but there are _some things_ that can't do, and even for things both can do *BSD solutions are much simpler.
- allreduce 7mo ago
  You can emulate latency, packet errors, etc using netem tc [0] on Linux. [0]: https://man.archlinux.org/man/tc-netem.8.en https://man.archlinux.org/man/tc-netem.8.en
- favorited 7mo ago
  > The ZFS implementation is less buggy. FreeBSD and Linux have been using the same implementation of ZFS for years.
  - 7mo ago
adrian_b 7mo ago
There are various niche applications where Debian or any Linux are worse than FreeBSD. For example the support for magnetic tapes and for a few other SCSI peripherals is better in FreeBSD. The Linux utility for controlling a LTO tape drive lacks some important options that the corresponding FreeBSD utility has. I have a tape drive, and to be able to use it like I want I had to move it to a FreeBSD server. Some years ago I was using a surveillance camera that was much easier to use in FreeBSD than in Linux, if you wanted to record good quality video and audio. I have not tried more recently to use such cameras in Linux, to see if now the recording quality is better. So while there are more hardware devices that have better support in Linux than in FreeBSD, there are also devices with better support in FreeBSD than in Linux. However the main reason why I use FreeBSD on many of my servers is that I need much less time for their administration than for Linux servers. In my experience, Linux servers need much less time for administration than Windows servers, and FreeBSD compares to Linux like Linux to Windows. I have FreeBSD servers that I have not touched for years, and they have worked 24/7 with no downtime and no rebooting, and this includes servers connected directly to the Internet, which implement firewalls, routers and various services, like NTP, DNS servers and proxies, e-mail servers, web servers and proxies etc.
- irishcoffee 7mo ago
  > Some years ago I was using a surveillance camera that was much easier to use in FreeBSD than in Linux, if you wanted to record good quality video and audio. I have not tried more recently to use such cameras in Linux, to see if now the recording quality is better. This example seems very hand-wavy. What camera?
  - adrian_b 7mo ago
    A Logitech FullHD camera on USB, but I doubt that the problem was camera-specific. I believe that I would have seen the same behavior on any high-resolution USB camera. In FreeBSD, the command required for recording was very simple and it worked flawlessly. In Linux, it was more complex and there were various stuttering problems at maximum resolution. I am still using those cameras, but I have not tried them again in Linux. In Linux they worked worse than in FreeBSD around 5 years ago, perhaps nowadays there is no longer any problem in Linux. This was intended to be an example that you cannot know a priori whether a given device will work better on FreeBSD or on Linux. In general, there is a greater probability for Linux to have good support than for FreeBSD, but there are also counterexamples, so you cannot be certain which is better until you try both.
righthand 7mo ago
FreeBsd is Systemd free.
- TacticalCoder 7mo ago
  I'm using Linux since the Slackware-on-a-CDRom days and systemd is a lost cause: it only got worse and worse and only kept meddling more and more into the Linux ecosystem. The XZ "I only work on systemd distro" backdoor was the final straw (people are going to say it's unrelated but the fact is there: non-systemd Linux distro weren't affected). I've been gradually switching my workflow to VMs and containers and my idea is to, eventually, run the VMs under FreeBSD's bhyve instead of running them from a systemd Linux distro (Proxmox in my case). At long last I should soon be, once again, totally free of systemd (last time it was before it existed).
- grahamjperrin 7mo ago
  > FreeBsd is Systemd free. https://www.reddit.com/r/freebsd/comments/96pm7w/benno_rice_the_tragedy_of_systemd_bsdcan_2018/ https://www.reddit.com/r/freebsd/comments/96pm7w/benno_rice_... > Benno Rice: The Tragedy of systemd – BSDCan 2018 : r/freebsd Don't be misled by the title. I thoroughly recommend listening to the whole thing.
liendolucas 7mo ago
FreeBSD is an amazing beast. I'm currently using it as my workstation, and because I need to use Linux, bhyve came to the rescue and is easy to use it through the `vm` wrapper tool. It works like a charm and it is built in. Being that said, on FreeBSD 15, I believe I've found a serious bug: when I disconnect a USB optical mouse on the "Lenovo 16 G7 ARP" the system completes freezes and reboots, I guess it reaches a kernel panic. It took me a few disconnections of the power, ethernet and finally the mouse to detect this condition. Surprinsingly this does not happen if the device is wireless (I tried to remove the receiver of a Trackball and the system keeps working just fine). I find this really weird and don't know if actually report it in the FreeBSD forums, maybe is just a glitch on this particular laptop or it has something to do with the touchpad, just guessing here. Putting this particular issue aside, I'm extremely happy that almost everything works with little or no effort on a recent/modern laptop. BSDs in general are fantastic OSes.
- rootnod3 7mo ago
  Instead of the forums, report it also here https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/ https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/
johng 7mo ago
I think the main difference is that Linux simply has more hardware support than FreeBSD.
- jdefr89 7mo ago
  That’s all it came down to with me.. FreeBSD doing WiFi circa 2002 was a remote dream. Shit even Linux you had to use ndiswrapper and it still prob wouldn’t work
grahamjperrin 7mo ago
> … ZFS was a huge selling point, but I heard that it works quite well on Linux, these days. … True. I have OpenZFS-native encrypted root-on-ZFS for Kubuntu 25.10, made ultra-simple by the installer for Ubuntu (25.04 at the time). FreeBSD can not yet do this. Please see, for example, https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=263171 https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=263171 > 263171 – add loader(8) and boot loader menu support for boot with OpenZFS-encrypted ROOT
chillfox 7mo ago
I started out running FreeBSD on my home servers, then moved to Alpine Linux because all server software that I wanted to run was provided in Docker docker containers and with docker compose examples, so it was just easier. Moving the ZFS pools over to Linux was effortlessly. And now I am looking at moving over to k3s (still on Alpine) because everyone is providing Helm charts, so it seems easier. I really like FreeBSD, but it's just easier to go with the flow.
jandrewrogers 7mo ago
There are narrow things for which FreeBSD is just lovely but it hasn’t been as powerful as Linux for decades. It was one of the best server OS back in the 1990s though. Just a very clean implementation. I used it a lot back in the day and am very fond of it. But I can no longer recommend it.
- lproven 7mo ago
  > as powerful as Linux Can you explain what you mean by that? Can you give some examples?
  - jandrewrogers 7mo ago
    Linux added differentiated support for high-scale and high-performance systems pretty early on. Good support for very high core counts, kernel bypass mechanisms, XFS, and more recently things like io_uring. This opened Linux up to a class of high-end applications that FreeBSD wasn't designed for. FreeBSD was excellent for ordinary UNIX-y server things. If you were designing a high-end database engine though, where you mostly just need the OS to get out of the way, it was much easier to target Linux.
antihero 7mo ago
How is it at running something like microk8s? Also do you have to build your own binaries for anything not in the distro?
debian3 7mo ago
> Is there anything FreeBSD can do that, say, Debian cannot? Docker containers is a big one.
- anthk 7mo ago
  Docker it's a solution for a big Linux problem. FreeBSD would just resort to compatNx libraries (to run older binaries) and/or a jail.
pseudohadamard 7mo ago
FreeBSD is actually really nice as an OS, but Linux gets pretty much all of the application support. For example compare XigmaNAS with OMV, I'd really prefer to run my NAS on FreeBSD but Xigma has more or less stalled while OMV is being actively worked on.
endsandmeans 7mo ago
> But I appreciate the reliability, the good documentation, the community These were big reasons for me. Cannot overstate the documentation angle. > Ports. Packages. > DEB/APT/RPM (particularily for a C programmer. > Licensing more friendly to integrating into your appliances (I did this) or code Before ZFS it was still better for the afformentioned reasons but ZFS was a game changer. I started Linux with Slackware and writing my own ppp up/down scripts while dual booting from windows, which took 2 weeks to get online the first time, then I went to redhat/debian/mandrake for a few years... then I found FreeBSD at it was like a breath of 'clear' air. Started using it for my daily desktop in 2002 and I still use it on several converted Macs at home and my main 'office' server which is a VPS these days. Production wise I would always have to reboot my fbsd servers for EOL never any issues and many uptimes north of 1000 days over the years. That builds trust. I trust FreeBSD project to be conservative and consistent for the most part -- THE PRINCIPLE OF LEAST SURPRISE -- another thing I have not seen enough of with Linux distros.
passthejoe 7mo ago
Having ZFS baked into the installer and fully supported by the project is a huge motivator for using FreeBSD. I know that Linux distros can accommodate ZFS, but it's a fair-weather situation due to licensing and most distros' preference for BTRFS.
- fluoridation 7mo ago
  Licensing is totally irrelevant for the end user. It just means you can't distribute the fully configured system.

by krylon 7mo ago

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
      - tosti 7mo ago
        Who besides Joyent and NetBSD would ever do a bulk build? Portage can also do binary packages. That doesn't mean you have to have them. You can just not ever enable them and be fine.
        jen20 7mo ago
        By that logic, Docker doesn't have to do image distribution either...
        tosti 7mo ago
        In pkgsrc, building packages isn't done by default and 100% optional. I'm not sure what logic you're ascertaining here. There were operating systems before package managers and AFAICT IIRC the first package manager "repository" was a stack of floppies. But yes, there's always a choice to be made. Docker could separate out the image repository elsewhere. It could integrate buildroot. It could use a suitable initramfs generator. I'm not sure why present day devs like to create a hodgepodge of different distros mashed together and even do it all from CI, while the same CI could also run gmake on a source tree. For a sysadmin, docker would be fine. For a programmer, dealing with binary blobs all day, that's IMNSHO not what programming should be about.
- genthree 7mo ago
  Docker's what lets me spend more time using the software on my server than fiddling with it. I got the fiddling out of my system years ago, I just want shit to work now. I don't really care about it per se but having a cross-distro unified daemon config & supervisor, package manager, and ability to cram every single important file into a file tree (again, using the same interface to achieve this with every daemon) that has only those files in it (making backups and restores trivial) and then easily verify that I got all the important files (destroy image -> re-create, does it still look good? Then I got everything) makes everything so easy. I no longer put off trying a new service until the weekend because it'll take an unknown amount of time that could end up being hours. Odds are I can have anything available in the official Docker registry (which is approximately everything, these days) up in five minutes flat to try it out, and may not even need any further modifications for it to be ready for (personal) "production". I use Debian but don't even care, I haven't had to touch systemd once (thank god) and the only Debian-parts I even use are its ZFS, SSH, and Docker, with my ten or so actual user-facing services all just pulled and managed via Docker, ready to transfer to any other distro seamlessly, should I ever care to. Even Samba is under Docker (oh my god it is so much easier to configure for common use-cases this way). (I would definitely be using FreeBSD on my server if I cared about anything other than Docker, though—I haven't actually liked Linux for about fifteen years now)
- whizzter 7mo ago
  I've fixed too many linux-isms in code manually over the years, pkg/ports does what it should but since *nix tradition relies on hardcoded paths I often wanted out-of-tree builds for various software. And that's the thing, as I grow older I feel more and more that I just want the parts of computing that I don't want to _care_ about to be stupid simple. If I'm doing a program needing a recent version of some language that doesn't have a FreeBSD port yet and some database behind it, I don't really want to configure it all manually because I don't particularly care for porting the runtime or managing the database (that isn't exposed to the outside world anyhow). This is stuff where I don't want a large CI pipe or other management (or needing to remember to upgrade the packages if I upgrade the hosting OS). Stuff like this is why "the clouds are winning", friction should be linear depending on the effort I want to put into managing something. But going for real HW or even VPS a places an "upgrade tax" on me because I can't just let non-public services like an isolated DB just ride-along over major versions (maybe Jails with isolated userlands could be an option, but that becomes painful instead when needing newer versions of the application behind the veil).
- sauercrowd 7mo ago
  docker and flatpak/snap are _extremely_ different tools with very different purposes.
  - tosti 7mo ago
    Sure they're different. They all download blobs and can then execute them. Exactly how, when and why is completely different but they still get you blobs.
    - sauercrowd 7mo ago
      In the same way s3 is different to a dropbox, and a car being different to a bike. Can't tell if you're ragebaiting here, but I'm very confused by this question because they support an entirely different set of features, and if you use both it's painfully obvious how they're different. Docker is built for running services, distribution is part of that, but it's core is that you can pull an image and run random service on your machine packaged with all the right libraries, network them into your machine in the way you like so it can access the right things, constrain it's resources, and create our own image based on it. Snap/Flatpak is built to distribute applications, sandboxing being a core part of it, with applications wanting to integrate into distribution mechanics such as audio, URL handling, taking screenshots, ...
      - tosti 7mo ago
        Exactly. Yes, I've used them and it was horrible. For me, the difference is in do I get to compile this from sources myself or do I get someone elses compiler output? IOW it's not comparing vastly different vehicles, but rather a vehicle with its blueprint. Also, a long time ago it was commonly accepted that spaghetti code is awful. Docker replaces all that with spaghetti services and debugging gets much worse.
krylon 7mo ago
I have not thus far had anything to do with containers, so docker is unknown territory for me. I run audiobookshelf in a Debian VM via bhyve, but I was gonna run a Debian VM anyway.
BirAdam 7mo ago
You could just use podman.
- whizzter 7mo ago
  Theoretically yes, however still limited by how well the FreeBSD Linux layer handles syscalls. A year or so back I tried running .NET (just binaries, not via a container) since the port wasn't as far along as today and it crashed due to what I suspect was slight differences in signal handling defaults. And this is part of the situation that's going to get worse, io_uring will become more popular in language runtimes and iirc it's not trivial to emulate via existing FreeBSD mechanisms (kqueue). Iirc Mac docker uses xhyve (bhyve port/inspired) to run containers via Linux emulation, MS went for pv-Linux for WSL2, while FreeBSD has been "good enough" so far. But I think that for containers it's either time to shape up Linux emulation well (It's ironic that WSL1 ironed out their worst quirks just as WSL2 was introduced, although that was without io_uring) or just add an option for Podman to have a minimal pv-Linux kernel via bhyve to get better compatibility.
  - frumplestlatz 7mo ago
    Indeed, ideally we could get docker on FreeBSD using the same approach as is used on macOS — automatically run (one or more) Linux VMs under bhyve. I wonder if FreeBSD ought to consider a WSL2-style approach to Linux binary compatibility, too. Keeping the Linux syscall compatibility layer up-to-date has always been a resource problem, especially when syscalls depend on large, complex Linux kernel subsystems that just don’t map cleanly to FreeBSD kernel facilities.
  - akdev1l 7mo ago
    I’m confused because can already do this on MacOS, Windows and Linux Does `podman machine init` not work in FreeBSD? In those other platforms it will spin a small Linux VM to run containers on.
jbverschoor 7mo ago
Exactly the reason why I switched from FreeBSD to Debian, 25 years ago
- TacticalCoder 7mo ago
  The difference compared to a quarter of a century ago is that hardware virtualization is an ubiquitous thing now and that machines go so much faster that you don't even realize you're running in a VM anymore: it's pretty much transparent. I run Docker on my Linux servers inside a VM. There's no way I let Docker touch the bare metal, not with a ten foot pole. If people want or need to run Docker on FreeBSD, they can run a Linux VM under bhyve.

toast0 7mo ago

> Is there anything FreeBSD can do that, say, Debian cannot? Probably not (at least I cannot think of anything). Stability of user interface and documentation.

throwaway27448 7mo ago
What documentation does a distro even publish? I only ask because freebsd has the most solid documentation I've used of any OS I've ever encountered. I seriously doubt Debian has documented the linux kernel that well (which, tbf, would be an insane project to even attempt)
- toast0 7mo ago
  Debian has an installation guide[1]. I'd imagine all the major distributions do. But it probably has to change a lot for every major release, because so many things change. FreeBSD major releases have changes too, but a lot of the user interfaces are very stable and so the documentation can be too. Stable documentation allows time for it to be edited and revised to become better documentation, as well as developing quality translations. [1] https://www.debian.org/releases/stable/amd64/ https://www.debian.org/releases/stable/amd64/
  - gzread 7mo ago
    I wonder if this is a curse of popularity. Presumably the documentation is stable and good because the software is also stable, and well-specified with one way to do each thing rather than five competing projects.
  - grahamjperrin 7mo ago
    > … Stable documentation allows time for it to be edited and revised to become better documentation, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47407895 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47407895 Part of the problem is, too few committers. https://cgit.freebsd.org/doc/log/access?h=refs/internal/admin https://cgit.freebsd.org/doc/log/access?h=refs/internal/admi... > as well as developing quality translations. … https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=267274 https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=267274 https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=284875#c8 https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=284875#c8 For Russian, things are better: https://freshbsd.org/freebsd/doc?committer[]=Vladlen+Popolitov+%28vladlen%29 https://freshbsd.org/freebsd/doc?committer[]=Vladlen+Popolit... – see https://cgit.freebsd.org/doc/commit/access?h=refs/internal/admin&id=3272fb9c5505d0ca72838e10306a23cefb1631b7 https://cgit.freebsd.org/doc/commit/access?h=refs/internal/a...

MisterTea 7mo ago

ZFS on FreeBSD is first class. I had an old FreeNAS raid z5 array on 5x 500GB disks that I wanted to check 4 years after decommissioning the system. I put together a temporary machine with all the disks plugged in and without doing anything the live FreeBSD image found and configured the array. I was instantly able to look through the file system and even dump it to my current FreeBSD server with almost 0 effort. I was sold after that. These days I prefer to run small systems and basic services. I don't want webguis or docker images anymore.

adiabatichottub 7mo ago
Right. On my development workstation I use Arch and I'm always worried a kernel upgrade is going to break the ZFS module. For those that aren't familiar, ZFS isn't part of mainline Linux because of licensing incompatibility (and general distrust of Oracle). On FreeBSD I know its always going to work.
- grahamjperrin 7mo ago
  > … For those that aren't familiar, ZFS isn't part of mainline Linux because of licensing incompatibility (and general distrust of Oracle). … It's probably fair to say that trust in Oracle is irrelevant to OpenZFS. Where Linux does use ZFS: to the best of my knowledge, it's typically OpenZFS – https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47407937 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47407937 is my own use case.
  - adiabatichottub 7mo ago
    I was mainly referring to statements made by Linus Torvalds that got a lot of press. Canonical seems undeterred by any such arguments.
- akimbostrawman 7mo ago
  >I use Arch and I'm always worried a kernel upgrade is going to break the ZFS modulet That can only happen if you use the unreliable DKMS way of installing it. If you use zfs-linux provided by archzfs it will only allow updating if it's compatible with the kernel, which in linux-lts case is within couple hours of a kernel update. https://github.com/archzfs/archzfs https://github.com/archzfs/archzfs https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/ZFS#Kernel-specific_packages https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/ZFS#Kernel-specific_package...

evanjrowley 7mo ago

>Is there anything FreeBSD can do that, say, Debian cannot? ZFS boot environments. One could install Debian's root on ZFS by following the OpenZFS documentation guide, combine it with ZFSBootMenu (or similar), but there won't be any upstream support from the Debian project itself. The Nitrux Linux distribution is based on Debian and provides an immutable feature similar to boot environments, but you can't treat your immutable boot images the same way you can treat your mutable data like how you can with ZFS datasets on FreeBSD.

sidkshatriya 7mo ago
you can use snapper + btrfs and the end result is like `bectl`. However it not as simple/integrated as ZFS Boot environments on FreeBSD
- shrubble 7mo ago
  The btrfs code quality seems less than ZFS, based on the reports I have read.
  - sidkshatriya 7mo ago
    btrfs is suffering from a lot of old bad publicity and some poor design decisions around RAID. But by now it is a great file system if you don't go near RAID5/6. btrfs has its flaws (ZFS has its own flaws!). However: - It's used a lot, especially by facebook and Redhat (on fedora) - Gets a lot of testing - Sees a lot of bug fixes - Has a lot of features I haven't read btrfs code but given that it is a popular file system and Linux code quality tends to be good in popular subsystems I would hesitate to say its code quality is worse than ZFS in any way.
    - HackerThemAll 7mo ago
      btrfs is pathetic when it comes to performance. So no, thanks. https://www.phoronix.com/review/linux-70-filesystems https://www.phoronix.com/review/linux-70-filesystems

zenoprax 7mo ago

> Is there anything FreeBSD can do that, say, Debian cannot? If you asked the opposite (what can Debian do that FreeBSD cannot) I would have more to say and it would mostly be preceded by "I know FreeBSD is not Linux but ...". Whenever I need to do any sort of maintenance or inspection I have to look up the equivalent commands for things like `lsblk` and something nested in `/usr/etc/...` when I'm used to finding it in `/etc/` over every other system. This is a consequence of both FreeBSD's reliability in needing very infrequent attention and my limited use-cases to use it. As a NAS it is great but I can't touch it without full-text search of all my notes on the side! Either way, no regrets about learning and relying on it after ~18 months so far.

atmosx 7mo ago
Lack of docker support? Docker is available on macOS through emulation yes but bhyve is a thing… so why not? :-)
- HackerThemAll 7mo ago
  Docker is a concept resembling FreeBSD's jails that were introduced in year 2000, having much better isolation, much better security than Docker has had for a long time (perhaps even now jails are still superior to Docker).
  - overfeed 7mo ago
    Better isolation, better security, but far fewer gists and shared config-files shared ok the Internet for common tasks. Docker comprehensively wkn thr popularity contest, and is often the more convenient solution because of it, in a worse is better way.
    - st3fan 7mo ago
      People comparing Docker and Jails don't really understand that Docker is 99% about packaging and composing software. From that perspective Jails are nothing like Docker containers. No versioning, no standard, no registry, no compose, no healthchcks, no tree of containers, etc. etc. etc. If you want to compare Jails to something on Linux then I think LXD is probably much closer to what Jails are.

jmmv 7mo ago

> 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. I haven't done that yet because I think I'd want to switch to pkgbase but that makes me nervous. Did you go with that option or continued to use the sets?

sidkshatriya 7mo ago
Why not create a boot environment and try out FreeBSD 15 with pkgbase ? If the experiment is successful just make the boot environment the default otherwise throw it away... With such powerful tools I find it fascinating that FreeBSD users are not more willing to experiment !
- jmmv 7mo ago
  To be honest I've never tried boot environments. I know they are a thing, and I have my whole setup on ZFS, so maybe that's the perfect use case.
krylon 7mo ago
I haven't switched to pkgbase. Yet. I don't intend to for the time being. I set up a VM to test it, but I haven't gotten around to actually testing it.
grahamjperrin 7mo ago
> … I think I'd want to switch to pkgbase but that makes me nervous. … There has been a disproportionate amount of negative noise from people who know too little about pkgbase. pkgbase is a good thing. A very good thing. A huge game-changer, in terms of testing STABLE and CURRENT.

atmosx 7mo ago

> Is there anything FreeBSD can do that, say, Debian cannot? Yes. Emulate traffic latency using IPFW and dummynet[^1]. There is no Linux (or OpenBSD, NetBSD) counterpart. The ZFS implementation is less buggy. [^1]: https://man.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?dummynet https://man.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?dummynet

c0balt 7mo ago
That is not really accurate? Linux traffic control (tc, [0]) exists since Kernel 2.2. It can introduce traffic latency and a few other network conditions, like packet loss. [0]: https://www.man7.org/linux/man-pages/man8/tc.8.html https://www.man7.org/linux/man-pages/man8/tc.8.html
- atmosx 7mo ago
  Hmm kind of... I was referring to the fact that dummynet models pipes with a fixed bandwidth and centralized scheduler. Packets are released according to very high precision transmission timing. This means that serialization delay, queue buildup, and link behavior are simulated in a way that resembles real network conditions. Dummynet can provide a highly deterministic timing and queue behavior, which made it popular in networking research and WAN emulation experiments. TC cannot do that with the same accuracy. I think much like other tools, think SELinux vs OpenBSD (unveil, etc) TC is more flexible (does more things) but there are _some things_ that can't do, and even for things both can do *BSD solutions are much simpler.
allreduce 7mo ago
You can emulate latency, packet errors, etc using netem tc [0] on Linux. [0]: https://man.archlinux.org/man/tc-netem.8.en https://man.archlinux.org/man/tc-netem.8.en
favorited 7mo ago
> The ZFS implementation is less buggy. FreeBSD and Linux have been using the same implementation of ZFS for years.
- 7mo ago

adrian_b 7mo ago

There are various niche applications where Debian or any Linux are worse than FreeBSD. For example the support for magnetic tapes and for a few other SCSI peripherals is better in FreeBSD. The Linux utility for controlling a LTO tape drive lacks some important options that the corresponding FreeBSD utility has. I have a tape drive, and to be able to use it like I want I had to move it to a FreeBSD server. Some years ago I was using a surveillance camera that was much easier to use in FreeBSD than in Linux, if you wanted to record good quality video and audio. I have not tried more recently to use such cameras in Linux, to see if now the recording quality is better. So while there are more hardware devices that have better support in Linux than in FreeBSD, there are also devices with better support in FreeBSD than in Linux. However the main reason why I use FreeBSD on many of my servers is that I need much less time for their administration than for Linux servers. In my experience, Linux servers need much less time for administration than Windows servers, and FreeBSD compares to Linux like Linux to Windows. I have FreeBSD servers that I have not touched for years, and they have worked 24/7 with no downtime and no rebooting, and this includes servers connected directly to the Internet, which implement firewalls, routers and various services, like NTP, DNS servers and proxies, e-mail servers, web servers and proxies etc.

irishcoffee 7mo ago
> Some years ago I was using a surveillance camera that was much easier to use in FreeBSD than in Linux, if you wanted to record good quality video and audio. I have not tried more recently to use such cameras in Linux, to see if now the recording quality is better. This example seems very hand-wavy. What camera?
- adrian_b 7mo ago
  A Logitech FullHD camera on USB, but I doubt that the problem was camera-specific. I believe that I would have seen the same behavior on any high-resolution USB camera. In FreeBSD, the command required for recording was very simple and it worked flawlessly. In Linux, it was more complex and there were various stuttering problems at maximum resolution. I am still using those cameras, but I have not tried them again in Linux. In Linux they worked worse than in FreeBSD around 5 years ago, perhaps nowadays there is no longer any problem in Linux. This was intended to be an example that you cannot know a priori whether a given device will work better on FreeBSD or on Linux. In general, there is a greater probability for Linux to have good support than for FreeBSD, but there are also counterexamples, so you cannot be certain which is better until you try both.

righthand 7mo ago

FreeBsd is Systemd free.

TacticalCoder 7mo ago
I'm using Linux since the Slackware-on-a-CDRom days and systemd is a lost cause: it only got worse and worse and only kept meddling more and more into the Linux ecosystem. The XZ "I only work on systemd distro" backdoor was the final straw (people are going to say it's unrelated but the fact is there: non-systemd Linux distro weren't affected). I've been gradually switching my workflow to VMs and containers and my idea is to, eventually, run the VMs under FreeBSD's bhyve instead of running them from a systemd Linux distro (Proxmox in my case). At long last I should soon be, once again, totally free of systemd (last time it was before it existed).
grahamjperrin 7mo ago
> FreeBsd is Systemd free. https://www.reddit.com/r/freebsd/comments/96pm7w/benno_rice_the_tragedy_of_systemd_bsdcan_2018/ https://www.reddit.com/r/freebsd/comments/96pm7w/benno_rice_... > Benno Rice: The Tragedy of systemd – BSDCan 2018 : r/freebsd Don't be misled by the title. I thoroughly recommend listening to the whole thing.

liendolucas 7mo ago

FreeBSD is an amazing beast. I'm currently using it as my workstation, and because I need to use Linux, bhyve came to the rescue and is easy to use it through the `vm` wrapper tool. It works like a charm and it is built in. Being that said, on FreeBSD 15, I believe I've found a serious bug: when I disconnect a USB optical mouse on the "Lenovo 16 G7 ARP" the system completes freezes and reboots, I guess it reaches a kernel panic. It took me a few disconnections of the power, ethernet and finally the mouse to detect this condition. Surprinsingly this does not happen if the device is wireless (I tried to remove the receiver of a Trackball and the system keeps working just fine). I find this really weird and don't know if actually report it in the FreeBSD forums, maybe is just a glitch on this particular laptop or it has something to do with the touchpad, just guessing here. Putting this particular issue aside, I'm extremely happy that almost everything works with little or no effort on a recent/modern laptop. BSDs in general are fantastic OSes.

rootnod3 7mo ago
Instead of the forums, report it also here https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/ https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/

johng 7mo ago

I think the main difference is that Linux simply has more hardware support than FreeBSD.

jdefr89 7mo ago
That’s all it came down to with me.. FreeBSD doing WiFi circa 2002 was a remote dream. Shit even Linux you had to use ndiswrapper and it still prob wouldn’t work

grahamjperrin 7mo ago

> … ZFS was a huge selling point, but I heard that it works quite well on Linux, these days. … True. I have OpenZFS-native encrypted root-on-ZFS for Kubuntu 25.10, made ultra-simple by the installer for Ubuntu (25.04 at the time). FreeBSD can not yet do this. Please see, for example, https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=263171 https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=263171 > 263171 – add loader(8) and boot loader menu support for boot with OpenZFS-encrypted ROOT

chillfox 7mo ago

I started out running FreeBSD on my home servers, then moved to Alpine Linux because all server software that I wanted to run was provided in Docker docker containers and with docker compose examples, so it was just easier. Moving the ZFS pools over to Linux was effortlessly. And now I am looking at moving over to k3s (still on Alpine) because everyone is providing Helm charts, so it seems easier. I really like FreeBSD, but it's just easier to go with the flow.

jandrewrogers 7mo ago

There are narrow things for which FreeBSD is just lovely but it hasn’t been as powerful as Linux for decades. It was one of the best server OS back in the 1990s though. Just a very clean implementation. I used it a lot back in the day and am very fond of it. But I can no longer recommend it.

lproven 7mo ago
> as powerful as Linux Can you explain what you mean by that? Can you give some examples?
- jandrewrogers 7mo ago
  Linux added differentiated support for high-scale and high-performance systems pretty early on. Good support for very high core counts, kernel bypass mechanisms, XFS, and more recently things like io_uring. This opened Linux up to a class of high-end applications that FreeBSD wasn't designed for. FreeBSD was excellent for ordinary UNIX-y server things. If you were designing a high-end database engine though, where you mostly just need the OS to get out of the way, it was much easier to target Linux.

antihero 7mo ago

How is it at running something like microk8s? Also do you have to build your own binaries for anything not in the distro?

debian3 7mo ago

> Is there anything FreeBSD can do that, say, Debian cannot? Docker containers is a big one.

anthk 7mo ago
Docker it's a solution for a big Linux problem. FreeBSD would just resort to compatNx libraries (to run older binaries) and/or a jail.

pseudohadamard 7mo ago

FreeBSD is actually really nice as an OS, but Linux gets pretty much all of the application support. For example compare XigmaNAS with OMV, I'd really prefer to run my NAS on FreeBSD but Xigma has more or less stalled while OMV is being actively worked on.

endsandmeans 7mo ago

> But I appreciate the reliability, the good documentation, the community These were big reasons for me. Cannot overstate the documentation angle. > Ports. Packages. > DEB/APT/RPM (particularily for a C programmer. > Licensing more friendly to integrating into your appliances (I did this) or code Before ZFS it was still better for the afformentioned reasons but ZFS was a game changer. I started Linux with Slackware and writing my own ppp up/down scripts while dual booting from windows, which took 2 weeks to get online the first time, then I went to redhat/debian/mandrake for a few years... then I found FreeBSD at it was like a breath of 'clear' air. Started using it for my daily desktop in 2002 and I still use it on several converted Macs at home and my main 'office' server which is a VPS these days. Production wise I would always have to reboot my fbsd servers for EOL never any issues and many uptimes north of 1000 days over the years. That builds trust. I trust FreeBSD project to be conservative and consistent for the most part -- THE PRINCIPLE OF LEAST SURPRISE -- another thing I have not seen enough of with Linux distros.

passthejoe 7mo ago

Having ZFS baked into the installer and fully supported by the project is a huge motivator for using FreeBSD. I know that Linux distros can accommodate ZFS, but it's a fair-weather situation due to licensing and most distros' preference for BTRFS.

fluoridation 7mo ago
Licensing is totally irrelevant for the end user. It just means you can't distribute the fully configured system.