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Wonderful! I may actually consider dumping Debian for FreeBSD 10. I've never been totally happy with Linux after moving off "proper" UNIX machines. I had a Fr

Wonderful! I may actually consider dumping Debian for FreeBSD 10. I've never been totally happy with Linux after moving off "proper" UNIX machines. I had a FreeBSD 4.4 machine floating around for years which I was rather happy with but drifted off to Linux-land primarily due to convenience when it came to Flash and audio. So many compelling reasons to switch back to FreeBSD now.

maheart 13y ago
What exactly is attracting you to FreeBSD? I ask because Debian has a FreeBSD "port". That is, it offers the Debian userland on top of the FreeBSD kernel. So, depending on what you're looking for, you might be able to gain access to the best of both worlds. If you're after the FreeBSD experience (i.e. the community, the BSD command line utils, ports, and the preference for permissive licenses), then I guess Debian/kFreeBSD really isn't of any interest to you.
- mavhc 13y ago
  I use debian/kfreebsd on my server so I can use zfs. Had Freebsd previously, but the lack of a Stable ports tree meant updating broke things often. Although many things don't work on debian/kfreebsd, and searching for help is tricky, do I go the debian way or the freebsd way, it's always updated with few problems.
  - Freaky 13y ago
    Port updates are a lot nicer now we have poudriere and pkgng - I haven't had a "pkg upgrade" break anything in months, and that was prior to automatic shared library tracking and just needed a "pkg install -Rf lang/perl" to fix. e.g. the latest entry in UPDATING is for any port depending on converters/libiconv. Using portmaster or portupgrade requires querying the package database for the list of depending ports, force-deleting libiconv and then force-rebuilding from the previously saved list. With pkgng it's a case of "pkg upgrade && pkg autoremove".
  - dcreemer 13y ago
    I have been using ZFS on Linux[1] for about six months now, on both Debian and Ubuntu. Installation is trivial and it seems to work quite well, though I do not stress it very much. [1] http://zfsonlinux.org/ http://zfsonlinux.org/
- harrytuttle 13y ago
  Well the main things for me are 1. feels closer to "old fashioned non-Canonical'ed UNIX" which I was brought up on. 2. Way less politics due to license. 3. Less crazy forking and wheel reinventing (basically everything Ubuntu isn't). 4. It has orders of magnitude better documentation 5. pkgng is actually really nice 6. separation of core OS vs ports/packages so easy to stage updates compared to catch all Linux distros. 7. pf is miles better than iptables 8. ZFS. 9. I have a Sun Ultra 30 sitting in my cupboard which Linux doens't like. 10. Has valgrind that works properly unlike the other BSD's. That's about it but it's enough. My use cases are: personal use, professional use (devops), professional use (production).
  - masklinn 13y ago
    It also has dtrace, including kernel support enabled by default.
    - harrytuttle 13y ago
      Forgot about dtrace - good point! So much goodness!
- lmm 13y ago
  I've heard Debian/kFreeBSD has poor multithreading support because it's built against glibc/libpthread rather than the native freebsd libc (which has an NPTL-equivalent).
  - emaste 13y ago
    kFreeBSD recently gained native support (called FBTL). See http://lists.debian.org/debian-bsd/2013/07/msg00060.html http://lists.debian.org/debian-bsd/2013/07/msg00060.html and http://asdfasdf.debian.net/~salinger/eglibc.fbtl/ http://asdfasdf.debian.net/~salinger/eglibc.fbtl/
- jonhohle 13y ago
  > I ask because Debian has a FreeBSD "port" I've used FreeBSD and before that Gentoo (which has a package manager, portage, influenced by BSDs ports system) for more than a decade, and I've never understood the appeal of apt or the other Debian tools. In my experience, they just don't work as well as ports, constantly require adding additional repositories (because the official repository is missing some relatively popular package for who knows what reason) - which may or may not conflict with others I have -, and in general, are just more work than ports, portage, or MacPorts. Inflicting apt on a system with a superior package management system seems like a sysadmin's bright idea - having no experience with ports or other package managers. I've used apt on several systems - Maemo, Debian, Ubuntu, OS X (as fink), and always found it to be one of the weakest package managers (I've even had better experience with yum/RPM).
  - jhh 13y ago
    So how do you use ports in practice? Do you use sources or binary packages? Which management solution do you use, or do you just use the make files? I am constantly thinking about revisiting BSD, but in contrast to your experience I found the apt package solution to work very well and just be better.
    - Freaky 13y ago
      I use poudriere and pkgng - the former for building my own package repository, the latter for installing and upgrading. The pkgng side is comparable to apt: `pkg install vim`, `pkg upgrade`, `pkg autoremove` etc; the poudriere side isn't much worse: https://fossil.etoilebsd.net/poudriere/doc/trunk/doc/pkgng_repos.wiki https://fossil.etoilebsd.net/poudriere/doc/trunk/doc/pkgng_r... I admit I had some level of apt-envy back when I was using portupgrade. pkgng has nicely eliminated that.
    - harrytuttle 13y ago
      From my perspective (I'm not the GP), I will be using a custom configuration management system that I wrote back in 1999. It's. Like puppet but ssh based, written in sh and standard Unix tooling. It doesn't use a DAG so you have to order dependencies carefully. That will pull binary packages from ports builds on another machine and install and configure them.

maheart 13y ago

What exactly is attracting you to FreeBSD? I ask because Debian has a FreeBSD "port". That is, it offers the Debian userland on top of the FreeBSD kernel. So, depending on what you're looking for, you might be able to gain access to the best of both worlds. If you're after the FreeBSD experience (i.e. the community, the BSD command line utils, ports, and the preference for permissive licenses), then I guess Debian/kFreeBSD really isn't of any interest to you.

mavhc 13y ago
I use debian/kfreebsd on my server so I can use zfs. Had Freebsd previously, but the lack of a Stable ports tree meant updating broke things often. Although many things don't work on debian/kfreebsd, and searching for help is tricky, do I go the debian way or the freebsd way, it's always updated with few problems.
- Freaky 13y ago
  Port updates are a lot nicer now we have poudriere and pkgng - I haven't had a "pkg upgrade" break anything in months, and that was prior to automatic shared library tracking and just needed a "pkg install -Rf lang/perl" to fix. e.g. the latest entry in UPDATING is for any port depending on converters/libiconv. Using portmaster or portupgrade requires querying the package database for the list of depending ports, force-deleting libiconv and then force-rebuilding from the previously saved list. With pkgng it's a case of "pkg upgrade && pkg autoremove".
- dcreemer 13y ago
  I have been using ZFS on Linux[1] for about six months now, on both Debian and Ubuntu. Installation is trivial and it seems to work quite well, though I do not stress it very much. [1] http://zfsonlinux.org/ http://zfsonlinux.org/
harrytuttle 13y ago
Well the main things for me are 1. feels closer to "old fashioned non-Canonical'ed UNIX" which I was brought up on. 2. Way less politics due to license. 3. Less crazy forking and wheel reinventing (basically everything Ubuntu isn't). 4. It has orders of magnitude better documentation 5. pkgng is actually really nice 6. separation of core OS vs ports/packages so easy to stage updates compared to catch all Linux distros. 7. pf is miles better than iptables 8. ZFS. 9. I have a Sun Ultra 30 sitting in my cupboard which Linux doens't like. 10. Has valgrind that works properly unlike the other BSD's. That's about it but it's enough. My use cases are: personal use, professional use (devops), professional use (production).
- masklinn 13y ago
  It also has dtrace, including kernel support enabled by default.
  - harrytuttle 13y ago
    Forgot about dtrace - good point! So much goodness!
lmm 13y ago
I've heard Debian/kFreeBSD has poor multithreading support because it's built against glibc/libpthread rather than the native freebsd libc (which has an NPTL-equivalent).
- emaste 13y ago
  kFreeBSD recently gained native support (called FBTL). See http://lists.debian.org/debian-bsd/2013/07/msg00060.html http://lists.debian.org/debian-bsd/2013/07/msg00060.html and http://asdfasdf.debian.net/~salinger/eglibc.fbtl/ http://asdfasdf.debian.net/~salinger/eglibc.fbtl/
jonhohle 13y ago
> I ask because Debian has a FreeBSD "port" I've used FreeBSD and before that Gentoo (which has a package manager, portage, influenced by BSDs ports system) for more than a decade, and I've never understood the appeal of apt or the other Debian tools. In my experience, they just don't work as well as ports, constantly require adding additional repositories (because the official repository is missing some relatively popular package for who knows what reason) - which may or may not conflict with others I have -, and in general, are just more work than ports, portage, or MacPorts. Inflicting apt on a system with a superior package management system seems like a sysadmin's bright idea - having no experience with ports or other package managers. I've used apt on several systems - Maemo, Debian, Ubuntu, OS X (as fink), and always found it to be one of the weakest package managers (I've even had better experience with yum/RPM).
- jhh 13y ago
  So how do you use ports in practice? Do you use sources or binary packages? Which management solution do you use, or do you just use the make files? I am constantly thinking about revisiting BSD, but in contrast to your experience I found the apt package solution to work very well and just be better.
  - Freaky 13y ago
    I use poudriere and pkgng - the former for building my own package repository, the latter for installing and upgrading. The pkgng side is comparable to apt: `pkg install vim`, `pkg upgrade`, `pkg autoremove` etc; the poudriere side isn't much worse: https://fossil.etoilebsd.net/poudriere/doc/trunk/doc/pkgng_repos.wiki https://fossil.etoilebsd.net/poudriere/doc/trunk/doc/pkgng_r... I admit I had some level of apt-envy back when I was using portupgrade. pkgng has nicely eliminated that.
  - harrytuttle 13y ago
    From my perspective (I'm not the GP), I will be using a custom configuration management system that I wrote back in 1999. It's. Like puppet but ssh based, written in sh and standard Unix tooling. It doesn't use a DAG so you have to order dependencies carefully. That will pull binary packages from ports builds on another machine and install and configure them.