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A Love Letter to FreeBSD

420 points by rbanffy

by arthurfirst

4 subcomments

26 years of FreeBSD and counting...
IIRC in about 99 I got sick of Mandrake and RH RPM deps hell and found FreeBSD 3 CD in a Walnut creek book. Ports and BSD packages were a revelation, to say nothing of the documentation which still sets it apart from the haphazard Linux.
The comment about using a good SERVER mobo like supermicro is on point --- I managed many supermicro fbsd colo ack servers for almost 15 years and those boards worked well with it.
Currently I run FreeBSD on several home machines including old mac minis repurposed as media machines throughout the house.
They run kodi + linux brave and with that I can stream anything like live sports.
Also OpenBSD for one firewall and PFSense (FreeBSD) for another.

by knowknow

16 subcomments

It seems FreeBSD is becoming more talked about in enthusiast communities simply because Linux is a lot more mainstream now and there’s a joy in contrarianism rather than any real changes with either of the two operating systems.

by andrehacker

8 subcomments

As much as I love FreeBSD, the release schedule is a real challenge in production: each point release is only supported for about three months. Since every release includes all ports and packages, you end up having to recertify your main application constantly.
Compare this to RedHat: yes, a paid subscription is expensive, but RedHat backports security fixes into the original code, so open source package updates don’t break your application, and critical CVEs are still addressed.
Microsoft, for all its faults, provides remarkable stability by supporting backward compatibility to a sometimes ridiculous extent.
Is FreeBSD amazing, stable, and an I/O workhorse? Absolutely: just ask Netflix. But is it a good choice for general-purpose, application-focused (as opposed to infrastructure-focused) large deployments? Hm, no ?

by st3fan

1 subcomments

"If someone wants hype or the latest shiny thing every month, they have Linux."
This is just such a bizarre view ... what do they think Linux really is? Maybe if you are on bleeding edge Arch as a hobbyist who follows the latest shiny windows managers or something like that. But those of us who run Linux in production do that on stable releases with proven tech that hasn't changed significantly in more than a decade. Or longer for some things.
The FreeBSD folks need a reality check. They are so out of touch with what Linux really is. It is hard to take these kind of articles seriously.

by keyle

3 subcomments

These rose tinted glasses are pretty strong. I found nothing but pain trying to run the BSDs on recent computers/setups.
There is 'different' as in 'alternative/edgy', and then there is 'different' as in 'won't implement/yagni' which becomes highly subjective.

by vogon_laureate

0 subcomment

BSDs taught me how to Unix in a way that I just wasn't able to manage with Linux before. This was during the early RedHat 5.x days and I just found so many pain points with the RPMs and odd file hierarchy inconsistencies for different packages. I tried to setup a firewall for my office network and struggled with iptables (or was it ipchains back then?) and found the documentation confusing.
I tried OpenBSD to setup a firewall system and fell in love. Everything just made more sense and felt more cohesive. PF rules syntax was just so much easier to work with and flexible. I loved the ports system and the emphasis on code correctness and security. The Man pages were a revelation! I could find everything I needed in the command line.
I tried all the BSDs, and each have their own strengths and weaknesses. FreeBSD had the most ports and seemed to also have good hardware support, NetBSD had the most platform support, DragonflyBSD was focused on parallel computing, etc. They all borrow and learn from each other.
BSDs are great and I heartily recommend people give them a whirl. This article in The Register is also worth a read:
https://www.theregister.com/2024/10/08/switching_from_linux_...

by rhinoceraptor

2 subcomments

I personally have been itching for a NixOS-style BSD or Illumos derivative. My main machine is currently NixOS with root on ZFS, but I would love to be running something where ZFS isn't an afterthought, I could use dtrace, the kernel has first class OS virtualization, and so on. I think that the declarative approach to package management is obviously the future, but I wish there were a non-Linux option.

by tombert

1 subcomments

Nothing "against" FreeBSD, but I've never been able to really use it as a desktop OS.
Don't get me wrong: ports is pretty cool and jails are cool, but every time I've tried running FreeBSD on a laptop I end up spending a day chasing problems with drivers or getting things like brightness or volume controls working. Basically, FreeBSD on laptops (as of the last time I tried it about two years ago) feels like Linux on laptops about fifteen years ago. Linux on laptops nowadays generally works out of the box, at least with AMD stuff. I didn't have much issue getting NixOS working on my current laptop, but I am not sure that would be the case with FreeBSD, even still.
That said, FreeBSD on servers is pretty sweet. Very stable, and ports is pretty awesome. I ran FreeBSD on a server for about a year.

by bluGill

0 subcomment

Last time I entountered a mainframe they religiously rebooted - full power cycle every six months. a few years before their power backup failed in an emergency and for months aftrewards they were trying to figure out what all was running on that thing and how to get it started. By rebooting people starting a process remember to get it in the startup sequence - or at least only a few moths have passed so odds are they remember how it works.

by mshroyer

0 subcomment

These days I use it as a home file server because for my needs, FreeBSD the best tool for that job.
But back in the early 2000s I got access to a free Unix shell account that included Apache hosting and Perl, and if I'm not misremembering, it was running on FreeBSD and hosted by an ISP in the UK using the domain names portland.co.uk and port5.com.
That was formative for me: I learned all of Unix, Perl, and basic CGI web development on that server. I don't know who specifically was running that server, or whether they have any relation to the current owner of that domain. But if you're out there, thanks! Having access to FreeBSD was a huge help to a random high schooler in the U.S., who wouldn't have been able to afford a paid hosting account back then.

by RantyDave

2 subcomments

"a thousand-day uptime shouldn’t be folklore"
I reboot a lot. Mostly I want to know that should the system need to reboot for whatever reason, that it will all come back up again. I run a very lightly loaded site and I highly doubt anybody notices the minute (or so) loss of service caused by rebooting.
Pretty sure I don't feel bad about this.

by mistyvales

1 subcomments

I run freeBSD for a NAS and a couple linux vm's under bhyve. Could I have just installed Ubuntu and been done with it? Probably. I did make some mistakes like setting a very low swap partition, forgetting to switch my RAID controller to IT mode which made me have to rebuild my raidz1 pool, changing my bhyves to UEFI so the internet works better. I made sure the jail I built for plex worked fine. It's been fun. At this point I should probably rebuild the whole damn thing, but I know it will run just fine as is.

by nickdothutton

0 subcomment

FBSD user since the mid 90s. It (and BSDi) often outperformed "big UNIX" vendors, and was far ahead in terms of bang per buck... if only good server grade rack-mount x86 hardware had been available at the time we'd have made more use of it. Now I have returned to it for server workloads. Good documentation, consistent release schedule, reliability even under extreme load.

by MisterTea

0 subcomment

I've been running home servers in one form or another for some time. Win NT4 briefly, FreeBSD, Win2k server for a while, then to Linux for quite some time. I tried FreeNAS but learned to hate the webui churn and outdated/scattered docs but liked ZFS. Went back to Linux using Mint (yeah, weird choice...) and had issues with Mint and my hardware was crap. I wanted ZFS so I decided to go back to my roots and run FreeBSD again.
I realized the right way to start is with GOOD hardware. So I went on eBay (I know, I know...) and found a nice Supermicro uATX server board and a 65 watt quad core Xeon in the 1151(?) socket then bought a fresh set of Kingston 16 GB ECC DIMMs, and 4x 8TB enterprise CMR SATA disks.
I read the docs and read a few how-to's from blogs and personal sites. In a day I had a everything setup, accounts, Raid-Z5 data store, samba and nfs exporting the data store. It was so damn easy. It's been running solid ever since. It's so reliable it's boring. I have to remind myself its even there so I can run updates and check on the thing to make sure its not full of dust or snakes or whatever.

by Ericson2314

0 subcomment

I hope that someday that https://github.com/nixos-bsd/nixbsd will be upstreamed into NixOS, and it will allow much easier switching between Linux and FreeBSD.

by rwaksmunski

0 subcomment

I got over 20 years of sane, reliable and consistent computing from the FreeBSD Project, thank you.

by jandrusk

0 subcomment

What is love? Baby don't reboot me, baby don't reboot me :) Truly a rock solid OS and I use it for my personal DNS servers and never had any issue, it just run and runs and runs with minimal bloat. I think it's way more stable than Linux, but obviously has some work to be a comptetive desktop. I've recently developed the philosophy of using Omarchy as my desktop and servers are FreeBSD unless there's some reason it doesn't fit my use case.

by karlgkk

1 subcomments

> let administrators see longevity as a feature, not a gamble
I get what you’re going for. But…
Please god no. Immutable images, servers are cattle not pets.

by arthurfirst

1 subcomments

I felt the same way in 1999.

by js-j

1 subcomments

I like freebsd a lot, too. In production we use debian (without systemd!), and here's the uptime of one of our servers:
$ uname -a
Linux deb2 3.16.0-4-amd64 #1 SMP Debian 3.16.7-ckt25-2 (2016-04-08) x86_64 GNU/Linux
$ uptime
08:50:41 up 2512 days, 17:15, 1 user, load average: 18.70, 20.46, 21.43

by BoredomIsFun

0 subcomment

To me biggest selling point of freebsd is delayed rolling release package policy - every 3 month you get a bulk of new packages, and security updates in between I wish Debian was like that.

by fridder

0 subcomment

I'm really enjoying the uptick in interest in FreeBSD I'm starting to see as well as the really exciting 15.0 release.

by adastra22

16 subcomments

I so wish that FreeBSD was GPL. I know this won't be a popular opinion, but I believe that success Linux has had is because of copyleft, and *BSD are riding on the coat tails of that.
But I don't like Linux. I use it daily, but I don't like it. I wish FreeBSD held the position Linux does in the market today. That would be heaven.

by bobanrocky

1 subcomments

Love the Sun E10k reference !!
- ex Sun

by jeffjeffbear

0 subcomment

I would still use it but NVIDIA abandoned it, so I can't. I wish they still had some support for modern CUDA.

by sharts

2 subcomments

Other than a few niche areas like Netflix and Playstation or even MacOS as some like to often put fourth as examples of how great it is…
yeah.

by bitwize

0 subcomment

More of a Net/Open guy myself, but the Qotom network appliance I mentioned a few posts back runs FreeBSD. I use it as a wifi bridge to provide backhaul for my office's wired LAN over the house wifi. There are gadgets you can buy for this, but I like my solution running stock FreeBSD + some configuration.

by kosolam

4 subcomments

As a small user I find it hard to find a use case where I’d want a bsd for some reason. I even installed ghostbsd in a vm to try it but it seemed very similar to linux so I didn’t understand what’s the upside?

by Klonoar

2 subcomments

> If someone wants hype or the latest shiny thing every month, they have Linux.
Just. Run. Debian.

by tuhgdetzhh

3 subcomments

A love letter to the last operating system that isn’t trying to gaslight you. FreeBSD really is the anti-hype choice: no mascot-as-a-service, no quarterly identity crisis, just a system that quietly works until the heat death of the universe.

by alex1138

2 subcomments

I know this is the noob perspective but they should try (yes, I'm already aware of GhostBSD) to make getting into the desktop a little bit easier, it can be very hard to bootstrap anything and learn if you're new to it

by alan-jordan13

0 subcomment

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by Annatar

0 subcomment

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by Quranakh

0 subcomment

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by sapphirebreeze

0 subcomment

[flagged]

by shevy-java

2 subcomments

> Culture matters too. One reason I stepped away from Linux was the noise, the debates that drowned out the joy of building.
No clue what he is babbling about. LFS/BLFS is active. FreeBSD doesn't have that. I am sorry but Linux is the better tinker-toy. I understand this upsets the BSD folks, but it is simply how it is. Granted, systemd and the corporatification took a huge toll into the Linux ecosystem but even now as it is in some ruins (KDE devs recently decreed that xorg will die and they will aid in the process of killing off xorg, by forcing everyone into wayland), it is still much more active as a tinker-toy. That's simply how it is.
I recall many years ago NetBSD on the mailing list pointed out that Linux now runs on more toasters than NetBSD. This is simply the power of tinkerification.
> Please keep FreeBSD the kind of place where thoughtful engineering is welcome without ego battles
K - for the three or four users worldwide.
> There’s also the practical side: keep the doors open with hardware vendors like Dell and HPE, so FreeBSD remains a first-class citizen.
Except that Linux supports more hardware. I am sorry FreeBSD people - there is reality. We can't offset and ignore it.
> My hope is simple: that you stay different. Not in the way that shouts for attention, but in the way that earns trust.
TempleOS also exists.
I think it is much more different than any of the BSDs.
> If someone wants hype or the latest shiny thing every month, they have Linux.
Right - and you don't have to go that route either. Imagine there is choice on Linux. I can run Linux without systemd - there is no problem with that. I don't need GNOME or KDE asking-for-donation begging devs killing xorg either. (Admittedly GTK and QT seem to be the only really surviving oldschool desktop GUIs and GTK is really unusuable nowadays.)
> the way the best of Unix always did, they should know they can find it here.
Yeah ok ... 500 out of 500 supercomputers running Linux ...
> And maybe, one day, someone will walk past a rack of servers, hear the steady, unhurried rhythm of a FreeBSD system still running
I used FreeBSD for a while until a certain event made me go back to Linux - my computer was shut off when I returned home. When I left, it was still turned on. It ran FreeBSD. This is of course episodical, but I never had that problem with Linux.
I think FreeBSD folks need to realise that Linux did some things better.