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.
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 ?
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.
There is 'different' as in 'alternative/edgy', and then there is 'different' as in 'won't implement/yagni' which becomes highly subjective.
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_...
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.
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.
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.
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.
I get what you’re going for. But…
Please god no. Immutable images, servers are cattle not pets.
$ 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
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.
- ex Sun
yeah.
Just. Run. Debian.
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.