alt Hacker NewsA Love Letter to FreeBSD
Comments
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 ?
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
> If someone wants hype or the latest shiny thing every month, they have Linux.
Just. Run. Debian.
> 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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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
[flagged]
> 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.
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.