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wolvoleotoday at 2:41 PM1 replyview on HN

Interesting. I use FreeBSD on my desktop too but it's really a desktop so I don't have to bother with WiFi or bluetooth. I generally dislike laptops for ergonomic reasons, and I never bring my computers anywhere anyway so I just buy NUCs. Not having to buy for a display, keyboard, trackpad, battery helps keep the price down.

I like it for several reasons. It's a holistic system which means it's much easier to understand, not a collection of random parts thrown together. There is only really one (big) distro so documentation is easy to come by and consistent. I love the way the updates of the system are uncoupled from the userland software so you can have rolling packages but a stable OS.

Also the ports collection is great (being able to manually compile every package with different flags where needed). And jails. And ZFS first-class citizen. Also I like the attitude. Less involvement from big tech, less strive to change for change's sake. It feels a lot more stable, every new version there's only a few things changed. It's not that with every major update I have to learn everything anew again because someone wanted to include their new init system (like systemd), configuration tools (like ifconfig -> ip), packaging system (like snap) etc. Things that work fine are just left alone.

It has some really good ideas also, like boot environments. But it's not linux. It's not meant to be.

But yeah if you want everything all figured out for you, don't use FreeBSD. Just take a commercial linux like ubuntu. You'll need to tinker a bit, which I like because it helps me understand my system. FreeBSD is a bit like Linux was in the early 2000s, it mostly works but you often have to dive into a shell for some magic. The good thing is having ZFS snapshots as a safety net though. Never really get caught out that way.


Replies

vehemenztoday at 4:29 PM

> FreeBSD is a bit like Linux was in the early 2000s, it mostly works but you often have to dive into a shell for some magic.

Which, ironically, is what Linux users have been saying for ages with respect to Windows, but the market share speaks for itself.