Blog ran on Ubuntu 16.04 for 10 years. I migrated it to FreeBSD

The biggest mistake I made was high uptime. arjie.com was up for 10 years plus on a Hetzner VPS so that by the time they wanted to sunset the machine underlying I had no idea what my teenage self had set up. I have the backups but the site hasn’t been up in a decade…

Nowadays I build things so that they move and I have moved things about a bit so I know they work.

I'm in the same boat. I have 2 old servers that I let get "too" old, and now I'm afraid to touch them to update them. However, with some of the shenanigans that the Linux distributions are pulling around age verification/attestation, I'm considering bailing on them entirely.

Note, I did try Artix, but when it broke last week after a restart (in which evidently something had gone wrong with an earlier kernel update), and I had to pull out a rescue ISO, I decided I didn't want to mess with that. I switched that machine to Devuan, but the jury is still out for me. I don't have any major complaints, but I'm still in the burn-in phase. :) I'm running Arch on a laptop, but they have been a bit hostile in the community with censorship, so I'm just waiting for a free weekend to blast it and put something else on. I don't want political drama in my software.

This all comes at an interesting time, though. This is the first time that I purchased a new laptop and didn't even let it boot into Windows, but instantly installed Linux. And everything "just worked". And now that I'm excited to try Linux, so many of the big players are embracing the steps to erode privacy (AI everywhere... age attestation/verification... telemetry on by default...). It's sad, and I'm just going to "nope" out of any interactions with them.

Slightly off topic: What's currently the free Linux distribution with the longest support cycle?

For a while I used CentOS 7 on all of those small VMs, because it got security updates for a really long time. With minimal risk of breaking things on updates.

PS: after a bit of research Alma/Rocky Linux are probably the best choices for now. 10 years of support. But are they maintained well?

I enjoyed my foray into trying FreeBSD for my personal server. There's something cool, clean, simple and "punk rock" about it. But I gave up as my main pain points were:

- PM2 was buggy on FreeBSD, which I used to manage my processes

- An alternative, using `rc.d` to run daemons was just so hard to get logs working.

- The firewall required too much self configuration to get it right with all the best security practices (ie. What does one do with ICMP.) I was missing something like a template with the defaults that come with UFW, for instance.

I've switched to Debian (and since Ubuntu) for my server needs but I remember being obsessed in the mid 2000s with FreeBSD when I was younger. I would spend more time configuring and setting them up than doing anything actually useful on them.

It used to be hard to find dedicated servers or VPSs with any of the BSDs, I think I settled on Panix.com or something?

Before that I remember some company called 15MinuteServers (NAC?) out of NJ I think that offered them. Just kind of rambling down memory lane at this point though.

Personally, I've been running with Caddy in front of Docker (compose) for most of my personal/hobby usage. If it's a straight website, I'll let Caddy serve the contents directly... for "web apps" I'll pretty much containerize all the things and use caddy for TLS termination and reverse-proxy duties to the app running under Docker...

Mostly ~/apps/appname, where each appname has a docker compose file, and the data directories mounted under appname... I can compose down and (s)ftp the data out for hard archives or to move a site/service. I had been running a few VMs under a dedicated server, but switched to separate VPSes on OVH. Only gotcha with OVH is if you want to run mail, you want to avoid the local zone VMs that don't allow mail hosting.

YMMV

The benchmarks are completely off, and a recent version of Ubuntu with sane config would easily beat Freebsd.

I, too, have a server running 16.04 that I'm afraid to update. It currently has an uptime of 1281 days... at this point I'd feel bad rebooting it

I love people that aren't afraid to experiment and learn. As someone that hasn't had a formal education in software engineering (just in other kind of engineering) I learned the most by doing and failing.

I recently switched from Debian based servers to OpenBSD and I have never been happier. I wish I would have done it much, much earlier.

Boggles my mind that people pay money to host hugo static sites on a VPS, which is objectively inferior and harder in every meaningful way compared to hosting for free on GitHub pages or S3+CloudFront.

> I don’t know why fastfetch always report more memory being used than the actual values. I’ve never seen more than 3GiB used in btop for this server

My guess would be that fastfetch probably reports actual memory usage while btop probably reports the total usage of all processes. The former is probably higher because of things like filesystem caching

I was running Ubuntu 16.04; migrated to FreeBSD and I'm all in. Between 16.04 and the current version of Linux; the ecosystem shifted. It's values shifted in ways that did not align with me. This mis-alignment is what motivated me to boot-up FreeBSD. I'm glad I discovered it. I found my happy place again.

It's an incredible journey to take--whether you stick with it or not. Migrating to FreeBSD gives you new eyes into what Linux was, is, and the awesomeness of FreeBSD that is so hard to articulate; like describing the color blue. It must be taken as a whole to appreciate it; and I'm not just saying the OS, it's commands, kernel features, but, the end-to-end compute experience, over time.

If I could draw an equivelent, it would be like when Djistrka savagely destroyed the GOTO statement with a single, short, paper. It took a brilliant mind to articulate that and there has yet to be such a mind to describe the beauty of FreeBSD. So, the best I can do, is just to challenge you to try it.