You should try FreeBSD (2014) • Hacker News Board

Re: You should try FreeBSD (2014)

#71

Post by krenoten » Fri, Nov 20, 2015, 5:02 PM UTC

dorfsmay wrote: post #64

myztic wrote: post #56

I wonder why this got so many votes to be honest, it's from May 2014 and as far as why one would want to try FreeBSD it is not very detailed. That being said: I use FreeBSD and (obviously) prefer it, but: 1) ZFSonLinux has made huge steps forward and actually (at least in my opinion) is production ready and rock solid (of course it's not as good as ZFS on FreeBSD though, for example it's lacking some features and of…

Are there significant differences in usability between BSD jails and LXC?

http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/127001/linux-lxc-vs-...

Re: You should try FreeBSD (2014)

#72

Post by krenoten » Fri, Nov 20, 2015, 5:05 PM UTC

cannam wrote: post #65

asuffield wrote: post #21

(Tedious disclaimer: not speaking for anybody else, my opinion only, etc. I'm an SRE at Google.) > Many major companies like Google or Netflix use FreeBSD in production. Erm. Well, the company's so huge that I'm sure there's something with some freebsd in it somewhere, but... not really. I've worked with freebsd extensively in a past job, where it was used for licensing reasons. I don't agree with this article.

Yahoo used to run largely on FreeBSD, at least up to the mid 2000s. Wonder whether they still use it.

They have mostly moved away from it.

Re: You should try FreeBSD (2014)

#73

Post by vezzy-fnord » Fri, Nov 20, 2015, 5:07 PM UTC

byuu wrote: post #69

protomyth wrote: post #47

Those interested in FreeBSD for their desktop might want to take a look at PC-BSD http://www.pcbsd.org which is a FreeBSD variant geared towards desktop users. Also, BSD Now http://www.bsdnow.tv and BSDTalk http://bsdtalk.blogspot.com are excellent podcasts for BSD.

Just a word of warning, Jordan Hubbard and Kip Macy work for iXsystems and are pushing for both PC-BSD and FreeNAS to move to NextBSD, which is basically bringing half of OS X into FreeBSD. (Probably inspired by Jordan's days of working at Apple.) Which many people, including myself, feel is a disastrously bad idea (ex http://blog.darknedgy.net/technology/2015/08/26/0/ ). It has a lot of similarities to Linux and sys…

Thanks for the shout-out. Thankfully, the FreeBSD Foundation itself doesn't seem particularly receptive to the NextBSD effort (judging from their most recent quarterly status), so there's no danger of it being merged soon.

Re: You should try FreeBSD (2014)

#74

Post by unethical_ban » Fri, Nov 20, 2015, 5:08 PM UTC

asuffield wrote: post #21

(Tedious disclaimer: not speaking for anybody else, my opinion only, etc. I'm an SRE at Google.) > Many major companies like Google or Netflix use FreeBSD in production. Erm. Well, the company's so huge that I'm sure there's something with some freebsd in it somewhere, but... not really. I've worked with freebsd extensively in a past job, where it was used for licensing reasons. I don't agree with this article.

Netflix uses FreeBSD as a major component of its CDN (IIRC, it's the OS on all their CDN nodes).

Re: You should try FreeBSD (2014)

#75

Post by bsg75 » Fri, Nov 20, 2015, 5:11 PM UTC

myztic wrote: post #56

I wonder why this got so many votes to be honest, it's from May 2014 and as far as why one would want to try FreeBSD it is not very detailed. That being said: I use FreeBSD and (obviously) prefer it, but: 1) ZFSonLinux has made huge steps forward and actually (at least in my opinion) is production ready and rock solid (of course it's not as good as ZFS on FreeBSD though, for example it's lacking some features and of…

Where is ZoL not up to speed compared to FreeBSD / ZFS?

Re: You should try FreeBSD (2014)

#76

Post by bsg75 » Fri, Nov 20, 2015, 5:15 PM UTC

therealmarv wrote: post #37

I really wanted to try FreeBSD because of ZFS. Then I've seen benchmarks of ZFS between FreeBSD and ZFS on Linux on Ubuntu. Ubuntu was nearly double the speed in the benchmarks. I was sold to Ubuntu. Simple.

"There are lies, damned lies, and benchmarks"

Did you compare performance on your own workloads?

We test ZoL with each major release, and while stability has improved significantly, it becomes apparent that ZFS can have wide performance differences depending on configuration and use case.

This is true with all ZFS implementations, but with ZFS on Linux not being native there are even more variables.

Re: You should try FreeBSD (2014)

#77

Post by protomyth » Fri, Nov 20, 2015, 5:18 PM UTC

byuu wrote: post #69

protomyth wrote: post #47

Those interested in FreeBSD for their desktop might want to take a look at PC-BSD http://www.pcbsd.org which is a FreeBSD variant geared towards desktop users. Also, BSD Now http://www.bsdnow.tv and BSDTalk http://bsdtalk.blogspot.com are excellent podcasts for BSD.

Just a word of warning, Jordan Hubbard and Kip Macy work for iXsystems and are pushing for both PC-BSD and FreeNAS to move to NextBSD, which is basically bringing half of OS X into FreeBSD. (Probably inspired by Jordan's days of working at Apple.) Which many people, including myself, feel is a disastrously bad idea (ex http://blog.darknedgy.net/technology/2015/08/26/0/ ). It has a lot of similarities to Linux and sys…

I think its a little premature to worry about NextBSD in the context of PC-BSD. PC-BSD has brought some stuff from OpenBSD over, but I it doesn't sound like they do stuff without proof of working.

I guess Linux has SystemD and the BSDs have NextBSD to be fearful of.

Re: You should try FreeBSD (2014)

#78

Post by floatboth » Fri, Nov 20, 2015, 5:18 PM UTC

eatonphil wrote: post #33

corv wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've found that OpenBSD has incredibly complete support for many laptops, going so far as to support Thinkpads with touchscreens and digitizer pens out of the box. Overall I find FreeBSD's desktop to be more usable, even though OpenBSD has more streamlined configuration in some parts of the system.

I agree! For instance, my wifi card (Centrino 2230) is not supported on FreeBSD 10.2-STABLE but it has been available on OpenBSD for a little while. It is now supported in HEAD but won't be in STABLE until 11.0 next year. I decided to go with FreeBSD because, from what I read, it seemed like it and 3rd-part packages are kept more up-to-date. As a server-side and front-end developer, this is somewhat more immediately…

Don't be afraid to run -CURRENT on a laptop! Or even the graphics team's testing branch, which already has Haswell accelerated graphics support: https://github.com/freebsd/freebsd-base-graphics/tree/drm-i9...

About 3rd party packages: FreeBSD ports are always current, binary packages are available as quarterly and current. With OpenBSD, it's all frozen on release, and you basically have to run -CURRENT to get recent packages.

The OpenBSD team is working on a hypervisor too: http://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article&sid=20151101223132

ZFS + jails + DTrace though… :-)

Re: You should try FreeBSD (2014)

#79

Post by thinkingkong » Fri, Nov 20, 2015, 5:21 PM UTC

Not sure which operating systems are still pushing the enveloppe but I get the impression that these system designs are congealing.

BSD and Solaris were different enough to create real competition, if only friendly. Now it seems that momentum of linux has turned it into the only real option for doing "serious" things, unless you need the license freedom of BSD for an embedded device.

Re: You should try FreeBSD (2014)

#80

Post by tmbsundar » Fri, Nov 20, 2015, 5:22 PM UTC

I have freebsd in one of my VMs and like it very much. One reason I am reluctant to move it as my primary OS is the lack of CUDA support (this might be an nvidia thing and not the fault of freebsd devs). But still it's seems to be a blocker.

Is there a way to make CUDA work in freebsd? Would be glad to know.