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You should try FreeBSD (2014)

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Re: You should try FreeBSD (2014)

#81

Post by byuu »

protomyth wrote: post #77
byuu wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

Pretty much. But the FreeBSD developers have a history of being much more conservative on these types of changes. But then again, Debian used to as well. So you never know.

I'm all for people experimenting and trying out new types of init systems and the like. I just don't like having them forced upon me when they're clearly not ready for production. I'm also really worried about the lock-in effects. The BSDs are already feeling the pain of software growing dependencies on the unportable systemd (the most egregious was Brasero, a CD-burning tool, recently having an argument over a systemd dependency.) I don't want to see the BSDs repeat the same mistake.

It's enough "fun" dealing with networking idiosyncrasies like SO_NOSIGPIPE vs MSG_NOSIGNAL, kqueue vs epoll; audio idiosyncrasies like OSS vs ALSA; input idiosyncrasies like devd vs udev; etc as it is. Let's not add another one with init system dependencies. Desktop applications have done fine for the past 50 years without init system dependencies, why start now?

Re: You should try FreeBSD (2014)

#83

Post by drewg123 »

crb wrote: post #10

Does anyone have a source that FreeBSD are used at Google and Netflix today?

I work on the OCA team at Netflix. I can confirm we run FreeBSD on our CDN servers.

I was at Google for several years before Netflix, and I believe that any claims of FreeBSD being used by Google are either outdated or misguided. AFAIK, Google was linux from day 1.

Re: You should try FreeBSD (2014)

#84

Post by gnoway »

olavgg wrote: post #9

Actually, FreeBSD is a great platform to learn about Linux. The more you learn about FreeBSD, the more will you understand Linux. The only time I will advice not spending time on FreeBSD, is when you have to deal with Java.

Have you tried lately? Java used to be a big issue on FreeBSD, but that hasn't been the case in several years. Now it works as well as any other platform.

Re: You should try FreeBSD (2014)

#85

Post by benjohnson »

bsg75 wrote: post #75
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?

Short answer for me: It hasn't been tested as much.

I know a zraid3 FreeBSD/ZFS root array will still boot with two drives failed and one drive acting wonky. Not so sure about Linux.

Re: You should try FreeBSD (2014)

#86

Post by oscargrouch »

alimbada wrote: post #32

> A really big difference is that FreeBSD is the kernel and userland together. Can someone explain the significance of this as the author seems to keep glossing over it. What's does he mean by saying they are "together" and what is the advantage of it?

If you download the source of freebsd, the userland tools come together with it, they are developed as a whole with the kernel side of things. Even the clang/llvm compiler will get built by a 'make buildworld'

You have a full working system from source, while with linux you need kernel, binutils, gcc, in different pieces, not developed as a cohesive whole

Re: You should try FreeBSD (2014)

#87

Post by eatonphil »

floatboth wrote: post #78
eatonphil wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Man, I definitely am scared to! I haven't quite figured out the environment though. It was such a relief just to get graphics working in the first place. I don't I have the time to put up with volatile nightly builds. But as I said, I have no clue how volatile CURRENT is. But with your suggestion, I'll have to read.

I thought I heard something about OpenBSD wanting a native bhyve replacement. But vmm sounds awesome! Thanks for pointing that out!

Re: You should try FreeBSD (2014)

#88

Post by pepijndevos »

pge wrote: post #25

I used FreeBSD for a couple of years but now use Arch (after a fling with Ubuntu in between). Reasons I switched (some of which may have been addressed since): * building everything from source got old * lack of support for hardware (Linux has gotten really good at having drivers for hardware) * ports of desktop applications were not always available, and the POSIX shim to use Linux applications didnt always work wit…

I tried putting BSD on my laptop, but quickly got annoyed by graphics and sound not working and software missing. I know most things work, and most software is available, but I need more than that.

Now I went back to Ubuntu because I'm to lazy to set up Arch. I'm not even using a tiling VM anymore.

While I see great value in BSD as a server OS, Linux is just much more convenient on the desktop, and this leads to a circle where I use what I know, what I use what I know. So I tend to also run Ubuntu on servers because it's one system less to know.

Though still, if I needed to build a file server, or an environment where security is important, I would take a closer look at BSD.

Re: You should try FreeBSD (2014)

#89

Post by Freaky »

unethical_ban wrote: post #74
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).

Yup: https://openconnect.netflix.com/software/

They're actively giving back a lot of their work too: http://v4.freshbsd.org/search?q=netflix

Re: You should try FreeBSD (2014)

#90

Post by davidgerard »

I like FreeBSD a lot more than Linux at the administration level. I ran it as my desktop for a few years.

The big problem: all the software I wanted to run assumed the whole world was GNU/Linux. So I ended up running lots of Linux binaries under emulation.

(yes, I could have compiled everything from ports. But the time I spent 3 days compiling OpenOffice to discover the port was known-broken put me off that a bit ...)

Then I discovered Ubuntu and in particular synaptic and the Debian repos and had a "holy shit, this gets it right" moment. Haven't looked back.

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