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You should try FreeBSD (2014)

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Re: You should try FreeBSD (2014)

#121

Post by KirinDave »

kris-s wrote: post #117
KirinDave wrote: post #111

I sort of hope people are waking up from the rut the industry has been. OSX for dev, Linux for backend services... Even AWS. If I were to start another company today, I'd almost surely be using none of these options to max my productivity. Right now, OSX has become increasingly hostile to dev and Linux is great at modularizing other features FreeBSD built years ago. Lately I've been trying to ship software from the n…

What would you develop on then?

Backend services, maybe micro maybe not. The CLR has really great support for a hybrid async/threadpool model and C# has direct language support. There's a framework called "ServiceStack" which tastes a lot like Jetty that you can use to avoid the ASP.NET-influenced technologies and approach things in a lightweight way.

There is also a developer preview of actual native compilation, which means your deploy story in a container is competitive with Go and startup times for a statically linked binary are great. This means it's actually outperforming Java for containerized deploys (in this specific facet).

Azure and GCE are both really, really good compared to EC2. Hell, GCE is shipping actual Kubernetes support and I want to migrate our entire tech stack to that. Already we've migrated our growing website to it, and as soon as they fix some network performance issues (already fixed in master, but we don't use beta orchestration software in production), we'll flip the switch on that as it elegantly solves some really shitty problems you hit in AWS VPCs.

I like F# a lot, by the way. I can't wait to use it more. It's like OCaml but with a lot of the amenities you expect from the JVM ecosystem (like, for example, the ever-required but poorly supported datetime libraries) and LINQ support, which is pervasive, user-extensible object comprehensions with compiler support. C# doesn't excite me so much, but it has a REPL and it's certainly a more advanced language than Java.

Re: You should try FreeBSD (2014)

#122

Post by fredsir »

KirinDave wrote: post #111

I sort of hope people are waking up from the rut the industry has been. OSX for dev, Linux for backend services... Even AWS. If I were to start another company today, I'd almost surely be using none of these options to max my productivity. Right now, OSX has become increasingly hostile to dev and Linux is great at modularizing other features FreeBSD built years ago. Lately I've been trying to ship software from the n…

If I could find another OS that give me the same ability to do stuff that OS X does, and it was more open and developer/me friendly, I would switch in a heartbeat.

Things that my Mac + OS X gives me, that other I have not found anywhere is includes 10+ hour battery with excellent power-tooling, excellent hardware design that is robust, nice looking and feeling, a desktop environment that works for the most part and lets me work on my software without getting in the way, while still being top notch when it comes to quality of bundled software, graphics and such.

Re: You should try FreeBSD (2014)

#123

Post by Thaxll »

jamescun wrote: post #8

I recently switched my personal box to FreeBSD. I honestly find it significantly easier to manage than Linux, and have greater trust in its reliability merely from its simplicity. The single biggest thing which stood out for me was PF (from OpenBSD). Anybody who has ever had the grace of managing IPTables on Linux, give PF a go with /etc/pf.conf (docs: https://www.freebsd.org/doc/handbook/firewalls-pf.html , my confi…

afaik Iptables is more complex but also has more features than PF.

Re: You should try FreeBSD (2014)

#124

Post by jeffdavis »

Linux has a lot of the pathology that comes with monopoly. Low innovation, features almost entirely copied from other OSes (often poorly and very late). Also my brief experience with a kernel patch for Linux felt very abrasive, defensive, and I didn't make any progress (though part of the issue was fixed in a roundabout way a few months later).

If you use freebsd/openbsd/dragonflybsd you are supporting a more innovative group of people, and will have a much more pleasant experience if you need something fixed in the kernel (I had an issue with the freebsd kernel as well, and they acknowledged and fixed it).

Re: You should try FreeBSD (2014)

#125

Post by runiq »

corv wrote: post #11
dijit wrote: post #2

I did. I like it. It feels very clean and well engineered, I always manage to break it via updates though (freebsd-upgrade vs ports vs pkg) Apparently pkg-ng and ports are linked via a central database though now, so that should not be the case any longer. As for why? I disliked systemd and was told to "evolve or gtfo" so I gtfo since I didn't like the way it was being forced on me and the few gripes I had with it fe…

freebsd-upgrade has been absolutely fool-proof for me. Mixing ports and pkg is not advisable even though they use the same database since versions are often not in sync. Boot environments on ZFS with beadm provide a brilliant way to protect against catastrophic updates. I don't know of any other popular OS that offers something comparable.

If you boot a Fedora 22/23 machine with root on btrfs, you get something similar, I believe: dnf notifies you of OS upgrades, you click 'yay', the system reboots, makes a snapshot and installs upgrades. If installation fails, the snapshot is rolled back; if it completes successfully, the system reboots again and you're good to go. It's apparently been in since systemd 183: https://wiki.freedesktop.org/www/Software/systemd/SystemUpda...

Re: You should try FreeBSD (2014)

#126

Post by Thaxll »

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).

Most of the CDN isn't served by open connect but by real CDN like Akamai.

Re: You should try FreeBSD (2014)

#127

Post by tobik »

floatboth wrote: post #112
davidgerard wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This was ten years ago, I have no idea what it's like in 2015. It's a syscall emulator and a pile of libs from Red Hat. It was reasonably reliable. X font rendering was awful. But then, Linux at the time wasn't much better; Ubuntu had only just started on the process of making the Linux desktop less annoying.

It is maintained. epoll support is coming to the linuxulator in FreeBSD 11. But you don't need it really. All the usual desktop software is available natively. Firefox, Thunderbird, Chromium, LibreOffice, Transmission, VLC, GIMP, darktable, ioquake3 :-) You don't need to compile anything (if you don't want to, say, use LibreSSL everywhere), pkgng is excellent.

> But you don't need it really.

You need it to run Linux Docker containers on FreeBSD. More on https://wiki.freebsd.org/Docker

Re: You should try FreeBSD (2014)

#128

Post by unluckier »

mhandley wrote: post #105
unluckier wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We all know that exploit mitigations aren't perfect. But to not even bother using them... that's just ridiculous. There are plenty of scenarios where ASLR helps prevent exploitation. And the fact that FreeBSD doesn't even have it is pretty damning.

I didn't say not to bother; I just said the protection provided by ASLR is weaker, even on 64-bit systems, than most of us believed a couple of years ago.

It's the FreeBSD folks that didn't bother. Not you.

Re: You should try FreeBSD (2014)

#129

Post by sergiolp »

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…

Sorry if I'm too harsh, but saying that ZoL is "rock solid" and "production ready" sounds like a joke to my ears.

ZFS is an extremely complex filesystem, and it took Sun _years_ of internal testing first, and hundreds of angry customers later (sadly, at some point, the only way to improve a product is through real world testing), to reach a milestone where it was really production ready.

I know that on these days of dockers and unicorns, "production ready" has very different meaning than years ago, but still...

Re: You should try FreeBSD (2014)

#130

Post by KirinDave »

fredsir wrote: post #122
KirinDave wrote: post #111

I sort of hope people are waking up from the rut the industry has been. OSX for dev, Linux for backend services... Even AWS. If I were to start another company today, I'd almost surely be using none of these options to max my productivity. Right now, OSX has become increasingly hostile to dev and Linux is great at modularizing other features FreeBSD built years ago. Lately I've been trying to ship software from the n…

If I could find another OS that give me the same ability to do stuff that OS X does, and it was more open and developer/me friendly, I would switch in a heartbeat. Things that my Mac + OS X gives me, that other I have not found anywhere is includes 10+ hour battery with excellent power-tooling, excellent hardware design that is robust, nice looking and feeling, a desktop environment that works for the most part and l…

> If I could find another OS that give me the same ability to do stuff that OS X does, and it was more open and developer/me friendly, I would switch in a heartbeat.

I am using Windows 10 on a surface book. There are some minor glitches in a 1st gen product I admit wholeheartedly. Most are fixed for me. I had a defective unit off lot 0 but the replacement and recent driver updates have fixed everything but the "sometimes my mouse goes away" and "sometimes my screen pauses as the driver freaks out". Both are minor and correctible annoyances that are well known.

The Surface book gives me 7-8 hours of battery life doing Clojure development with deploy cycles with casual use, with audio streaming and bluetooth headphones. This eclipses my i7 OSX boxes, current gen, that typically conk out around 5 hours in the same config. The SB has a funny behavior though, it does connected standby like a tablet. It'll hibernate, but the default is after 2 hours of standby. So you need to know that a bit of your battery life is being used there.

I highly recommend the surface book, unless you're an iOS developer. Otherwise, your tools are universal. What I need is there: Docker support is handled via identical (or superior) mechanisms to what we do on OSX; X11 apps are supported about as well; you can get access to the tools you need but PowerShell is actually very whiz-bang and advanced once you see it for what it is; the security model is better than OSX; and honestly I like Win10 better than OSX, which feels incredibly dated by comparison.

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