Too bad BSD has such obscure hardware support, anyone running BSD over GNU/Linux is going to lose performance and responsiveness having to run everything through layers of code and emulation.
Also, due to squalid support, it's only really usable without GUI - bad scaling and graphical acceleration, or the lack hereof, as well as poor support just means that most GUI solutions for BSD look worse than Windows 3.0.I've yet to see anyone make BSD look agreeable, the only viable solutions being KDE and XFCE, both of which suck. Surely that'll take away from productivity as well, but that's just me.
The poor support is the worst offender, also because it seems to me that a lot of the lacking hardware support stems not from a lack of users, but a general apathy towards doing anything on your computer that isn't just using emacs or compiling. The lack of wifi support is most baffling and contributes to the fact that doing anything with BSD on a laptop that isn't owned by one of the developers themselves, will result in sluggish or subpar performance.
I have the same opinion on desktop BSD users as I do with GNU/Hurd users. You do you. But as soon as you start talking about the perceived sufficiency and/or supremacy of your deprecated, wet 80's FOSS fever dream of an OS, it becomes impossible to communicate.
Technical reasons to choose FreeBSD over GNU/Linux (2020)
181–190 of 376 posts
Re: Technical reasons to choose FreeBSD over GNU/Linux (2020)
#182I am using freebsd since version 8 for all my server needs (was using linux, but got repelled by its chaos which I dont care about on my laptop, but it pisses me off on server). Some more points: - bhyve, developed by netapp, they ditched all old technologies support and it works faster on my i5 server than kvm on my i7 laptop. Snapshoting using ZFS is not a feature to discard either. - FIBs, absolute miracle routing…
Remember, you're comparing Linux and FreeBSD in 2022 but BSD lost to Linux much earlier, many years ago. Back when I was looking into them (long time ago, excuse me for not remembering the details), BSD felt more pleasant and coherent. But at the same time it had limitations on scalability, performance and compatibility with hardware and also with userland software. In every benchmark, especially on multi-core, multi…
> The more common explanation was that Linux got a head start by a few years by being a clean-sheet implementation
My favorite theory for why Linux got a head start is in this (long) comment I found some time ago here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21420338
Some excerpts:
"With Linux, I just booted from a Linux boot floppy with my Linux install CD in the CD-ROM drive, and ran the installation. With BSD...it could not find the drive because I had an IDE CD-ROM and it only supported SCSI."
"It insisted on being given a disk upon which it could completely repartition. [...] Linux, on the other hand, was happy to come second after my existing DOS/Windows."
"By the time the BSD people realized they really should be supporting IDE CD-ROM and get along with prior DOS/Windows on the same disk, Linux was way ahead."
Re: Technical reasons to choose FreeBSD over GNU/Linux (2020)
#183Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not "only Ubuntu". I'm using ZFS (not for boot or root partition) on Gentoo for some time. It's a separate package from kernel, and has to rebuild after a kernel upgrade but it works as expected.
To add another anecdote: I use ZFS on NixOS for all of my partitions, including an encrypted boot partition. It has been rock solid for me.
Not only rock solid but also very easy!
Re: Technical reasons to choose FreeBSD over GNU/Linux (2020)
#184Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If you look at the kernel contributions, most of them are from people working for all the big names Like hardware manufacturers? I thought getting commercial users to contribute to the kernel was desirable? > For example, would these guys ever have approved the GPL-3? Didn't Torvalds himself reject GPL-3? > And in fact it's the very BSD license that makes big business shun FreeBSD Now I'm really confused. Why would…
> Didn't Torvalds himself reject GPL-3? Was the GPLv3 ever formally rejected? Isn't the problem that the Linux kernel was GPLv2 only before the GPLv3 existed, and by the time it did come out, there were too many contributors for there to be any hope of getting it changed?
Some googling around the issue suggests Linus pretty clearly rejects the principles of GPLv3.
https://www.linux.com/news/why-torvalds-sitting-out-gplv3-pr...
Re: Technical reasons to choose FreeBSD over GNU/Linux (2020)
#185Earlier quoted context omitted.
Anecdotally, as a user of a different distribution and desktop environment, yes. Just Works.
If that's true then there's been substantial improvements on that front recently (which is good). As I recall, that was a tricky problem since your laptop screen likely runs another resolution, different DPI, etc so connecting to an additional screen makes things go haywire.
That's only with Wayland. If you don't use Wayland, the situation has been fine for a decade.
Re: Technical reasons to choose FreeBSD over GNU/Linux (2020)
#186Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Didn't Torvalds himself reject GPL-3? Was the GPLv3 ever formally rejected? Isn't the problem that the Linux kernel was GPLv2 only before the GPLv3 existed, and by the time it did come out, there were too many contributors for there to be any hope of getting it changed?
Some googling around the issue suggests Linus pretty clearly rejects the principles of GPLv3. https://www.linux.com/news/why-torvalds-sitting-out-gplv3-pr...
I know he isn't a fan of it. My point is just that his dislike of it isn't why Linux can't use it today.
Re: Technical reasons to choose FreeBSD over GNU/Linux (2020)
#187I am using freebsd since version 8 for all my server needs (was using linux, but got repelled by its chaos which I dont care about on my laptop, but it pisses me off on server). Some more points: - bhyve, developed by netapp, they ditched all old technologies support and it works faster on my i5 server than kvm on my i7 laptop. Snapshoting using ZFS is not a feature to discard either. - FIBs, absolute miracle routing…
Remember, you're comparing Linux and FreeBSD in 2022 but BSD lost to Linux much earlier, many years ago. Back when I was looking into them (long time ago, excuse me for not remembering the details), BSD felt more pleasant and coherent. But at the same time it had limitations on scalability, performance and compatibility with hardware and also with userland software. In every benchmark, especially on multi-core, multi…
I remember why I chose linux in 1998 for my desktop, and would choose for my server.
Hardware compatibility. I could install Linux on my shabby work desktop, and it just worked. Actually it worked more stably than NT 4.
Binary distros. I could apt-get install stuff onto my box in minutes. I rarely had to build things from source.
Speed of change. Linux was acquiring features at a breakneck speed. Large companies started contributing. SMP, interesting networking stuff, better disk I/O, new filesystems, stuff like that. Hell, Windows emulation good enough to run StarCraft! It felt alive and cared for. It was apparent that many serious businesses want to bet big on Linux. Some say marketing; I say GPL and project guidance.
I also had a lovely server box with FreeBSD. It had select compatible hardware. It had really nice documentation. It ran Apache and Squid pretty well. I had to build the latter from source IIRC. I had to build a lot from source (slow in 1998). If that was not available as a buildable package, I often had to tweak header files to make it build. For many amenities which I took for granted on my linux box, I decided that it's too much hassle to make them built on BSD.
Features like SMP or journaling file systems were a bit late in FreeBSD. Maybe they were more solid, and achieved performance parity with Linux with time. Sadly, the industry largely made the choice.
I also find modern Linux a mess, and run a minimalist distro (Void) on my laptop. I could consider running BSD on a server, but most servers now have to run VMs and containers within them, most tooling just assumes Linux.
Re: Technical reasons to choose FreeBSD over GNU/Linux (2020)
#188I'm 50 years old, now, so in college I had hands-on experience with a 3B2 running real live SVR3. There was also an academic VAX running 4.3BSD. And being closely tied to the UC system myself, I gradually became a BSD fanboy.
I started by putting Minix on my 286 at home, but I longed to run 386BSD. I eventually realized my dream with some nice OpenBSD installs. I was a partisan, not entirely a bigot, but I'd also seen Linux grow from infancy and considered it a toy or plaything, compared to mature BSD codebases. And truly, Linux was a hobbyist's choice for ages, but many hobbyists grow up to be professionals, don't they?
In 1999 (to prove I wasn't a bigot) I installed Linux on the old 386. It was either Slackware or Debian, and the reason I chose it was to support the floppy-tape controller that was unsupported by BSD.
I continued to use OpenBSD as a daily driver, alongside Windows, until 2004. Then a trusted sysadmin friend listened to my pleas for help with audio and assorted hardware, and simply directed me to Ubuntu. Since then I've been BSD-free (including no Apple devices.)
My needs over the decades have reduced from "godlike control-freak sysadmin" to "power user" to "does ordinary consumerist stuff on a Windows laptop". BSD has great technical reasons and use cases. If you still use BSD, more power to you! BSD's dual legacy for the world, even after the OS itself has evaporated, will be MacOS X and BSD's corporate-profit-friendly licensing terms.
Re: Technical reasons to choose FreeBSD over GNU/Linux (2020)
#189I am using freebsd since version 8 for all my server needs (was using linux, but got repelled by its chaos which I dont care about on my laptop, but it pisses me off on server). Some more points: - bhyve, developed by netapp, they ditched all old technologies support and it works faster on my i5 server than kvm on my i7 laptop. Snapshoting using ZFS is not a feature to discard either. - FIBs, absolute miracle routing…
> it works faster on my i5 server than kvm on my i7 laptop
Laptop processors are usually slower, due to lower thermal and power limits, so that's not surprising at all.
Re: Technical reasons to choose FreeBSD over GNU/Linux (2020)
#190I am using freebsd since version 8 for all my server needs (was using linux, but got repelled by its chaos which I dont care about on my laptop, but it pisses me off on server). Some more points: - bhyve, developed by netapp, they ditched all old technologies support and it works faster on my i5 server than kvm on my i7 laptop. Snapshoting using ZFS is not a feature to discard either. - FIBs, absolute miracle routing…
Having used BSD many years ago on desktop, I completely disagree. What are you using your computer for using BSD? I really don't spend 99% of my time just compiling lol
The chaos thing is something I hear from BSD users quite a lot. I'm still not sure what it is means, maybe that's some sort of personal issue..? I suppose you don't like forking and variation, which is understandable coming from a user of an OS with a fantastically small userbase that somehow still manages to be proportionally more fragmented than any other community I can think of, but the "chaos" of Linux is grossly overstated. Most everything that is relevant today runs Debian, unless you're a poweruser running Arch or even Gentoo, but even then, who's out there being a distro purist? I'm willing to bet that most people running Arch or Gentoo are still using quite a bit of 'Debian resources'/assets.
Sure, there's RedHat too and all the others that fill some corporate niche, but there really isn't this whole divide within the Linux community like people sometimes imply. I think a lot of people are stuck in a mindset that hasn't been relevant for somewhere between 10 and 20 years.