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Technical reasons to choose FreeBSD over GNU/Linux (2020)

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Re: Technical reasons to choose FreeBSD over GNU/Linux (2020)

#211

Post by School-Cotton »

rubyist5eva wrote: post #66

I use FreeBSD on servers instead of Linux for one reason: ZFS. It's really that much better than anything that is currently available on Linux. BTRFS is not even close. Yes I know it's available on Ubuntu but everything else about Ubuntu is just so messy.

I don’t have a lot of SRE/sysadmin/etc. experience, so this is probably just ignorance on my part, but I find it hard to imagine a scenario where the filesystem on my servers matters at all (as long as we’re not talking about something super ancient like FAT).

What are some workflows that ZFS enables for you on servers that you couldn’t do with ext4 or stock FreeBSD FFS ?

Re: Technical reasons to choose FreeBSD over GNU/Linux (2020)

#212

Post by greggyb »

jsiepkes wrote: post #162
jen20 wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Keep in mind that Oracle is the copyright holder of ZFS. So you (and Ubuntu) are violating Oracle's license terms. If anything IS a problem here it is violating the terms of the GPL, not the CDDL. So no, no one is violating Oracles licensing terms - and if they were, they’d have been sued in 2016 when this shipped. Do you really think ORACLE of all people is just holding back out the goodness of their hearts? Compl…

> If anything IS a problem here it is violating the terms of the GPL, not the CDDL. The CDDL terms are violated because you can't re-license code that is under the CDDL (in contrast to for example the BSD licenses). The GPLv2 is a strong copy-left license that puts the CDDL files under GPLv2. Even the creators of the CDDL themselves have stated that the CDDL is probably incompatible with the GPL [1]. [1] https://lwn.…

You cannot relicense BSD code. In general, you cannot change anything about the copyright or license for any work that you do not own the copyright to.

Perhaps you mean the BSD licensed artifacts are "compatible" with copyleft licenses?

Re: Technical reasons to choose FreeBSD over GNU/Linux (2020)

#213

Post by mkl »

dixie_land wrote: post #203
mkl wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> in next sub-version, the commands can have completely different switches That claim seems crazy and doesn't match my experience at all. Please name a widely used program that changed its switches completely in a sub-version.

GNU ls adding quotes and you have to actually opt out

Do you mean displaying quotes in the output? That has been around for years (by default on many distributions) and doesn't answer my question at all. Please name a widely used program that changed its switches completely in a sub-version.

Re: Technical reasons to choose FreeBSD over GNU/Linux (2020)

#214

Post by galangalalgol »

mtlmtlmtlmtl wrote: post #193
stingraycharles wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From a technological perspective, everything you say is true, and FreeBSD is better in so many regards. But, compatibility and community support is just a deal breaker. The jails vs docker argument is a good example: while technically better, Docker (or rather, cgroups and image distribution) have been standardised and have tremendous community adoption. FreeBSD cannot tap into any of this at all. Yes, jails might be…

I think one of the biggest mistakes the FreeBSD team made(in terms of more widestream adoption) was abandoning the Linux syscall table layer. It's still there, but it's stuck on 2.6.x last time I looked. It's a lot to maintain, yes, but it would help secure a lot more users like me, who are highly technical, potential contributors, who like a lot of the features(jails, better ZFS integration, easy to set up dtrace su…

Is cuda support decent on BSD?

Drivers for niche stuff seem like they would be an issue as well.

Re: Technical reasons to choose FreeBSD over GNU/Linux (2020)

#215

Post by School-Cotton »

rvz wrote: post #63

It is not early days anymore and we have given it a quarter of a century for these 'alternatives' OSes to do something on the desktop and it is still plagued with issues for just simple desktop usage. This list of reasons here makes it easy for me and others to choose neither and tell users to just stick with either Windows or macOS (which macOS is a BSD Unix, but the users don't care and they should not). Both FreeB…

Neither Linux nor (especially) FreeBSD is primarily used on desktops. That’s a nice-to-have side feature (and one I’m personally grateful for, since I run Linux on my laptop now and have used FreeBSD desktop in the past), but the fact remains that it’s not the core value proposition of those OSes.

It’s no surprise that they’re not as nice on the desktop as OSes produced by corporations that pour billions into making them polished. I’m not sure why so many people expect them to be and get indignant when they’re not.

Re: Technical reasons to choose FreeBSD over GNU/Linux (2020)

#217

Post by nequo »

stiray wrote: post #62

I 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…

> I will never understand on what technical merits people are using linux for servers except the support-ability of hardware.

System upgrades are cleaner in Linux. Debian has had pkgbase ever since I can remember and it’s still underway in the BSDs. Live kernel patching is nice, too. Just two examples.

Re: Technical reasons to choose FreeBSD over GNU/Linux (2020)

#218

Post by mtlmtlmtlmtl »

fuckstick wrote: post #210
mtlmtlmtlmtl wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think one of the biggest mistakes the FreeBSD team made(in terms of more widestream adoption) was abandoning the Linux syscall table layer. It's still there, but it's stuck on 2.6.x last time I looked. It's a lot to maintain, yes, but it would help secure a lot more users like me, who are highly technical, potential contributors, who like a lot of the features(jails, better ZFS integration, easy to set up dtrace su…

> It's a lot to maintain, yes, but it would help secure a lot more users like me, What an understatement. The modern Linux syscalls are tightly coupled to the implementation of Linux. Special fds, io_uring, robust lists, etc etc … There’s a reason why Microsoft said fuck it and run Linux in a VM for WSL2. If you want Linux, just run Linux.

This is exactly the kind of gatekeeping that holds FreeBSD back. Users asking about missing features being snarkily put down with things like "go use Linux then, we're doing just fine without feature X". This kind of toxic attitude is what pushed me away from FreeBSD in the end. They're so childish about constructive criticism sometimes, it's downright embarassing considering these are supposedly adults.

Edit: It's come to my attention that this particular instance of gatekeeping came from the Linux camp, not FreeBSD. Though you can find it in the FreeBSD community too, to be sure.

Re: Technical reasons to choose FreeBSD over GNU/Linux (2020)

#219

Post by fuckstick »

mtlmtlmtlmtl wrote: post #218
fuckstick wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's a lot to maintain, yes, but it would help secure a lot more users like me, What an understatement. The modern Linux syscalls are tightly coupled to the implementation of Linux. Special fds, io_uring, robust lists, etc etc … There’s a reason why Microsoft said fuck it and run Linux in a VM for WSL2. If you want Linux, just run Linux.

This is exactly the kind of gatekeeping that holds FreeBSD back. Users asking about missing features being snarkily put down with things like "go use Linux then, we're doing just fine without feature X". This kind of toxic attitude is what pushed me away from FreeBSD in the end. They're so childish about constructive criticism sometimes, it's downright embarassing considering these are supposedly adults. Edit: It's c…

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Re: Technical reasons to choose FreeBSD over GNU/Linux (2020)

#220

Post by jeremyjh »

mtlmtlmtlmtl wrote: post #218
fuckstick wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's a lot to maintain, yes, but it would help secure a lot more users like me, What an understatement. The modern Linux syscalls are tightly coupled to the implementation of Linux. Special fds, io_uring, robust lists, etc etc … There’s a reason why Microsoft said fuck it and run Linux in a VM for WSL2. If you want Linux, just run Linux.

This is exactly the kind of gatekeeping that holds FreeBSD back. Users asking about missing features being snarkily put down with things like "go use Linux then, we're doing just fine without feature X". This kind of toxic attitude is what pushed me away from FreeBSD in the end. They're so childish about constructive criticism sometimes, it's downright embarassing considering these are supposedly adults. Edit: It's c…

It isn't gatekeeping to point out that maintaining Linux syscall compatibility is impractical, especially citing the fact that Microsoft tried and gave up after sinking tons of resources into it; and FreeBSD has also already tried and gave up as you pointed out yourself.
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