I love FreeBSD too, I used to use it on my desktop as a daily driver. I probably still would if it would support my video card (RDNA4).
Why I love FreeBSD
21–30 of 270 posts
Re: Why I love FreeBSD
#22My home server has been running FreeBSD for ten years now, and it has never let me down. Except for one time I got fresh with /dev/speaker and triggered a spontaneous reboot (I don't know if it's FreeBSD's fault or the hardware, though). I delayed upgrading to 15.0 after it was released, but last weekend I finally did it, and it left me wondering why I hadn't done it sooner, because it went quickly and smoothly. Is t…
My current home server passed 10 years in the autnum, but I've been running FreeBSD on servers since around 2000.
The main gripe is probably Docker and/or software depending on Linux-isms that can't be run natively without resorting to bhyve or smth alike that.
Re: Why I love FreeBSD
#23> Over the years, FreeBSD has served me well. At a certain point it stepped down as my primary desktop - partly because I switched to Mac, partly because of unsupported hardware - but it never stopped being one of my first choices for servers and any serious workload. Not my idea of love. Maybe that hardware was supported on Linux. Switch from Linux to FreeBSD so that you can later switch to Mac when you get frustrat…
100%. It reminds me of how a ton of FreeBSD devs moved to Mac during the Darwin days. Then they were abandoned by Apple once they stopped contributing to upstream.
We weren’t abandoned by Apple — Apple never contributed to upstream. Darwin and OpenDarwin were APSL projects and never fed code back into FreeBSD.
Using macOS meant we got laptop hardware that worked reliably, including Wi-Fi, running a more or less BSD-derived userspace.
The lack of graphics and Wi-Fi driver support on the *BSDs is not Apple’s fault. It has always been a resource issue.
Thanks to the AT&T lawsuit, Linux secured momentum at a critical juncture — and here we are. Path dependence and the complexities of real life mean that “winning” is never just a question of technical merit.
Re: Why I love FreeBSD
#24I'd love to move my home server to FreeBSD but I would like to run Immich on it.
Immich assumes you're running Docker and I can't seem to get Linux running in a bhyve VM with Intel Quick Sync acceleration.
Re: Why I love FreeBSD
#25> had trained me to hunt for documentation in fragments: often incomplete, often outdated, sometimes already stale after barely a year. This is indeed a problem now that google search is next to useless. And AI further degrading the quality. I work around it to some extent by keeping my local knowledge base up to date, as much as that is possible; and using a ton of scripts that help me do things. That works. I am al…
>> I could read my email in mutt while compiling, something that was practically impossible on Linux
> Ok sorry, I stopped reading there.
Why? That's a treasured feature. https://xkcd.com/303/
Re: Why I love FreeBSD
#26My home server has been running FreeBSD for ten years now, and it has never let me down. Except for one time I got fresh with /dev/speaker and triggered a spontaneous reboot (I don't know if it's FreeBSD's fault or the hardware, though). I delayed upgrading to 15.0 after it was released, but last weekend I finally did it, and it left me wondering why I hadn't done it sooner, because it went quickly and smoothly. Is t…
My current home server passed 10 years in the autnum, but I've been running FreeBSD on servers since around 2000. The main gripe is probably Docker and/or software depending on Linux-isms that can't be run natively without resorting to bhyve or smth alike that.
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Re: Why I love FreeBSD
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
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1. What does Guix have to do with anything 2. GNOME hasn't been a GNU project in a long time
Cohesiveness. Gnome was born out from GNU and today it's just RedHatware, and overtime you will only get a RedHat/Flatpak/Wayland OS with no alternatives but brainless Pacman repacks over and over as they will provide near nothing against some Fedora Silverblue install. And, yes, overtime all Fedoras will be Silverblue rebases with different desktops, toolbox + RPMs for concurrent development environments (if any, as Flatpak would supersede it) and most customizations will be over. Kinda like a crappiffied NT clone with MSI's/WIM images but from IBM. Even worse, because MS and Icaza has been making GNU/Linux almost like a MS testbed for different C#, networking, io scheduling, performance tests, usability on tactile input and so on. Yes, it looks like a propotype OS more than a final product to freely thinker with.
Meanwhile, the true spirit of GNU won't be at GNU+Linux as they are becoming aware of what's Linux all about today. GNU+Lisp lovers would support their own desktop and packing layer and Hurd maybe running Linux kernel drivers (the libre ones) on top free from IBM/Microsoft hands.
Unix? Most people will move on from BSD's and maybe they will be fed up as FreeBSD and NetBSD are just stacking Linux layers over and over. OpenBSD users are die hard, staunch developers and thus they will last for longer, but I won't be surprised if they somehow adapted the plan9 namespaces into OpenBSD well instead of the GNU/Linux implementations. And, who knows, as POSIX won't matter a lot in a near future, maybe they would break it for the good and even simplify it, borrowing 9front ways into OpenBSD. I'm talking about 10-15 years from now, of course.
Most Unix diehard hackers will be at 9front today because of the ease of thinkering, simplicity, rc+rio vs all the POSIX+FDo cruft and so on. It's in the docs, /sys/doc/ and 'man intro' covers nearly everything.
Don't expect i3, X, Wayland, anime setups a la /r/unixporn or h4ck3r ones. It's more like a gray, dull whiteboard, it's up to you to build your own path. Learn rc, Plan9 C, even Go if you want, just don't ask for crappy ports with SDL2, try the native tools and emulators first.
Make games/snes faster. Write mappers for games/nes, add search support for page(1).
PD: don't use LLM's unless you want to be kicked out fast. We all know when an LLM it's writting both your code and speech and you will be known as a dumb useless idiot forever.
Re: Why I love FreeBSD
#28I could never get sleep to work, and got tired of rebooting 17 times a day.
Re: Why I love FreeBSD
#29I'd love to move my home server to FreeBSD but I would like to run Immich on it. Immich assumes you're running Docker and I can't seem to get Linux running in a bhyve VM with Intel Quick Sync acceleration.
Could be worth checking out: https://github.com/immich-app/immich/discussions/24931
Re: Why I love FreeBSD
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
100%. It reminds me of how a ton of FreeBSD devs moved to Mac during the Darwin days. Then they were abandoned by Apple once they stopped contributing to upstream.
We weren’t abandoned by Apple — Apple never contributed to upstream. Darwin and OpenDarwin were APSL projects and never fed code back into FreeBSD. Using macOS meant we got laptop hardware that worked reliably, including Wi-Fi, running a more or less BSD-derived userspace. The lack of graphics and Wi-Fi driver support on the *BSDs is not Apple’s fault. It has always been a resource issue. Thanks to the AT&T lawsuit,…
A consequence of the license, which allows Apple and Sony to do exactly that.