Why I love FreeBSD

And that's the thing, as I grow older I feel more and more that I just want the parts of computing that I don't want to _care_ about to be stupid simple.

If I'm doing a program needing a recent version of some language that doesn't have a FreeBSD port yet and some database behind it, I don't really want to configure it all manually because I don't particularly care for porting the runtime or managing the database (that isn't exposed to the outside world anyhow).

This is stuff where I don't want a large CI pipe or other management (or needing to remember to upgrade the packages if I upgrade the hosting OS).

Stuff like this is why "the clouds are winning", friction should be linear depending on the effort I want to put into managing something.

But going for real HW or even VPS a places an "upgrade tax" on me because I can't just let non-public services like an isolated DB just ride-along over major versions (maybe Jails with isolated userlands could be an option, but that becomes painful instead when needing newer versions of the application behind the veil).

Ubuntu could have been the one, but they reversed course after dropping support for Zsys in 2022[1].

If there are others, then please let me know, but as far as I can tell, the closest approximations in Linux are:

- Btrfs with Snapper in OpenSuse Tumbleweed/MicroOS

- Snapshot Manager/Boom in RHEL

- OStree in Fedora Atomic, CarbonOS, EndlessOS

- Bootable container implementations in Fedora CoreOS, RHEL10, CarbonOS, Bazzite, BlendOS, etc.

- Snaps in Ubuntu Core

- Generations in NixOS and Guix

- A/B update mechanism in ChromeOS, IncusOS

- OverlayFS in Nitrux Linux

- Ad-hoc implementations with Arch, Alpine, etc.

Excluding the ad-hoc implementations, only OpenSuse and Red Hat approaches allow you to treat your system image and system data the same way. They're great, but fundamentally incompatible, and neither has caught on with other distributions. Capabilities of both approaches are limited compared to ZFS.

The strangest part of the Linux situation IMHO is, every time ZFS on Linux is discussed, someone will invariably bring up XFS. For the past decade, XFS on Linux contains support for Copy-on-Write (CoW) and snapshots via relinking. If this is the preferred path on Linux (for users who don't want checksumming of ZFS/Btrfs/Bcachefs), then how come no major distros besides Red Hat have embraced it[2] to provide an update rollback functionality?

I concede that most of the other approaches do provide a higher level level of determinism for what your root system looks like after an upgrade. It's powerful when you can test that system as an OCI container (or as a VM with Nix/Guix). FWIW, FreeBSD can approximate this with the ability to use it's boot environments as a jail[3].

[0] https://daemonforums.org/showthread.php?t=7099

[1] https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/ubiquity/+bug/1968...

[2] https://docs.redhat.com/en/documentation/red_hat_enterprise_...

[3] https://man.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=bectl&sektion=8&ma...

But there is always pressure for more features, more bloat. In Linux, on the plus side, I can plug in some random gadget and in most cases it just works. And any laptop that's a few years old, you can just install Fedora from its bootable live image, and it will work. Secure boot, suspend, Wifi, the special buttons on the keyboard, and so on. But the downside is enormous bloat and yes, often the kind of tinkering you really don't want to do any more, such as the Brother laser printer drivers still being shipped as 32-bit binaries and the installer silently failing because one particular 32-bit dependency wasn't autoinstalled. Or having to get an Ubuntu-dedicated installer (Displaylink!) to run on Fedora.

But here you have the "mainstream" Unix-ish OS absorbing all the bleeding edge stuff, all the bloat. Allowing FreeBSD free reign to be pure, with a higher average quality of user, which sets the tone of the whole scene. An echo of the old days, like Usenet before "Eternal September" and before Canter & Siegel - for those old enough to remember how it all felt back then.