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Why I love FreeBSD

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Re: Why I love FreeBSD

#51

Post by ogogmad »

smm11 wrote: post #28

I could never get sleep to work, and got tired of rebooting 17 times a day.

OpenBSD might have "better" support for sleep and hibernate, but I didn't succeed in installing it on this laptop: I think it required me to connect an Ethernet cable, which I wasn't going to do.

Veering even more off-topic: I've just installed OpenSUSE Kalpa on this laptop. That's not regular OpenSUSE, by the way. Previously, each of the like, 5 problems I've encountered doing it, would've caused me to give up - but ChatGPT helped me fix all of them! I think this is going to become my daily driver for a while now.

Re: Why I love FreeBSD

#52

Post by 0x457 »

Hendrikto wrote: post #2

A week ago, I decided to set up my home server with FreeBSD, after the HDD failed, just to try it out. The setup was quick and easy and everything works fine so far. I am just not sure it is worth leaving the Linux ecosystem. What if I want to run a Docker container? Do I have to trust random people for ports of software that runs natively on Linux, or port it myself? FreeBSD seems good so far, but community and ecos…

> I am just not sure it is worth leaving the Linux ecosystem. What if I want to run a Docker container? Do I have to trust random people for ports of software that runs natively on Linux, or port it myself?

You already trust random people in linux, you have to trust even more random and more people when you run docker.

Ports are quite large collection already. If you port yourself it's either up to 20 minutes plus compilation time or major nightmare. More and more software today assumes you run on linux only.

I think FreeBSD is great for setup and forget. If you have to interact with it regularly it's not worth it. Definitely not worth it for desktop.

Re: Why I love FreeBSD

#53

Post by whizzter »

BirAdam wrote: post #45
whizzter wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You could just use podman.

Theoretically yes, however still limited by how well the FreeBSD Linux layer handles syscalls. A year or so back I tried running .NET (just binaries, not via a container) since the port wasn't as far along as today and it crashed due to what I suspect was slight differences in signal handling defaults.

And this is part of the situation that's going to get worse, io_uring will become more popular in language runtimes and iirc it's not trivial to emulate via existing FreeBSD mechanisms (kqueue).

Iirc Mac docker uses xhyve (bhyve port/inspired) to run containers via Linux emulation, MS went for pv-Linux for WSL2, while FreeBSD has been "good enough" so far.

But I think that for containers it's either time to shape up Linux emulation well (It's ironic that WSL1 ironed out their worst quirks just as WSL2 was introduced, although that was without io_uring) or just add an option for Podman to have a minimal pv-Linux kernel via bhyve to get better compatibility.

Re: Why I love FreeBSD

#54

Post by sidkshatriya »

evanjrowley wrote: post #46
krylon wrote: post #18

My 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…

>Is there anything FreeBSD can do that, say, Debian cannot? ZFS boot environments. One could install Debian's root on ZFS by following the OpenZFS documentation guide, combine it with ZFSBootMenu (or similar), but there won't be any upstream support from the Debian project itself. The Nitrux Linux distribution is based on Debian and provides an immutable feature similar to boot environments, but you can't treat your…

you can use snapper + btrfs and the end result is like `bectl`. However it not as simple/integrated as ZFS Boot environments on FreeBSD

Re: Why I love FreeBSD

#55

Post by sauercrowd »

tosti wrote: post #26
whizzter wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[flagged]

docker and flatpak/snap are _extremely_ different tools with very different purposes.

Re: Why I love FreeBSD

#56

Post by sidkshatriya »

MarkusWandel wrote: post #49

Early in my Unix-ish at home journey (26-ish years ago) I tried FreeBSD. It was so Unix because, well, it is. An operating system, not a collection of parts. I found at the time in Linux land Debian felt similar. 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 i…

> But the downside is enormous bloat

If you think Linux can have "enormous bloat" then Windows bloat by the same standards is terrifyingly humongous (and slow!).

Re: Why I love FreeBSD

#57

Post by gosukiwi »

When I tried FreeBSD, I was also blown away by the manual, so simple, such high-quality documentation. I think what I liked the most is that it felt coherent, unlike modern OS like Linux and Windows. I think macOS might be the most cohesive of the popular OS's.

Re: Why I love FreeBSD

#58

Post by shrubble »

sidkshatriya wrote: post #54
evanjrowley wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Is there anything FreeBSD can do that, say, Debian cannot? ZFS boot environments. One could install Debian's root on ZFS by following the OpenZFS documentation guide, combine it with ZFSBootMenu (or similar), but there won't be any upstream support from the Debian project itself. The Nitrux Linux distribution is based on Debian and provides an immutable feature similar to boot environments, but you can't treat your…

you can use snapper + btrfs and the end result is like `bectl`. However it not as simple/integrated as ZFS Boot environments on FreeBSD

The btrfs code quality seems less than ZFS, based on the reports I have read.

Re: Why I love FreeBSD

#59

Post by Asooka »

sidkshatriya wrote: post #56
MarkusWandel wrote: post #49

Early in my Unix-ish at home journey (26-ish years ago) I tried FreeBSD. It was so Unix because, well, it is. An operating system, not a collection of parts. I found at the time in Linux land Debian felt similar. 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 i…

> But the downside is enormous bloat If you think Linux can have "enormous bloat" then Windows bloat by the same standards is terrifyingly humongous (and slow!).

It is.

Re: Why I love FreeBSD

#60

Post by krylon »

sidkshatriya wrote: post #54
evanjrowley wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Is there anything FreeBSD can do that, say, Debian cannot? ZFS boot environments. One could install Debian's root on ZFS by following the OpenZFS documentation guide, combine it with ZFSBootMenu (or similar), but there won't be any upstream support from the Debian project itself. The Nitrux Linux distribution is based on Debian and provides an immutable feature similar to boot environments, but you can't treat your…

you can use snapper + btrfs and the end result is like `bectl`. However it not as simple/integrated as ZFS Boot environments on FreeBSD

On openSUSE Tumbleweed, it is. Each Upgrade creates two snapshots, one before, one after, and if anything goes wrong, I can boot into a snapshot where the world was still in order.

I have a higher opinion of ZFS than I do of btrfs, but FWIW snapper+btrfs has worked well for me on openSUSE Tumbleweed for ten years now, too.

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