Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Why I love FreeBSD

it-notes.dragas.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 270 posts

Re: Why I love FreeBSD

#61

Post by throwaway27448 »

toast0 wrote: post #35
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? Probably not (at least I cannot think of anything). Stability of user interface and documentation.

What documentation does a distro even publish? I only ask because freebsd has the most solid documentation I've used of any OS I've ever encountered. I seriously doubt Debian has documented the linux kernel that well (which, tbf, would be an insane project to even attempt)

Re: Why I love FreeBSD

#62

Post by hideout_berlin »

frumplestlatz wrote: post #23
nullpoint420 wrote: post #14

Earlier 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,…

do you remember opendarwin? i was also at puredarwin but the project seams death

Re: Why I love FreeBSD

#64

Post by hideout_berlin »

seethishat wrote: post #47

I love OpenBSD for similar reasons, except, I still run it as my primary desktop and on an old Chromebook. It just works. No drama with updates. Upgrade every six months. I'd be lost without it.

i plan to run netbsd on my chromebook do you have a good manual? or how to?

Re: Why I love FreeBSD

#65

Post by commandersaki »

Ran a FreeBSD colocated server for about a decade that went through generations of hardware. I really want to like the OS, except it's most touted feature, the network stack, was consistently unreliable for me using Intel NICs on Supermicro servers. They would go offline usually after some load due to mbuf resource exhaustion. I never got to the bottom of it even though I posted to the bugs database and would diligently follow up and perform experiments. This also happened on different incarnations of server hardware, so it wasn't the same physical NIC having the issue, but different varieties.

Anyways had enough of the random downtime, I just switched to Linux which didn't have these issues.

I'd say the best part of FreeBSD though is freebsd-update which was a game changer from the previous make world shenanigans.

Re: Why I love FreeBSD

#66

Post by toast0 »

throwaway27448 wrote: post #61
toast0 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Is there anything FreeBSD can do that, say, Debian cannot? Probably not (at least I cannot think of anything). Stability of user interface and documentation.

What documentation does a distro even publish? I only ask because freebsd has the most solid documentation I've used of any OS I've ever encountered. I seriously doubt Debian has documented the linux kernel that well (which, tbf, would be an insane project to even attempt)

Debian has an installation guide[1]. I'd imagine all the major distributions do.

But it probably has to change a lot for every major release, because so many things change. FreeBSD major releases have changes too, but a lot of the user interfaces are very stable and so the documentation can be too. Stable documentation allows time for it to be edited and revised to become better documentation, as well as developing quality translations.

[1] https://www.debian.org/releases/stable/amd64/

Re: Why I love FreeBSD

#67

Post by zenoprax »

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?

If you asked the opposite (what can Debian do that FreeBSD cannot) I would have more to say and it would mostly be preceded by "I know FreeBSD is not Linux but ...". Whenever I need to do any sort of maintenance or inspection I have to look up the equivalent commands for things like `lsblk` and something nested in `/usr/etc/...` when I'm used to finding it in `/etc/` over every other system.

This is a consequence of both FreeBSD's reliability in needing very infrequent attention and my limited use-cases to use it. As a NAS it is great but I can't touch it without full-text search of all my notes on the side! Either way, no regrets about learning and relying on it after ~18 months so far.

Re: Why I love FreeBSD

#68

Post by philistine »

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…

FreeBSD is the macOS to Linux's Windows. Or better yet, the iOS to Linux's Android.

Re: Why I love FreeBSD

#69

Post by dewarrn1 »

commandersaki wrote: post #65

Ran a FreeBSD colocated server for about a decade that went through generations of hardware. I really want to like the OS, except it's most touted feature, the network stack, was consistently unreliable for me using Intel NICs on Supermicro servers. They would go offline usually after some load due to mbuf resource exhaustion. I never got to the bottom of it even though I posted to the bugs database and would diligen…

Hail u/cperciva.

Re: Why I love FreeBSD

#70

Post by w4rh4wk5 »

For someone who has multiple years of experience using Linux for desktop and servers, what's the best way to get into FreeBSD? Any specific recommendations for desktop, like is Wayland ready on FreeBSD?
Post reply on HN