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Why I love FreeBSD

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Re: Why I love FreeBSD

#91

Post by cess11 »

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…

If you just want to run a Docker container casually, perhaps do it on your personal computer instead of the home server. If there is some service you really can't manage to get running with jails or right on the BSD, bhyve and guest Linux should be easy enough.

Re: Why I love FreeBSD

#92

Post by adrian_b »

bitwize wrote: post #87
freeopinion wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FreeBSD supports a much larger range of hardware than MacOS. It's a bit strange to bemoan hardware support, then switch OS and buy very specific hardware for that OS. Imagine quitting MacOS because it doesn't support Realtek RTL8188CUS.

Well it just so happens that the best hardware in the world for desktop use—literally years ahead of any competition—is made by the makers of macOS and is totally supported by macOS.

What you say is true only when you define "desktop use" in a certain way, which corresponds to what an Apple PC is good for.

I define "desktop use" in another way, and for my definition any Apple PC is completely non-competitive, by having a much lower performance and a much higher price than a desktop PC using an AMD Ryzen CPU.

Apple PCs have exceptional single-thread performance, but that is irrelevant for me. I care about multi-threaded performance and especially about floating-point FP64 and big integer computational throughput, for which the Apple CPUs are weak, one could say years behind their competition, except that Apple does not make any attempt to compete in this domain.

An Apple PC may be the optimum PC for your needs and that is fine, but you should not believe that any computer user has the same needs as you.

Re: Why I love FreeBSD

#93

Post by sidkshatriya »

shrubble wrote: post #58
sidkshatriya wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

btrfs is suffering from a lot of old bad publicity and some poor design decisions around RAID.

But by now it is a great file system if you don't go near RAID5/6. btrfs has its flaws (ZFS has its own flaws!). However:

- It's used a lot, especially by facebook and Redhat (on fedora)

- Gets a lot of testing

- Sees a lot of bug fixes

- Has a lot of features

I haven't read btrfs code but given that it is a popular file system and Linux code quality tends to be good in popular subsystems I would hesitate to say its code quality is worse than ZFS in any way.

Re: Why I love FreeBSD

#95

Post by sidkshatriya »

jmmv wrote: post #73
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…

> 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. I haven't done that yet because I think I'd want to switch to pkgbase but that makes me nervous. Did you go with that option or continued to use the sets?

Why not create a boot environment and try out FreeBSD 15 with pkgbase ? If the experiment is successful just make the boot environment the default otherwise throw it away...

With such powerful tools I find it fascinating that FreeBSD users are not more willing to experiment !

Re: Why I love FreeBSD

#96

Post by krylon »

shrubble wrote: post #58
sidkshatriya wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Last I heard (~8 years ago), the RAID-like functionality in btrfs was very unstable and crash-prone. The impression I got was that there was not a lot of interest in fixing this. Then bcachefs came and ... appears to have gone nowhere AFAICT.

The non-RAID part of btrfs appears to be stable. It's the default filesystem on openSUSE and SLES. But I don't think it's ever going to reach feature parity with ZFS.

Re: Why I love FreeBSD

#97

Post by krylon »

jmmv wrote: post #73
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…

> 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. I haven't done that yet because I think I'd want to switch to pkgbase but that makes me nervous. Did you go with that option or continued to use the sets?

I haven't switched to pkgbase. Yet. I don't intend to for the time being. I set up a VM to test it, but I haven't gotten around to actually testing it.

Re: Why I love FreeBSD

#98

Post by sidkshatriya »

adrian_b wrote: post #88
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…

I do not believe that your problems are typical for FreeBSD servers. I have been using FreeBSD servers for around 30 years. Most of them had Intel NICs and I have used at least 5 or 6 different kinds of Supermicro motherboards, both with Xeon and with Epyc. Most servers have worked 24/7, without being rebooted for years and without having any minute of downtime except when I did some hardware upgrade or kernel upgrad…

> There is one advantage of Linux over FreeBSD, which is not widely known. Linux has a huge database of known bugs in various peripheral devices, including Ethernet NICs, and when one of those is recognized it applies workarounds for the bugs.

Almost universal hardware support and workarounds for quirks is precisely the reason why everyone uses Linux even if they might want to use FreeBSD or something else. In other words, this advantage is known and is the reason why Linux is dominant in the server space today.

Re: Why I love FreeBSD

#99

Post by adiabatichottub »

w4rh4wk5 wrote: post #70

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?

I've been using both Linux and BSD since 2000. Honestly, I prefer Linux on the desktop. My dev workstation runs Arch, and I keep a FreeBSD VM running to do OS and ports builds.

As a server OS I find FreeBSD really consistent and easy to administrate. I never have trouble finding things: packages always go in /usr/local. The old-school init system works great at what it's designed to do, and all the startup scripts are easy to understand. The whole thing just feels kind of cozy and familiar. If you like working in a shell then FreeBSD just kind of feels like /home.

Coming from modern Linux though, some of the constructs can feel a bit outdated. Usually this gives me a warm fuzzy feeling, but sometimes it's a real pain (looking at you, make(1)). It's like hacking Perl, once you understand the idiom and what it's good at then you can be good friends.

If you want to run a mail server for 20 years and go through multiple hardware and OS upgrades with minimal pain and maximal uptime then you can't beat it.

Re: Why I love FreeBSD

#100

Post by aap_ »

I was using FreeBSD (after NetBSD) as my primary system for a while in school (no, i can't watch this youtube video, flash doesn't run on FreeBSD). i still use it for my home server, it's just cozy.
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