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

101–110 of 270 posts

Re: Why I love FreeBSD

#101

Post by adrian_b »

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…

There are various niche applications where Debian or any Linux are worse than FreeBSD.

For example the support for magnetic tapes and for a few other SCSI peripherals is better in FreeBSD. The Linux utility for controlling a LTO tape drive lacks some important options that the corresponding FreeBSD utility has.

I have a tape drive, and to be able to use it like I want I had to move it to a FreeBSD server.

Some years ago I was using a surveillance camera that was much easier to use in FreeBSD than in Linux, if you wanted to record good quality video and audio. I have not tried more recently to use such cameras in Linux, to see if now the recording quality is better.

So while there are more hardware devices that have better support in Linux than in FreeBSD, there are also devices with better support in FreeBSD than in Linux.

However the main reason why I use FreeBSD on many of my servers is that I need much less time for their administration than for Linux servers. In my experience, Linux servers need much less time for administration than Windows servers, and FreeBSD compares to Linux like Linux to Windows.

I have FreeBSD servers that I have not touched for years, and they have worked 24/7 with no downtime and no rebooting, and this includes servers connected directly to the Internet, which implement firewalls, routers and various services, like NTP, DNS servers and proxies, e-mail servers, web servers and proxies etc.

Re: Why I love FreeBSD

#102

Post by jmmv »

sidkshatriya wrote: post #95
jmmv wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 !

To be honest I've never tried boot environments. I know they are a thing, and I have my whole setup on ZFS, so maybe that's the perfect use case.

Re: Why I love FreeBSD

#103

Post by adrian_b »

sidkshatriya wrote: post #98
adrian_b wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It is widely known that Linux has "better" hardware support for many peripheral devices, but few know what "better" means, i.e. that a lot of devices that you can buy have various bugs and in most cases their vendors do not document the bugs in any way, because they provide Windows drivers that contain workarounds for the bugs, and they do not care about other operating systems.

The users of other operating systems must discover the bugs and how to handle them by reverse engineering, and here Linux has the advantage of a much greater user base than any alternative, so in most cases the bugs will be identified by some Linux user, and then either the user or the maintainers of the corresponding Linux subsystem will implement a workaround for the bug.

Re: Why I love FreeBSD

#104

Post by irishcoffee »

adrian_b wrote: post #101
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…

There are various niche applications where Debian or any Linux are worse than FreeBSD. For example the support for magnetic tapes and for a few other SCSI peripherals is better in FreeBSD. The Linux utility for controlling a LTO tape drive lacks some important options that the corresponding FreeBSD utility has. I have a tape drive, and to be able to use it like I want I had to move it to a FreeBSD server. Some years…

> Some years ago I was using a surveillance camera that was much easier to use in FreeBSD than in Linux, if you wanted to record good quality video and audio. I have not tried more recently to use such cameras in Linux, to see if now the recording quality is better.

This example seems very hand-wavy. What camera?

Re: Why I love FreeBSD

#105

Post by righthand »

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…

FreeBsd is Systemd free.

Re: Why I love FreeBSD

#106

Post by adrian_b »

irishcoffee wrote: post #104
adrian_b wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are various niche applications where Debian or any Linux are worse than FreeBSD. For example the support for magnetic tapes and for a few other SCSI peripherals is better in FreeBSD. The Linux utility for controlling a LTO tape drive lacks some important options that the corresponding FreeBSD utility has. I have a tape drive, and to be able to use it like I want I had to move it to a FreeBSD server. Some years…

> Some years ago I was using a surveillance camera that was much easier to use in FreeBSD than in Linux, if you wanted to record good quality video and audio. I have not tried more recently to use such cameras in Linux, to see if now the recording quality is better. This example seems very hand-wavy. What camera?

A Logitech FullHD camera on USB, but I doubt that the problem was camera-specific. I believe that I would have seen the same behavior on any high-resolution USB camera.

In FreeBSD, the command required for recording was very simple and it worked flawlessly. In Linux, it was more complex and there were various stuttering problems at maximum resolution. I am still using those cameras, but I have not tried them again in Linux. In Linux they worked worse than in FreeBSD around 5 years ago, perhaps nowadays there is no longer any problem in Linux.

This was intended to be an example that you cannot know a priori whether a given device will work better on FreeBSD or on Linux. In general, there is a greater probability for Linux to have good support than for FreeBSD, but there are also counterexamples, so you cannot be certain which is better until you try both.

Re: Why I love FreeBSD

#107

Post by adiabatichottub »

adrian_b wrote: post #101
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…

There are various niche applications where Debian or any Linux are worse than FreeBSD. For example the support for magnetic tapes and for a few other SCSI peripherals is better in FreeBSD. The Linux utility for controlling a LTO tape drive lacks some important options that the corresponding FreeBSD utility has. I have a tape drive, and to be able to use it like I want I had to move it to a FreeBSD server. Some years…

> I have FreeBSD servers that I have not touched for years, and they have worked 24/7 with no downtime and no rebooting, and this includes servers connected directly to the Internet, which implement firewalls, routers and various services, like NTP, DNS servers and proxies, e-mail servers, web servers and proxies etc.

Same. We've got qmail config files with 2006 as the mtime

Re: Why I love FreeBSD

#109

Post by elcritch »

ComputerGuru wrote: post #15
vermaden wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No one prevents You from installing Linux in a Bhyve VM and running Docker there. Overhead of FreeBSD Bhyve Hypervisor is about 0.5% (measured in benchmarks) so You loose nothing. Here You have easy and complete jumpstart into Bhyve in FreeBSD: - https://vermaden.wordpress.com/2023/08/18/freebsd-bhyve-virt... Regards, vermaden

Isn't that no longer necessary? Doesn't linuxulator + podman suffice?

Unfortunately podman on freebsd is pretty early stage. I was only able to get very simple containers to run.
Post reply on HN