The worst part of FreeBSD is the license.
Ask HN: Can we talk about FreeBSD vs. Linux?
101–110 of 221 posts
Re: Ask HN: Can we talk about FreeBSD vs. Linux?
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is not the right question to ask. Ubuntu is aimed at making Linux available to the masses on the desktop. FreeBSD has the aim to create a solid Unix environment. IMO FreeBSD is awesome as a server, and okay-ish for the desktop. PC-BSD makes it easier, but still: you need to know what you're doing, but if you do, it's pretty solid.
I started wondering about this when I heard Sony uses the FreeBSD kernel. If for a console, why not for the desktop?
developing drivers is expensive. it makes sense to take a kernel and develop a in-house drivers for a more or less fixed set of hardware. less so to test thousands of apps on thousands possible hw configurations for very limited customer base. it's a ROI thing.
Re: Ask HN: Can we talk about FreeBSD vs. Linux?
#103Docker has a ton of momentum right now, which should play into this comparison (as it doesn't run on FreeBSD).
Re: Ask HN: Can we talk about FreeBSD vs. Linux?
#104Like others have said, being unbiased is difficult, but I'll try. First, Linux v FreeBSD is really tough, so I will instead approach this from Debian v FreeBSD. I really like how easy Debian on the desktop is: install it, apt-get install xfce, and I have a nice desktop. It's very easy to add Adobe Flash, Steam, Skype, etc. The FreeBSD desktop isn't as nice. You can add things like Flash and Skype on FreeBSD, but you…
The Firefox issue is because gtk is brain damaged and sends the image to the x server, then reads it back, but it gets broken up into tiny chunks and causes a billion syscalls. You can fix it by recompiling x with larger socket buffers.
Ah interesting, thanks for the pointer.
Re: Ask HN: Can we talk about FreeBSD vs. Linux?
#105Like others have said, being unbiased is difficult, but I'll try. First, Linux v FreeBSD is really tough, so I will instead approach this from Debian v FreeBSD. I really like how easy Debian on the desktop is: install it, apt-get install xfce, and I have a nice desktop. It's very easy to add Adobe Flash, Steam, Skype, etc. The FreeBSD desktop isn't as nice. You can add things like Flash and Skype on FreeBSD, but you…
> I have to make this org.freedesktop.consolekit.pkla file and add entries to it in order to get the restart and shutdown buttons in Xfce to work These Just Worked for me. My only real annoyance with Xfce is that it's unresponsive to mouse clicks for the first few seconds after starting. > I really, really appreciate Debian's branches. If you install Wheezy, you can get security updates for packages, but not get vers…
> These Just Worked for me. My only real annoyance with Xfce is that it's unresponsive to mouse clicks for the first few seconds after starting.
Under a regular user account? I even added my user to wheel and operator, and no go. I've helped a few people on forums.freebsd.org set up this pkla file, too.
> There are quarterly port branches now to give people more of a choice
The quarterly branches are definitely a step in the right direction, but still not really what I want. I want patches for Heartbleed and Shellshock, but without any software version number bumps. I know their team is much smaller so it's just not feasible, but it's definitely something that would be greatly appreciated.
> I just wish it were more actively maintained and kept at least vaguely in-sync with upstream.
Definitely. Is OpenBSD's MP-safe yet? I believe that's partly related to why FreeBSD's has ALTQ disabled (but it's hard to find good information on why that choice was made.)
Re: Ask HN: Can we talk about FreeBSD vs. Linux?
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
What stopped me from using FreeBSD a year ago was lack of automatic tab completion on the shell. I would like to try FreeBSD again. Does anyone know if this works now? edit: clarified the reason I ask is because I want to know.
The default shell in freebsd is probably still sh, which does not have tab completion. The Linuxes long ago moved to bash, which does. However, in the FreeBSD ports tree, I guarantee you there is a bash package you can install, and then you can just switch your shell to be bash instead of sh.
The default shell in freebsd is probably still sh, which does not have tab completion
/bin/sh in 10.x has tab completion.
Re: Ask HN: Can we talk about FreeBSD vs. Linux?
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is OT, but since you seem to know a fair bit about filesystem types and their trades and have an opinion on sane patching behavior, I have a question you might be able to answer: Why aren't modern filesystems based on a content-addressable-store where the content is 100% separated from the organization of the filesystem itself? It seems to me like it would make more sense to have only one copy of a file ever sav…
Zfs, to take one example, does do approximately what you want - the file system (or rather, the underlying block storage) has a tree structure, and changes to files are propagated via copy-on-write rewrites up the tree, so that earlier snapshots still get to see the original file. This does make rolling things back trivial. It doesn't give you dedupe for free, though. Think about what would have to happen: every modi…
cp --reflink
Re: Ask HN: Can we talk about FreeBSD vs. Linux?
#108We do quite a bit of Java development and particularly with regards to Java EE 7. In the past I've had bad experiences in terms of a stable Java environment on production servers on FreeBSD. It appears that OpenJDK is the best option on FreeBSD right now - but is it something one can trust as much as Oracle's Java on Linux? These are mission critical servers, so I would hesitate to take chances. To put it in perspect…
You can also install and use the Linux version of Oracle Java on FreeBSD. The FreeBSD Foundation and Oracle also started a project to build/distribute binary packages of OpenJDK for FreeBSD this year.
Re: Ask HN: Can we talk about FreeBSD vs. Linux?
#109I wanted to know about hosting solutions if I want to use FreeBSD. Linode, Digital Ocean don't support it. AWS and GCE have support, but it seems the kernel is provided by a FreeBSD maintainer rather than AWS or GCE. How stable is FreeBSD on AWS or GCE ?. And are there any companies using FreeBSD on AWS / GCE ?.
How stable is FreeBSD on AWS
Very. You're more likely to run into problems running FreeBSD on physical hardware, in fact, because (a) a wider range of hardware means more potentially weird drivers, and (b) Amazon does a better job of weeding out flaky hardware than Joe's Dedicated Server Shop.
Re: Ask HN: Can we talk about FreeBSD vs. Linux?
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
Here's a couple: https://www.cloudsigma.com/landing/freebsd-cloud-hosting/ https://www.rootbsd.net/
Most of the AWS support for FreeBSD was done by Colin Percival, whom many hold in high regard. Given that fact and the fact that Tarsnap runs on AWS I think it's safe to assume it's pretty stable.
Indeed, I didn't move Tarsnap over to FreeBSD/EC2 for a couple of years because the platform wasn't stable yet. But it definitely is stable now.