Ask HN: Can we talk about FreeBSD vs. Linux? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: Can we talk about FreeBSD vs. Linux?

#141

Post by tokenrove » Sat, Nov 22, 2014, 10:17 PM UTC

tw04 wrote: post #85

near wrote: post #27

Like 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…

Your post is self-contradicting. You tell people not to use PC-BSD if they "want to know how stuff works". You then complain that to get a desktop working on plain old FreeBSD... you have to actually configure it... and know how it works. "I just apt-get install xfce and I'm done" isn't learning how anything works. If you want a ready-made desktop, use PC-BSD. If you want to learn to install a desktop from scratch, u…

I found it a particularly helpful comparison (since I've recently tried using FreeBSD after a long lapse, and considered trying PC-BSD), but I can see how you might find it deceptive. Debian is really effortless when you know what you're doing, but you still need to know a lot more to use it effectively than you do with Ubuntu.

Re: Ask HN: Can we talk about FreeBSD vs. Linux?

#142

Post by KaiserPro » Sat, Nov 22, 2014, 10:41 PM UTC

badgersandjam wrote: post #122

byuu wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And ZFS deduplication consumes an absolutely frightening amount of RAM: 5GB of RAM per 1TB of storage is recommended.

That's not much. Our baseline config HP DL380s come with 64GiB RAM (!!)

File servers should really have Looooots of ram. after all its cheap cache (compared to a fusion io card) Our file servers have 384 gigs of ram. The next gen will probably have much more.

Re: Ask HN: Can we talk about FreeBSD vs. Linux?

#143

Post by byuu » Sat, Nov 22, 2014, 10:41 PM UTC

tedunangst wrote: post #138

byuu wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, you can work around it (with no known downsides) by adding: export MOZ_DISABLE_IMAGE_OPTIMIZE=1 To the top of your ~/.xinitrc file. Kind of surprised PC-BSD doesn't do that for you. Probably should ask them to.

IIRC that would sometimes lead to weird glitches like images with repeating static patterns, though perhaps those bugs have been fixed as well.

Might have in the past, I have yet to see any rendering glitches from it.

Now, some of the about:config options that were proposed as alternate workarounds definitely caused very weird rendering glitches, but this one seems mostly side-effect free.

Re: Ask HN: Can we talk about FreeBSD vs. Linux?

#144

Post by wtallis » Sat, Nov 22, 2014, 10:42 PM UTC

eeZi wrote: post #126

ClashTheBunny wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

cp --reflink

One of the few feature btrs has which ZFS hasn't.

At this point, I don't think it's fair to imply that btrfs is lagging behind ZFS. Yes, there are quite a few things that ZFS does better than btrfs, but btrfs isn't following in ZFS's footsteps and has some killer features that ZFS will never have, like on-the-fly changing between RAID modes and resizing arrays in either direction.

Re: Ask HN: Can we talk about FreeBSD vs. Linux?

#145

Post by tedunangst » Sat, Nov 22, 2014, 10:52 PM UTC

byuu wrote: post #143

tedunangst wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IIRC that would sometimes lead to weird glitches like images with repeating static patterns, though perhaps those bugs have been fixed as well.

Might have in the past, I have yet to see any rendering glitches from it. Now, some of the about:config options that were proposed as alternate workarounds definitely caused very weird rendering glitches, but this one seems mostly side-effect free.

You're right. I was thinking of gfx xrender.

Re: Ask HN: Can we talk about FreeBSD vs. Linux?

#146

Post by Jukelox » Sat, Nov 22, 2014, 10:54 PM UTC

In my experience it all comes down to performance and tunability. Our personal preferences are just that, personal.

Linux has vsyscalls which makes it performant for the typical LAMP stack. If you profile a PHP Zend framework "hello world" app it makes 20k+ calls to gettimeofday(), which is very slow on FreeBSD in comparison. Throw a couple hundred requests/s and you saturate the CPU for no good reason.

FreeBSD needs business support in order to maintain funding, and be a relevant competitor to Linux. If a developer were to pick a popular application stack like node and identify significant performance gains it would make waves.

Re: Ask HN: Can we talk about FreeBSD vs. Linux?

#147

Post by cmyr » Sat, Nov 22, 2014, 10:54 PM UTC

Random_BSD_Geek wrote: post #70

Long time reader, first time poster. I've run FreeBSD on laptops, desktops and servers since 2.2.7. Laptops are not its strong suit. It works great for me as a desktop, but I've been tinkering with X desktop configurations for a long time, and don't mind doing some work to have a desktop that functions precisely the way I want it to. Also, it is not my only desktop. (/usr/ports/sysutils/synergy FTW!) Servers and netw…

Post more often please.

Re: Ask HN: Can we talk about FreeBSD vs. Linux?

#148

Post by jrochkind1 » Sat, Nov 22, 2014, 10:59 PM UTC

byuu wrote: post #116

jrochkind1 wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you think the choice to compare FreeBSD to a particular distro, Debian -- indicates that the difference between FreeBSD and Debian is about the same as between Debian and other distros? Is FreeBSD essentially just like another distr (even though it's actually a separate OS, it's similar enough?)

FreeBSD is a concrete project in the same way Debian is. Comparing a full system like FreeBSD to a kernel like Linux doesn't really get us anywhere. You can't really talk about the desktop experience comparisons when Linux can't even boot without a userland. If you tried to do it in an abstract sense, you'd be guaranteed to get responses of, "yes but Mouse Rat Linux supports ZFS and is also run by an elected core tea…

It sounds to me then like what I was guessing is true -- the difference between the FreeBSD kernel and the Linux kernel, for most purposes, is of less importance than the choices made by the particular distro (FreeBSD or Linux distro of choice).

I'm curious if anyone who knows more than me would disagree, though (maybe for some purposes?).

Re: Ask HN: Can we talk about FreeBSD vs. Linux?

#149

Post by anonbanker » Sat, Nov 22, 2014, 11:02 PM UTC

Why aren't we talking about OpenBSD vs. Linux? I mean, it's the only OS I trust anymore.

Re: Ask HN: Can we talk about FreeBSD vs. Linux?

#150

Post by tokenrove » Sat, Nov 22, 2014, 11:07 PM UTC

imanaccount247 wrote: post #18

obviouslygreen wrote: post #11

As a Debian user who started on Gentoo, I think the linked article was very interesting in terms of at least getting an idea of what the differences in design are. I've never used a BSD or even looked into it... given what I read there, it seems like it'd be a lot nicer in at least one sense, since Debian releases die off and release-upgrade can be either perfect or very painful. On the other hand, I do love how smal…

>On the other hand, I do love how small and unassuming a basic Linux installation is There is no "basic linux installation". Every distro is its own thing. Size seems like a really odd thing to bring up since every mainstream linux distro's "basic" installation is larger than the full OS of any of the four BSDs.

> Size seems like a really odd thing to bring up since every mainstream linux distro's "basic" installation is larger than the full OS of any of the four BSDs.

I don't think that's entirely true. The Debian install I do by default, with no tasksel tasks selected, is very minimal. I haven't checked recently how large it is (and one of the reasons I am considering moving away is that I suspect the minimal required system has been growing with the adoption of things like systemd), but I remember a few years ago noting that it was a fair bit smaller than a clean OpenBSD install. That's not including X and compilers IIRC.

Also, as I understand it, Arch Linux is becoming quite popular and it is also pretty spartan by default.

(Not that I think this really matters for most cases (embedded excepted); I would like to be able to uninstall tcsh, though.)