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Why I love FreeBSD

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11–20 of 270 posts

Re: Why I love FreeBSD

#11

I used to but driver support for wireless devices was so inconsistent I had to move to Linux.

That's unintentionally hilarious -- some of us remember 15-20 years ago when flaky support for wireless devices was the biggest reason people would decide Linux wasn't ready for desktop yet and avoid switching from Windows to Linux. (Well, Windows to dual-boot -- Windows users were never fully willing to let go of the video games angle at the time.)

Re: Why I love FreeBSD

#12

> had trained me to hunt for documentation in fragments: often incomplete, often outdated, sometimes already stale after barely a year. This is indeed a problem now that google search is next to useless. And AI further degrading the quality. I work around it to some extent by keeping my local knowledge base up to date, as much as that is possible; and using a ton of scripts that help me do things. That works. I am al…

[flagged]

Re: Why I love FreeBSD

#14

> Over the years, FreeBSD has served me well. At a certain point it stepped down as my primary desktop - partly because I switched to Mac, partly because of unsupported hardware - but it never stopped being one of my first choices for servers and any serious workload. Not my idea of love. Maybe that hardware was supported on Linux. Switch from Linux to FreeBSD so that you can later switch to Mac when you get frustrat…

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.

Re: Why I love FreeBSD

#15
post #3

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…

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?

Re: Why I love FreeBSD

#16

> Over the years, FreeBSD has served me well. At a certain point it stepped down as my primary desktop - partly because I switched to Mac, partly because of unsupported hardware - but it never stopped being one of my first choices for servers and any serious workload. Not my idea of love. Maybe that hardware was supported on Linux. Switch from Linux to FreeBSD so that you can later switch to Mac when you get frustrat…

It's not really a demerit of FreeBSD given their lesser resources (and even less vender support) than Linux.

Most of the major ethernet chipsets for networking you'd expect to find in a server are well supported and the system is quite solid for many server use cases, but you're probably not going to be running bleeding edge consumer hardware day one on it.

On the desktop side of things Linux has far superior hardware support for current GPUs/Wifi chipsets. AMDGPU support is a few card generations behind (they have to spend effort porting from the Linux drivers) and things are still mostly in X11 land and you don't have Valve supporting gaming on BSD.

I'd still be interested in running FreeBSD on severs, it just takes a bit of different knowledge (the handbook is excellent) and with OpenZFS being a thing on Linux there's not as much exclusive to the BSDs on a surface level that Linux can't at least mostly provide.

Re: Why I love FreeBSD

#17

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…

it isn't anywhere close to the convenience of docker, but if you just need containerised OS-level virtualization FreeBSD has Jails which are really cool

Re: Why I love FreeBSD

#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 there anything FreeBSD can do that, say, Debian cannot? Probably not (at least I cannot think of anything). When I set up the server, ZFS was a huge selling point, but I heard that it works quite well on Linux, these days. But I appreciate the reliability, the good documentation, the community (when I need help).

Re: Why I love FreeBSD

#19
post #12

> had trained me to hunt for documentation in fragments: often incomplete, often outdated, sometimes already stale after barely a year. This is indeed a problem now that google search is next to useless. And AI further degrading the quality. I work around it to some extent by keeping my local knowledge base up to date, as much as that is possible; and using a ton of scripts that help me do things. That works. I am al…

[flagged]

1. What does Guix have to do with anything

2. GNOME hasn't been a GNU project in a long time

Re: Why I love FreeBSD

#20

> Over the years, FreeBSD has served me well. At a certain point it stepped down as my primary desktop - partly because I switched to Mac, partly because of unsupported hardware - but it never stopped being one of my first choices for servers and any serious workload. Not my idea of love. Maybe that hardware was supported on Linux. Switch from Linux to FreeBSD so that you can later switch to Mac when you get frustrat…

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.

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