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Why I love FreeBSD

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Re: Why I love FreeBSD

#171

Post by nineteen999 »

anthk wrote: post #27
mghackerlady wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. What does Guix have to do with anything 2. GNOME hasn't been a GNU project in a long time

Cohesiveness. Gnome was born out from GNU and today it's just RedHatware, and overtime you will only get a RedHat/Flatpak/Wayland OS with no alternatives but brainless Pacman repacks over and over as they will provide near nothing against some Fedora Silverblue install. And, yes, overtime all Fedoras will be Silverblue rebases with different desktops, toolbox + RPMs for concurrent development environments (if any, as…

> GNU+Lisp lovers would support their own desktop and packing layer and Hurd maybe running Linux kernel drivers (the libre ones) on top free from IBM/Microsoft hands.

Then why DON'T they? Probably because in most cases they have more holier-than-thou attitude than actual technical chops. Otherwise it'd be done and dusted by now, and this imaginary 0.01% community would have taken the GNU/Linux world by storm! Instead of shitposting on HN about how inadequate the major Linux distros (which are being used in Enterprise all over the world _as well as_ everyone's personal pet projects) are.

> as POSIX won't matter a lot in a near future

This is the comedy gold I come to HN for.

Re: Why I love FreeBSD

#172

Post by assimpleaspossi »

irishcoffee wrote: post #137
assimpleaspossi wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>maybe I'm "holding it wrong" (always a strong possibility) Yes. You are holding it wrong. And it's obvious from your comment.

A tool that is non-obvious in how to use it is a tool problem, not a user problem.

[flagged]

Re: Why I love FreeBSD

#173

Post by grahamjperrin »

AdieuToLogic wrote: post #164
joshstrange wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lack of good NFS support? When we benchmarked it last it was 10x+ slower than running on linux (ubuntu). Also lack of collective mindshare. I use FreeBSD at work every since day and while I don't hate it, I do wish we just used Linux. There are more guides, tools, etc for Linux than for FreeBSD. Yes, as a comment in this sub-thread stated, jails exist but everyone knows docker, not jails. So even with jails apparentl…

> I use FreeBSD at work every since day and while I don't hate it, I do wish we just used Linux. There are more guides, tools, etc for Linux than for FreeBSD. Regarding guides specifically, FreeBSD has exceptional resources: FreeBSD Handbook[0] FreeBSD Porter's Handbook[1] FreeBSD Developers' Handbook[2] The Design and Implementation of the FreeBSD Operating System[3] Not to mention that the FreeBSD man pages are qui…

> Regarding guides specifically, FreeBSD has exceptional resources: FreeBSD Handbook …

Ahem.

https://www.reddit.com/r/freebsd/comments/1rpnd05/comment/o9...> for the ZFS chapter "… telling people to do the WRONG thing, …"

https://www.reddit.com/r/freebsd/comments/1ru0k9u/comment/oa...> for the ports chapter "… misleading, it was wrongly updated: …"

– and so on.

> … the project's documentation is a gold standard IMHO.

Documentation certainly is not gold standard. I'm a former doc tree committer, familiar with many of the bugs …

Re: Why I love FreeBSD

#174

Post by grahamjperrin »

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…

> … ZFS was a huge selling point, but I heard that it works quite well on Linux, these days. …

True.

I have OpenZFS-native encrypted root-on-ZFS for Kubuntu 25.10, made ultra-simple by the installer for Ubuntu (25.04 at the time).

FreeBSD can not yet do this. Please see, for example, https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=263171

> 263171 – add loader(8) and boot loader menu support for boot with OpenZFS-encrypted ROOT

Re: Why I love FreeBSD

#175

Post by st3fan »

overfeed wrote: post #121
HackerThemAll wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Docker is a concept resembling FreeBSD's jails that were introduced in year 2000, having much better isolation, much better security than Docker has had for a long time (perhaps even now jails are still superior to Docker).

Better isolation, better security, but far fewer gists and shared config-files shared ok the Internet for common tasks. Docker comprehensively wkn thr popularity contest, and is often the more convenient solution because of it, in a worse is better way.

People comparing Docker and Jails don't really understand that Docker is 99% about packaging and composing software. From that perspective Jails are nothing like Docker containers. No versioning, no standard, no registry, no compose, no healthchcks, no tree of containers, etc. etc. etc.

If you want to compare Jails to something on Linux then I think LXD is probably much closer to what Jails are.

Re: Why I love FreeBSD

#176

Post by grahamjperrin »

adiabatichottub wrote: post #162
gerdesj wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"with no downtime and no rebooting" So, no patching. I used to boast about my NetWare server uptimes but that is so noughties 8)

Well, my experience on the stable release branches is that there aren't all that many kernel updates, so if you keep your services patched then you really only need to reboot about every 6 months.

> … stable … about every 6 months.

Maybe slightly optimistic.

https://bokut.in/freebsd-patch-level-table/#stable/13

https://bokut.in/freebsd-patch-level-table/#stable/14

https://bokut.in/freebsd-patch-level-table/#stable/15

Re: Why I love FreeBSD

#177

Post by grahamjperrin »

joshstrange wrote: post #128
zenoprax wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Is there anything FreeBSD can do that, say, Debian cannot? If you asked the opposite (what can Debian do that FreeBSD cannot) I would have more to say and it would mostly be preceded by "I know FreeBSD is not Linux but ...". Whenever I need to do any sort of maintenance or inspection I have to look up the equivalent commands for things like `lsblk` and something nested in `/usr/etc/...` when I'm used to finding it…

Lack of good NFS support? When we benchmarked it last it was 10x+ slower than running on linux (ubuntu). Also lack of collective mindshare. I use FreeBSD at work every since day and while I don't hate it, I do wish we just used Linux. There are more guides, tools, etc for Linux than for FreeBSD. Yes, as a comment in this sub-thread stated, jails exist but everyone knows docker, not jails. So even with jails apparentl…

> … Yes, as a comment in this sub-thread stated, jails exist …

https://mastodon.bsd.cafe/@grahamperrin/116168374700889783

> Would anyone like to say something? > > …

Re: Why I love FreeBSD

#178

Post by george916a »

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…

Magnetic tapes? Super cool! What are you using them for if one may ask? Very curious.

Re: Why I love FreeBSD

#180

Post by grahamjperrin »

adiabatichottub wrote: post #74
MisterTea wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ZFS on FreeBSD is first class. I had an old FreeNAS raid z5 array on 5x 500GB disks that I wanted to check 4 years after decommissioning the system. I put together a temporary machine with all the disks plugged in and without doing anything the live FreeBSD image found and configured the array. I was instantly able to look through the file system and even dump it to my current FreeBSD server with almost 0 effort. I w…

Right. On my development workstation I use Arch and I'm always worried a kernel upgrade is going to break the ZFS module. For those that aren't familiar, ZFS isn't part of mainline Linux because of licensing incompatibility (and general distrust of Oracle). On FreeBSD I know its always going to work.

> … For those that aren't familiar, ZFS isn't part of mainline Linux because of licensing incompatibility (and general distrust of Oracle). …

It's probably fair to say that trust in Oracle is irrelevant to OpenZFS.

Where Linux does use ZFS: to the best of my knowledge, it's typically OpenZFS – https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47407937 is my own use case.

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