Why I run FreeBSD for my home servers (2024)

If aynthing Linux is an outlier in that core OS components and 3rd party apps both come in similar packages which makes it hard to distinguish which is a part of the base OS and which and optional 3rd party software. In FreeBSD I know that I can delete all packages and still have a system remotely accessible via SSH (with rare exception a normal user will not come across). In Linux to tell which package can be uninstalled without breaking the system one have to be an expert. Can I delete iproute package if I don't use ip command, can I remove NetworkManager, is systemd-container optional? Where the OS stops and 3rd party apps start?

Holy smokes, that's quite biased!

Good on the author for having strong beliefs, but in my eyes containers avoid entire categories of problems, like: https://blog.kronis.dev/user/pages/blog/oracle-jdk-and-openj... (request processing times for a random system at work ages ago under load tests, it ran passably in OpenJDK, whereas running with the Oracle JDK resulted in an order of magnitude worse performance, this was before containers were introduced in the project; guess which vendor's version was installed in prod without telling us about it)

It was an old post, but sometimes there's configurations that do break in mysterious ways when the dependencies and the runtime environments aren't matched exactly to what was developed/tested against; see the whole reproducible software movement, can have good install scripts and other tools to help even without containers, but good luck managing the support matrix of a bunch of separate *nix distros and OSes, as well as having testing environments for those. Not even that much of an enterprise concern.

We shouldn't need containers for everything, but there aren't that many other good options for packaging software.

> There is a new fashion on the OpenSource world. Developpers think Docker is the new de-facto standard and only propose to install the tools with Docker.

It shouldn't be the only way, but I'll take Docker over random shell scripts and the ability to easily launch software and then later tear it down without messing up my host OS or having to mess around with VMs. Tbh, I do kind of wish that Vagrant had caught on more.

> Most of the time they do no provide any DOCUMENTATION to install their software in a baremetal way.

> At best, they offer an .rpm or .deb package for installation on a non-docker OS. But most of the time it's a docker file.

The Dockerfile is more or less living documentation, which is better than having a source code repo with nothing but obviously worse than someone taking the time of the day to write some guides or docs. Then again, if it's FOSS devs, then I'll take anything over nothing, given how much time they (don't) have.

> Even worse, modern applications often deploy the code and database needed to run the code directly in the docker compose file.

Deploying DBs or even multiple separate apps within a single container is pretty much an anti-pattern (anyone who has needed to decipher what happens inside of a GitLab Omnibus image, or update the Sonatype Nexus image from the embedded OrientDB to PostgreSQL probably understands the pain) and should be avoided, maybe save for rare cases like a web server with PHP-FPM (maybe with supervisord) if you really need to, or for the lazy/testing setups that will ultimately be a mess to maintain.

Edit: however if the complaint is literally just about having a Docker Compose file which contains a self-contained DB container, then it's up to you to decide whether you want or don't want to use it, or reference another DB running on the host or elsewhere (e.g. host.docker.internal or equivalent). It doesn't take much work to comment out a block.

> At what point did these people think it was relevant to run 10 different databases when I'm hosting 10 applications ?

You don't have to. You could have a single PostgreSQL or MariaDB/MySQL instance that just has multiple users and DBs/schemas. I honestly prefer the more distributed setup because I now can move software across servers trivially and can update the versions as I please and when something misbehaves, the impact is limited (because you can set CPU/RAM limits, easier than with cgroups).

Good for the author for enjoying FreeBSD, it's a pretty cool OS and feels more like it's "designed" instead of the more organic feel of how Linux distros work.

But I reject the motionally charged language and stance.

(Also the "ip" command from iproute2 came around in the last millenium, no?)

I don't think not knowing all of what systemd does will turn Linux users into mindless drones and it's quite dismissive to take that stance, these are users that chose another OS for their out of their own free will.