What a delightful letter of appreciation for a project. Reminds us all to appreciate what FOSS gives the world every day and to not take it for granted!
Why I love FreeBSD
211–220 of 270 posts
Re: Why I love FreeBSD
#212I've never used FreeBSD and I appreciate the appeal, but to me the most exciting ideas in OS space are being developed within Nix/Guix projects. I am putting up a NixOS-based homelab server right now. Does FreeBSD have anything remotely similar?
Re: Why I love FreeBSD
#213Earlier quoted context omitted.
Last I heard (~8 years ago), the RAID-like functionality in btrfs was very unstable and crash-prone. The impression I got was that there was not a lot of interest in fixing this. Then bcachefs came and ... appears to have gone nowhere AFAICT. The non-RAID part of btrfs appears to be stable. It's the default filesystem on openSUSE and SLES. But I don't think it's ever going to reach feature parity with ZFS.
> Then bcachefs came and ... appears to have gone nowhere AFAICT. I heard the developer got sidetracked into writing himself an AI girlfriend. (Not sarcasm)
hah, you weren't joking... https://poc.bcachefs.org/ https://www.theregister.com/2026/02/25/bcachefs_creator_ai/
Re: Why I love FreeBSD
#214I've never used FreeBSD and I appreciate the appeal, but to me the most exciting ideas in OS space are being developed within Nix/Guix projects. I am putting up a NixOS-based homelab server right now. Does FreeBSD have anything remotely similar?
No. FreeBSD enthusiast will tell you there's no need for something even remotely similar. I love the OS but some of the zealots are the reason for the miniscule size of the community.
Re: Why I love FreeBSD
#215Earlier quoted context omitted.
I just use pkgsrc from netbsd
Ah right, that doesn’t have binary distribution at all. Oh wait [1]. [1]: https://www.netbsd.org/docs/pkgsrc/bulk.html
Who besides Joyent and NetBSD would ever do a bulk build?
Portage can also do binary packages. That doesn't mean you have to have them. You can just not ever enable them and be fine.
Re: Why I love FreeBSD
#216Ran a FreeBSD colocated server for about a decade that went through generations of hardware. I really want to like the OS, except it's most touted feature, the network stack, was consistently unreliable for me using Intel NICs on Supermicro servers. They would go offline usually after some load due to mbuf resource exhaustion. I never got to the bottom of it even though I posted to the bugs database and would diligen…
Intel has had a somewhat awkward relationship with FreeBSD forever. While they are forced to support it (for $reasons) they never have properly covered it. I would say as of FreeBSD 12-13 most major issues are addressed from 1gig up to current 100g. There is an odd bug in 2.5g igc where some users have interface stalls whilst others like Netgate are shipping large numbers without issue, waiting to hear if this is fir…
Thanks for your contributions!
Re: Why I love FreeBSD
#217FreeBSD and OpenBSD docs are great, but let's not say they're the pinnacle of docs. I like them a lot more than docs for the average Linux distribution. They're even more polished than Arch Linux wiki. But they still have room for improvement. And improving the Arch wiki is easier in my experience.
Re: Why I love FreeBSD
#218Earlier quoted context omitted.
[flagged]
docker and flatpak/snap are _extremely_ different tools with very different purposes.
Sure they're different. They all download blobs and can then execute them. Exactly how, when and why is completely different but they still get you blobs.
Re: Why I love FreeBSD
#219For someone who has multiple years of experience using Linux for desktop and servers, what's the best way to get into FreeBSD? Any specific recommendations for desktop, like is Wayland ready on FreeBSD?
I'm running Sway on FreeBSD daily and it's way snappier and sharper than on any Linux distro I tried. Go ahead, it doesn't hurt.
Re: Why I love FreeBSD
#220Earlier quoted context omitted.
docker and flatpak/snap are _extremely_ different tools with very different purposes.
Sure they're different. They all download blobs and can then execute them. Exactly how, when and why is completely different but they still get you blobs.
In the same way s3 is different to a dropbox, and a car being different to a bike.
Can't tell if you're ragebaiting here, but I'm very confused by this question because they support an entirely different set of features, and if you use both it's painfully obvious how they're different.
Docker is built for running services, distribution is part of that, but it's core is that you can pull an image and run random service on your machine packaged with all the right libraries, network them into your machine in the way you like so it can access the right things, constrain it's resources, and create our own image based on it.
Snap/Flatpak is built to distribute applications, sandboxing being a core part of it, with applications wanting to integrate into distribution mechanics such as audio, URL handling, taking screenshots, ...