Live data from Hacker News

Why I love FreeBSD

it-notes.dragas.net

31–40 of 270 posts

Re: Why I love FreeBSD

#31

> had trained me to hunt for documentation in fragments: often incomplete, often outdated, sometimes already stale after barely a year.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…

Just one small note: those experiences are from 2002 and I was writing about my first experience when running it on my Sony Vaio. Running on a modern 64Gb Ram hardware is a totally different experience, 24 years later

Re: Why I love FreeBSD

#32

> 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.

Something that a Mac user or developer, those that have been on the ecosystem for decades would never bother to do anyway.

Re: Why I love FreeBSD

#33
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My current home server passed 10 years in the autnum, but I've been running FreeBSD on servers since around 2000. The main gripe is probably Docker and/or software depending on Linux-isms that can't be run natively without resorting to bhyve or smth alike that.

[flagged]

What exactly do you think pkg(1) is for? [1]

[1]: https://docs-archive.freebsd.org/doc/10.3-RELEASE/usr/local/...

Re: Why I love FreeBSD

#35
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…

> Is there anything FreeBSD can do that, say, Debian cannot? Probably not (at least I cannot think of anything).

Stability of user interface and documentation.

Re: Why I love FreeBSD

#36
post #34
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What exactly do you think pkg(1) is for? [1] [1]: https://docs-archive.freebsd.org/doc/10.3-RELEASE/usr/local/...

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

Re: Why I love FreeBSD

#37
post #27

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…

Icaza hasn't been involved in the GNU/Linux space for years iirc, even if he has it's been limited. Also, what the fuck are you going on about? for the record, I also don't like the current direction of the standard "Linux" desktop but also am not schizoposting about it

Also, let's pray that's the future for GNU because I think the hurd is pretty darn cool

Re: Why I love FreeBSD

#38
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…

My current home server passed 10 years in the autnum, but I've been running FreeBSD on servers since around 2000. The main gripe is probably Docker and/or software depending on Linux-isms that can't be run natively without resorting to bhyve or smth alike that.

I have not thus far had anything to do with containers, so docker is unknown territory for me.

I run audiobookshelf in a Debian VM via bhyve, but I was gonna run a Debian VM anyway.

Re: Why I love FreeBSD

#39
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My current home server passed 10 years in the autnum, but I've been running FreeBSD on servers since around 2000. The main gripe is probably Docker and/or software depending on Linux-isms that can't be run natively without resorting to bhyve or smth alike that.

[flagged]

Docker's what lets me spend more time using the software on my server than fiddling with it. I got the fiddling out of my system years ago, I just want shit to work now.

I don't really care about it per se but having a cross-distro unified daemon config & supervisor, package manager, and ability to cram every single important file into a file tree (again, using the same interface to achieve this with every daemon) that has only those files in it (making backups and restores trivial) and then easily verify that I got all the important files (destroy image -> re-create, does it still look good? Then I got everything) makes everything so easy. I no longer put off trying a new service until the weekend because it'll take an unknown amount of time that could end up being hours. Odds are I can have anything available in the official Docker registry (which is approximately everything, these days) up in five minutes flat to try it out, and may not even need any further modifications for it to be ready for (personal) "production".

I use Debian but don't even care, I haven't had to touch systemd once (thank god) and the only Debian-parts I even use are its ZFS, SSH, and Docker, with my ten or so actual user-facing services all just pulled and managed via Docker, ready to transfer to any other distro seamlessly, should I ever care to. Even Samba is under Docker (oh my god it is so much easier to configure for common use-cases this way).

(I would definitely be using FreeBSD on my server if I cared about anything other than Docker, though—I haven't actually liked Linux for about fifteen years now)

Post reply on HN