41–50 of 82 posts
Perhaps they have some security concerns. https://vez.mrsk.me/freebsd-defaults.txt - more admin time spent tweaking poor default security == more money being spent.
Many of the "points" mentioned therein are misleading, at best, if not outright wrong. There was a nice discussion / rebuttal of this article somewhere , although I can't remember where at this moment. Unfortunately, I'm just about to leave but I'll see if I can find it later.
I'm not sure you're going to find one unifying answer, so I'll just contribute my own experience. - FreeBSD lost the desktop battle to Linux. All joking aside about Linux on the desktop, if you want a *nix environment (and not Mac), Linux distributions are just a lot easier to set up and have traditionally enjoyed better packaging of proprietary software (graphics card drivers, RAID card drivers, applications, etc.).…
I actually ran FreeBSD as a "desktop OS" on more than a few IBM Stinkpads for years. It worked well, driver support -- well, wifi was always fun, but if you knew enough, you could get them going (orinoco cards for the win). That said, I never saw FreeBSD as anything other than a Server OS. So I wouldn't say the "desktop" comparison really ever fit in.
I think that right there was the problem.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's platform, and then there's drivers. There's no point on having an OS on a net-enabled device if that OS can't talk to the network hardware, for example. Linux has had a ridiculous amount of work from a variety of sources in it's drivers. I once used a git animation tool (forget the name of it, sorry) on the linux kernel source, and the area where the drivers were put was buzzing like a beehive, as people from…
>I once used a git animation tool (forget the name of it, sorry) Probably Gource I would imagine http://gource.io/
In my experience, the BSDs used to be trusted for their reliability and performance. Linux has come a long way in terms of reliability and configuration cost - though performance is harder to tune for. Docker has enabled a lot of trusted deployments. 6-8 years ago I remember the question "Why don't companies use Linux as much in production as FreeBSD?" Maybe I'm sheltered.
But Linux has come a long way since then. The major issues have been resolved and IMO the overwhelmingly larger ecosystem Linux enjoys outweighs most if not all advantages FreeBSD might still have on a technical level.
However in 1992 and 1993 there were some internal political problems in BSD land (which eventually led to FreeBSD spinning off) and the "USL v. Regents of the University of California" lawsuit also cast a shadow on the legality of the BSDs.
During those two years Linux kept developing, jumped ahead and basically grabbed all the mind-share and marketing share.
The BSDs have been playing catchup since. For instance with fewer developers they had problems supporting a wide range hardware so were not even an option for many.
About a year ago I wanted to replace newlines in a file with "sed" on FreeBSD. I couldn't.
At first I thought there was an error on my side. I was very surprised to find out that you could not do that at all, it said so right there in "man sed".
Dirty hacks to work around this problem posted on stackoverflow did not work on that machine either.
Tried to mess with newlines with python. Turned out there was some kind of other problem if you open files in 'wb' mode under FreeBSD.
This experience with some of the most basic tools not working as they do on GNU/Linux made me want to avoid FreeBSD if possible.
Those people who are familiar with a Unix variant are more familiar with Linux. Linux is different enough from *BSD that what people do learn about Linux doesn't translate.
Linux entry level is actually easier than Windows these days. In fact when I look for candidates if they only have Ubuntu / Docker on their resume its trash.
What used to be considered entry level skill sets are now called "Michael Jordan" level skillsets ( kernel compile / tuning , C debugging etc etc )
Currently I use Linux because it makes me money. I use the BSD's because I like them
I still run FreeBSD 8.4 on one production system, and recently decommissioned a FreeBSD 5 box that had been happily humming away in a colo for 10 years. I learned FreeBSD before Linux and prefer almost everything else about it...except that part about updating software.
If you take security seriously, you apply security updates in a timely fashion. For a while I was diligent about it on my FreeBSD boxes, monitored vuxml, and updated vulnerable packages regularly with this:
portaudit -a |
sed -ne 's/^Affected package: //p' |
sort -u |
xargs portupgrade -P -rv
Near as I can tell Ubuntu/Debian wins here because it freezes packages alongside the OS release, except for backported security patches if you're on LTS. FreeBSD has only one ports tree. It's in constant flux, and (in my experience) is constantly broken. Why can't ports be branched off alongside the OS release and receive security backports? Maybe FreeBSD doesn't have the manpower to do this, maybe it's cultural, I'm not really sure. What I can say is it's relatively easy to check out, tweak, build and install ports on a case-by-case basis if for some reason you need the latest and greatest of something. I don't see the value in constantly having the latest and greatest of everything though, and it even seems a little antithetical to FreeBSD to me.
Anyway, so port upgrades suck, but base upgrades also suck. Doing an `apt-get dist-upgrade` to go from Ubuntu 12.04 to 14.04 "just worked." Rebuilding world to upgrade from FreeBSD 7.x to 8.x worked, but just barely, and the whole process scared the shit out of me. Random incompatibilities continued to crop up for some time after.
I think this one comes down to the integrated base userland + kernel in FreeBSD versus the "everything's a package" approach in Ubuntu/Debian. Kernel upgrades are much more common on Linux. Not that this is an objectively good thing, but rare events don't tend to get tested and optimized like routine ones do.
Note: if you're a diehard FreeBSD user and you've figured out how to keep your system up-to-date with minimum fuss, please school me.
After 18 years of running FreeBSD on my servers, my $0.02: Politics/marketing: * Most "unix" admins only know linux and will advocate for it vigorously because it is so much better than.. "what do you use again? Fedora? Ah, FreeBSD, something with F, I knew it!" * Management not always listens to reason but just wants a discussion go away, so they listen to the loudest advocates. Knowledge/Community: * It is easier t…
This is my favorite part of the Linux community. Ask something that you aren't sure of, and if it's wrong, you'll get quite some volume of responses correcting you!