Why I run FreeBSD for my home servers (2024)

With Linux there’s been many times I’ll google some problem and the only solution that turns up is for distro Y which is mostly or entirely irrelevant to distro X that I’m running at the moment. This happens even with the big mainstream distros like Ubuntu and Fedora, but of course it’s worse with more niche ones.

The only salient point in this entire article is that BSD typically is less convoluted as a system (and as a consequence... usually less capable and less supported).

I find absolutely all of the other points to be "easy cop outs". They're there to provide him a mental justification for doing the thing he wants to do anyways, without actually justifying his logic or challenging any assumptions.

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Case in point - I used to point all (most of) my hosted services at a single database. It genuinely sucked. It's a larger backup, it's a larger restore, if it goes down everything is down, and you better hope all the software you're hosting supports your preferred DB (hah - they won't, half will use postgres, half will use mysql, and half of the mysql half will actually be using mariadb, and I'm ignoring the annoying group that won't properly support a networked db at all and don't understand why I'm frustrated they only support sqlite).

You know the only thing it was actually doing for me? Marginally simplifying deployment, usually at first time setup.

You know what else the author of this post is trashing? Some pretty good tools for simplifying deployments.

Turns out... if spinning up a database is 3-10 lines in a config file, and automatic backups are super simple to configure with your deployment tool (see - all those k8s things he's bashing)... You don't even feel this pain at all.

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Basically - This is a lazy argument.

Perfectly fine personal preference (I also sometimes enjoy the simplicity of my freeBSD machines, and I run opnsense for a reason).

But a trash argument against the things he's railing against.

Switching to k3s and running kubernetes was a a pretty giant time sink to get online (think maybe 25 hours) - but since it's come online... I've never had an easier time managing my home services.

Deployment is SO fucking simple, no one machine going down takes any service down, I get automatic backups, easy storage monitoring (longhorn and NAS), I can configure easy policies to reboot services, or manage their lifecycles, I can provision another machine for the cluster in under 10 minutes, and then it just works (including GPU accelerated workloads).

These days... It's been so long since I've ssh'd into some of my machines that I occasionally have to think for a minute before I remember the hostname.

I don't think about most of them AT ALL - they just fucking work (tm).

I remember the before times - personally, I don't want to go back. It's never been easier to run your own cloud - I currently have 112 online pods across 37 services. I don't restart jack shit on my own - the system runs itself.

Everything from video streaming to LLM inference to simple wikis and bookstack.

I've worked at 'pets not cattle' and 'cattle not pets', and I vastly prefer pets. Yes, you should be able to easily bring up a new pet when you need to; yes, it must be ok if pet1 goes away, never to be seen again. But no, it's not really ok when your servers have an average lifetime of 30 days. It's very hard to offer a stable service on an unstable substrate. Automatic recovery makes sense in some cases, but if the system stops working, there's a problem that needs to be addressed when possible.

> All this being said, I have this romantic draw to FreeBSD and want to play around with it more. But every time I set up a basic box I feel teleported back to 2007.

Like another poster mentioned; this is actually a good thing. FreeBSD respects your investment in knowledge; everything you learned in 2007 still works, and most likely will continue to work. You won't need to learn a new firewall tool every decade, whichever of the three firewalls you like will keep working. You don't need to learn a new tool to configure interfaces, ifconfig will keep working. You don't need to learn a new tool to get network statistics, netstat will keep working. Etc.