Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Why I love FreeBSD

it-notes.dragas.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 270 posts

Re: Why I love FreeBSD

#71

Post by doublerabbit »

commandersaki wrote: post #65

Ran 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…

I colocate all my servers that all run FreeBSD.

Myself has been through generational hardware, and had had zero issues with any apart from when the raid card failed.

Network has been solid. ZFS has just worked. Not sure what your issues were however colocating since FreeBSD 8, and now colocating 16-CURRENT on my the server. FreeBSD has been rock stable in my books.

2x Dell R630 and 1x Cisco U220 M5

    doublerabbit@cookie:~ $ uname -a && uptime
    FreeBSD cookie.server 12.2-BETA1 FreeBSD 12.2-BETA1 r365618 GENERIC  amd64
    10:39PM  up 1752 days,  1:31, 1 user, load averages: 0.64, 1.30, 1.31

Re: Why I love FreeBSD

#72

Post by xenophonf »

w4rh4wk5 wrote: post #70

For 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 love FreeBSD for its documentation. To answer your question about Wayland specifically:

https://docs.freebsd.org/en/books/handbook/wayland/

If you want something with a graphical environment ready to run, check out GhostBSD, which is based on FreeBSD and features MATE:

https://www.ghostbsd.org/

Re: Why I love FreeBSD

#73

Post by jmmv »

krylon wrote: 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…

> 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.

I haven't done that yet because I think I'd want to switch to pkgbase but that makes me nervous. Did you go with that option or continued to use the sets?

Re: Why I love FreeBSD

#74

Post by adiabatichottub »

MisterTea wrote: post #44
krylon wrote: 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…

ZFS on FreeBSD is first class. I had an old FreeNAS raid z5 array on 5x 500GB disks that I wanted to check 4 years after decommissioning the system. I put together a temporary machine with all the disks plugged in and without doing anything the live FreeBSD image found and configured the array. I was instantly able to look through the file system and even dump it to my current FreeBSD server with almost 0 effort. I w…

Right. On my development workstation I use Arch and I'm always worried a kernel upgrade is going to break the ZFS module. For those that aren't familiar, ZFS isn't part of mainline Linux because of licensing incompatibility (and general distrust of Oracle).

On FreeBSD I know its always going to work.

Re: Why I love FreeBSD

#75

Post by atmosx »

krylon wrote: 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?

Yes. Emulate traffic latency using IPFW and dummynet[^1]. There is no Linux (or OpenBSD, NetBSD) counterpart.

The ZFS implementation is less buggy.

[^1]: https://man.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?dummynet

Re: Why I love FreeBSD

#76

Post by steve1977 »

philistine wrote: post #68
MarkusWandel wrote: post #49

Early in my Unix-ish at home journey (26-ish years ago) I tried FreeBSD. It was so Unix because, well, it is. An operating system, not a collection of parts. I found at the time in Linux land Debian felt similar. But there is always pressure for more features, more bloat. In Linux, on the plus side, I can plug in some random gadget and in most cases it just works. And any laptop that's a few years old, you can just i…

FreeBSD is the macOS to Linux's Windows. Or better yet, the iOS to Linux's Android.

I mean, parts of FreeBSD literally are in macOS and iOS...

Re: Why I love FreeBSD

#77

Post by atmosx »

zenoprax wrote: post #67
krylon wrote: 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? If you asked the opposite (what can Debian do that FreeBSD cannot) I would have more to say and it would mostly be preceded by "I know FreeBSD is not Linux but ...". Whenever I need to do any sort of maintenance or inspection I have to look up the equivalent commands for things like `lsblk` and something nested in `/usr/etc/...` when I'm used to finding it…

Lack of docker support? Docker is available on macOS through emulation yes but bhyve is a thing… so why not? :-)

Re: Why I love FreeBSD

#78

Post by adiabatichottub »

throwaway27448 wrote: post #61
toast0 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

What documentation does a distro even publish? I only ask because freebsd has the most solid documentation I've used of any OS I've ever encountered. I seriously doubt Debian has documented the linux kernel that well (which, tbf, would be an insane project to even attempt)

I've been surprised at times by what's missing. There are are some strange omissions, from most recent memory around the Bourne shell builtin commands and make(1). I've had to go hunting in other BSD distribution manuals at times to find what I need. I'd say the GNU core utilities sometimes have better docs for their equivalent commands.

That said, for non-core utilities on Linux it's pretty hit-or-miss. The BSDs are generally pretty consistent in what they do offer, and that's what I love about them. Of course it's a different development model and it shows.

Re: Why I love FreeBSD

#79

Post by Gud »

Hendrikto wrote: post #2

A week ago, I decided to set up my home server with FreeBSD, after the HDD failed, just to try it out. The setup was quick and easy and everything works fine so far. I am just not sure it is worth leaving the Linux ecosystem. What if I want to run a Docker container? Do I have to trust random people for ports of software that runs natively on Linux, or port it myself? FreeBSD seems good so far, but community and ecos…

You should avoid Docker, is the obvious answer, and grow to love FreeBSD jails.

Re: Why I love FreeBSD

#80

Post by jbverschoor »

whizzter wrote: post #22
krylon wrote: 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.

Exactly the reason why I switched from FreeBSD to Debian, 25 years ago
Post reply on HN