It's apparently "post a link to an OS with no further comment or discussion" day, first we get SmartOS and then Linux From Scratch and now this. Nice way to farm karma, I guess. Flagging them all.
People often post follow-ups but they're usually the opposite of what we want, since the idea is to have 30 buckets of the frontpage hashed out evenly over the topic space.
Disclaimer: No disrespect meant towards FreeBSD or the maintainers.
I currently work on FreeBSD servers pretty much exclusively for my job and I have a really hard time grokking why I would want to use them over some flavor of Linux. I also work (and have worked in my career) with Linux servers (Ubuntu and Debian primarily, and things like alpine in docker) and there isn't anything I do that I think "I wish I was on FreeBSD", the opposite is not true, I semi-regularly pine for X tool or Y program that doesn't run on FreeBSD (or is harder to run).
It's very possible that I am just not using/experiencing the full power of FreeBSD (as in: I'm too dumb to know how great it is) but if I had pro/con columns for FreeBSD I can think of a number of cons and very few pros that Linux doesn't share. Again, there is a very good chance that I'm "holding it wrong", but I've heard "oh, but not on FreeBSD" or "Hmm, they don't support FreeBSD" about too many things that might have solved issues we've run into at my job.
Maybe I'm boring or maybe I'm just lazy but I feel like Linux is the past of least resistance, it has the most info online available, the most guides, blog posts, LLM training, etc.
I'd be interested to hear what people on HN like best about FreeBSD so I can see if it applies to my usage or not and to see if I can't learn new tips/tricks.
BSD can be a better choice for a variety of reasons. Firstly business reasons BSD has more permissive licences than Linux's GNU licence which compels you to share any modifications you make to the software. BSD uses the MIT licenses which state that you are allowed to modify the source code and not release it, which is why most embedded devices like routers/firewalls use BSD over Linux. That and BSD is faster at networking.
It also has better storage (ZFS), although this is now implemented in Linux, it is not as stable as BSD which developed it specifically for their OS.
I run most of my personal network infra (routers, DNS servers, etc.) on FreeBSD because I have been running it on FreeBSD since the late 90's, and have never had any reason to change it.
In all that time, I've never felt like I suffered from lack of information on how to get things done: the documentation is generally good, and I've always been able to fill in any missing details by reading shell scripts and, very very rarely, source code.
While the "better" security than Linux argument is weak, the FreeBSD/OpenBSD OS network packet handling is extremely good (common OS for routers etc.) =3
I ended up switching from FreeBSD to Linux twice (TrueNAS CORE -> TrueNAS SCALE, opnSense -> OpenWrt) due to poor network performance on FreeBSD. Could just never get 10 Gbps throughput on FreeBSD, whereas Linux on the same hardware was fine. Across Intel and Mellanox NICs, so not a specific driver issue.
Mine: It's not Linux. Linux feels like a heavy weight. Compiling a kernel is tideous. If a service fails, systemd breaks which a PITA in to fix. "Waiting for X/Y to quit", NetworkManager is archaic.
I've found that on RedHat based distro's you have to at least enable different repo's (epel, rpmfusion, el) just to get the packages required. Debian you're already out of date but that's for security, so fair enough. It's under corporate control, Ubuntu (Canonical) is corporate, anything RedHat (IBM) are corporate. You try to look online for a reason why SSSD is failing and the actual answers are hidden behind a paywall on redhat.com
We have aggressive HP machines designed for Windows with 4000RTX's which get used for rendering. They get thrashed and for the studio to obtain further TPN status I am moving from Windows to Linux. The struggles on a good day to operate with them is insanity. I'm now drinking 2x double shot lattes a day from just a single, double shot. Next it will be whisky, some days I have snuck in a shot of Mezcal before work in hope the Mezcal gods save the day.
FreeBSD handles them like a champ. TPN doesn't recognize FreeBSD so it has to be Rocky Linux.
I needed a PXE server, this shop only had a old 2009 mac mini left over in the cupboard. It does the job, 100Mbit is fine for provisioning, and if I want more I'll just use a USB Ethernet dongle. Linux, failed. FreeBSD, booted off memory stick and has been working flawlessly. I now have a working PXE server coded in TCL and running on FreeBSD. It's glorious and because so I've now been told going forward all my future creations must be Python. Urgh but fair enough, TCL is niche.
ZFS <3, why the hell TrueNAS went Linux is beyond my grasp.
I run FBSD 16 (bleeding edge) on my main rig, 4x screens. 2x27' 4K, 2x27' all work flawlessly with Xorg.
Jails are fantastic, my web browsers never touch the OS and at any point I can torch them and roll back to a clean snapshots. Thanks ZFS.
Four of my colocated servers are running FreeBSD. Two of them have over 1000 days uptime.
My laptop which works flawlessly including suspend (MSI Modern 2015) works as my media TV station with Bluetooth audio streaming to my sound bar with a 3rd party HDMI transmitter. This runs FreeBSD.
I didn't see you give any reason to why you don't like FreeBSD. because what you can do on Linux, you can do on FreeBSD.
./configure, make, make install. Nothing else is required unless you want docker, then eww. go away.
My life of a FreeBSD admin has been a large weight off my shoulders. And I was there when Linux was on the 2.x branch kernel & you had to write your own X config without internet at the age of 13. If it wasn't for Minix pissing off Linus, Linux wouldn't of existed. The only distribution if forced would be Slackware.
I will say the FreeBSD handbook is such a breath of fresh air compared to other OS documentation. Everything is easy to find and well formatted. Same goes for the OS internals themselves. It's just a cohesive project altogether.
You're seeing the benefit of the cathedral model right there: a centralized, architected approach yields unified documentation, whereas the bazaar is inherently fragmented.
Back in college I spent some time translating portions of it to Russian. It was super easy to work with the project on that. I honestly have no idea if any of my contributions are still a part of it but I am really glad I did that.
I ran it for a while it’s nice. Easy as breathing ZFS on root and zfsbootmenu is really nice. Also the userland is maintained in connection with the kernel (or something to that extent) and it’s just a nice solid whole.
not to pick on OP but what is up with all the links to OS project homepages today? i've seen illumos, LFS, FreeBSD and a handful of others. did i miss something (other than W11 shitting the bed with app launching) that's got people suddenly interested in alternative OSes today?
When you finally understand the full stack you inevitably end up down operating system rabbit holes.
You try them out. To jump distro to distro. Linux to BSD to Linux to Amiga EMU to C64 to BSD again. It’s a short circuit of the brain. One that thinks if they just learn one more thing. In the end, learning how these things work makes us better engineers. Knowing how compilers work makes us better engineers. Knowing how our mind works makes us better engineers. If you don’t want to go down the rabbit hole, don’t. Enjoy the Vista, or National Parks, or whatever you got going on. Some of us like digging underground.
(This is just fun poking at what I’ve observed and in no way represents you, the OP, or my employer.)
The site guidelines is supposed to be anything that a hacker finds interesting.
This feels a bit like dumping the manual to a Toyota Camry without explanation. It’s technical, but what’s interesting?
Maybe there is interesting stuff in here - but I’d love to see submissions do some kind of analysis to justify it - like an appreciation of an example of well-run user documentation, or a highlighting a clear and concise explanation of how a particular subsystem works.
These posts just rocket to the top of Hacker News with no discussion.
At a certain point in some use-cases the Linux problems outweigh the "improvements", and more traditional partially conformant posix systems reduce complexity.
For example, the reduced attack surface area of OpenBSD hardware support is a kick in the pants for average users, but desirable for hardened system design.
Why does none of this really matter practically? (seriously it doesn't)
In general, Linux has so many people looking at its code, that the CVE and driver issues will be addressed with higher frequency. Thus, FreeBSD/OpenBSD lower 0-day incident rates tend to be illusionary, as the security incidents in fringe OS always have lower discovery probability.
I am a fan of most things posix, and acknowledge most problems originate from Application space rather than the OS itself. =3
I've said it before too, it is exemplary in terms of what documentation should be ; just read through it with a VM on, type the things, and everything just works, no googling or LLMing around. I heard it is the same for other BSDs as well, will try those some day. Also a testimony of how coherent this system is.
As a seasonned SRE it is a breathe of fresh air in this world where everything else seems to change from one version to another and nothing seems to work at first try, ever.
Readit News
People often post follow-ups but they're usually the opposite of what we want, since the idea is to have 30 buckets of the frontpage hashed out evenly over the topic space.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
I currently work on FreeBSD servers pretty much exclusively for my job and I have a really hard time grokking why I would want to use them over some flavor of Linux. I also work (and have worked in my career) with Linux servers (Ubuntu and Debian primarily, and things like alpine in docker) and there isn't anything I do that I think "I wish I was on FreeBSD", the opposite is not true, I semi-regularly pine for X tool or Y program that doesn't run on FreeBSD (or is harder to run).
It's very possible that I am just not using/experiencing the full power of FreeBSD (as in: I'm too dumb to know how great it is) but if I had pro/con columns for FreeBSD I can think of a number of cons and very few pros that Linux doesn't share. Again, there is a very good chance that I'm "holding it wrong", but I've heard "oh, but not on FreeBSD" or "Hmm, they don't support FreeBSD" about too many things that might have solved issues we've run into at my job.
Maybe I'm boring or maybe I'm just lazy but I feel like Linux is the past of least resistance, it has the most info online available, the most guides, blog posts, LLM training, etc.
I'd be interested to hear what people on HN like best about FreeBSD so I can see if it applies to my usage or not and to see if I can't learn new tips/tricks.
It also has better storage (ZFS), although this is now implemented in Linux, it is not as stable as BSD which developed it specifically for their OS.
In all that time, I've never felt like I suffered from lack of information on how to get things done: the documentation is generally good, and I've always been able to fill in any missing details by reading shell scripts and, very very rarely, source code.
I use Arch for superior hardware support on the laptop and FreeBSD on the server for superior software management.
I've found that on RedHat based distro's you have to at least enable different repo's (epel, rpmfusion, el) just to get the packages required. Debian you're already out of date but that's for security, so fair enough. It's under corporate control, Ubuntu (Canonical) is corporate, anything RedHat (IBM) are corporate. You try to look online for a reason why SSSD is failing and the actual answers are hidden behind a paywall on redhat.com
We have aggressive HP machines designed for Windows with 4000RTX's which get used for rendering. They get thrashed and for the studio to obtain further TPN status I am moving from Windows to Linux. The struggles on a good day to operate with them is insanity. I'm now drinking 2x double shot lattes a day from just a single, double shot. Next it will be whisky, some days I have snuck in a shot of Mezcal before work in hope the Mezcal gods save the day.
FreeBSD handles them like a champ. TPN doesn't recognize FreeBSD so it has to be Rocky Linux.
I needed a PXE server, this shop only had a old 2009 mac mini left over in the cupboard. It does the job, 100Mbit is fine for provisioning, and if I want more I'll just use a USB Ethernet dongle. Linux, failed. FreeBSD, booted off memory stick and has been working flawlessly. I now have a working PXE server coded in TCL and running on FreeBSD. It's glorious and because so I've now been told going forward all my future creations must be Python. Urgh but fair enough, TCL is niche.
ZFS <3, why the hell TrueNAS went Linux is beyond my grasp.
I run FBSD 16 (bleeding edge) on my main rig, 4x screens. 2x27' 4K, 2x27' all work flawlessly with Xorg.
Jails are fantastic, my web browsers never touch the OS and at any point I can torch them and roll back to a clean snapshots. Thanks ZFS.
Four of my colocated servers are running FreeBSD. Two of them have over 1000 days uptime.
My laptop which works flawlessly including suspend (MSI Modern 2015) works as my media TV station with Bluetooth audio streaming to my sound bar with a 3rd party HDMI transmitter. This runs FreeBSD.I didn't see you give any reason to why you don't like FreeBSD. because what you can do on Linux, you can do on FreeBSD.
./configure, make, make install. Nothing else is required unless you want docker, then eww. go away.
My life of a FreeBSD admin has been a large weight off my shoulders. And I was there when Linux was on the 2.x branch kernel & you had to write your own X config without internet at the age of 13. If it wasn't for Minix pissing off Linus, Linux wouldn't of existed. The only distribution if forced would be Slackware.
e.g. Thin Jails
https://docs.freebsd.org/en/books/handbook/jails/#thin-jailh...
You try them out. To jump distro to distro. Linux to BSD to Linux to Amiga EMU to C64 to BSD again. It’s a short circuit of the brain. One that thinks if they just learn one more thing. In the end, learning how these things work makes us better engineers. Knowing how compilers work makes us better engineers. Knowing how our mind works makes us better engineers. If you don’t want to go down the rabbit hole, don’t. Enjoy the Vista, or National Parks, or whatever you got going on. Some of us like digging underground.
(This is just fun poking at what I’ve observed and in no way represents you, the OP, or my employer.)
This feels a bit like dumping the manual to a Toyota Camry without explanation. It’s technical, but what’s interesting?
Maybe there is interesting stuff in here - but I’d love to see submissions do some kind of analysis to justify it - like an appreciation of an example of well-run user documentation, or a highlighting a clear and concise explanation of how a particular subsystem works.
These posts just rocket to the top of Hacker News with no discussion.
For example, the reduced attack surface area of OpenBSD hardware support is a kick in the pants for average users, but desirable for hardened system design.
Why does none of this really matter practically? (seriously it doesn't)
In general, Linux has so many people looking at its code, that the CVE and driver issues will be addressed with higher frequency. Thus, FreeBSD/OpenBSD lower 0-day incident rates tend to be illusionary, as the security incidents in fringe OS always have lower discovery probability.
I am a fan of most things posix, and acknowledge most problems originate from Application space rather than the OS itself. =3
As a seasonned SRE it is a breathe of fresh air in this world where everything else seems to change from one version to another and nothing seems to work at first try, ever.