Around 10 years ago, I picked up an old Thinkpad T42, put FreeBSD on it, and had an amazing experience. Actually used it as a daily driver for a while, which seems crazy in retrospect, but I enjoy trying to work within that kind of constraint sometimes. I miss it! This post rekindles the flame...
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 there anything FreeBSD can do that, say, Debian cannot? Probably not (at least I cannot think of anything). When I set up the server, ZFS was a huge selling point, but I heard that it works quite well on Linux, these days. But I appreciate the reliability, the good documentation, the community (when I need help).
There are various niche applications where Debian or any Linux are worse than FreeBSD.
For example the support for magnetic tapes and for a few other SCSI peripherals is better in FreeBSD. The Linux utility for controlling a LTO tape drive lacks some important options that the corresponding FreeBSD utility has.
I have a tape drive, and to be able to use it like I want I had to move it to a FreeBSD server.
Some years ago I was using a surveillance camera that was much easier to use in FreeBSD than in Linux, if you wanted to record good quality video and audio. I have not tried more recently to use such cameras in Linux, to see if now the recording quality is better.
So while there are more hardware devices that have better support in Linux than in FreeBSD, there are also devices with better support in FreeBSD than in Linux.
However the main reason why I use FreeBSD on many of my servers is that I need much less time for their administration than for Linux servers. In my experience, Linux servers need much less time for administration than Windows servers, and FreeBSD compares to Linux like Linux to Windows.
I have FreeBSD servers that I have not touched for years, and they have worked 24/7 with no downtime and no rebooting, and this includes servers connected directly to the Internet, which implement firewalls, routers and various services, like NTP, DNS servers and proxies, e-mail servers, web servers and proxies etc.
> I have FreeBSD servers that I have not touched for years, and they have worked 24/7 with no downtime and no rebooting, and this includes servers connected directly to the Internet, which implement firewalls, routers and various services, like NTP, DNS servers and proxies, e-mail servers, web servers and proxies etc.
Same. We've got qmail config files with 2006 as the mtime
Cameras? I suppose the world still has some weird cameras that need proprietary/weird drivers, but for all intents and purposes: USB cameras are UVC and work with a generic driver, and IP cameras are OnVIF and work with ffmpeg. I can't imagine the latter having any OS dependencies as far as Linux/BSD/Mac/Windows is concerned. Quality is fine - I have a bunch recording 24/7 with high quality audio and video.
> Some years ago I was using a surveillance camera that was much easier to use in FreeBSD than in Linux, if you wanted to record good quality video and audio. I have not tried more recently to use such cameras in Linux, to see if now the recording quality is better.
A Logitech FullHD camera on USB, but I doubt that the problem was camera-specific. I believe that I would have seen the same behavior on any high-resolution USB camera.
In FreeBSD, the command required for recording was very simple and it worked flawlessly. In Linux, it was more complex and there were various stuttering problems at maximum resolution. I am still using those cameras, but I have not tried them again in Linux. In Linux they worked worse than in FreeBSD around 5 years ago, perhaps nowadays there is no longer any problem in Linux.
This was intended to be an example that you cannot know a priori whether a given device will work better on FreeBSD or on Linux. In general, there is a greater probability for Linux to have good support than for FreeBSD, but there are also counterexamples, so you cannot be certain which is better until you try both.
I am sorry, I have a hard time accepting this level of detail, acknowledging it was half a decade ago.
In a nutshell, you content that FreeBSD running on the same hardware as "a linux" performed better with camera operations. However, you did not specify even a specific camera model, or the interface(s) used to interact with the camera.
I have zero issue accepting that a BSD is better than a linux at things, pretending otherwise is foolish. However, this specific example isn't tracking.
I have already said that it was an USB camera, using the UVC protocol, and that it had FullHD resolution. Nothing else really matters about the interface.
FreeBSD has a dedicated service for USB cameras, webcamd, and it worked very well for capturing video and audio at maximum resolution, and without interference from any other programs that were running concurrently on the server. As I have said, in Linux not only the required configuration was more complex, but I tried several programs and all had stutter problems at FullHD resolution (while other programs were also running on the computer). That was the status at that time. Now, many kernel versions later, I assume that such problems no longer exist, at least not with old cameras.
I do not see what is not tracking for you in this example. It is not an isolated example, for many years FreeBSD was known to have less problems than Linux in handling video streams and audio streams with low latency and constant throughput. More recently, Linux has also improved, but in the past unreliable performance with certain video/audio devices was not unusual (i.e. where other programs running concurrently caused video/audio drops or delays).
That’s fair. I’m struggling to understand how Linux had a harder time interfacing with a USB byte stream than a bsd would. A model for the camera would be great!
> 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 in `/etc/` over every other system.
This is a consequence of both FreeBSD's reliability in needing very infrequent attention and my limited use-cases to use it. As a NAS it is great but I can't touch it without full-text search of all my notes on the side! Either way, no regrets about learning and relying on it after ~18 months so far.
Lack of good NFS support? When we benchmarked it last it was 10x+ slower than running on linux (ubuntu).
Also lack of collective mindshare. I use FreeBSD at work every since day and while I don't hate it, I do wish we just used Linux. There are more guides, tools, etc for Linux than for FreeBSD. Yes, as a comment in this sub-thread stated, jails exist but everyone knows docker, not jails. So even with jails apparently being better than containers, it doesn't really matter, there isn't the ecosystem there.
FreeBSD might be as good as this blog author makes it out to be, and maybe I'm "holding it wrong" (always a strong possibility) but I can't help but feel it causes more friction than I'd like, it's just "slightly" harder to do anything. In the age of LLMs I have to tell it (or put it in my system prompt) "I'm using FreeBSD" or it will be give me Linux advice. It just feels like death by a thousand papercuts.
Docker is a concept resembling FreeBSD's jails that were introduced in year 2000, having much better isolation, much better security than Docker has had for a long time (perhaps even now jails are still superior to Docker).
Better isolation, better security, but far fewer gists and shared config-files shared ok the Internet for common tasks. Docker comprehensively wkn thr popularity contest, and is often the more convenient solution because of it, in a worse is better way.
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 was sold after that. These days I prefer to run small systems and basic services. I don't want webguis or docker images anymore.
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).
Just so you know: the zfs in freebsd and in linux are the same codebase. Literally. It’s OpenZFS.
Also, a few years ago the FreeBSD people decided to throw away their own ZFS implementation and import the linux one (OpenZFS) because they couldn’t keep up with the development pace.
Nowadays ZFS development is collaborative but in each major freebsd release it’s clearly marked which OpenZFS releases they imported in the FreeBSD codebase.
FreeBSD is an amazing beast. I'm currently using it as my workstation, and because I need to use Linux, bhyve came to the rescue and is easy to use it through the `vm` wrapper tool. It works like a charm and it is built in.
Being that said, on FreeBSD 15, I believe I've found a serious bug: when I disconnect a USB optical mouse on the "Lenovo 16 G7 ARP" the system completes freezes and reboots, I guess it reaches a kernel panic. It took me a few disconnections of the power, ethernet and finally the mouse to detect this condition.
Surprinsingly this does not happen if the device is wireless (I tried to remove the receiver of a Trackball and the system keeps working just fine). I find this really weird and don't know if actually report it in the FreeBSD forums, maybe is just a glitch on this particular laptop or it has something to do with the touchpad, just guessing here.
Putting this particular issue aside, I'm extremely happy that almost everything works with little or no effort on a recent/modern laptop.
>Is there anything FreeBSD can do that, say, Debian cannot?
ZFS boot environments.
One could install Debian's root on ZFS by following the OpenZFS documentation guide, combine it with ZFSBootMenu (or similar), but there won't be any upstream support from the Debian project itself.
The Nitrux Linux distribution is based on Debian and provides an immutable feature similar to boot environments, but you can't treat your immutable boot images the same way you can treat your mutable data like how you can with ZFS datasets on FreeBSD.
On openSUSE Tumbleweed, it is. Each Upgrade creates two snapshots, one before, one after, and if anything goes wrong, I can boot into a snapshot where the world was still in order.
I have a higher opinion of ZFS than I do of btrfs, but FWIW snapper+btrfs has worked well for me on openSUSE Tumbleweed for ten years now, too.
Last I heard (~8 years ago), the RAID-like functionality in btrfs was very unstable and crash-prone. The impression I got was that there was not a lot of interest in fixing this. Then bcachefs came and ... appears to have gone nowhere AFAICT.
The non-RAID part of btrfs appears to be stable. It's the default filesystem on openSUSE and SLES. But I don't think it's ever going to reach feature parity with ZFS.
btrfs is suffering from a lot of old bad publicity and some poor design decisions around RAID.
But by now it is a great file system if you don't go near RAID5/6. btrfs has its flaws (ZFS has its own flaws!). However:
- It's used a lot, especially by facebook and Redhat (on fedora)
- Gets a lot of testing
- Sees a lot of bug fixes
- Has a lot of features
I haven't read btrfs code but given that it is a popular file system and Linux code quality tends to be good in popular subsystems I would hesitate to say its code quality is worse than ZFS in any way.
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)
Debian has an installation guide[1]. I'd imagine all the major distributions do.
But it probably has to change a lot for every major release, because so many things change. FreeBSD major releases have changes too, but a lot of the user interfaces are very stable and so the documentation can be too. Stable documentation allows time for it to be edited and revised to become better documentation, as well as developing quality translations.
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.
That is not really accurate? Linux traffic control (tc, [0]) exists since Kernel 2.2. It can introduce traffic latency and a few other network conditions, like packet loss.
Hmm kind of... I was referring to the fact that dummynet models pipes with a fixed bandwidth and centralized scheduler. Packets are released according to very high precision transmission timing. This means that serialization delay, queue buildup, and link behavior are simulated in a way that resembles real network conditions. Dummynet can provide a highly deterministic timing and queue behavior, which made it popular in networking research and WAN emulation experiments. TC cannot do that with the same accuracy.
I think much like other tools, think SELinux vs OpenBSD (unveil, etc) TC is more flexible (does more things) but there are _some things_ that can't do, and even for things both can do *BSD solutions are much simpler.
AFAIK the most common is ARC but there are other areas as well.
On Linux, ARC memory is reclaimed using the kernel shrinker API which has historically been a problem. There has been several bugs leading to OOMs or system freeze due to high memory usage on systems that use ARC heavily.
On FreeBSD ARC is integrated directly with the VM subsystem. The stack is simpler, less bug-prone.
Now this is not a ZFS algo/whatever problem. It's an implementation/subsystem issue but it's still something to keep an eye on for the ZFS admin.
ps. I'm using ZFS on Linux for 15 years on a self-hosted, home backup server and only once I've had mem issues leading to crashes when I misconfigured the ARC. So it's fairly _stable_ but still not FreeBSD-level stable.
Theoretically yes, however still limited by how well the FreeBSD Linux layer handles syscalls. A year or so back I tried running .NET (just binaries, not via a container) since the port wasn't as far along as today and it crashed due to what I suspect was slight differences in signal handling defaults.
And this is part of the situation that's going to get worse, io_uring will become more popular in language runtimes and iirc it's not trivial to emulate via existing FreeBSD mechanisms (kqueue).
Iirc Mac docker uses xhyve (bhyve port/inspired) to run containers via Linux emulation, MS went for pv-Linux for WSL2, while FreeBSD has been "good enough" so far.
But I think that for containers it's either time to shape up Linux emulation well (It's ironic that WSL1 ironed out their worst quirks just as WSL2 was introduced, although that was without io_uring) or just add an option for Podman to have a minimal pv-Linux kernel via bhyve to get better compatibility.
Indeed, ideally we could get docker on FreeBSD using the same approach as is used on macOS — automatically run (one or more) Linux VMs under bhyve.
I wonder if FreeBSD ought to consider a WSL2-style approach to Linux binary compatibility, too.
Keeping the Linux syscall compatibility layer up-to-date has always been a resource problem, especially when syscalls depend on large, complex Linux kernel subsystems that just don’t map cleanly to FreeBSD kernel facilities.
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)
I've fixed too many linux-isms in code manually over the years, pkg/ports does what it should but since *nix tradition relies on hardcoded paths I often wanted out-of-tree builds for various software.
And that's the thing, as I grow older I feel more and more that I just want the parts of computing that I don't want to _care_ about to be stupid simple.
If I'm doing a program needing a recent version of some language that doesn't have a FreeBSD port yet and some database behind it, I don't really want to configure it all manually because I don't particularly care for porting the runtime or managing the database (that isn't exposed to the outside world anyhow).
This is stuff where I don't want a large CI pipe or other management (or needing to remember to upgrade the packages if I upgrade the hosting OS).
Stuff like this is why "the clouds are winning", friction should be linear depending on the effort I want to put into managing something.
But going for real HW or even VPS a places an "upgrade tax" on me because I can't just let non-public services like an isolated DB just ride-along over major versions (maybe Jails with isolated userlands could be an option, but that becomes painful instead when needing newer versions of the application behind the veil).
> 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?
Why not create a boot environment and try out FreeBSD 15 with pkgbase ? If the experiment is successful just make the boot environment the default otherwise throw it away...
With such powerful tools I find it fascinating that FreeBSD users are not more willing to experiment !
I haven't switched to pkgbase. Yet. I don't intend to for the time being. I set up a VM to test it, but I haven't gotten around to actually testing it.
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 install Fedora from its bootable live image, and it will work. Secure boot, suspend, Wifi, the special buttons on the keyboard, and so on. But the downside is enormous bloat and yes, often the kind of tinkering you really don't want to do any more, such as the Brother laser printer drivers still being shipped as 32-bit binaries and the installer silently failing because one particular 32-bit dependency wasn't autoinstalled. Or having to get an Ubuntu-dedicated installer (Displaylink!) to run on Fedora.
But here you have the "mainstream" Unix-ish OS absorbing all the bleeding edge stuff, all the bloat. Allowing FreeBSD free reign to be pure, with a higher average quality of user, which sets the tone of the whole scene. An echo of the old days, like Usenet before "Eternal September" and before Canter & Siegel - for those old enough to remember how it all felt back then.
Well, all those years ago, my testbed for installing and trying out FreeBSD was a 486 with 8MB of memory. That was a heck of a machine compared to the ones BSD grew up on, and it ran great. No GUI on that setup of course, but all the Unixy stuff... vi editor, C toolchain, NFS etc.
I don't know what's the minimum system to run no-GUI mainline Linux on these days. I'm sure BSD has gotten bloated too, but I'll bet not as much.
I am a long time Debian Netinst (terminal) user, and Mint Cinnamon for Desktop.
OPNSense run on FreeBSD and it just works.
My personal issue is that I do not believe FreeBSD will give me a smooth experience to get my GPU and what not running. On Mint Cinnamon, I only had to install the latest supported kernel to get my RTX and WiFi6 card recognised.
Debian, the reason why I run Debian as a server everywhere, even in my 3D printer is because it just work, and not just that.
I only run Debian Netinst version, that means to only install standard system and SSH, text mode is the way.
We are talking about 300MB of memory being used by Pihole + Unbound Recursive DNS of 512MB running on a Debian 13.
Disk space?? 1GB or so I guess.
These are my blockers to even try raw FreeBSD, lack of proper hardware support and as a server even if I remove everything I can, I do not imagine FreeBSD running with 300MB/1G of resources.
Not to mention if you work in IT in any way, the last thing you wanna is fighting the system you use to solve another problem, that is why I left Ubuntu after 13years or so, it is a Windows within the Linux world now.
A distro Linux must just run, no dramas, no issues, major system release goes like nothing happened. That matters!!!
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 diligently follow up and perform experiments. This also happened on different incarnations of server hardware, so it wasn't the same physical NIC having the issue, but different varieties.
Anyways had enough of the random downtime, I just switched to Linux which didn't have these issues.
I'd say the best part of FreeBSD though is freebsd-update which was a game changer from the previous make world shenanigans.
Intel has had a somewhat awkward relationship with FreeBSD forever. While they are forced to support it (for $reasons) they never have properly covered it.
I would say as of FreeBSD 12-13 most major issues are addressed from 1gig up to current 100g. There is an odd bug in 2.5g igc where some users have interface stalls whilst others like Netgate are shipping large numbers without issue, waiting to hear if this is firmware or not.
Source: I maintain several of the Intel drivers on a volunteer basis and used to send several Tbit/s to the Internet over them professionally.
I do not believe that your problems are typical for FreeBSD servers.
I have been using FreeBSD servers for around 30 years. Most of them had Intel NICs and I have used at least 5 or 6 different kinds of Supermicro motherboards, both with Xeon and with Epyc.
Most servers have worked 24/7, without being rebooted for years and without having any minute of downtime except when I did some hardware upgrade or kernel upgrade.
I do not doubt that you had the problems described, but there must be some very unusual circumstances that have caused this. I would not be surprised if there was some problem with the version of Supermicro BIOS of your motherboards, and not with FreeBSD, because I have seen many bugs in Supermicro firmware. Or perhaps you had some buggy version of Intel NICs.
There is one advantage of Linux over FreeBSD, which is not widely known. Linux has a huge database of known bugs in various peripheral devices, including Ethernet NICs, and when one of those is recognized it applies workarounds for the bugs.
Like any other operating system, FreeBSD also implements workarounds for peripheral interfaces with known bugs, but because it has a much smaller user base also its database of bugs includes much fewer bugs, typically only those that had been reported by FreeBSD users. Because of this, I have seen cases when some hardware devices did not work well in FreeBSD, while they worked well in Linux, and the reason was always because Linux knew that they must not be used in the standard way, but it applied the corresponding workaround for their bugs.
Only Windows is shielded from the problems caused by bugs, because the hardware vendors write themselves the Windows device drivers and include in them any required workarounds for their bugs.
This looks to be a theme in FreeBSD, specifically tweaking mbuf numbers because of exhaustion [1], [2], [3], [4] (and not to mention any posted on the freebsd bug tracker). The fact that you have options to tweak mbufs and limits in the first place just doesn't seem like a well thought out design -- in Linux you never have to specify skbuff (Linux's mbuf equivalent) numbers for any reason. I don't even know if my issue was hardware specific or just a FreeBSD-ism to do with mbufs, but it is a class of issue that just doesn't exist in Linux.
While you are right that it would be better to never need tweaking the number of buffers, all your links show such a problem caused by the same application, the firewall pf.
I assume that for some reason pf consumes more buffers than other applications, so it is likely to cause such problems. So pf users should preemptively change the default configuration.
I have never used pf, because I prefer the native FreeBSD firewall, both to pf and to the Linux firewall.
With the native firewall and with the many other networking applications that I have run, I have never seen buffer exhaustion, and like I have said, the mean time between reboots was well above a year.
FreeBSD and the other *BSDs have always been famous for not needing reboots, even after years of continuous operation. For this goal, avoiding memory fragmentation caused by dynamic allocation is essential. Thus static allocation for various kinds of resources might be necessary.
> There is one advantage of Linux over FreeBSD, which is not widely known. Linux has a huge database of known bugs in various peripheral devices, including Ethernet NICs, and when one of those is recognized it applies workarounds for the bugs.
Almost universal hardware support and workarounds for quirks is precisely the reason why everyone uses Linux even if they might want to use FreeBSD or something else. In other words, this advantage is known and is the reason why Linux is dominant in the server space today.
It is widely known that Linux has "better" hardware support for many peripheral devices, but few know what "better" means, i.e. that a lot of devices that you can buy have various bugs and in most cases their vendors do not document the bugs in any way, because they provide Windows drivers that contain workarounds for the bugs, and they do not care about other operating systems.
The users of other operating systems must discover the bugs and how to handle them by reverse engineering, and here Linux has the advantage of a much greater user base than any alternative, so in most cases the bugs will be identified by some Linux user, and then either the user or the maintainers of the corresponding Linux subsystem will implement a workaround for the bug.
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.
I think I finally know what to do with my second NUC: FreeBSD.
I'm in the process of converting and consolidating all my home infra into a mono-compose, for the simple reason I don't want to fiddle with shit, I just want to set-and-forget. The joy of technology was in communications and experiences, not having to dive through abstraction layers to figure out why something was being fiddly. Containers promised to remove the fiddliness (as every virtualization advancement inevitably promises), and now I'm forced to either fiddle with Docker and its root security issues, fiddle with Podman and reconfiguring the OS for lower security so containers don't stop (or worse, converting compose to systemd files to make them services), or fiddle with Kubernetes to make things work with a myriad of ancillary services and CRDs for enterprises, not homelabs.
For two years now, there's been a pretty consistent campaign of love-letters for the BSDs that keep tugging at what I love about technology: that the whole point was to enable you to spend more time living, rather than wrangling what a computer does and how it does it. The concept of jails where I can just run software again, no abstractions needed, and trust it to not misbehave? Amazing, I want to learn more.
So yeah, in lieu of setting up the second NUC as a Debian HA node for Docker/QEMU failover, I think I'm going to slap FreeBSD on it and try porting my workloads to it via Jails. Worst case scenario, I learn something new; best case scenario, I finally get what I want and can finally catch up on my books, movies, shows, and music instead of constantly fiddling with why Plex or Jellyfin or my RSS Aggregator stopped functioning, again.
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 ecosystem are important.
> 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?
You already trust random people in linux, you have to trust even more random and more people when you run docker.
Ports are quite large collection already. If you port yourself it's either up to 20 minutes plus compilation time or major nightmare. More and more software today assumes you run on linux only.
I think FreeBSD is great for setup and forget. If you have to interact with it regularly it's not worth it. Definitely not worth it for desktop.
it isn't anywhere close to the convenience of docker, but if you just need containerised OS-level virtualization FreeBSD has Jails which are really cool
I can not answer the other questions; for me Linux worked and works better. But that statement here:
> Do I have to trust random people for ports of software that runs natively on Linux, or port it myself?
This is a bit problematic in my opinion because ultimately we have to trust all who write open source code. This works well for the most part but there are malicious actors too. See the xz backdoor as example. Or various state actors who want to sniff after people. Age verification is the current attempt to sniff for people data, trying to push legislation by claiming "this is only to protect children" (while it has some interesting side effects, e. g. becoming a stepping stone for anyone wanting to sniff user data and relay this).
> FreeBSD seems good so far, but community and ecosystem are important.
Well, there are many more Linux users. Whether that is better or worse ... but it is a fact too.
If you just want to run a Docker container casually, perhaps do it on your personal computer instead of the home server. If there is some service you really can't manage to get running with jails or right on the BSD, bhyve and guest Linux should be easy enough.
I was using FreeBSD (after NetBSD) as my primary system for a while in school (no, i can't watch this youtube video, flash doesn't run on FreeBSD). i still use it for my home server, it's just cozy.
> 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 frustrated with unsupported hardware is not a good pitch.
It's not really a demerit of FreeBSD given their lesser resources (and even less vender support) than Linux.
Most of the major ethernet chipsets for networking you'd expect to find in a server are well supported and the system is quite solid for many server use cases, but you're probably not going to be running bleeding edge consumer hardware day one on it.
On the desktop side of things Linux has far superior hardware support for current GPUs/Wifi chipsets. AMDGPU support is a few card generations behind (they have to spend effort porting from the Linux drivers) and things are still mostly in X11 land and you don't have Valve supporting gaming on BSD.
I'd still be interested in running FreeBSD on severs, it just takes a bit of different knowledge (the handbook is excellent) and with OpenZFS being a thing on Linux there's not as much exclusive to the BSDs on a surface level that Linux can't at least mostly provide.
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.
Well it just so happens that the best hardware in the world for desktop use—literally years ahead of any competition—is made by the makers of macOS and is totally supported by macOS.
What you say is true only when you define "desktop use" in a certain way, which corresponds to what an Apple PC is good for.
I define "desktop use" in another way, and for my definition any Apple PC is completely non-competitive, by having a much lower performance and a much higher price than a desktop PC using an AMD Ryzen CPU.
Apple PCs have exceptional single-thread performance, but that is irrelevant for me. I care about multi-threaded performance and especially about floating-point FP64 and big integer computational throughput, for which the Apple CPUs are weak, one could say years behind their competition, except that Apple does not make any attempt to compete in this domain.
An Apple PC may be the optimum PC for your needs and that is fine, but you should not believe that any computer user has the same needs as you.
100%. It reminds me of how a ton of FreeBSD devs moved to Mac during the Darwin days. Then they were abandoned by Apple once they stopped contributing to upstream.
We weren’t abandoned by Apple — Apple never contributed to upstream. Darwin and OpenDarwin were APSL projects and never fed code back into FreeBSD.
Using macOS meant we got laptop hardware that worked reliably, including Wi-Fi, running a more or less BSD-derived userspace.
The lack of graphics and Wi-Fi driver support on the *BSDs is not Apple’s fault. It has always been a resource issue.
Thanks to the AT&T lawsuit, Linux secured momentum at a critical juncture — and here we are. Path dependence and the complexities of real life mean that “winning” is never just a question of technical merit.
Word is that NetApp and Juniper are using FreeBSD.
What these have in common is that they rely heavily on FreeBSD's I/O performannce and capabilities which is said to be head and shoulders above Linux.
Serious FreeBSD question: I like a lot of what FreeBSD promises, but have been hesitant to make the leap for my home server as I enjoy hosting game servers via steamcmd. I know FreeBSD has Linux binary compatibility, but I am unsure how this would play out for all of my hosting needs. Also, I have some old Nvidia GPUs in this machine, which I might get rid of as they are no longer supported by the latest releases of ML packages, but I also might keep them around for self-teaching CUDA.
How do FreeBSD users get around the inconveniences associated with the "the rest of the world" running on Linux?
I love OpenBSD for similar reasons, except, I still run it as my primary desktop and on an old Chromebook. It just works. No drama with updates. Upgrade every six months. I'd be lost without it.
When I tried FreeBSD, I was also blown away by the manual, so simple, such high-quality documentation. I think what I liked the most is that it felt coherent, unlike modern OS like Linux and Windows. I think macOS might be the most cohesive of the popular OS's.
I ran a TrueNAS server that was based on BSD, loved jails. Then TrueNAS started using debian so more application can run on it. Selfishly I like getting more utility from my server so this was a welcomed change. What industry is BSD used in now a days?
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've been using both Linux and BSD since 2000. Honestly, I prefer Linux on the desktop. My dev workstation runs Arch, and I keep a FreeBSD VM running to do OS and ports builds.
As a server OS I find FreeBSD really consistent and easy to administrate. I never have trouble finding things: packages always go in /usr/local. The old-school init system works great at what it's designed to do, and all the startup scripts are easy to understand. The whole thing just feels kind of cozy and familiar. If you like working in a shell then FreeBSD just kind of feels like /home.
Coming from modern Linux though, some of the constructs can feel a bit outdated. Usually this gives me a warm fuzzy feeling, but sometimes it's a real pain (looking at you, make(1)). It's like hacking Perl, once you understand the idiom and what it's good at then you can be good friends.
If you want to run a mail server for 20 years and go through multiple hardware and OS upgrades with minimal pain and maximal uptime then you can't beat it.
One of my favorite FreeBSD features is first-class support for ZFS boot environments. These have been working in FreeBSD/Solaris since 2008[0]. Having each boot environment available as a ZFS snapshot capable of being managed the same way as any other dataset, capable of being sent and received, is such a powerful feature. I dilligently watch the immutable/atomic Linux space to see when something implements this in the same fashion.
Ubuntu could have been the one, but they reversed course after dropping support for Zsys in 2022[1].
If there are others, then please let me know, but as far as I can tell, the closest approximations in Linux are:
- Btrfs with Snapper in OpenSuse Tumbleweed/MicroOS
- Snapshot Manager/Boom in RHEL
- OStree in Fedora Atomic, CarbonOS, EndlessOS
- Bootable container implementations in Fedora CoreOS, RHEL10, CarbonOS, Bazzite, BlendOS, etc.
- Snaps in Ubuntu Core
- Generations in NixOS and Guix
- A/B update mechanism in ChromeOS, IncusOS
- OverlayFS in Nitrux Linux
- Ad-hoc implementations with Arch, Alpine, etc.
Excluding the ad-hoc implementations, only OpenSuse and Red Hat approaches allow you to treat your system image and system data the same way. They're great, but fundamentally incompatible, and neither has caught on with other distributions. Capabilities of both approaches are limited compared to ZFS.
The strangest part of the Linux situation IMHO is, every time ZFS on Linux is discussed, someone will invariably bring up XFS. For the past decade, XFS on Linux contains support for Copy-on-Write (CoW) and snapshots via relinking. If this is the preferred path on Linux (for users who don't want checksumming of ZFS/Btrfs/Bcachefs), then how come no major distros besides Red Hat have embraced it[2] to provide an update rollback functionality?
I concede that most of the other approaches do provide a higher level level of determinism for what your root system looks like after an upgrade. It's powerful when you can test that system as an OCI container (or as a VM with Nix/Guix). FWIW, FreeBSD can approximate this with the ability to use it's boot environments as a jail[3].
I don't want to be that guy, but zfs on freebsd was kind-of-experimental until around 2012;AFAIK in 2012 (Freebsd 9) root on zfs was a manual process, and not that easy to upgrade. Root on zfs is somewhat "recent"- it took years to get to the installer. My company at the time was basically a bsd shop (openbsd and freebsd), and the opensolaris(12?) version was still quite ahead. Still have my opensolaris tshirt of "first 5000" :)
Rule of thumb, its not. Common stuff like address randomization is a recent default, afaik still doesnt have random process ids, and the base permissions arent stellar. However I would prefer jails any day of the week vs the clusterf** that are namespaces and cgroups.
OpenBSD might have "better" support for sleep and hibernate, but I didn't succeed in installing it on this laptop: I think it required me to connect an Ethernet cable, which I wasn't going to do.
Veering even more off-topic: I've just installed OpenSUSE Kalpa on this laptop. That's not regular OpenSUSE, by the way. Previously, each of the like, 5 problems I've encountered doing it, would've caused me to give up - but ChatGPT helped me fix all of them! I think this is going to become my daily driver for a while now.
That's unintentionally hilarious -- some of us remember 15-20 years ago when flaky support for wireless devices was the biggest reason people would decide Linux wasn't ready for desktop yet and avoid switching from Windows to Linux. (Well, Windows to dual-boot -- Windows users were never fully willing to let go of the video games angle at the time.)
> 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 also efficient. But some projects are simply underdocumented. A random example is, in the ruby ecosystem, rack. Have a look
here:
Yes, you can jump to the individual documentation of the classes, but does that really explain anything? It next to tells you nothing at all about anything about rack.
If you are new to ruby, would you waste any time with such a project? Yes, rack is useful; yes, many people don't use it directly but may use sinatra, rails and so forth, I get it. But this is not the point. The point is whether the documentation is good or bad. And that is not the only example. See ruby-webassembly. Ruby-opal. Numerous more projects (I won't even mention the abandoned gems, but this is of course a problem every language faces, some code will become outdated as maintainers disappear.)
So this is really nothing unique to Linux. I bet on BSD you will also find ... a lack of documentation. Probably even more as so few blog about BSD. OpenBSD claims it has great documentation. Well, if I look at what they have, and look at Arch or Gentoo wiki, then sorry but the BSDs don't understand the problem domain.
It really is a general problem. Documentation is simply too crap in general, with a few exceptions.
> if the team behind this OS puts this much care into its documentation, imagine how solid the system itself must be.
Meh. FreeBSD documentation can barely called the stand-out role model here either. Not sure what the BSD folks think about that.
> I realized almost immediately that GNU/Linux and FreeBSD were so similar they were completely different.
Not really.
There are some differences but I found they are very similar in their respective niche.
Unfortunately my finding convinced me that Linux is the better choice for my use cases. This ranges from e. g. LFS/BLFS to 500 out of top 500 supercomputers running Linux. Sure, I am not in that use case of having a supercomputer, but the point is about quality. Linux is like chaotic quality. Messy. But it works. New Jersey model versus [insert any high quality here]. https://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is-better.html
> Not only that: Linux would overheat and produce unpredictable results - errors, sudden shutdowns, fans screaming even after compilation finished.
Well, hardware plays a big factor, I get it. I have issues with some nvidia cards, but other cards worked fine on the same computer. But this apocalypse scenario he writes about ... that's rubbish nonsense. Linux works. For the most part - depending on the hardware. But mostly it really works.
> I could read my email in mutt while compiling, something that was practically impossible on Linux
Ok sorry, I stopped reading there. My current computer was fairly cheap; I deliberately put in 64GB RAM (before the insane AI-driven cost increases) and that
computer works super-fast. I compile almost everything from source. I have no real issue with anything being too slow; admittedly a few things take quite a bit of compile-power, e. g. LLVM, or qt - compiling that from source takes a while, yes, even on a fast computer. But nah, the attempt to claim how FreeBSD is so much faster than Linux is, that's simply not factual. It is rubbish nonsense. Note that OpenBSD and NetBSD folks never write such strangeness. What's wrong with the FreeBSD guys?
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
The Arch Wiki it's a joke as it gets obsolete with every major upgrade. OpenBSD has the FAQ and all of the base it's throughly documented. GNU/Linux manpages? Info pages? Often either incomplete or missing. Don't let me start on compatibility. On your beloved overengineerd turd, you need to resort to either containers or hacks to run 10 yo software. FreeBSD will just run it through compatNx libraries, where N is the version number, and there's a -32 (bit) suffix for obvious needs. Now, how can you run legacy software under current Arch Linux? Yeah, there's Flatpak, but I've found broken software on it.
Altough on compatibility, under 9front everything it's statically compiled, period. Compile, store, copy back, run.
Docs? man pages, and /sys/doc. Easier to be understood and set.
Current Unixes are too bloated. Yes, FreeBSD too. NetBSD and OpenBSD, a bit less. GNU/Linux it's such a monster that over time I'd guess Guix will just keep Coreutils as a toolbox and everything will be jitted Guile/Scheme, and for the rest of the distros, it will just be Wayland+Gnome+Flatpak OS. Now try hacking that. Try creating a working 32 bit OS with it. Documentation beyond GUIX' info files? Good luck, man will be a legacy tool called from Info from Guix.
SystemD? Over time, Gnome won't be under non SystemD OSes. Forget it under BSD's and shims, KDE will be the only option (and under Guix too). The irony, GNU Networked Object Model Environment outside of the GNU os.
Meanwhile, by default GNU/Linux has more propietary bits in the kernel than GNU bits. Untar it, Radeon depends on nonfree firmware. So does tons of SOCS, audio devices, wireless cards. Linux Libre + Guix? Not with Gnome, maybe with a Guile JIT/AOT'ed desktop environment, a la Cosmic but with AOT'ted Guile instead of Rust. Forget cohesiveness, your Redhatware OS will be as native to the rest as Waydroid inside Fedora Silverblue. Seamless, but not native. And with similar issues on running some software in Waydroid without hacks faking up the existence of some blobs.
And as tons of infra depends on SystemD and blobs, guess what will happen to Arch and the rest of the distros. It will jut be second class, Pacman packaged Fedoras.
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 Flatpak would supersede it) and most customizations will be over. Kinda like a crappiffied NT clone with MSI's/WIM images but from IBM. Even worse, because MS and Icaza has been making GNU/Linux almost like a MS testbed for different C#, networking, io scheduling, performance tests, usability on tactile input and so on. Yes, it looks like a propotype OS more than a final product to freely thinker with.
Meanwhile, the true spirit of GNU won't be at GNU+Linux as they are becoming aware of what's Linux all about today. GNU+Lisp lovers would support their own desktop and packing layer and Hurd maybe running Linux kernel drivers (the libre ones) on top free from IBM/Microsoft hands.
Unix? Most people will move on from BSD's and maybe they will be fed up as FreeBSD and NetBSD are just stacking Linux layers over and over.
OpenBSD users are die hard, staunch developers and thus they will last for longer, but I won't be surprised if they somehow adapted the plan9 namespaces into OpenBSD well instead of the GNU/Linux implementations. And, who knows, as POSIX won't matter a lot in a near future, maybe they would break it for the good and even simplify it, borrowing 9front ways into OpenBSD. I'm talking about 10-15 years from now, of course.
Most Unix diehard hackers will be at 9front today because of the ease of thinkering, simplicity, rc+rio vs all the POSIX+FDo cruft and so on. It's in the docs, /sys/doc/ and 'man intro' covers nearly everything.
Don't expect i3, X, Wayland, anime setups a la /r/unixporn or h4ck3r ones. It's more like a gray, dull whiteboard, it's up to you to build your own path. Learn rc, Plan9 C, even Go if you want, just don't ask for crappy ports with SDL2, try the native tools and emulators first.
Make games/snes faster. Write mappers for games/nes, add search support for page(1).
PD: don't use LLM's unless you want to be kicked out fast. We all know when an LLM it's writting both your code and speech and you will be known as a dumb useless idiot forever.
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
More like schizoposting, I'm just watching what RHOS it's becoming into, some weird NT/Solaris hybrid with a non X11 layer.
And, yes, Hurd with Guix it's where the potential of reproducible distros lies on. True separate services, namespaces, non-root perms to mount both local and remote FS' (no FUSE needed) and so on.
This is closer to what RMS dreamt about. Hurd was about to recreate Unix but giving the users almost full rights without compromising the systems' security. And, yes, I know OG Emacs and ITS had no permissions at all and it was a 'free for all OS', but times changed.
With 9front and namespaces/separate servers you get a similar environment but even more modular.
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