I am a retired software developer/manager with a lot of hands-on OS experience, especially in the scheduling and memory-management areas.
I have a checkered history with FreeBSD. I've tried multiple times over many years to use the system and have always run into show-stopping problems. And I have not been shy about describing my negative experiences in this forum.
I've been running 13.0 for months on my primary system and while it is not absolutely flawless (what is?), the system has really performed well and been absolutely reliable. This has not been the case recently with my favorite Linux distribution(s). And there are some things about FreeBSD that I really value that I can't get from Linux:
- I don't like the idea of journaled file-systems on SSDs, because they require writing all meta-data updates twice. And sequential journals provide no performance advantage on SSDs. So I use UFS with non-journaled soft-updates enabled, which works very well (I can't resist noting that the late, great Ray Tomlinson, the man who sent the first email across a network and who invented the '@' notation, added the exact equivalent of UFS soft-updates to the Tenex file-system 50 years ago; Tenex was the predominant OS on the Arpanet; I ran the Tenex project at BBN in those days and Ray was a close colleague and did this work when I was involved in the project; he had written the original Tenex file-system, which was much like UFS async at first). I don't have this choice with Linux. So I'm forced to either run a journaled file-system or run ext4 without a journal and do frequent backups, to guard against the theoretical possibility of fsck being unable to restore file-system correctness in the event of an unsafe shutdown.
- Speaking of backups, I really like the ability to back up a UFS file-system while the system is running and still get a consistent snapshot. With Linux, I am forced to shut the system down to do my backups without the system wiggling around while they are happening.
Since I've posted my share of complaints here in the past, I thought it was my obligation to acknowledge the fact that the current release is the first I've encountered that does the job better than the alternatives (and I've tried them all). And it's nice to use a system that doesn't feel like it was put together by shopping at a chaotic street market.
I have a checkered history with FreeBSD. I've tried multiple times over many years to use the system and have always run into show-stopping problems. And I have not been shy about describing my negative experiences in this forum.
I've been running 13.0 for months on my primary system and while it is not absolutely flawless (what is?), the system has really performed well and been absolutely reliable. This has not been the case recently with my favorite Linux distribution(s). And there are some things about FreeBSD that I really value that I can't get from Linux:
- I don't like the idea of journaled file-systems on SSDs, because they require writing all meta-data updates twice. And sequential journals provide no performance advantage on SSDs. So I use UFS with non-journaled soft-updates enabled, which works very well (I can't resist noting that the late, great Ray Tomlinson, the man who sent the first email across a network and who invented the '@' notation, added the exact equivalent of UFS soft-updates to the Tenex file-system 50 years ago; Tenex was the predominant OS on the Arpanet; I ran the Tenex project at BBN in those days and Ray was a close colleague and did this work when I was involved in the project; he had written the original Tenex file-system, which was much like UFS async at first). I don't have this choice with Linux. So I'm forced to either run a journaled file-system or run ext4 without a journal and do frequent backups, to guard against the theoretical possibility of fsck being unable to restore file-system correctness in the event of an unsafe shutdown.
- Speaking of backups, I really like the ability to back up a UFS file-system while the system is running and still get a consistent snapshot. With Linux, I am forced to shut the system down to do my backups without the system wiggling around while they are happening.
Since I've posted my share of complaints here in the past, I thought it was my obligation to acknowledge the fact that the current release is the first I've encountered that does the job better than the alternatives (and I've tried them all). And it's nice to use a system that doesn't feel like it was put together by shopping at a chaotic street market.