Does FreeBSD make you happy? Explain why

DrJuanNadie

DrJuanNadie

I already explained why FreeBSD makes me happy in another thread, but I forgot to ask for your participation. I think happiness is important, and FreeBSD contributes to it, but I might be wrong. So...

Does FreeBSD make you happy? Explain why.
 
because it exists.
one of the main reason i'm using it is to promote diversity. i could use linux (not windows or mac, not anymore, the former i never used, the latter i did from 2006 to 2012, book machine, but then the os and ideals became too much...) as a daily machine (used ubuntu then debian for about 25y), it'd probably be easier. but from my point of view we need diversity, in OSs, in browsers, in phone OSs, in **everything**.
ergo...
 
DrJuanNadie said:
I already explained why FreeBSD makes me happy in another thread, but I forgot to ask for your participation. I think happiness is important, and FreeBSD contributes to it, but I might be wrong. So...

Does FreeBSD make you happy? Explain why.
Click to expand...
It makes me happy that I don't have to use Windows to make my computers serve me rather than Bill Gates.

It also makes me happy that I don't need to learn 1000 flavours of Linux to give me that alternative.
 
In fact, I also love the overall hier(7)archy so to speak: I love the separation into /usr and /usr/local, the entire separation into base and third-party, the easily configurable files under /etc. You know, it's just really well-designed and it feels so good to use such well-designed thing. Everything in its right place and every thing _works_.

FreeBSD, as I see it, is the only OS that regards discipline.
 
DrJuanNadie said:
I already explained why FreeBSD makes me happy in another thread, but I forgot to ask for your participation. I think happiness is important, and FreeBSD contributes to it, but I might be wrong. So...

Does FreeBSD make you happy? Explain why.
Click to expand...
The first thing is freedom from monetization by Microsoft: popups asking me to turn on OneDrive, to sign up for Minecraft, to use Copilot, and on and on.

(I also gave up on Ubuntu, once my favorite Linux distro, because they are inserting ads on the desktop.)

FreeBSD seems to hit the sweet spot of adding new technology, like ZFS and DTrace, but leaving alone things that have worked well forever, like rc.conf and the whole startup system. With Linux, it seemed like every time I turned around, SystemD had taken over another part of the system and changed all the commands.

An advantage of FreeBSD over Linux is that, as Colin Percival points out (https://www.daemonology.net/blog/2013-12-09-FreeBSD-EC2-configinit.html), while Linux is configured by commands, FreeBSD is configured by files (for example, rc.conf), making it easier to take an existing system and duplicate it.

And actually, Colin Percival himself is an advantage of FreeBSD. In addition to his other contributions, he has worked tirelessly to make sure FreeBSD works well with every new EC2 offering that AWS comes up with.
 
For a long time I was a Solaris user (from about 1997 to 2018) and Mac from about 2007. I switched from Solaris to FreeBSD.

What is/was good about these platforms? The first thing is that they are reliable. I never ever experienced a kernel panic with Solaris SPARC at work. I had two kernel panics at home with Solaris amd64. That was due to an issue with the udf driver. That got fixed quite quickly. Mac and FreeBSD have given me a handful of kernel panics each.

By comparison Linux is junk. I mainly use Fedora. I’ve lost count of the number of kernel panics I’ve had at home. Hundreds if not thousands, mostly random panics at boot. RedHat and derivatives haven’t been so bad at work. At one point I could reliably get servers to panic by using ‘perf’, and going back further in time the borked Linux NFS implementation would cause zombie processes to pile up causing problems for the scheduler and making the machines sluggish. And did I mention video and graphics? Pretty much all graphics hardware has proprietary accelerators which get total disdain from the Linux crowd. Result: time and again updates break the graphics drivers and you boot to a black screen. This happens occasionally on FreeBSD but nowhere near the scale of Linux. At the time of writing I just upgraded to Fedora 43 KDE which has dropped X11 forcing users to use Wayland. When I boot kwin crashes 3 times (on automatic retry I suppose) and I end up with no desktop.

It seems that the only answer to this instability problem in the Linux world is that taken by Debian. They just live 5 years in the past. For me that cure is worse than the disease. I need an up to date toolchain for development.

Quality wise Windows OS is OK. The apps tend to be buggy IMO because they have chronic feature bloat. The main thing that I don’t like about Windows is that it is all closed making it difficult to see exactly what is happening in the kernel and at the kernel interface.

FreeBSD has a very good balance of stability and having up to date ports.
 
I use it exclusively for several years, so, yes, it does.

FreeBSD
  • is a complete OS. In contrary to MS DOS, or Windows, which lack certain things you need to get extra to make it a complete system, like having a useful programming language by default, or maintenence stuff, like a registry cleaner, since otherwise your system sooner or later becomes instable by being trashed up just by using it.
  • is (almost) POSIX standard, which is a very good, and besides that the only senseful and widely used standard I know. This brings two benefits: It's easier to orient with other OSs using the same standard. And there is no need to learn trivial things new again over, and over. cracauer@ summarized it: "I have primary things to do." The computer is for doing jobs, not for learning it's usage. While you cannot do the first without the second, the latter has to be as small as possible. Because of FreeBSD's unixstyle/POSIX usage does not change, only in some certain details, only when it's senseful, really needed, and announced, with a transitional period to get used to it, it's worth learning it. It's worth learning it deep. And it's fun learning it. And not being confronted with sudden, unasked, unexpected, changes like with Windows' every major version release, which most of the times not even improve anything, but are just changes, only, and suggests only, there is few to learn about computers, because the users are prevented from getting there.
  • is quiet. While there is way more logged what the machine does, and messages are no "You wouldn't understand it anyway. So I just did that to make you responsible for the actions you don't even know what you're doing. So simply give me an 'OK' for me to proceed"-gibberish, but actually being useful, it only tells me things, when I ask it. Otherwise, if unasked, it stays quiet. Not annoying me with sudden pop-up balloon messages, windows, and other garbage I neither want, nor asked for.
  • is well documented. Besides there is the good Unix tradition of man pages being the core and complete documentation (while there are still some loafers thinking man pages are not needed), there is the handbook, the wiki, and this forums. When you're capable of reading, and actually read, 99% of everything needs to be done with the system, you find already there. Plus you can learn things on even old books, like usage of shell, shellscripting, awk and many other things. That I cannot say about every OS. Especially Linux world lacks of large parts of useful, and up-to-date documentation. By my experience, when you try to find something out, you are looked down at (from those who regard themselves superior to do such low jobs as writing documentation) because you are not born with this knowledge. When I want to use a software, I want to use it. Not studying it's source code first, just to find one option I need. I don't use software not sufficiently documented. It's obviously not meant to be used by somebody else, or not to being used at all, but it's for its own programming purpose, only.
  • is less, and easier to maintain. The computer is for doing jobs, not to maintain it. While you cannot do the first without the second, the latter has to be as small as possible. Comparing it to Windows, or some turnkey Linux distros which not only come every day with annoying upgrade/update needs, some Linuxes are a full time job just to get an entirely working machine by coincidence for a few hours, FreeBSD is less stress in maintenance I experienced so far.
  • is reliable.
  • is secure (enough).
  • is stable.
  • does everything I need.
  • let me pick my hardware (Yeah, I know. I don't want another "FreeBSD does not support every hardware" discussion. To me it supports enough. When I pick my hardware by what's supported by the OS I use, which is the way things are since the dawn of computers, and I am used to live with compromises, which you have to do anyway with everything in life, then I don't miss anything. If you want to do it vice versa, turn things on its head, and buy any hardware and then demand your OS has to support it, use Windows. Even there is no guarantee any junk works.)
  • saves resources, protect the environment, and reduces emission of greenhouse gases, because I can use hardware longer, and can chose lower energy consuming hardware.
  • is free. I can have control over the least detail of my machine, because it's open source and all (most) config is done in textfiles.
  • is free. FreeBSD lets me set up my computer how I want, when I want. It neither constrains, nor forces me to anything.
  • is free. FreeBSD is not spying on me.
  • is free. Which reminds me: Thanksgiving is coming. Time for my annual donation.
 
Maturin said:
  • is quiet. While there is way more logged what the machine does, and messages are no "You wouldn't understand it anyway...."
Click to expand...
One really annoying aspect of Windows is when you get a Blue Screen of Death. You get a "stop code", a long hexadecimal string. If you search for it on the web, no one, even Microsoft, seems to know what it means. You get a lot of hits that say "Well, I did this and this and it went away" or "maybe you should do this" or my favorite "Try re-installing Windows".

I grew up on MVS on the IBM mainframe. Like Unix, it does a lot of logging of messages, so if the boot hangs, or otherwise blows up, at least you can see what was going on at the time.

Another nice thing about FreeBSD is that it doesn't try to pretend it is a person talking to you. No "The system crashed, just a moment while we collect some information", or on the first boot "Just a moment while we get things set up for you."
 
Second reply for the downsides.

It isn't all milk and honey. Like pretty much open source projects FreeBSD has a chronic lack of contributors. That means that bug reports can languish either forever or until they get closed OBE.

Hardware support can be patchy.
  • system sleep seems to work fine, but I've yet to hit the space bar and have the same system wake
  • AMDGPU didn't work for me (AMD Ryzen 9 9900X)
  • RPi 4b and 5 support is poor
 
My dislike of FreeBSD is less than my dislike of Linux, and much less than my dislike of Windows. So far, the only thing that bothers me is how Windows 11 guest operates under BHYVE.

So, among these three, it is FreeBSD that makes me at least a little happier. :rolleyes:
 
Maturin said:
saves resources, protect the environment, and reduces emission of greenhouse gases, because I can use hardware longer, and can chose lower energy consuming hardware.
Click to expand...
Very true. Probably overlooked in general.
lgrant said:
You get a "stop code", a long hexadecimal string. If you search for it on the web, no one, even Microsoft, seems to know what it means.
Click to expand...
Very true, and very sad and somehow funny at the same time.
 
The removal of the Great Lock allowed me to build a really cool dual Athlon XP (modded to MP) A7M266-D platform and do SMP home-computing before multicore was even a thing. I realize that was FreeBSD 5, but that still makes me happy! :D

Also root on ZFS. A desktop/workstation users dream -- just chuck all your SSDs at it and let it sort itself out. Works great, I probably couldn't set up a better RAID on my own anyhow. It's so convenient I find it hard to accept other OSes ways of handling partitioning even.

Booting into my retro-riced FreeBSD greeter makes me smile, it just feels great using the computer-- like in the spirit of Sir Sinclair, "Computing is Fun!"
 
FreeBSD makes me happy by being a proper operating system, with unix philosophy of doing things correctly, ZFS & boot enviroment helps as well as no systemd linux type crap. When you learn the system you know it will not bite you in the arse like all the other operating systems
 
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