FreeBSD is a really good operating system

Haha, that's a great way to put it. I wish I had all the hair back I've pulled trying to get operating systems to behave the way I want. So far the biggest hair pulling experience has been w10.

Ugh. I wish i didnt play any video games so I could abandon windows altogether. I dont even recognize Windows ten as an OS. I mean candy crush? On a professional operating system?😆
 
Ugh. I wish i didnt play any video games so I could abandon windows altogether. I dont even recognize Windows ten as an OS. I mean candy crush? On a professional operating system?😆

My favorite part is when I used an old Windows install disc to make a virtual machine, removed Candy Crush, then ran updates and saw it come back in the next feature release.

Part of me is glad that most of my games don't run on FreeBSD, since that means I'm forced to be more productive, or at least more creative in how I waste time. (Still looking forward to WOW64 wine in ports and updated linuxulator support for games, though).
 
Part of me is glad that most of my games don't run on FreeBSD, since that means I'm forced to be more productive, or at least more creative in how I waste time.

Haha, that's a good way to put it. There's so many distractions out there to waste time on, better to make them provide some accomplishment to be happy about.
 
No, that's just a psychological coping mechanism, aka rationalization. If you really didn't want that, you would not even think of it. Personally, I believe it's entirely reasonable for FreeBSD desktop to be limited in scope, but talking to each other how good it feels to miss a certain functionality is a bit too much.
 
Well, strictly speaking a general purpose OS for personal computers is the right tool there, it's just not feasible to chase every single use case. I have to say, though, the gap between FreeBSD and Linux in gaming capabilities is actually infuriatingly narrow, so technically it's not that difficult to plug, it's mostly that we don't have any high-profile committers pushing for it.
 
My experience is good, but on some notebooks it's difficult to get a good working installtion.

On this I prefer Linux, using different Distros for specific use case.

At this I'm moving my servers from Linux to FreeBSD based. Performance is a little bit better than linux, having high load a little bit is very much.

Only compatibilty is sometimes not as expected, but that's not caused by FreeBSD. Would like to see more servers running FreeBSD.

I have to learn some more specific about FreeBSD, so mostly used Debian (my side) or CentOS (lot of companies using it...) or other like Gentoo or Window before. (and on desktop lot of linux distros)

I started using BSD after I installed FreeNAS one year before. My expierience of the OS it's based was great, included jails. So I started using more and more FreeBSD based systems.
 
The only computer game that interests me is Elder Scrolls: Oblivion. I haven't played for a year but when I do will load a spare HDD in my W520 and install Win7 from a Lenovo disk that came with one of my HDD from ebay that validates the key from the BIOS. It's not that much trouble if I'm going to spend the next month playing it, still have my FreeBSD HDD to slip back in and a couple other FreeBSD boxen to use online.

I'm into console gaming and been playing Disgaea: Hour of Darkness for PS2. I'm a Demon fighting strategic battles with the aid of my horde to ascend the throne and take my rightful place as Demon Overlord of the Netherworld.

My female Nord Warrior rules the land in Oblivion.
 
Is FreeBSD still the only place to get ZFS right out of the box? The only other option I can think of is the moribund OpenIndiana, surprisingly still not dead. I recently tried it on an old Lenovo Ideapad from around 2009. More or less everything worked, but there were very few packages. It was nothing like the wild bazaar of ports or AUR (Arch User Repository).

I can't believe it has been now many years since FreeBSD got ZFS and there is still nothing comparable on most common OSes. FreeBSD continues to look better and better, mostly through the sustained thoughtlessness and outright silliness of other systems.

I was particularly disappointed that Apple created a whole new filesystem to replace HFS+ and data integrity checks and self-healing were not even on the agenda. I wonder about BTRFS. Nobody seems to want to use BTRFS, other than --shambolic even by Linux distro standarts--OpenSuSE.

Recent stagnation seems kind of ominous to me, but then I remember 1985-1995, when desktops went from 8-bit microcomputers to Windows 95 PCs. Sad that such change doesn't continue: from 2010 to 2020 desktop PCs (and trashy phones) have only undergone incremental, "next year's model will be thinner and have fins!" type changes; most stuff from 2010 that is still alive is usable but slow on today's java cesspool.

I guess people really do not care to know whether their data gets corrupted, nevermind being able to easily duplicate it (zfs send) or being able to easily get it back. I don't know who John Galt is, but I hope he's got the plans for that motor of his stored on ZFS.
 
Well, I do not use ZFS and do not worry about data corruption (on my PC) because I do daily backups. I did use ZFS on my poudriere build box, but only because it is faster supposedly. I find ZFS to be incredibly confusing but that isn't because it is, only because I am not used to using file systems like it.

I have not heard anything about BTRFS other than its snapshot ability, but in my use case, this is pointless. For my PC, I don't care about the OS: I have the pertinent FreeBSD OS configs backed up to my NAS, and my /home is backed up daily using rsync. I can install FreeBSD in less than 10 minutes and it is very simple to get the OS back to a pre-disaster state, which has actually never occurred for me.

I don't know what else offers ZFS, other than the ongoing ZoL saga.
 
I have been always storing my photos on my main pc since my first digital camera in 2000. I can tell you: bit rot is a problem and has cost me days over the years. Sometimes I just viewed my pictures and realized that some where semi-destroyed (bottom half is grey or other jpg artifacts), then going back and restoring from my backup hard disk, just to encounter other errors, sometimes even on the same files, so grab that 2nd backupdisk and compare the pics. The hardware errors won't go away, in contrary, with disks packing so many bytes on the same surface, studies showed that the problem will become more serious with big disks. But with zfs (scrub), most of the stuff can be repaired, and if not I know about corruption before viewing my photos and can restore the data from an even more trustful backup source (also zfs).

I am using zfs also on my job ... gone are the days of fsck ;-)
 
Interesting - I have seen photos like that, albeit not in a very long time and I can't remember on which OS I saw them. Would have to be either Linux, MacOS or FreeBSD but more likely Linux because I have used it longest.

I have no issue with using ZFS per se, but I do not have ECC memory in my main PC and only have one SSD for my user's /home so I "think" I need another to set up RAID. Unless ZFS can be used on a single drive.
 
Unless ZFS can be used on a single drive.
This is perfectly fine. I use that on one laptop w/o ECC memory. By the way, regarding my PC where backups are: I am happy with a system with ECC memory a former colleague of mine had no use for anymore ;-). RAID without dedicated hardware is just one of the nice ZFS features.
 
This is good to know. I may attempt to convert my SSD hosting /home to ZFS this weekend as an experiment. Thanks for the reply.

ZFS offers two privileges: you can store all data in a secure way in case of hardware failure (mirror or RAIDZ but you need at least two HDD / SSD), and boot environments will allow you to clear any "evil" update.

That being said, you have just to plug another drive to get data redondancy in a few commands.
 
I don't want to drag this thread too off-topic but my thoughts were UFS / as it is now and ZFS /home. I read the handbook on how to create a ZFS pool manually so that seems easy. The part that eludes me is how does the system know where /home is so my user can login since ZFS needs no /etc/fstab entry. Guessing if I name the dataset "home" it will be on "/home". I can add another SSD to this at a later time, as $ permits.
 
Well that was surprisingly easy! Might be me, but data transfers seem to be faster. I commended out my /etc/fstab mount line for /home, enabled ZFS, unmounted /home and created the pool named "home" and a dataset named my user. Bounced the machine and viola` I had ZFS. Mounted my NAS and pulled my data back over. :cool:
 
I use ZFS on all my systems, most of them are without ECC. All my backup disks use ZFS as single drive. Enjoy all the fun and relief that comes with snapshots!
 
The first server I ever made with FreeBSD was a zfs-on-root with a single disk. One lovely summer day, the disk has died. My server diseapeared in a starting whisper.

Since, I didn't mount a so-called server with at least two disks, each one able to boot the whole system.
 
No servers for me, only a workstation and a poudriere build machine which I haven't used in some time. I am going to get a pair of drives to use in RAID for my user's /home though. Just haven't decided whether to get spinning rust or SSD. Apparently ZFS doesn't do trim? I don't think that has anything to do with data integrity but more with longevity of SSDs, as far as I know anyway. Maybe ZFS on SSDs is not a big deal, I don't know. This ZFS instance is the first one I have had on an SSD.
 
No servers for me, only a workstation and a poudriere build machine which I haven't used in some time. I am going to get a pair of drives to use in RAID for my user's /home though. Just haven't decided whether to get spinning rust or SSD. Apparently ZFS doesn't do trim? I don't think that has anything to do with data integrity but more with longevity of SSDs, as far as I know anyway. Maybe ZFS on SSDs is not a big deal, I don't know. This ZFS instance is the first one I have had on an SSD.

With more drives and ZFS, you could no longer care about the longevity of your drives. When one dies, just replace it and let ZFS rebuild it. :)
 
been using freebsd and zfs for years.. its to the point now where other systems such as linux just seem old and inefficient (like no zfs, or needing multiple applications like docker, kuberneties, and deployment manager) whereas a well designed FreeBSD system can accomplish the same thing with a 1 liner cron tab..

every system I have has native freebsd on it.. using bhyve when needed... Once bhyve fully supports gpu passthrough .. Ill never look back..
 
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