FreeBSD vs everything else

[carlton_draught]

This thread has now headed into off-topic territory. So to continue the discussion, I'm making a new thread for the topic.

Basically the idea is to update or at least, discuss the FreeBSD comparison grid as shown here that is a decade old or so. Probably a lot of the left hand side topics are good to keep. They are:

• Reliability
• Security
• Performance
• Development Environment
• Development Infrastructure
• Support
• Price and Total Cost of Ownership
• Filesystem
• Device Drivers
• Commercial Applications
• Free Applications

Not sure if this is the best place to really develop something, but probably a lot of us don't have write access to the wiki which would be a more logical place to create something. However, we can at least flesh out a lot of the content perhaps? Do we continue with the same 3 OS, or include some others?

I'll continue with a comment from the parent thread.

While I agree that programming is easier on FreeBSD than on Linux distributions, because of cohesive, complete OS and stable API/ABI, Windows programmers have access to tools we use, and a helluva lot more.

The only thing I miss from Windows is the games. Even that is an advantage if you are a game addict. No other tool I can think of comes with built-in productivity killers.

I can think of several things that BSD has over Windows. Ports. There may be FOSS for windows but the model of surfing and downloading software is not as good as package repositories or ports. Linux repository system is (IMO) superior to FreeBSD packages as there is a method to ensure that you can verify security hashes etc.

Also, just being able to string stuff together in a shell via pipes natively kicks ass over cygwin. Cygwin is good if you are stuck with Windows, but it's still a pale substitute.

I also made a stab at the "filesystem" bit.

Filesystem
FreeBSD
Only FreeBSD and Solaris have ZFS. There is no other production filesystem anywhere else that can guarantee data integrity and usability to the same extent as ZFS. ZFS can put sha256 hashes on every block of data to allow verification that silent data corruption has not occurred, and heal it when it does (provided that sufficient redundancy is provisioned).

By completely rethinking the needs of filesystems in today's world, ZFS offers many other advantages. ZFS removes the pain of dealing with legacy filesystem issues. Want to move a small amount of data on a large pool to a smaller pool? No problem. Ditto with upgrading the pool size - whether you can do it or not depends on the amount of data you have, not on how big you have made a partition. Want to cache reads and writes with SSDs? Do so with one command.

Linux, Windows etc.
Not sure what to say here. There is nothing to get excited about for me. It works provided you use a HDD that doesn't give you bad sectors or otherwise. Might be fast, but then so is piping your data to /dev/null.

 

[SirDice]

That grid is indeed quite old. And to be honest, a lot of the Windows arguments are either false or uninformed. But, I've never seen a grid that compared Windows to other OSs that didn't have those same bogus arguments.

 

[B0o-supermario]

IMO Windows is better than Linux for desktops PCBSD rocks

The problem with BSD is: there aren't 1000 distros But it's an advantage too

I wonder why people create a distro for an operating system (!) which has an unstable kernel and userland development in different places instead of a unified userland and kernel.

 

[Eponasoft]

More an advantage than anything; it allows for a certain level of conformity. FreeBSD is a good blend of standardization and choice, whereas Windows offers the former but lacks in the latter (at the OS level), and Linux tends to be the other way around (at *every* level). Just my 2 cents.

EDIT: OK, more than 2 cents coming up here. I'm gonna look at that chart and outlay some specifics about the Windows claims.

Reliability: Some of this is true, but much of it is highly dependent on how the system is configured. Also, if you're an uptime junkie, you're already a chowderhead. A system that's been up too long is likely to have unpatched security holes. You will *need* to reboot Windows to install them.

Performance: From what I understand, Microsoft swapped out the FreeBSD servers not long after buying out Hotmail. But that aside, Windows 2000 *was* poor at handling heavy network loads, but *only when compared against FreeBSD*. For the time this chart was intended to portray, it was about on par with most Linux distros.

Security: Largely accurate.

Development Environment: Mostly accurate, though I question the notion of compatibility. Microsoft's own compilers almost always play nice with each other, they just don't tend to play nice with third-party compilers all the time. Since this chart's time frame, Microsoft has gotten better about this.

Development Infrastructure: Mostly hogwash. It might be true if each successive version of Windows was started from scratch, but that's not the case... each version is built on the previous version, and after said version has been tested extensively through Microsoft's beta program as well as live testing in the wild. Its source control is of no consequence.

Support: True, but only if you try getting support from Microsoft themselves... don't do this anyway, as it's a waste of time.

Price and Total Cost Of Ownership: How many people actually *need* the server edition? This only rings true if you actually need it.

Filesystem: FAT was being phased out in favor of NTFS during the Windows 2000 days. It's a far more robust filesystem than FAT and fixes a myriad of problems. What's more is that the chart incorrectly states that neither of these were designed for a multi-user system or networking in mind, which is utter hogwash because one of the main purposes of NT is to function as a network server with many potential users at once.

Device Drivers: Correct.

Commercial Applications: Largely correct. Windows apps are where the money's at for the PC.

Free Applications: Iffy. There are now and were back then thousands of freeware and public domain applications for Windows. It just depended on what you needed. The difference between Windows and the other two is that almost *everything* for the other two is free. The issue of source control tends to be correct though.

So there ya have it.

 

[DutchDaemon]

That BSD does not have a thousand distros is why I'm sticking with it.

 

[vometia]

The only thing I miss from Windows is the games. Even that is an advantage if you are a game addict. No other tool I can think of comes with built-in productivity killers.

I rather like killing my productivity that way, but I have to admit it's the only reason I continue to endure Windows and the expensively overpowered PC that plays host to said time-wasters. Other than that it's generally been a fight between Linux and FreeBSD as to who gets my desktop: mostly FreeBSD wins thanks to both familiarity and that it does what I want with a minimum of fuss, though Linux does have the occasional "ooh shiny" that I simply must have. But my cheapo desktop broke 18 months ago and I've been lumbered with the Windows box ever since (and have been too lazy to set up a multi-boot, virtual box or whatever) but in that time it hasn't stopped me thinking "I really don't like this" when it comes to day-to-day work. I guess I should really stop being so lazy and get it together again if it bothers me so much...

 

[carlton_draught]

I rather like killing my productivity that way, but I have to admit it's the only reason I continue to endure Windows and the expensively overpowered PC that plays host to said time-wasters.

It's not that you can't waste time with games in Linux. The difference is that instead of wasting time playing games, you waste time setting them up in wine. Which is virtually a game in itself, and one that can often be Nintendo hard.

Other than that it's generally been a fight between Linux and FreeBSD as to who gets my desktop: mostly FreeBSD wins thanks to both familiarity and that it does what I want with a minimum of fuss, though Linux does have the occasional "ooh shiny" that I simply must have. But my cheapo desktop broke 18 months ago and I've been lumbered with the Windows box ever since (and have been too lazy to setup a multi-boot, virtual box or whatever) but in that time it hasn't stopped me thinking "I really don't like this" when it comes to day-to-day work. I guess I should really stop being so lazy and get it together again if it bothers me so much...

Why not have the best of both worlds? Get a workstation with gobs of RAM (an extra 4GB of ECC RAM is like half an EeePC in cost, i.e. nothing compared to an extra PC), and in Virtualbox have a linux VM for everything you want to do in Linux. With shared folders, it's so easy to share stuff from host to guest. With bridged networking, you can do stuff like remote desktop through VNC by clicking a few options in gnome, and because your VM has its own IP it works as well as a dedicated machine. (Probably preaching to the converted, but I'm just loving Virtualbox right now.)

If you are running a reliable ZFS system (shameless plug), then you will have a much greater assurance of data integrity than you will get with anything else. Which will of course be extended to anything running in a VM hosted by that system. (Assuming that vbox and your guest OS is not flaky, which it hasn't been IME).

If you must play modern 3d games in Windows, then you still need a dedicated machine of course. However, I suspect Virtualbox will get there eventually. When it does, Windows is going to haemorrhage some more market share.

 

[vometia]

It's not that you can't waste time with games in Linux. The difference is that instead of wasting time playing games, you waste time setting them up in wine. Which is virtually a game in itself, and one that can often be Nintendo hard.

I think between keeping my computers running and pointless games mods that I never release, I don't really need to add the entertainment of getting them to work with Wine! And I so enjoy the "find the CD" game... x(

Why not have the best of both worlds? Get a workstation with gobs of RAM (an extra 4GB of ECC RAM is like half an EeePC in cost, i.e. nothing compared to an extra PC), and in Virtualbox have a linux VM for everything you want to do in Linux. With shared folders, it's so easy to share stuff from host to guest. With bridged networking, you can do stuff like remote desktop through VNC by clicking a few options in gnome, and because your VM has its own IP it works as well as a dedicated machine. (Probably preaching to the converted, but I'm just loving Virtualbox right now.)

If you are running a reliable ZFS system (shameless plug), then you will have a much greater assurance of data integrity than you will get with anything else. Which will of course be extended to anything running in a VM hosted by that system. (Assuming that vbox and your guest OS is not flaky, which it hasn't been IME).

If you must play modern 3d games in Windows, then you still need a dedicated machine of course. However, I suspect Virtualbox will get there eventually. When it does, Windows is going to haemorrhage some more market share.

I really need to expunge my VaxStation 4000 from my mind so it doesn't pop up every time I think of "workstation". This has been quite fortuitous because I was wondering what was the preferred VM du jour, though I just need to figure out what to run this Virtualbox on: assuming it doesn't run on Windows, that leaves my FreeBSD server which is perpetually out of memory: long story, but I guess obtaining an SSD contraption for ZFS caching may free up some of its 3GB. But that's a question for another topic, except to say that after a couple of years of using ZFS, I'm not in a hurry to go back to another filesystem. I just hope Oracle don't do anything unpredictable...

Anyway, yes, the point still stands: the only reason I've bought Windows is for gaming, otherwise it's highly unlikely I would have bothered (well, for myself, that is: my other half seems curiously fond of it. Well, perhaps not "fond", but tolerant...)

 

[carlton_draught]

I really need to expunge my VaxStation 4000 from my mind so it doesn't pop up every time I think of "workstation". This has been quite fortuitous because I was wondering what was the preferred VM du jour, though I just need to figure out what to run this Virtualbox on: assuming it doesn't run on Windows, that leaves my FreeBSD server which is perpetually out of memory: long story, but I guess obtaining an SSD contraption for ZFS caching may free up some of its 3GB.

I'm not sure what caching you mean, but AFAIK having an L2ARC SSD cache does not reduce the considerable ZFS memory requirement. All it does is cache the most frequently used data from a pool of HDDs (well, it could cache an SSD pool but that would be pointless).

Now that Intel have lowered their Xeon prices it is possible to get a very capable, quite low cost and low Watt desktop system, through either Intel or AMD. I would wait until Llano is fully out to see what the comparison is like. Even 4 cores allows one to run 3 concurrent VMs. If you don't get the RAM right away, at least make sure that you have the ability to add lots of it in future. Probably 4GB is good for ZFS, plus maybe 2GB per VM you plan to run concurrently. And if you run dedup, I think you need more. Depends what you would use it for though, of course. A machine to run VMs can seem expensive until you realize it is far cheaper and more performant than the several machines you can replace it with. You only have to backup the one machine, and every time you want to run another operating system for whatever reason, just allocate another 20GB and there you go. Cheap as chips. The only thing you pay for is the number of concurrent machines you want to run (e.g. RAM + cores). I realize you probably already know all this, it just seems almost magical to me.

But that's a question for another topic, except to say that after a couple of years of using ZFS, I'm not in a hurry to go back to another filesystem. I just hope Oracle don't do anything unpredictable...

Me too.

 

[sossego]

Probably that many users have a passion for the BSD of their choice without become fanatical about it. I haven't messed with my BSD systems in a while- lots happening here.