What are you doing with FreeBSD?

MartijnAtLico

MartijnAtLico

I'm pretty curious what the audience is here, so if you feel like it please describe what your primary use for FreeBSD is. Are you a kernel hacker, curious Linux user or a Fortune 500 sys admin?

I myself use FreeBSD on the servers of our small hosting business and at some client sites for running Java applications. We've used FreeBSD ever since Linux didn't support our Promise ATA RAID controller back when we purchased our first server and fell in love with it immediately. My desktop is OS X powered though :)
 
My file server / web server / database server / second desktop has been FreeBSD for ages. It's currently running 6.1 (i386 - it's an old dual P4 xeon), with samba/NFS/PostgreSQL/apache+PHP and mod_python, with storage on a hardware mirror, and KDE 4 for desktop use (I wanted to test it, and then never got around to stop using it). A bit overloaded, but it works oddly well.

The newest desktop PC runs 8-CURRENT. I'm writing a thesis on it at the moment, so text editor + LaTeX and a web browser. KDE 4 - the exposé clone in kwin is really quite handy, and the nvidia drivers are good enough to keep it enabled.
It also sees some gaming - World of Warcraft runs fine in Wine. Sure, it's markedly faster on Vista, but it's still perfectly playable. A bit of DLL copying got ventrilo working as well.

Getting WoW working was apparently enough to keep me from dualbooting, as I haven't used the Vista install for a few months now.

My laptop runs XP, though. It's got some programs I know don't work in Wine (e.g. Lightroom), limited disc space (so dualbooting is inconvenient), and XP is better at battery life, wiFi and suspend/resume on this hardware.


As for why I run FreeBSD, well. I did the usual round of linux distros some years ago, but ended up with FreeBSD 4.7, and I've sort of stuck with it for my toy server since. Using it as a desktop started when I swapped my "server"-hardware for something fast enough and found it convenient to do things on the always-on machine instead of booting the other (windows-)PC, and then I started keeping a FreeBSD partition on the other one as well, to play with it on a reasonably current computer. It sort of escalated from there.

Oh, and I just remembered. My router runs m0n0wall, which is technically FreeBSD as well. ;)
 
I'm not using it for anything in particular. Just learning something new, and testing to see if it will be a suitable desktop replacement once XP is no longer supported.

It's also nice to have a secondary OS installed just in case. ;)
 
I'm using it for almost everything. Border routers, NAT gateways, Access concentrators (all of those routing more than 7GBits/s and about 15000 home users), Databases, Hosting servers, Desktops (including gaming), 3D Render farms, Large file servers ... uh probably and many other things, prety much everything You can use an OS for :) .
 
Using FreeBSD on my laptop, if it had real Flash support (no linux/wine stuff) it could soon become my main workstation (that's actually a lie since I'm tied to a few Windows-only programs). FreeBSD is also on my server, and I will soon try to use it on a commercial project if we get the hardware to work. I've used FreeBSD since 4.x but never really had the chance to learn much since the server never really needed much attention except for some updates. Using it on my workstation lets me get much more time with it, and therefore I hope to learn more in the future. It's simply a brilliant operating system.
 
I'm ISP Admin. Why FreeBSD? case one 1,500$ well-tuned FreeBSD server can pass 400Mbit of traffic with NAT, firewall and shaping. And what is the cost of equivalent Cisco/Juniper?
 
I'm a desktop user; I use some form of Unix when I can because I like not having to worry about security issues (eg firewalls, services) when I'm cruising around the net.

I still need windows for the odd things (office -OOo doesn't reliably cut it) but when I'm just listening to music and surfing the web I'm using FreeBSD.
 
I use FreeBSD 7-STABLE on my workstation back at home. I absolutely love it because of the little maintenance that it requires. I use it for programming, watching videos, listening to music, surfing the internet, schoolwork, and SSH.
 
I'm using FreeBSD as a Samba/NFS Server. Used to be my Desktop OS but due lack of some features and/or software, downgraded to Windows XP :(

But I'm still thinking of a FBSD Desktop revival ;)
 
Servers at work replacing SCO OpenServer (iBSC2 ftw), running applications written by me in MS FoxPro Unix. Also file server to Win2k clients via Samba and printer services likewise.

Never a moments downtime, what more could someone want?
 
router, firewall, web, mail, samba, dhcp, vpn server and other server usage :>
I am intending to use it as a desktop system at home, but so far freebsd nvidia-driver is not usable for me.
 
I use it on an old headless 266 Mhz Celeron. This old timer runs Samba, SSH, MLDonkey, FTP and IPFW.

I'm thinking of upgrading it to an Asus board with an integrated Celeron 220 with 2GB and a couple 1 TB disks which will, of course, run FreeBSD with the same services plus webserving.

I also have FreeBSD on my desktop where I dual boot with Gentoo. In this desktop I use FreeBSD mainly to play ET while Gentoo is used because of Virtualbox and flash.
 
I'm using FreeBSD for almost everything i need. Internet, multimedia, development. I want to get ardour working for recording guitar.
 
FreeBSD is stable, it does not need any antivirus software, but I configured IPF firewall just for fun. :e

I run FreeBSD release version on my desktop, I like gcc gfortran and gnu_octave.

Programming with Vim/gVim is interesting, and GNOME is very beautiful.

The system have everything that I need, except video card driver support with 3d acceleration, it is the imperfect in the perfect for desktop users. :(
 
I use mostly for studying, playing with software and as a desktop for surfing web, reading e-mail and watch movies and listen to music. I also work with FreeBSD web, DNS, mail servers. For NAT and firewall I use OpenBSD.
 
Using for www/db/ftp/dns server for my own small bussiness.
At work, used as www, dns, database, backup, firewall, nat... Everything! =)
 
I am in technical support so i use it to pay my bills primarily but after a younger newer employee asked me why I don't run it on my work station and that he had been running it for years on his desktops I gave it shot on my home desktop and never looked back. I always loved freebsd on the server but over the last 6 months or so I have become quite an advocate of it on the desktop. I do program & script for fun on my desktop and I am introducing my 12 year old step son FreeBSD, Postgresql and other FLoss via DesktopBSD. He loves it as well.
 
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