What Do You Love Most About FreeBSD? :)

Because FreeBSD has withstood all the pressure and the hard times of past last decades, demonstrating an unprecedented value/cost ratio. Other systems have many times the number of developers that FreeBSD has with only marginally better results (if any).
FreeBSD has remained steady, trustworthy, efficient. In a word : Great!
True, I almost lost my faith some times, but came back again in a heartbeat!
 
FreeBSD was actually the first OS I came across that I found was good, after I dropped my C64.
Since then, no computer/device running Windows, Linux or MacOS could ever convince me they where better in any way.
I allways liked that FreeBSD feels free (like in freedom) and not like an enemy on my own computer, I have to fight all the time.
...and I grew up with it :beer:.

Yeah, It kicked my butt sometimes (I often kicked myself to be honest), but that's not something specific to FreeBSD...
I've heard there are commercial OSes that treat their customers as beta testers all time, longing for the next patch that finally make the OS usable :p.
 
I am extremely fond of pkg && ports, ZFS, the Linux ABI, kqueue(), clang + lldb, DTrace, jails, bhyve, having multiple firewall implementations to choose from, and just how tidy kernel configuration files are along with how intuitive it is to build a custom kernel.
 
i love this from FreeBSD

-Freedom to choose
-Great community
-Great support
-Security
-The chance to change E-V-E-R-Y-T-H-I-N-G that i want
-The limit to tuneup your FreeBSD if up to you
-The rules are simple, keep it simple and functional
-I' can modify source for everyting that i'want and compile without problems from /usr/ports
-A real solid server infraestructure
-A real solid desktop
-Speed and a great logo :)
 
As much as I detest the way Torvalds expresses himself (in my opinion he's an arrogant dork when it comes to this: apparently he doesn't even want to put any effort into this thing called communication, I honestly wouldn't want anything to do with him)

Likewise, among the other reasons, one I'm really unlikely going to have anything to do with the CHAD UNIX for, is de Raadt and his "I am better than you" complex.

One plus side, spoilt narcissistic leaders like thoseo ften tend to attract proud aspergers fanboys which develop a religous cult for their OS leader and represent a true plague for OSS communities nowadays; I remember OpenSolaris mailing lists in 2006-2010 to be much more friendly and populated with rational people (similar to those here). netbsd-users abd openindiana-discuss are good places to attend too.

But whenever I had to deal with Linux communities (been in Linux for 3 years so far) I always felt kind of rejected and out of place, no matter the distro. They're obsessed with privacy, security, GPL even though half of times they show to know less than nothing on those subject, then make pretentious assumptions making laugh of those who were pointing them out the truth. Politeness, respect, civil debate are out of question.. They're always quarrelling with each other and they seem to enjoy scanning others replies in search of something to criticize.
 
What Do You Love Most About FreeBSD? :)
It's not one thing, it is a cost-benefit-pro-con tradeoff. I have a long history of using computers, from MVS, RSX-11, VM CP/CMS, VMS, both Berkeley and AT&T Unix on minicomputers, SunOS, NeXTStep, and who knows what else. I started using Linux at home in 1994 or 1995, somewhere around 0.99.13, when the only distributions were stacks of floppies. There is still a (trivial) line of code I wrote in the Linux kernel. Then at work I used a lot of HP-UX and AIX. At work, I deal with zillions of Linux machines, but fortunately I don't have to administer them, just log in and program on them.

For a while, I used OpenBSD at home. Today, the only OS that I seriously install at home and administer is FreeBSD (the other operating systems come free with a machine, and are things like Android or MacOS). Exception: The three Raspberry Pi run Raspbian Linux; I tried FreeBSD, but ran into too many road blocks (mostly minor but all annoying).

Why do I chose FreeBSD for my home machine? The main reason is that it is clean, well-organized, and done by people with a professional mindset of quality. Note that I only use it as a server, not as a desktop (where a lot of the cruft, like "drm-next" comes in). Honestly, OpenBSD is even better in this regard, as Theo and his friends do an even better job of reviewing everything, cleaning it up, and removing everything that's not strictly necessary. But then, OpenBSD is lacking one particularly important feature, namely ZFS. Since I know a little bit about storage, I insist on RAID, and a high-quality file system: the rest of the machine can go up in smoke as far as I'm concerned, but I want my data to be safe. ZFS with checksums and integrated RAID is the best available option at the FOSS hobbyist level (if I wanted to spent many $10K on a file system, there would be better commercial options, but for that money I'd rather buy musical instruments).

Little things which are really nice to have, and which prevent me from getting pissed off at FreeBSD, include things like mostly good documentation, a clean package system, a good and easy-to-use upgrade mechanism, and a forum that can be used for support with mostly friendly people. The absence of complete a**holes (of the caliber of Linus or Lennard), but on a day-to-day basis they don't annoy me much. I know some of the *BSD old-timers a little bit (Kirk, Eric, Sam), and they are all very friendly (at least when sober; when drunk they can be overwhelming). The FreeBSD code of conduct also helps, to keep people interacting in a friendly fashion.

The downsides of FreeBSD are hinted at above: not as minimalist and clean as OpenBSD; performance is not as high as a hand tuned Linux system (but performance is not my issue); much less hardware support (but my hardware happens to work, with the exception of wireless cards, but I gave up trying those), and no commercial support of the high-end caliber (which I probably wouldn't buy for home, but demonstrates that it can be supported). Some everyday things (like getting LetsEncrypt certificates, and many other examples) are a little harder than on Linux, because 99% of the documentation and help out there is written for Linux, but so far I've got everything worked out with a little extra effort.

The community support and the spot on documentation ..
Agree.

After an upgrade I found that there were several picture viewers installed as a dependency from the desktop, each with it's own bulk of dependencies. ...
That kind of dependency hell is exactly what killed Linux for me. And being root-kitted.

But does Linux really do any job better?
Yes, there are lots of jobs that Linux does much better than FreeBSD. Proof is in the pudding. For example, look at the new Summit computer at Oak Ridge, the fastest compute cluster in the world. It runs Red Hat Linux. No, it does not run AIX or zOS, even though it was built by IBM. The people at Oak Ridge (and the other national labs) are very very smart, and evaluated what OS to pick, and they clearly rejected Windows, MacOS, FreeBSD, and Minix. They have reasons, very good reasons. Matter-of-fact, 100% of the 500 fastest computers in the world run Linux (every single on). If you look at the likes of Facebook, Amazon, Google, the big banks: the overwhelming majority of their systems run Linux (with some Windows thrown in at commercial sites); the only major FreeBSD exceptions are NetFlix (the video distribution company), NetApp (the NAS storage server company), and Jupiter (which makes high-end routers), but together that's perhaps 1% of the market.

One job Linux does particularly well: being stable enough to be sold for profit and commercially supported. The fact that RedHat has grown to a very large company by cleaning up, selling and supporting a free OS speaks volumes about how good Linux can be. But that doesn't matter to me: my home system is not a big bank, not a big Internet company, nor do I want or need commercial support. I want an OS that I can and enjoy supporting myself.

The downfall will occur if FreeBSD should ever be more concerned with what others think rather than the science of computing.
What FreeBSD does today has nothing to do with computer science. The progress of FreeBSD is engineering, not science. When was the last time you saw a scientific publication about some improvement in *BSD? I think it might have been Kirk's paper on Soft Updates, but that was nearly 20 years ago.

Current Code of Conduct :)
Agree.

I used to like it because of this (picture of good-looking woman in tight-fitting beastie costume compared to badly dressed and ugly Linux geeks omitted)
That is indeed a good argument, unfortunately only for straight male and LGBT female computer users. But since I do self-identify as a male hetero chauvinist horny pig, I wouldn't mind if you shared the ladies' phone number. I'd like to meet her and check out whether she is silicon or real ...

but ever since FreeBSD became VirginOS...
In the office, when the annual "property control audit and inventory" comes around, I tell them the following joke: For religious reasons, I tried a vow of chastity once. It wasn't much fun. So now I have taken a vow of poverty instead, and no longer own any computing equipment that needs to be inventoried. They typically get upset at me.

OK, enough dirty jokes.

... is de Raadt and his "I am better than you" complex.
... spoilt narcissistic leaders like thoseo ften tend to attract proud aspergers fanboys which develop a religous cult for their OS leader and represent a true plague for OSS communities nowadays;...
All true. But the average *user* of Linux or OpenBSD (not developer or community member, but the person who just installs and runs it, perhaps with a support contract from a company like RedHat) does not go to the forums or mailing lists. He doesn't care whether Linus uses 4-letter words, or whether Theo is abusive if someone challenges his superiority, or whether Lennart is a fool with delusions. He simply cares that the product he downloaded or bought works well. And Linux does work well for many people. We should not over-emphasize the effect of a few nutcases on the business of computing.
 
Freebsd love, well love and hate all in one, pain in ass to get things going but once you do elation kicks in.
but i could best descibe it like this
windows ....works but everyone knows you are using it and everything you do is tracked logged spyed stolen and hijacked.

linnux ....works for a few weeks....updates break things ..every distro moves things, cant find anything without distro specific help...a muddled mess
freebsd ...nothing works but over time you can make it work, with a manual that easy to follow and a community thats helps you. And when your IQ kicks in and you copy and save your rc.conf bootloader.conf etc then next install gets easier and easier.
PLUS you can run a lean system on old crap you get given that no one else would use......recycling woooot!
oh.......and 666
gotta love the devil
 
ralphbsz First of all that's one of the best answers I've seen in a while; consider the possibility of start writing public speeches and press releases under payment

the average *user* of Linux or OpenBSD (not developer or community member, but the person who just installs and runs it, perhaps with a support contract from a company like RedHat) does not go to the forums or mailing lists.

And I perfectly agree with you; but similarly, why would those same users then, ever feel the need to worry that much about an internal Code of Conduct, which -let's be realistic- would affect FreeBSD developers only, if ever literally applied?

Let me remember that Crivens, a veteran user, a moderator, a developer was told to f*** off by someone in another thread not long ago, without any consequence.

If I remember correctly someone another thread reported the 'testimony' from a guy eulogizing his own courage for having moved his entire company from FreeBSD to OmniOS, because FreeBSD had supposedly "been hijacked by Geek Feminists".

Many of those who said they moved after the CoC revision didn't even appear to be professional enterprise users.

I think you're overestimating
people's judgement, maturity and rational discernment.
They do care about things like CoCs, or 'true tough male leaders' actually more than how much they care about the quality of the product, especially Home Server and Desktop users, young FOSS developers, IT/computer science students. Running either CHAD UNIX (regardless of its poor performance, its lack of virtualization capabilities, the fact its UFS2 implementation doesn't even support SU+J, snapshots, LVM, TRIM...) or an OS whose chief keeps telling Nvidia developers to get f*****, even when his requests clearly go against Nvidia's (who clearly detains a monopoly on the GPU market) enomical interests,while he takes between 500k and 1bilion USD per year from Linux Foundation, is exactly what those people care about, above everything else
 
With FreeBSD, if it does not work, it is usually my fault (cue in current C state problems).
Let me remember that Crivens, a veteran user, a moderator, a developer was told to f*** off by someone in another thread not long ago, without any consequence.
Was stört es die Eiche wenn sich die Schweine dran reiben?
And that is also one point that brought me here and keeps me. People here don't insult on purpose and don't throw a tantrum when something acts up. To insult or really tick off those great old ones, which I want to be one of one day, you need real machines - and not a box of spare parts (so to speak).
 
Was stört es die Eiche wenn sich die Schweine dran reiben?

Unfortunately, in spite of my nick, I don't speak German (studied it a bit,but was a long time ago); I put it on Google Translate, and here's the output :what::

What bothers the oak when the pigs rub it?

I assume you were wandering about what was I referring to: IIRC it was on the TP-LINK dongle thread ;),but really don't bother with that

And that is also one point that brought me here and keeps me. People here don't insult on purpose and don't throw a tantrum when something acts up. To insult or really tick off those great old ones, which I want to be one of one day, you need real machines - and not a box

Yeah, definitely, I agree 100% on this, one more reason to keep supporting this OS and community
 
Agree with ralphbsz and Sensucht94 about this. It's the cleanliness factor that nails it. Take a USB disk, apply an MBR, partition, and file system with a few commands, extract kernel.txz and base.txz to the file system, and you're done. Nice clean system. No glitzy GUI based installers that seem to run in circles and get cranky if they're not connected to the internet.
 
I noticed that, while blubbering, I hadn't actually told why I love FreeBSD, I'll try to be quick and concise:
  • clean, coherent, secure, simple yet modern and performing system. If you like free UNIX descendants, FreeBSD is IMHO the most advanced among all BSDs and Illumos distros
  • very Unix, has a positively strict, Unixish phylosophy and a clear position on how things should get done, but is opened to innovation and new technologies. Doesn't trade quality for convenience and stupid trends.
  • ZFS or UFS2 with snapshots, bhyve, jails, devd, IPFW, sndio, geli, GEOM, DTrace, poudriere/synth and the ports/packages system are nice things to have and play with on my system
  • amazing,unparalleled community and documentation. friendly developers and moderators open to hear users' feedback and help them
  • it's easy contribute and support the project in many ways if you're eager enough to do so
  • beastie is the best OS logo ever created :)
FreeBSD, even more than Solaris before it, brought me into Unix and made me develop such a strong passion for Unix-like systems, to the point that even as an amateur with a very busy life I've got more experienced than I would have ever imagined.
 
What drew you guys to FreeBSD?

This is very simple: whenever I get along a command /usr/bin/whatever, it is guaranteed that I can go to /usr/src/usr.bin/whatever and find there precisely the code that is actually running, can try to understand it, optionally change it, can say "make" and the code will replace without any unexpected side-effects and without searching for missing prereqs etc.etc.
This is freedom and independence. Certainly, as Datapanic remarked, this is challenging - but then it is probably the only way to really fulfil the stance: "do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law." (The point behind this is that there is no option left to look for other people's faults as the cause why something does not work: either accept it the way it is or work on your own development.)
 
I've been in the entertainment business for decades and have a son who's an actor and owned his own theatre company. You wouldn't believe the trying times I've had with daemons I've met.
 
chief keeps telling Nvidia developers to get f*****, even when his requests clearly go against Nvidia's (who clearly detains a monopoly on the GPU market) economic interests

What's wrong with that one? Do you realize that maintaining FreeBSD drivers also goes against Nvidia's interests and, for example, in addition to recently deprecating the 32-bit kernel driver they silently dropped the 32-bit (FreeBSD) application support? This company is really annoying to deal with.
 
Since drm-next-kmod is also to be amd64 only, they are in good company there. *grumble*
 
IMO, the best thing in FreeBSD is that it's a complete operating system,
it's not bunch of packages collected together in "distros", like GNU/Linux,
even Linux kernel is a separate package... So you'll never see "dependency hell",
when using pkg, also your system will never be broken after package upgrades,
you're even able to remove all packages and delete /usr/local, and your system
should work fine, without any issues. Also I like much that it is more focused on console usage,
this means that there is no crappy "settings GUI-s" to play with, which tries to emulate some kind
of control panel... Just edit appropriate configuration file, add appropriate service to rc.conf
and you're ready to go. Also it is very good that there is no and won't ever be no "crapware"
in base system, like systemd in GNU/Linux, for example. If FreeBSD had support for a similar ammount
of hardware (not "exotic", of course), apps (except systemd :)) and "desktop features" (like suspend to disk/RAM
on all GPU-s) as GNU/Linux, it would be the best OS IMO!
 
Unfortunately, in spite of my nick, I don't speak German (studied it a bit,but was a long time ago); I put it on Google Translate, and here's the output :what::

"What bothers the oak when the pigs rub it?"

Was stört es die Eiche wenn sich die Schweine dran reiben?

Insignificant as a single tear shed in the sea.
 
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