What do you run FreeBSD on?

What do you use FreeBSD on?

  • Total voters
    119
Just to say a quick thanks, and that's really cool. Most Siberian breeders around here will offer specific allergy tests for selected kittens, because, as you say, it is a crapshoot.
Apologies to all for being off topic.
 
sko said:
My point of view: If I cant trust and rely on FreeBSD on my servers, why should I use something less reliable and flexible on my desktops and laptop?
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I've been running FreeBSD on my laptops for 12 years now and if I had to use one word to describe them it would be reliable. Not once in all that time have I had a crash, a problem I couldn't figure out or find the answer to if I looked around. Flexible? I can do anything on them I could on a Windows or Linux machine with the possible exception of playing Oblivion, and only because I don't like Wine.

I use FreeBSD 11.0 RELEASE-p9 32bit on my 10 year old Sony Viao with Intel Dual Core t2060 and 2GB Ram.
The 64 bit version on a Gateway/Acer clone with AMD Phenom II x 3 n830, ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4250 and 4GB RAM.
I was running 64 bit on a Thinkpad T61 till it shot craps a few weeks ago, but I attribute that to the dock I had it in.
 
scottro said:
TL;DR
A couple of standard towers, everything fine
A few different laptops, mostly Ok, newer one needs CURRENT to get Intel video, Intel cards need lines added to /boot/loader.conf and only use 802.11a, trackpad works but scrolling and tapping don't.
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you know, i think that might be a new, fresh perspective for FreeBSD to have... in the past, there used to be a huge discrepancy between server, and desktop hardware, but today all desktops are yesterday's mainframe supercomputers, and the divide is ever getting smaller... With virtual reality, and more space being given to objects (in a "virtual" kind of sense), I definitely think FreeBSD should address this issue of focusing solely on the "backend" of things... I'm not saying it should become another distribution of a desktop OS, what I'm saying is that there should be a FreeBSD desktop environment... somehow, someway, in its own way...

Phishfry said:
I think you should check out the certifications needed for card processing.
https://www.pcisecuritystandards.org

The rate a merchant pays in processing fees is related to their security posture.
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You know, I haven't looked at it, but in a world where the most important thing at the end of the day is being able to assign blame to someone else (maybe so you can wash your hands of your own work), I don't doubt it's fairly hefty, and I don't doubt it's actually pretty simple and straightforward, despite being scary, and voluminous, so as to scare off the kiddies (which is a good idea, see... i'm not perpetuating that kind of bullshit : P )... and I'm sure it's also quite costly to meet all the requirements, but in the end, it's probably just using a bunch of certified software, and ensuring all employees wear badges or something... I'm sure it's not very hard to steal credit card numbers from a payment processor. I'd rent the office upstairs. : D

obsigna said:
Interesting that users are running so many FreeBSD desktop systems, since it seems to break with the common place that the main usage of FreeBSD is for servers.

I noticed the difference between the thread title "What do you run FreeBSD on?" and the poll title "What do you use FreeBSD on?" So it came to my mind, that maybe FreeBSD is running on many desktop systems for sort of curiosity, which are not actually being used heavily.
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I think you're chasing rabbits.
 
poorandunlucky said:
I definitely think FreeBSD should address this issue of focusing solely on the "backend" of things... I'm not saying it should become another distribution of a desktop OS, what I'm saying is that there should be a FreeBSD desktop environment... somehow, someway, in its own way...
Click to expand...

There is already GhostBSD, which is fairly well respected from what I know of it although I've never used it, and TrueOS, formerly PC-BSD.

I like things the way they are now. I prefer to build it from scratch and wouldn't use a version that came pre-rolled with a DE, applications, etc. even if they came out with one.

As far as that goes, I'm one one of my FreeBSD laptops now, using Fluxbox, so there already is a desktop option with vanilla FreeBSD. It's rock solid and set up just the way I want it with image manipulator, music and video player, CD ripper, DVD burner, web browser, file manager, etc. What more could you ask for? Somebody to do it for you?
 
obsigna said:
I noticed the difference between the thread title "What do you run FreeBSD on?" and the poll title "What do you use FreeBSD on?" So it came to my mind, that maybe FreeBSD is running on many desktop systems for sort of curiosity, which are not actually being used heavily.
Click to expand...

My home FreeBSD desktop (late 2009 Mac Mini) is used for email, web browsing, mailserver, webserver, nameserver and C programming. My other machine (late 2012 Mac Mini) runs macOS and has VMs of Windows 2000, XP, 7 and 10. It is rarely used in comparison except to read .docx files, and the Windows VMs are used only for compiling programs for PIC microcontrollers and running Delphi for compiling occasional OS X/macOS programs.
 
I use it for my home server. I used it before in VirtualBox. I will use (in 2 days) it in my laptop as dual-boot with Windows. I use it on MIPS based device. I use it with ARM based router.

Once got it working it works like a charm. I love FreeBSD.
 
Lenovo TS430-0388 w/32 GB ECC RAM
(4) 3.5" SATA drives; RAIDZ2 (data or NAS backup)
(8) 2.5" SAS drives; RAID6 (boot)
Intel PRO/1000 PT quad port NIC; em(4)
LSI (3ware) 9750-16i4e SAS/SATA RAID controller; tws(4)
HP Proliant Microserver G7 N54L w/16 GB ECC RAM
Several ALR Revolution 2X servers
  • Dual Pentium Pro Overdrive CPUs w/1 GB ECC RAM
  • AMI MegaRAID 428 UltraSCSI RAID5 (3 drives)
  • Dual Intel Pro/100 server NIC; fxp(4)
  • DEC EISA or PCI FDDI NIC; fea or fpa(4)
Two ALR Revolution 2XL
  • Dual Pentium Pro Overdrive CPUs & 1 GB ECC RAM
  • AMI MegaRAID 428 UltraSCSI RAID5 (6 drives)
  • Dual Intel Pro/100 server NIC; fxp(4)
  • DEC EISA or PCI FDDI NIC; fea or fpa(4)
A few Abit BP6 based systems with dual Celeron 533 CPUs and 768 MB RAM
An outrageous power bill if everything was on at once; most of the systems were cold standbys.
I'm big into taking vintage hardware and throwing it into a computing cluster, NAS or network lab with FreeBSD and letting it run until it dies. I've been using FreeBSD since 1996. I don't feel so bad about decommissioning my previous network as fpa(4) has been discontinued. I will say this, fpa(4) was absolutely bullet proof if you wanted 100Mbps networking.
 
I suppose it's a descriptive chart. What is the population [of summaries]? i.e. how many unique FreeBSD systems are there in your stats?
[EDIT]: I'm always pessimistic about statistics especially inferential ones (I'm not suggesting yours is inferential). But I like [the fact] that your data suggest desktop/Intel64 is the king.
 
vigole said:
I suppose it's a descriptive chart. What is the population [of summaries]? i.e. how many unique FreeBSD systems are there in your stats?
[EDIT]: I'm always pessimistic about statistics especially inferential ones (I'm not suggesting yours is inferential). But I like [the fact] that your data suggest desktop/Intel64 is the king.
Click to expand...

You can find details by clicking on the charts and then clicking on table rows. The sample is still relatively small — 300 tested computers on FreeBSD.
 
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aponomarenko said:
Current pie charts collected by https://www.freshports.org/sysutils/hw-probe/:
Click to expand...

vigole said:
[EDIT]: I'm always pessimistic about statistics especially inferential ones (I'm not suggesting yours is inferential).
Click to expand...
I think in this particular instance it's worth noting that the available data is most likely biased as most security concerned FreeBSD users would refrain from running sysutils/hw-probe as it requires root level access. There's a corresponding forum thread:
forums.freebsd.org

Solved - Why BSDstats.org is down so long? Somebody knows?

BSDstats.org is down several days (or more). Does anyone know what happened with it? I didn't find any mentions on the internet. Maybe it's time to switch to https://www.freshports.org/sysutils/hw-probe/ ;) ?
forums.freebsd.org forums.freebsd.org

This is solely meant to add some context. Personally I appreciate aponomarenko 's efforts in creating sysutils/hw-probe!
 
My FreeBSD adventure started with a few Zotac Zboxes that I got used very inexpensively from eBay. Mainly running DNS, net/wireguard, net/samba, and multimedia/plexmediaserver. Next, I grabbed a Chromebox for cheap on eBay and turned that into a fun little Desktop “bsdchromebox” running x11-wm/xfce4 with a really sweet custom theme and all of my various day to day applications. FreeBSD just runs blazingly fast on those little boxes.

From there, it’s safe to say that I got the FreeBSD bug :) I’ve been experimenting with various VM builds using VMWare Fusion on my Macbook Pro, plotting the next FreeBSD project for home.

Recently, I started playing with ports-mgmt/poudriere and building ports as a hobby. I quickly learned that cheap discarded Zboxes are most definitely NOT made for building ports any time in this century, lol. So now I am shopping around for something with much more power that I can really roll up my sleeves with port building and hopefully contribute some new ports to the FreeBSD ports tree. If anyone has any suggestions for a rig that won’t break the bank but will build ports well, please do let me know!
 
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