Why do people use FreeBSD?

sidetone said:
FreeBSD can use more people, but this also means the project will unfortunately accept unappreciative actions towards FreeBSD's community. That will have to be accepted by me, because widespread use can do more good than irritation.
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It's an opinion probably shared by many, but it's not my say, while it is irritating. Also, I understand that FreeBSD is not a charity, every company and person (including myself) gets something out of it first, then they give back what they like. I don't mind if people are unable to put something back, but I think they should at least appreciate it, while they aren't required to.

(Sorry for quoting myself, but I didn't want to heavily edit an established post of mine.)
 
Ahh.. I've been using FreeBSD since 3.1. It started when I was in the Navy back in 1998. They put me in charge of the ships library computer network, which consisted of 2x Pentium 166MHz systems and a crashed NT4 server. They didn't have the software, nor could not find the license keys to reinstall it.

So, I goofed around the internet for a few days and bumped into FreeBSD. I was going to try Linux, but the Linux society at the time was really rude and unhelpful. I was new to the whole *n*x world, so I started to learn it. I decided to subscribe to their CD-ROM kit due to dial-up being incredibly slow and I could get updated packs while deployed. I installed it without issues and started to tinker with it. This was on an (initial) P166 with 32MB of RAM. It was later bumped to a dual P90 with 128MB (the P166 was then turned into a 3rd workstation).

I ended up turning it into an on-demand dial-up router and a file server. The network was rather secure as well and was utilized by both enlisted and officers alike.

So, now I'm using pfSense on my router and FreeNAS on my home storage server (with a few arrays attached to it). I also use FreeBSD on a couple servers as well as running Gentoo on my MyBook Live drives (until I can figure out how to get FreeBSD installed on them as well).
 
Simba7 said:
Ahh.. I've been using FreeBSD since 3.1. It started when I was in the Navy back in 1998. They put me in charge of the ships library computer network, which consisted of 2x Pentium 166MHz systems and a crashed NT4 server. They didn't have the software, nor could not find the license keys to reinstall it.

So, I goofed around the internet for a few days and bumped into FreeBSD...

I ended up turning it into an on-demand dial-up router and a file server. The network was rather secure as well and was utilized by both enlisted and officers alike.
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That's an interesting story. They allowed use of FreeBSD, without getting some kind of authorization, or was it a private library?
 
sidetone said:
That's an interesting story. They allowed use of FreeBSD, without getting some kind of authorization, or was it a private library?
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That being on a navy ship, it is hard not to read that as "pirate" library ;) I must clean my glasses, it seems.

My first contact was with NetBSD 1.0, which came on a CD rom set bootable on i386 (yuk), SPARC (drool) and m68k (which I had). I used that for a long time, and still have that installation on that old machine. I hope it boots these days. Last week, I got out that CD set and re-installed it on VMWare, partly just for fun. It felt a bit awkward to set the settings to 32MB memory. But it worked well, only the configuration was as I remembered it to be. Without a printed manual you have a bit of a struggle at hand. That part came a long way.
 
As for me, I'm still evaluating it (right now running 11-CURRENT on my notebook again). I'm a professional software developer and -architect with a CS diploma. My first computer was a Commodore 64 and I'd say the first "real" operating system for me was AmigaOS. At university, I got to use all kinds of machines running Linux, Solaris, HP-UX, AIX, and so on -- only later, more Windows machines were added. So, coming from AmigaOS, you can imagine I was never really happy with Windows back then (I'm now, kind of, Windows 7 is usable as my development machine at work, but that's another story). On the other hand, I hated CDE and the clumsy dtterm, too. The next best thing in reach for a private server was, of course, Linux (after some evaluation, Debian seemed to fit the bill best). I also looked for alternatives on the desktop and, also with some testing, finally found KDE very usable. And that's more or less status quo.

So, why FreeBSD when Debian + KDE does the job quite well? The latest release annoyed me. I got used to a transparent OS without lots of black-box magic and still with powerful administrative tools, and that's what I want. But it seems Debian is changing away from that -- the inclusion of systemd is of course the single biggest offender, but there are other things as well. So far, FreeBSD seems to deliver what I'm looking for, so maybe it'll be on my main desktop soon and some time later on my server -- we will see.
 
The big issue that I have with Linux is that it is a kernel with a bunch of addons. FreeBSD is a complete and integrated operating system, like Windows and Max OS-X is. The piecemeal nature of Linux, however, is its biggest advantage and its biggest Achilles's heel. Linux is highly modular, which is a great because you can pick and choose that stuff that you want and need in the base OS. However, that flexibility comes with a high price: You have to update those individual parts separately, and the new versions may or may not play nice with each other. It's a roll of the dice. The 200+ distros do help alot, but it is still a fragmented mess because everyone has a different way of doing things. I don't need 12 different tools that all do the same thing. But different distros use different tools to do the exact same thing. I see this problem even in cygwin.

FreeBSD offers stability, a complete and unified OS, regular updates that make sense, good performance, good security, and a generally unified community. Linux, on the other hand, is a fragmented mess because everyone has a different way of doing things. At least this is my personal opinion.
 
Maelstorm said:
The big issue that I have with Linux is that it is a kernel with a bunch of addons. FreeBSD is a complete and integrated operating system, like Windows and Max OS-X is. The piecemeal nature of Linux, however, is its biggest advantage and its biggest Achilles's heel. Linux is highly modular, which is a great because you can pick and choose that stuff that you want and need in the base OS. However, that flexibility comes with a high price: You have to update those individual parts separately, and the new versions may or may not play nice with each other. It's a roll of the dice. The 200+ distros do help alot, but it is still a fragmented mess because everyone has a different way of doing things. I don't need 12 different tools that all do the same thing. But different distros use different tools to do the exact same thing. I see this problem even in cygwin.

FreeBSD offers stability, a complete and unified OS, regular updates that make sense, good performance, good security, and a generally unified community. Linux, on the other hand, is a fragmented mess because everyone has a different way of doing things. At least this is my personal opinion.
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You are right. Components fragmentation AND lack of standardization is Linux's biggest plague. While modularity can give some advantages and flexibility, lack of standards across components could ends in poor integration between them.
 
Really, I think it's often a matter of what we're familiar with ... just like it is with cars, boats, and sports teams. I've looked at the Linux models, but they seem to want all the options on it, when I'm looking for the standard model. Heck, I even asked them to remove the AM radio, and the standard wheel covers.

I've found it's pretty easy to put FreeBSD on a diet, and make it really skinny (LInux sometimes gets ruffled feathers when it can't eat what it wants to eat. Hard to live with then ...). But - that's also probably a matter of which system I'm more familiar with ...
 
Well, I have just recently returned to FreeBSD after being "lost" in the wilderness of Linux for a number of years.

I use(d) Windows(DOS) at work because I have to. As a designer, the programs I use only run on those (AutoCAD / SolidWorks).

At home I started with DOS -> OS/2 (definitely better than Windows 3.0) -> Debian (2.0.something - after OS/2 died) -> FreeBSD (around 4.2 I believe) -> Arch Linux (the closest Linux to BSD, it was that or Slack) -> FreeBSD. Note this is strictly desktop usage.

Why?

1. BSD init scripts. They make sense to me, much more so than sysv6. And systemd is the reason I'm not using Arch anymore. Frankly, systemd turned my rock-solid Arch desktop into a pile of unresponsive unstable crap (to paraphrase). And yes I DID use Arch/systemd from early 2012 until mid 2014, but never happily, and never successfully understanding what had happened to my computer.
2. Integration. No Linux distro (technically GNU/Linux) is as tightly integrated as FreeBSD (or any of the BSD's) as far as kernel and userland. Linux gives you a kernel. Technically, everything else is not Linux at all. Usually GNU, but still a completely separate entity from Linux. With FreeBSD it's all integrated together. And. It. Just. Works.
3. Compactness. I only install what I want to install. No extras that the distro supplier thinks I need, like Pulse Audio (thus I am not using PCBSD).
4. Transparency. I KNOW what's going on with my computer, something I no longer did with Linux, and something I have never had with Windows.
5. I just got really sick and tired of the political bullcrap (to paraphrase) in Linux these days.
6. BSD license. I am also getting thoroughly fed up with GPL's superiority complex. Probably related to 5.

I first tried a number of non-systemd Linux distros but there were always issues. Closest was Void Linux. Tried PCBSD, but there were major issues with upgrading (and Pulse Audio, which I've never really understood the need for). Finally decided to try FreeBSD again and I think I'm back to stay. Installed 10.2, upgraded to 10.3, no issues at all. Even when I was using Arch I would think back fondly on using FreeBSD 4/5/6.
 
Why does Steve Gibson use FreeBSD?
Sources: Gibson Research Corporation (Steve Gibson)
  • STEVE: The increasing load on our Microsoft-based news server began causing frequent system crashes. So I switched to FreeBSD UNIX and the INN server.
  • STEVE: The newsgroup server that I talked about at the beginning of the show, news.grc.com? That's a FreeBSD UNIX machine. FreeBSD is my, you know, Linux/UNIX-style platform of choice.
  • STEVE: Yeah, we've got a very active, super useful group of gurus who hang out there. It's news.grc.com is the machine. And so that's a FreeBSD box. So I use the appropriate one for the appropriate application.
  • STEVE: But what’s so cool is I do have FreeBSD servers at, you know, in our main facility at Level 3, and I’ve got one here on my own local gateway And so it’s a very simple way to set up a NAS using FreeBSD, absolutely free.
  • STEVE: I have a - one of the crazy boxes that I'm running OpenVPN on that I was talking about before - I built a diskless FreeBSD system because I just wanted to. It's where I'm running BIND 9 locally.
  • STEVE: But I do wish that I was on open source platform. And again, I'm not going to go rewrite everything now for it. But if I had to do it again, yeah, I probably would have chosen FreeBSD. That's my platform of choice when I'm not on Windows. And I do have a FreeBSD server running. My DNS server at GRC is on FreeBSD. I'm running a true NNTP server on FreeBSD Unix.
  • STEVE: This is an instance of the proper tool for the proper purpose. I am a FreeBSD person. I was turned on to FreeBSD by Brett Glass, who I mentioned before. Brett said this is the one you want, and I think Brett was right. I love FreeBSD. I've got a FreeBSD server running at Level 3, also one here. At Level 3 it is my OpenVPN terminus. So I run OpenVPN on that box. But also I run INN, the traditional NNTP, the Network News server which hosts GRC's newsgroups.
  • STEVE: FreeBSD is my personal favorite flavor of the Unix operating system. Whereas Linux is, of course, the wildly popular "Unix-like" operating system, FreeBSD is actually real Unix.
  • STEVE: So FreeBSD is the UNIX that I had chosen years ago. It's been good to me.
  • STEVE: I love FreeBSD.
Note (from Wikipedia):
Steven Gibson is an American software engineer, security researcher, and IT security proponent. In the early 1980s, Gibson was best known for his work on light pen technology for use with Apple and Atari systems. In 1985, Gibson founded Gibson Research Corporation, best known for its SpinRite software.
 
vigole said:
1985, Gibson founded Gibson Research Corporation, best known for its SpinRite software.
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SpinRite is an awesome piece of software... but I discovered it too late :/ and haven't owned any magnetic spinning platters in many years... I did wonder if low level NAND page information was exposed though SSD controllers in a similar way - though I suppose NAND technology is likely to become obsolete faster than magnetic platters.

I had better keep on topic:

I don't have lots of Linux experience or experience with SystemD etc. I mainly use Ubuntu and Mac OS 10.6 outside of BSD. The later is obsolete, later versions have become bloated and slow, Ubuntu doesn't give me the ground up experience I want so it was Arch or FreeBSD, and FreeBSD added EFI last year making life easier on my hardware so here I am :)

Also although I can't give comparison, being a kernel newbie, compiling the kernel and playing with module source on FreeBSD has been a painless pleasure even with no prior experience.
 
Same reason I like Juniper Networks (routers, switches, etc); it works! I might be biased since Juniper Junos is based on FreeBSD. :p
 
I just did a short clean up job at a local television station. Out of the mess, there are two PowerMacintosh G4 towers available.
Both FreeBSD and Debian will go on them for a audio/video animation studio setup for a local volunteer/charity organization.
This is a reason I use FreeBSD, to benefit others at little to no cost to/for them.
 
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