Why FreeBSD, if I may..

Rock said:
Now I am in the twilight zone. Since I installed FreeBSD 15 in my T520 Lenovo and on reboot it did not boot. I will check with sha256 just in case.
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I have a W520 which I'm very pleased with.

What happens when you switch on? Do you get a BIOS screen?

It is more likely to be a hardware problem rather than anything to do with FreeBSD.

Can you see any indication of it having any power?
 
ZFS as first-class citizen, kernel debugging as first-class citizen, crash dumps as first class citizen, solid drivers for tape devices, geom and CAM, pf. the linux equivalents don't even come close.
 
dorijan said:
Simple as that.
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Well... there are 2 answers to that for me.

First is simple & obvious: "because it gets the job done", the power to serve is strong within this one.

But my personal reasons... go a bit deeper. To me, personally (!), FreeBSD is the true spiritual successor to Sun Solaris. I am/was a certified Solaris administrator since the '90's and have been quite passionate about Solaris (and Unix in general) for quite a few years. At one time I even ran 3 local Solaris/x86 servers, 2 of them fully licensed for support because I believed in the company.

Well... we probably all know how that ended. Thing is, Unix is a bit of a passion for me; I can truly get excited and motivated when I work on my console(s) to make my servers "do" something. Probably needless to say but FreeBSD gives me all the good stuff from Solaris (like ZFS, the professional design and approach) as well as giving me the same level of control, if not even (much) more.

I mean... there's something special about having the ability to (almost) literally build your OS from the ground up (referring to
/usr/src) and fully customizing it to your needs. Sorry, no support for games nor HyperV, Unbound, wireless, Bluetooth, finger, FreeBSD update, bsdinstall or sendmail on my servers (though we obviously do keep the games/nethack36-nox11 around).

Best of all... I use FreeBSD versions which my hosting provider doesn't even officially support yet for their VPS systems. I also don't really need them to keep my systems up to date. Oh right, speaking of which... it's pretty trivial (IMO) to build the ports yourself, store all the packages in your own local repository then feed those to your backup server(s)... compile once, use many. Source tree? I use NFS for that on a (private) vlan between my servers (it's also an extra layer of security because my backup server only has ro access to said sourcetree export).

Right now I'm building v15 on my backup server and... I just love seeing how some things just never change. Why should they? I prefer reliability over "flashy gadget features", even though I really enjoyed Inspector Gadget as a kid ;)

Yah, what's there not to like here? ;)
 
I felt, sort of, betrayed when systemd was essentially forced on linux users.
Linux users were not asking for anything like that. But IBM/Redhat is the major player, and other distros had to adopt systemd to stay relevant.
I don't like a big corporation forcing unwanted standards on it users. That is the kind of crap I wanted to get away from.
People complain about Microsoft, but do you know where MS learned it's ruthless behavior? From their old business partner IBM. IBM used to dominate all computer standards, but the student defeated the master, and MS took over. IBM seems to be using Linux to fight back. Linux is becoming just as corporate as MS or Apple.
 
I’m not a fanboy.

I’m just getting started with MX Linux because I won’t tolerate Win11.

Windows has built in obsolescence (bribes?) where the vendors require Win11 or their products refuse to launch.

nvidia is an integral part of my workflow. If MX gives me a simple turnkey solution with endless tinkering I’m all for that.

FBSD is a great server when I need a server.
 
walterbyrd said:
IBM seems to be using Linux to fight back. Linux is becoming just as corporate as MS or Apple.
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They also effectively killed CentOS for the community, which is why Rocky and Alma Linux came into existence. IBM is slowly following the footsteps of Oracle when they take over stuff like Solaris, ZFS, and MySQL.

bgavin said:
Windows has built in obsolescence (bribes?) where the vendors require Win11 or their products refuse to launch.
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People like to shit on Microsoft, but other companies like Apple are, in my opinion, way worse when it comes to forced obsolescence. They will typically lock out new software updates only for their shiniest newest hardware and it's even worse when you're a developer as Xcode is typically locked to the MacOS version and without the latest Xcode, you also can't publish to the app store.

dorijan said:
Simple as that.
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I would love to use FreeBSD for my workstation, but my workstation workflow currently needs stuff that either only works on Linux or Windows.

I do, however, use FreeBSD extensively on servers because, in my opinion, it just works better than Linux as a server unless you are planning to use Docker for everything. Between native first-class support for ZFS, pf, jails, choice between quarterly/latest/poudriere, there is just nothing in the Linux world that can quite deliver all that. Not to mention the stability of the base system; Linux loves to make itself a nightmare of a moving target to support with the constant need to reinvent the wheel from basic utilities being deprecated (netstat, ifconfig, etc) to drastic changes with the init system, to schizophrenia with file system choice (Ext4/BTRFS/XFS/BCacheFS).... It's really the wild wild west out there. Oh I haven't even mentioned the inconsistencies between how different distros do things wildly differently from package managers to even directory hierarchy.
 
Whattteva said:
unless you are planning to use Docker for everything.
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Then don't use Docker for everything. I see people running Docker because...because...er...uh...
I've read a number of articles where people seem to run Docker "...because you're supposed to. Aren't you?" and no other reason.
On the other hand, a number of programs can run on FreeBSD using jails and do the same thing.
So I often question this need for Docker on Linux for every thing they run over there.
 
The reason that all the container-implementations arose on linux is that the base system did not provide one.
FreeBSD base system has included JAILS for the last 25 years. Thank you Poul-Henning.
 
did this thread turn into a sort of freebsd vs linux war?
please don't do that
FreeBSD is great, Linux is also great and I can even say that MacOs is great too but not free.
They're just different and that's it.
 
rmomota said:
did this thread turn into a sort of freebsd vs linux war?
please don't do that
FreeBSD is great, Linux is also great and I can even say that MacOs is great too but not free.
They're just different and that's it.
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The subject is "why freebsd" which implies "why freebsd instead of another OS?"
Comparisons to linux may be, somewhat, unavoidable. After all, linux and freebsd are both free unix like OSes. So why choose freebsd when linux is so much more popular?
 
If you want to ask that way, it is the biggest free operating system distribution project not under corporate stick.
Take Debian for instance, 99% of their workforce is what we call port maintenance. Several thousand people may work on package ecosystem of a Debian or FreeBSD release, but only in FreeBSD several hundred very capable people have worked on the OS; the Debian takes whatever Linuses, Stallmans, Poetterings decide to make.

Unless you're Red Hat or Canonical you don't have any power over OS kernel or its basic Unix userland. FreeBSD project controls all of it.
 
Cedric62 said:
Because most of the Linux distros I'm familiar with seemed to have started to head off in a strange direction lately.
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All the distributions with the same kernel can't distinguish for real.
They are trying to glorify their own software construct but it works on any clean kernel + usual binaries.
 
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