Why FreeBSD?

O

owemeacent

(Before you read, I would like to warn you that you may find some things offensive, but I mean no offence, curiosity might seem to offend people, but it doesn't mean to.)

I'm a Gentoo and Arch user. I love these two distributions dearly. Though I've only been a Linux user for about two years now, I see its potential. I stumbled across the BSD operating systems a couple of weeks ago and I'm trying to find out about them. I've heard that BSD "isn't that good", or that the BSD developers use Macs to develop FreeBSD. And that there's this USB drive thing where the system gets a kernel panic when when you take it out of the slot before you unmount it. And that BSD is much slower than Linux and everything else.

Is this stuff true? Why do people use FreeBSD instead of Linux? Or Mac? Or Windows? What does BSD have that all the other operating systems don't?
 
owemeacent said:
Is this stuff true?
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Sure, that's why we all use it here. We just love crap. §e

Edit: to name just one example, the separation of base system (the OS itself) and ports (third-party software) is almost as important as the separation of state and church, yet in the Linux world they just don't seem to understand that :OOO
 
owemeacent said:
What does BSD have that all the other operating systems don't?
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Documentation and consistency. Not totally perfect, but definitely better than what you can see elsewhere in the neighborhood. Minus the IBM AS/400, where you get enough books with a new machine that you can fill a small public library with them, but we still called that box heritage of the Institute of Black Magic, because no one had a couple of free months to spend in that library just for some basic testing.

About speed and crashes - why not give it a try and examine it with your own benchmarks, applications and even USB drive?

And what if a couple of developers use hardware and maybe software from Apple? Macs are really well-engineered pieces of hardware and maybe there is the best source editor available on Mac OS for their needs? You may be a little surprised that I don't use a headless cluster of servers to manage a headless cluster of servers, I am using several different workstations and some of them even with multiple displays. It may sound weird, but I got used to that after some time :)
 
But wouldn't that be a bit hypocritical for a BSD developer to make BSD on a Mac? That would be like a Linux kernel developer developing on Windows. And I don't mean hardware wise, software wise. It kind of defeats the whole reason you'd use FreeBSD. If you don't use it, why except anyone else?
 
It's not BSD, it's FreeBSD. And just for fun, look up where the Mac operating system userland originated.
 
Not necessarily, if you don't take a given OS as a silver bullet for all digital needs, one kernel rules them all. If somebody has interest for example in the networking or the storage and considers FreeBSD or any other OS as worth of investing his work into given area, it doesn't mean that he can not find something else fits better for his needs when he is writing text, watching movies etc.

I have Windows on my laptop which is my always-on-hand typewriter, not FreeBSD, although I set up excellent desktop environments on FreeBSD many times and I know, that such hand crafted desktops made with love will suit me a little better. But that better is so much little, that it is not worth let's say two days of experimenting, I always have something more urgent to do. I even don't use a Macbook lying somewhere under the table for my day to day work, because I am not yet used to little different control of its UI, which make me less productive. I need only web, e-mail and many and many terminals for my work and for such requirements preinstalled Windows was good enough. On the other hand, I kill the Linux with flame on all servers under my control and exchange it with FreeBSD, because it performs much better, is consistent, predictable and well documented. YMMV.
 
I find it laughable to use the word "hypocrisy" in this matter. There is nothing hypocritical in choosing the best tool for the job at hand to get the job done. That's what keeps you employed in the end. Those who failed to understand that are all now unemployed because of their inflexible views.
 
@@kpa: I have to read your post several times before I realized that the last sentence doesn't read as "Those who failed to understand that are all now Linux kernel developers because of their inflexible views." which makes perfect sense to me on first try.

@@fonz: Hey, this is important, I wrote four paragraphs about it and one semirhetorical question :)
 
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owemeacent said:
But wouldn't that be a bit hypocritical for a BSD developer to make BSD on a Mac?
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They don't. Macs are Unix. FreeBSD is a direct descendant of the original Unix. So they have a lot in common as far as Unix tools go. Even parts of OSX contain components from FreeBSD. The advantage some like about using a Mac with FreeBSD (including building with a VM containing FreeBSD) is the outstanding hardware available with Macs.
That would be like a Linux kernel developer developing on Windows. And I don't mean hardware wise, software wise.
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As I said, no. When I use my son's Mac when I visit him and work on his web site, there are no differences for me in what I do when I'm on a Mac or when I'm on FreeBSD.
 
I got tired of the inconsistencies of the Linux distributions. FreeBSD makes sense. The documentation is awesome. The filesystem is great and the directory organization is great. You can use and customize almost anything you want -- and configuring and porting third party software gives you full control. Linux is there for people who like Linux. I'm thrilled that I found FreeBSD.
 
@owemeacent, you'll really just have to give it a shot for a few weeks. Think of these recommendations like a travel guide to a foreign country. While it can be interesting and helpful, it's just not the same as being there. When you have technical problems you can't find a solution to in the documentation or elsewhere, post your technical questions here and you'll probably discover another benefit to FreeBSD, the helpful community. Enjoy your explorations.
 
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Then why are you here? Linux has the same problems with hardware. Not all of it works with the OS. So get hardware that works with FreeBSD. I have a new system using Gigabyte motherboards and nVidia graphics cards and other stuff running Haswell, 32 GB RAM and SSD drives. No issues at all.
 
owemeacent said:
I can't give it a shot because it doesn't want to work on my computer AT ALL. Look at my other thread: viewtopic.php?f=5&t=46237.
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I call bullshit on that one. So you can't get your network card to work, and you can't be bothered to read/learn enough so that you can disable it, get another card that works, and continue your exploration and learning of FreeBSD? How did you become a "Gentoo and Arch user" in the first place?
 
I started with Linux Mint, didn't like it, tried Ubuntu, looked horrible, tried Arch loved it, forward one year later, I was bored so I tried Gentoo and I loved it even more. Though in none of these instances have I ever had a problem with my network cards. I've always found sufficient information on the Gentoo and Arch wiki. And I've tried browsing the Internet for the problem and I can't find anything that will help me.
 
So what is it you like so much about Arch and Gentoo. I'm sure it's not because your network card works so well with it. Why don't you set up a virtual machine and just try, it's not so hard. If you like it, and I'm sure you will, you can decide if it's worth buying hardware that supports FreeBSD.
 
Me? I haven't used Arch seriously in several years. Maybe you're thinking of some ancient posts of mine--otherwise, if I've given the impression that I'm an Arch expert, it was definitely not intended.

I will say that their documentation seems to usually be excellent.

To the OP, for what it's worth, Daniel Robbins, who created Gentoo, was heavily inspired by FreeBSD--he worked on FreeBSD before creating Gentoo, if I remember correctly. I also remember, way back when I did use Arch a good deal, Judd Vinet, Arch's creator, mentioning that if one liked FreeBSD, they'd probably like Arch.

I would agree with others who have said, if it's not working on your hardware, try it in a VM. If Mr. Vinet thought a FreeBSD user would like Arch, it's reasonable to think that an Arch user may like FreeBSD. Unfortunately, sometimes, the hardware lags behind Linux hardware support, but, my personal impression is that FreeBSD is more designed for servers. Sometimes, the GUI applications especially, may lag behind Linux. I use it as a desktop at work, but confess that I have a Linux VM to use for a few things that I can't do with FreeBSD.

One thing you may come to appreciate are the UPDATING files. For example, if I remember correctly, in Arch, you're supposed to follow the mailing list and the news page and possibly the devel mailing list. In FreeBSD if an update makes a change, it should be documented in one centralized UPDATING file. There are two, one for the system, and one for third party packages.


EDIT: Though I'm certainly not an Arch expert, or even one who has used it a lot in the past few years, I probably have said that I didn't think it was that special, especially after it went to systemd, and that may be what @drhowardfine is mentioning. Arch isn't bad, but one can pretty easily get something almost the same by doing a minimal Fedora install, then adding a GUI. Much as most of us who need X do with FreeBSD. :)
 
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I was afraid I was misunderstanding what I had read in the past when I typed that. Sorry for misrepresenting you but I picked up some bad habits from Raymond Tusk.
 
owemeacent said:
I've heard that BSD "isn't that good", or that the BSD developers use Macs to develop FreeBSD. And that there's this USB drive thing where the system gets a kernel panic when when you take it out of the slot before you unmount it. And that BSD is much slower than Linux and everything else.

Is this stuff true? Why do people use FreeBSD instead of Linux? Or Mac? Or Windows? What does BSD have that all the other operating systems don't?
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You've received a lot of comments from other folks, so you get my 2 cents as well :e

  • What is "good"? It is what gets the job that needs doing, done. With a minimal amount of annoyance to all involved. If you need to run some particular app that is only available for the Tandem NonStop platform, then you go out and get one of those. Fortunately, most apps are available for a variety of platforms, and in other cases there are emulators that will let you run the app on a different platform. If the app is available for two platforms and you know one of them well, you'll probably use that one, even if the other platform is "better" in some manner.
  • FreeBSD developers. I'm not one, but the ones I've spoken to use a variety of hardware, generally running FreeBSD native (not as a VM or via an emulator). I'm sure there are exceptions. Mac OS X is as much FreeBSD as Debian GNU/kFreeBSD is Linux - Mac OS X is mostly FreeBSD userland with a Mach kernel, while Debian GNU/kFreeBSD is a Linux userland with a FreeBSD kernel.
  • USB unmount panic. There is no "correct" way of continuing operation in the general case. The only thing we can argue about is how polite the system is when it stops. Consider a program with files open on the USB device when it suddenly vanishes. What should the program do? Continue operating until it tries to read or write from the device? Invoke some application specific error recovery - if so, why isn't that error recovery already in the application? Now, consider what happens if the USB device was used for swap space. After it is removed, any program that has part of its address space written out to swap will fail miserably when it needs to access that region and the system tries to swap it in. In the meantime, many operations may have taken place (email received, torrents downloaded, whatever) and when processes start to die, all that work may be lost. Now, it may certainly be possible to conduct deeper checks to see if any of this sort of thing could possibly happen on the specific system at the time the USB drive was removed, and if not, be less disruptive when the device is removed. But that adds a lot of complexity and overhead for dealing with the possibility of a rare issue. Another possibility would be for the system to do something like beep continuously and display "Put that BACK!" in boldface on the console. Also unlikely to get implemented.
  • Ethernet driver (from your other post). Many Linux drivers are contributed by the actual device manufacturers / vendors. Due to the number of devices (routers, NAS, etc.) that use Linux, there's a sound business case for the chip manufacturers to create drivers, and once they have those drivers, they may as well make them generally available. In the case of video cards, there is apparently a large enough Linux gaming market segment that video card makers supply drivers to help sell cards. In the FreeBSD ecosystem, this occasionally happens (I'd like to give kudos to Intel and 3Ware / LSI Logic as two vendors that do an excellent job of providing and supportting FreeBSD drivers; I'm sure there are many other vendors but those are two I know of from personal experience). But many other drivers are maintained by volunteer developers, sometimes with (but often without) the assistance of the manufacturer. And when the manufacturer changes something, that may not get communicated to the appropriate developer in a prompt manner. But a well-presented bug report (along with access to the problem hardware, if needed) will usually get the bug fixed.
  • Why not Macs or Windows boxes? The only way to legally run Mac OS X is on Apple hardware. There's a substantial price premium for that hardware, and Apple doesn't actually compete in the market segment I'm interested in - they discontinued their rackmount Xserve family in 2010. For Windows, in my case it is mostly due to a loathing of using Windows for critical services. My desktops are Windows-based, but my servers are almost exclusively FreeBSD-based. In fact, I've convinced another commercial app vendor to add native FreeBSD to their list of supported platforms, and I am running a half dozen or so products where I've already gotten native FreeBSD ports from the vendors. Also, when something doesn't operate as expected, I can look at the FreeBSD source code to see why - I don't have to hope Microsoft or Apple considers me and my bug important enough to listen to.
 
owemeacent said:
Why FreeBSD?
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Because I tried it (2001) and I liked it, until now. I am occasionally trying various Linux distributions and they are not as well-organized as FreeBSD. The Linux kernel is great, but the distributions are not satisfying for me. I tested SuSE, Ubuntu, Debian, Arch, Gentoo and Mint. I like Gentoo best, but the FreeBSD ports system always brings me back to FreeBSD.
 
owemeacent said:
And that there's this USB drive thing where the system gets a kernel panic when when you take it out of the slot before you unmount it.
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I ran FreeBSD 9.x on a USB stick for mounts without any errors. and you may not believe this but I compiled world/kernel and ports on that mighty stick. :)

Sure it took a LONG time to finish but it completed without any problems.
 
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